Potatoes and Commodities Can Teach Life Lessons

by Jason Weiland

Strolling aimlessly through a grocery store pushing an empty cart with a floppy wheel is interesting because you have time to explore and find things to take home and eat — at least when you have money to buy anything. But when you are walking through the same well-stocked store, pushing the same empty cart with the whopped wheel and you only have $5 to your name, it’s a completely different story, on so many levels.

It was 1986 and I was ending my problematic and angst-filled teens in a depressed mining town in northern New Mexico trying to figure out this adulting thing. I’d left a dead-end job managing a movie theater because my manager was stealing money from the safe I was responsible for. I’d gone to the owners with my fears, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t believe that their flesh and blood would steal from them (yes, my manager was the son of the owners). Knowing it was a matter of time before the missing money became a problem and they took the side of their son and blamed me, I took all the proof I had of my boss’s thievery and handed in my resignation.

It had been a well-paying and enjoyable career for an 18-year-old high school dropout, and I hated to leave, but no amount of free movies and stale popcorn could make up for them potentially branding me a thief. I looked for a new job for a few weeks, but it was a small town and as soon as jobs opened they were filled by people with more experience and better education.

In desperation, I found myself sitting in a showroom, learning how to schlep myself door-to-door and sell Kirby vacuum cleaners to clueless homemakers with more money than sense. It says a lot about how spunky I was that in my first week knocking on doors, I sold two $1500 machines, wowing them with a $20-a-month payment plan at only 34% interest. I made a commission but they told me since I was new it would take a month for my check to arrive.

I was so broke, that homeless people felt ashamed for asking and gave me money.

I only had a lonely crumpled $5 bill in my wallet to feed both my new girlfriend and me for the next few weeks. Neither one of us had any meat on our bones, we were both rail-thin and not at all suited to skipping meals on the regular. So, we found ourselves with an empty cart, one wheel flopping around maniacally, cruising the aisles of the Piggly Wiggly for something that would satisfy our needs.

It seemed hopeless at first and we began to despair, but then I saw a lone 30-pound bag of gorgeous Russet potatoes with a red discount sticker that proclaimed loudly: $4.25! I snatched it up before one of the other hungry and destitute shoppers could claim it and headed for the condiment aisle. But ketchup and mustard were too expensive so I headed for the checkout. I had a handful of change left over after tax, so we split an Orange Crush from the machine by the exit doors.

The orange soda tasted like fine wine because I knew it would be my last for a while.

The next few weeks saw us learn how to cook potatoes in ways you wouldn’t have thought possible. It was almost as if poverty forced us to become the most frugal professional chefs imaginable. Fried, mashed, boiled, baked, sauteed — we didn’t even bother taking the peels off because we didn’t want to waste the vitamins and minerals they provided to our famished bodies. There was no butter or sour cream, no ketchup or even hot sauce— we seasoned them with whatever spices were in the pantry, which after three weeks turned out to be stale red pepper flakes and cinnamon.

The potatoes inevitably ran out, much to our dismay. We went hungry for a week, and were so light-headed I broke my cardinal rule and called my dad to ask for money. When I moved out, I’d promised myself I would do anything to not bother my parents for money. I wanted to be independent and prove that I could live on my own. But, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded because I’d been practicing being poor my whole life.

I sucked it up and they sent me $100, which seemed like a fortune at that time.

We Were ‘Turkey Neck Soup’ Poor

Growing up in a family who moved from place to place looking for greener grass, we were anything if not dirt poor. There were times when my dad’s health would fail and he would be hospitalized, and we had to get by on a few dollars and the goodwill of the members of our church.

It was 1982, Michael Jackson released Thriller, and we were in another grimy grocery store with an empty shopping cart and no money. Most likely the wheel was broken on this one as well. It was summer in central Louisiana, and the temperature and humidity gauge were both stuck in the red at 100 degrees. We sweat out our liquids faster than we could replace them in a time before bottled water.

We couldn’t expect any money coming in, because my dad wasn’t working and Social Security ran out. My long-suffering mom was running her finger idly along the packages of meat, checking out the prices, hoping for a miracle, and my troublemaker of a brother and I were standing close by in the candy aisle dreaming of Snickers Bars and Three Musketeers.

Mom was almost at the end of the massive meat case when she stopped short like something had bitten her on the rear. She picked up a huge bag of mystery poultry in triumph! The bag was opaque, so you knew there was some kind of bird inside from the pale white skin, but you couldn’t tell what kind. She looked at the price and smiled, then looked at my brother and me (who were still eyeing the candy bars wondering if the penalty for shoplifting was worth it) wondering if she could cajole us into eating whatever was in the immense bag.

After arriving at our two-bedroom house that was comfortable but cheap, we found out that my mom had scored a monster sack of turkey necks. Though we kids weren’t convinced a meal could come from the little bit of meat on the bone, we trusted mom, because somehow she always had a hot meal on the table for us, no matter how little money we had. Also, we were hungry and learned long ago that you never complain about food when you have nothing else to eat.

An hour later, after sniffing the air for the enthralling smell coming from the kitchen, we peeked our heads around the corner to see what was cooking. Mom had somehow found a few vegetables — celery, carrots, and potatoes — and cooked them with a few of the necks to make the most delightful-smelling soup we could ever dream of in our adolescent brains. And, as a credit to my creative mother, it tasted like heaven and filled our empty stomachs until we could eat no more.

We ate turkey neck soup almost every day for months at a time. Sometimes we would come into money from an odd job or a bag full of groceries from a brother and sister in the faith, but when everything ran out and we were hungry yet again, my mother would find some turkey necks, and we would eat.

Is It Sad That Free Government Cheese Was a Treat?

We were no strangers to the pale brown boxes of commodities that were delivered to our house every month. If you’ve never had a grilled cheese sandwich made from a hunk of government cheese, butter, and soft wheat bread, you don’t know what you’re missing and I don’t know how you grew up to be a well-rounded person. We would also get cans of meat and bags of flour and cornmeal. Can you say cornbread? Mom could somehow look at a cupboard of ingredients and an hour later have a meal sitting on the table waiting for us kids to devour that tasted so good, we never missed McDonald’s.

If Mom had been any other person, we might not have survived those years.

Things eventually got better, but we rarely made it above the poverty line. It would be ten years into my first marriage before I finally made enough money to change tax brackets. I’ve been down, and I’ve been up over the years. I’ve gone hungry at times, and at other times, I was able to give of what I had and help other people. I made over 125k in one year, but I’ve never felt rich or even financially comfortable. I’ve never had good credit and I always considered myself broke.

It wasn’t until recently that I could call myself rich — not for having money but because I didn’t want anything. I had a beautiful family in two parts of the world — the Philippines and the States — and there was nothing I wanted that would satisfy me more than that. I am a man who walks around with a smile on his face for no reason — but not all the time, because no one can be happy 24/7 — and I know, no matter how much or how little money I have, I will always have love and fulfillment, and that is plenty for me.

What Have We Learned from Potatoes and Commodities

Those of you who have been poor know what I mean when I say growing up without money teaches a person what is important in life. It may take a few years to realize it, but when we do, it makes all the difficult times we lived through seem like nothing.

When you realize you don’t need to buy things to make you happy, you can finally be free to enjoy life for what it truly is and not be stuck in a constant rat race. Those who realize the truth in the old saying, money can’t buy happiness, have come to a place where we know that money is necessary but not enough to give up your life for.

Sadly there will be those who don’t figure it out until they are half-dead, lying on a deathbed, realizing they can’t take wads of cash or a gleaming diamond Rolex into the afterlife, and they have given up the only family that could have been with them and any fulfillment they could have enjoyed in the pursuit of fame and fortune. They worked their whole lives building cogs to make others rich and sacrificed their time and bodies for the sake of their needs and a new iPhone every year.

Don’t wait until it’s too late to determine what’s important. Fulfillment is what we live for, and the only thing that matters in this life. One day you will realize it yourself, but I hope it’s not because of a bag of potatoes and an empty floppy-wheeled shopping cart. I hope it’s because you saw the race to get more money was futile.