My television reports that today’s teenagers are worried about their future. A news story says a survey asked high school seniors if they expected their lives to be better than the lives of their parents. Forty-seven percent of these teenagers said “No.”

Authors of the survey claim this shows how bad the economy has become. These people say young people should expect to eclipse their parents’ standard of living. Each generation should have the ability to spend more money than the last.

That depends upon one’s perspective, I guess. Maybe it’s a good sign if teenagers don’t expect to have more things than their parents – they might spend more time with their children and get off the merry-go-round society has built for itself.

My generation has more money than our parents ever thought about, but I don’t think we are any happier. Nobody wants to return to the good old days, but there’s something to be said for learning to do without – just in case you ever have to.

All of this came to mind recently when my wife and I went out for dinner. We don’t go out each month as the marriage counselors suggest a couple should; we skip a lot of months between dinners out. When we do go out, I write about it in this column so I’ll have a record that we went.

Dinner at the restaurant reminded me of the meals my mother used to fix. Restaurant meals are nothing like we had at home, but dinner out always reminds me that Mother fed her family for a month on what two meals cost us at the restaurant.

Others of my generation will remember how she did it, too. Mother did it with gravy: She could make gravy out of anything, and once we had gravy we almost always had something to put it on.
We put gravy on bread, toast, potatoes, rice, vegetables and, when times were tough, we put gravy on gravy. Can you imagine how many meals a person can make with $40 worth of gravy?

Mother had to have meat to make the gravy, of course, but we always had meat. My third-grade teacher explained it this way: “You farm kids never have to worry about food. If you run out of money and need food, you can always go out and kill a pig.”
We never killed a pig just to make gravy, but I suppose we could have. Mother made gravy from small bits of meat – ham, steak, chicken, rabbit, hamburger, even bologna. Some readers may balk at bologna gravy, but it’s good if you’re hungry.

Another economical dish my mother used to make was “cornstarch.” Cornstarch is made by mixing and heating milk, sugar and, of course, cornstarch. It makes a hot, creamy breakfast to be served with toast on the side.

Cornstarch may be short on fiber and it certainly wasn’t invented by a nutritionist, but it had several things going for it – it was hot, it tasted good and best of all, it was made by your mother. Research has proven the latter is still more important than all of the nutrients money can buy.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.