“In Boston,” remarked Mrs. Gregory, “we have a little marketing club and study prices and market conditions. It takes time, but it saves us all quite a little.”
Mrs. Larry ate mechanically, hardly knowing what was served. This was what the lecturer had meant about studying food values—what Larry had meant by finding a new market. But both of them had missed the mark. She would combine the two, study the old markets and find new ones.
Mrs. Moore was warming up to the topic and everybody was interested. “New York is headquarters for the National Housewives’ League. We have district branches and leaders, and we are shaking up the dealers just beautifully. Last week our district leader announced that there had been a drop in bacon and ham. One of the nationally advertised brands of bacon in jars was selling at several cents less a jar. I asked my grocer why he had not reduced the price. He said this was the first he’d heard of it. The next day he started a sale on this particular brand, and I bought a dozen jars. He knew all the time that the firm had cut the price, that ham and bacon were down, but he did not give his customers, who did not know the same thing, the advantage of the wholesale cut. Other grocers gave it and announced it as a special or leader.
“That’s why I belong to the National Housewives’ League. Grocers and butchers may argue with an individual woman who has read about food prices in the papers, but when a committee bears down upon them, they listen respectfully and admit the truth about prices.”
“Then you believe that the old ogre H. C. of L., otherwise known as the High Cost of Living, can be reduced by an organization of housewives who agitate for lower prices?” inquired Mr. Gregory.
“I believe in education first, and organization afterward. An organization of women who do not know food values or market conditions will start a sensational campaign against cold storage eggs or poultry, and then subside. What we need under existing food conditions is women educated as buyers, not as cooks. It’s no use to economize in the kitchen and waste in the market.”
Mrs. Larry glanced round the table. Even the bachelor brother was listening intently. Of course—she had heard rumors of his attentions to that pretty Murray girl. As for Claire Pierce, her face bore the expression of one who sat at the feet of wisdom and understood.
“What does it avail a woman to have thirty-five recipes for utilizing the remains of a roast, if she does not know how to buy a roast in the beginning? Our grandmothers, yes, and even our mothers, used to devise means of making what was grown on the farm go as far as possible. To-day, our men folks grow nothing. We women in the cities and the towns and the villages must go out and buy so wisely that we rival in this new housekeeping the frugality of our ancestors. It’s all in the buying.”
Mrs. Larry, nibbling a salted almond, thought of her own burning zeal in using up left-overs, and almost sighed. No doubt Teresa Moore and the lecturer were both right. It was all in the buying. And her patient industry in the kitchen had probably been undone and set at naught by the trickery of grocer or butcher. She had been paying the old price for bacon and ham. She had been paying the price of Long Island potatoes for the Maine brand. She—
Goodness gracious! Larry had gone to South Bethlehem to find a better market—and she had only to turn the corner.