Irma Rombauer said she wrote The Joy of Cooking with “one eye on the family purse.” Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that the original 1931 edition had so much to say about leftovers. By the 1960s leftovers were becoming a joke to a lot of people, with a grumbling husband and a mystery casserole playing stock roles. That humor was a direct result of abundance.
Today, Americans spend just over 10 percent of their incomes on food, on average—less than any people in the history of world. But food waste has come to seem unaffordable in other ways. More Americans are becoming aware of the externalized costs that go into food, from the water needed to grow it to the fuel required to transport it, cool it, and cook it, to the questionable government policies that keep certain crops cheap and the wages paid to farm workers miniscule. Gleaning and scavenging and scrimping have become righteous statements in some quarters. Foraging, meanwhile, has been elevated to high cuisine.