i'm not a hoarder -- just a prudent housewife

Last night around midnight, I needed something to eat.

I had not eaten much for dinner. Just a handful of keto-inspired pepperoni and parmesan snacks I baked up for myself. I had not been very hungry.

The real hunger hit me after about two hours of reading. Because I had planned another two hours of reading, I decided to search the kitchen for something quick. 

The refrigerator was bereft of leftovers -- with the exception of some freshly-made salsa mexicana and a salad dressing I had put together that evening. But a salad did not interest me.

Instead, I went to the place where I go when the need for a quick meal arises. My pantry. There were plenty of options. I finally decided on a can of pork and beans dressed up with two slices of thick bacon, two serranos, some cherry tomatoes, scrambled eggs, and lots of onion. Plus a big dollop of my salsa mexicana.

The combination hit the spot. Maybe too well. After about a half-hour, I put down my Kindle and drifted off to sleep -- where I dreamt of zombie weddings with Illuminati subtexts.

The sight of my pantry reminded me of a Facebook comment fellow-blogger Gary Denness (he of The Mexile fame) wrote the other day dealing with pantries. In the midst of a Brexit discussion, he reminded Brexiteers that one of the reasons Britain joined the European Common Market was to alleviate food shortages that had plagued Britain since the end of the Second World War.

He also recounted a story that when Margaret Thatcher was seeking the leadership of the Conservatives in 1974, she had been subjected to what the British considered to be a "dirty trick." According to her biographer Charles Moore, Mrs. Thatcher had been interviewed by an obscure magazine, Pre-Retirement Choice. She commented that she was following her mother's war-time practice of buying food and linens for future use. She bought them when they were on sale with an eye to avoiding inflation and the impending sugar shortage.

Her political enemies turned the interview into a political bludgeon. In 1970s Britain (whose economy was teetering on third-world aspirations) was a place of food shortages. Her enemies styled her activity as hoarding -- which was one step lower on the social scale than being a child-molester.

I had just arrived in Britain (partly because of Mrs. Thatcher leadership challenge) and found the upheaval a bit charming from my American perspective. After all, my country had just toppled a president for something a bit more risible than slipping an extra can of sardines out of the White House mess.

But it was not the politics that interested me as much as the list of the cans the newspapers found in her cupboards when Mrs. Thatcher invited reporters into her kitchen to prove she was not a hoarder. Here it is, as reported by The Daily Express:

• Eight pounds of granulated sugar
• One pound of icing sugar "for Christmas"
• Six jars of jam
• Six jars of marmalade
• Six jars of honey
• Six tins of salmon "to make salmon mousse"
• Four 1lb. cans of corned beef
• Four 1lb. cans of ham
• Two 1lb. cans of tongue
• One tin of mackerel
• Four tins of sardines
• Two 1lb. jars of Bovril
• Twenty tins of various fruits
• "One or two" tins of vegetables '‘but we don't really like them from a tin"

As the daughter of a grocer, she came across as a defender of the middle class against the ravages of inflation families faced every day. Her ultimate defense was a home run: "I'm not a hoarder -- just a prudent housewife."

In many ways, my mother is an American version of Margaret Thatcher -- especially in having a well-stocked pantry for the vagaries of the future. The America I grew up in did not have the national food shortages that post-war Britain had. America has long been an exporter of food to the rest of the world.

But, our kitchen always had a supply of about six months of food to tide us over natural or economic disasters. And they did occur. As a child of the Depression, her instincts often crossed the border into hoarding.

I now live in a country that has long aspired to grow enough food to feed its people. It has been an unrealized dream for every Mexican administration.

The first problem was the number of mouths to feed. Between emigration and the fact that Mexico's birthrate has been lowered to an almost-replacement level, the demand side of the equation has been mostly resolved.

It is the supply side that is the problem. Even with the most innovative new agricultural procedures and with irrigation projects causing the desert to bloom, Mexico cannot produce enough of its own food. But international trade (especially through NAFTA) helps fill that gap.

And that is why my pantry is filled with cans (both Mexican and foreign) that help tide me over on midnight raids to the kitchen -- or when hurricanes close the local stores -- or when I run out of pesos for the month.

Mom has taught me well. Because, for all of our food abundance, it is sometimes good to be a "prudent housewife."