The death of thrift

Open any cookbook published before, say, 1965. The recipes all make mention of how to make the dish cheaply, using affordable cuts of meat, and canned vegetables because they were cheaper than fresh. The idea of "Thrift" was alive and well, and the idea that a housewife should look for ways to stretch the family budget was lauded as a virtue.

We snicker at such old-fashioned values today, even as we hold dear the nostalgia for a "simpler" time. Sometime in the last few generations, the fiscal conservatism our grandparents practiced as a matter of course went out the window with the rotary phones. A provocative article in Canada's Financial Post asks what happened?