My Mom was a 3rd generation Capricorn and she lived with her widowed mother and widowed grandmother during the Depression and WW2. Capricorn's motto is Eat it up, Wear it out. Make it do or do without. We ate mostly home cooked meals, stretched meals, etc. Except for shoes, socks and boys swim trunks (they were cheaper than girls suits, and nobody cared if we wore them), all our clothes were homemade.
I got my first store bought skirt in 1963. Just the skirt because the matching top was 59 cents which Mom thought was too much to pay. 76 cents for the skirt was okay because it was a poodle skirt with a lot of material.
Supermarket shelved goods generally have a storage life of 1-3 years, so expired foods in a household are clearly indicative of wasteful behaviors, buying too much, failure to rotate, or simply buying things with no real desire to eat it. My husband's reflex to cling to expired foods probably has nothing to do with how debatable are expiration dates, but it's rather an emotional response attempting to deny the reality of wasteful behavior. A waste-not/want-not philosophy doesn't reconcile with food that's been sitting around for over a year.
SO used to view it as throwing money away.
His family never had much and what they did buy was usually the cheapest of everything.
He would go shopping with his mother after the boy was born and I would end up with 3 cases of generic instant oatmeal, 5 jars of cheap watery spaghetti sauce, 3 boxes of noodles, 2 lbs of 1.99 chipped ham, 1 lb of greasy bologna, a jar of generic peanut butter, a tub of some mystery I'm definitely not butter WTF spread, and 2 loaves of white bread.
"But mom said....this was cheaper". The woman almost had a fucking breakdown when she came down one day and I put "real" butter on "fresh" green beans.
"Why are you using real butter?!!!"
"No one should use "real" butter....NO ONE!!!."
It's the 23rd sin down on the list right after having sex before marriage and not hanging thermal drapes on every window to block out the sun.
I really should write a book, Duck Dynasty has nothing.
Not even close.