A recipe for ‘Stone Soup’ and history’s warnings about the economy

The traditional folk tale goes like this: Mid-afternoon one day, a young man showed up at an elderly lady’s house and, when she answered the door, he asked, “Do you have any food? I am hungry and haven’t eaten.”

When she replied she did not, he then asked if she had a stone, so he could cook it in the kettle he was carrying and make some soup. Well, she went to the garden, got a round, smooth stone, poured some water in the kettle and watched it come almost to a boiling point.

“You know,” he said, “the stone would cook quicker if we added an onion and maybe some carrots.”

Then as time went on, they added more ingredients until, by itself, the soup, even without the stone, tasted very good.  They devoured it.

When finished, the lad announced that he was leaving, taking the stone with him, since it was not quite cooked enough.  He would have to boil it some more tomorrow.

“Fancy that,” the woman said as he left, “Soup from stone.”

Hard times may come, and I thought it helpful if I provided you with a special soup recipe, straight from the Great Depression. It is relatively simple and cheap. Quarter eight medium potatoes, place in water, slightly covering them, salt and pepper to taste, a tab of butter and one quart of milk. Heat until done. Note that it did not require a stone.

I have more soup suggestions that are just as simple. People today may be surprised to learn that, during the Depression, civic groups, labor unions, and churches, but not bankers — served thousands of bowls of this soup every day. In larger communities, in a single day, as many as 10,000 people lined up, in one of the many sites, for a simple bowl of hot soup.

How hard were the times?  My dad got a job driving in an unheated truck taking chickens from Iowa to Detroit. Dad said that when he got to the plant, he would have to take a club and beat people away when they tried to steal the crates. He said, “I hated it, but I was hired to deliver not distribute.” In western Iowa, farmers slaughtered their hogs in roadside ditches, because they couldn’t afford to feed them out. Twenty-five percent of the workers in the nation were unemployed, banks failed left and right and millionaires became paupers overnight.

But as we should have learned and apparently haven’t, great times, like the Roaring Twenties, can be followed by difficult economic circumstances. More recently, we have lived through the dot.com crash of 1990, when seemingly every business was going to make computers and got financing to do so.

But the biggest market collapse in recent times was the Great Recession of 2009 and 2010. Two of the giants of the investment industry went bankrupt almost overnight. Lehman Brothers, founded in 1850, and at the time its demise was the fourth largest investment firm in the United States, went under in September of 2008. Bear Stearns started in New York in 1923 and was history by March of 2008. Both financial organizations bet heavily, and lost, purchasing mortgages based on inflated real estate values.

Some phrases come to mind, like” too big to fail” and the financial instrument that triggered the mess: “mortgage-backed securities.” In the end, over millions of people lost their homes, and the national unemployment rate climbed to 10 percent.  Our government authorized $700 billion of taxpayer money on the bailout and ended up spending over $31 billion.

Here is reason to pause now. We are at war with Iran, we now in a tariff conflict with our neighbor Canada. Inflation is rising, affordability is a remembrance not a reality. Historically, every time the titans of wealth gain control of the economy and deregulate the free enterprise system, bad things seem to happen to the rest of us.  Oh, did I mention the farm economy?

The wealthy are borrowing money at such towering rates for AI ventures that the government just borrowed money to purchase our government-issued bonds back to bring down the interest rate on the new issue. Kinda like borrowing money from one credit card to pay off another.

But the president of the United States says the economy is in great shape.

Hopefully, my fears are unfounded.  But just in case I am right and affordability is not just around the corner, let me make three suggestions.

First, next spring plant more vegetables in the garden

Second, if an opening appears in food distribution center, take the job.  Better be a cook than stand in a line for hours waiting for a cup of stone soup.

Third, remember the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.