Speaking of Pictures
‘I can’t imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s… I don’t know of anything that better conveys the happy bounty of the age than a photograph that ran in Life magazine two weeks before my birth. It shows the Czekalinski family of Cleveland, Ohio, surrounded by the two and a half tons of food that a typical blue-collar family ate in a year… all purchased on a budget of $25 a week (Mr Czelalinski made $1.96 an hour as a shipping clerk in a Du Pont factory.)’
(from Life magazine, 19 Nov 1951)
In this remarkable picture of plenty, Steve Czekalinski, his wife Stephanie and his sons, Stephen and Henry, are surrounded by the food they will have eaten this year - 2 ½ tons of it. The photograph, made for the Du Pont company's magazine Better Living, is based on statistics on the American diet supplied by the Department of Agriculture. More eloquently then any statistics, it shows that Americans eat well.
Czekalinski, who works in the shipping department of the Du Pont plant in Cleveland, was selected as an average industrial worker with a family of average size. He earns $1.96 an hour, spends about $25 a week for food, or $1,300 a year. When the A & P Tea Company, in whose warehouse this picture was taken, added up the retail cost of this food, the total was $1,306, amazingly close to Czekalinski's estimated annual expenditures.
Four men worked 20 hours to assemble this mountain of food. The milk was a problem because the A & P distributor handled milk only in cardboard cartons whereas the photography insisted on milk in bottles. The distributor finally gave in, rounded up the necessary bottles and filled them from cartons. There are no dummies in this picture. Everything is the real thing and every single container is filled.
This is the Czekalinski grocery list:
- Evaporated milk, 56 cans
- Cheese, 20 lb
- Butter, 56 lb
- Margarine, 21 lb
- Milk, 698 qts
- Peaches, 3 bu
- Grapes, 2 boxes
- Eggs, 131 doz
- Apples, 2 crates
- Oranges, 2 crates
- Cantaloupes, 1 crate
- Lemons, 1 crate
- Watermelons, 2
- Plums, 1 box
- Bananas, 1 stalk
- Peaches, 20 cans
- Cherries, 11 cans
- Frozen corn, 2 cases
- Frozen orange juice, 48 cans
- Shortening, 72 lb
- Flour, 450 lb
- Dried fruit, 8 pkg
- Sugar, 350 lb
- Pears, 15 cans
- Bread, 180 loaves
- Tomatoes, 15 baskets
- Potatoes, 690 lb
- Beans, 3 baskets
- Radishes, 1 basket
- Squash, 1 basket
- Cucumbers, 1 basket
- Beets, 3 baskets
- Ice cream, 8 ½ gal
- Lettuce, 2 crates
- Cauliflower, 1 crate
- Cabbage, 1 crate
- Carrots, 1 crate
- Celery, 1 crate
- Peas, 1 bu
- Onions, 1 sack
- Orange juice,11 cans
- Spinach, 22 cans
- Sauerkraut, 12 cans
- Cereal, 48 pkg
- Coffee, 39 lb
- Tea, 12 lb
- Ham, 144 lb
- Pork loins, 132 lb
- Saddle lamb, 15 lb
- Saddle veal, 30 lb
- Carp, 25 lb
- Salmon, 20 lb
- Chickens, 31
- Turkeys, 2
- Beef, 300 lb