What Did Ordinary Families Eat When the Money Ran Out in the 1930s?

What did people eat during the Great Depression when the money ran out? In April 1932, Philadelphia's relief money ran out, and more than fifty thousand families got nothing for eleven days. One mother borrowed fifty cents and bought yesterday's bread. A father picked dandelions. That summer it happened again, for ten weeks. This is the true story from the 1932 and 1933 Senate hearings: what families ate when the food orders stopped, the little girl who came home from camp to bread and coffee, the mother who starved herself to feed her girls, and the Pennsylvania county whose relief menu told mothers to "add water to make gravy." With the real voices of people who lived it: Virginia Nicoll, Douglas Fraser and Art King. What did your family eat when the money ran out? Tell us in the comments. Chapters 0:00 Water gravy 1:00 The last food order 2:28 Eleven days 4:38 Bread 6:46 Again 8:58 Bread and coffee 12:19 Gravy soup 14:51 The bottom of the pot 16:46 What the kitchen kept ------------- Sources Federal Cooperation in Unemployment Relief, Senate Committee on Manufactures, hearing on S. 4592, May 9, 1932 (Karl de Schweinitz). Federal Aid for Unemployment Relief, Senate Committee on Manufactures, hearings on S. 5125, January 1933 (Helen Hall; Thomas Kennedy and the Fayette County menu; Ewan Clague, "When Relief Stops What Do They Eat?", The Survey, Nov. 15, 1932). Edmund Wilson, "Hull-House in 1932", The New Republic, in the Congressional Record, Jan. 30, 1933, p. 2942. Bonnie R. Fox, "Unemployment Relief in Philadelphia, 1930-1932", Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Jan. 1969. Homer L. Morris, The Plight of the Bituminous Coal Miner (1934). Studs Terkel, Hard Times (1970). Prices converted with the BLS Consumer Price Index (CPI-U), September 2026 dollars. Real voices Interviews with Virginia Nicoll, Douglas Fraser and Art King for "The Great Depression" (Blackside, 1993), Washington University in St. Louis Film & Media Archive. Photos: Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information, Library of Congress (Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon and others). "Henry Street Settlement, 263-267 Henry Street" by Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Film: People of the Cumberland (Frontier Films, 1937); Valley Town (1940) and It Happened in Mayfair (1937), Prelinger Archives; A Better Chicago, A Better West Virginia, Recovery in Michigan and Hands (WPA); Food Makes a Difference (USDA, 1931); Social Security for the People (1939); Kinograms (1931), Ford Gardens (1932) and the VFW Buddy Poppy Camp, Ford Film Collection, National Archives; The National Hunger March (1931); The Baking Industry (1946); Millions of Us (1936, a dramatisation), Prelinger Archives. Some footage: Storyblocks. Music: "Lost Time", "Evening", "Simple Duet" and "Dark Times" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b.... Other music: Storyblocks. Period 78s (Good Night Waltz, 1919; The Waltz of Long Ago, 1923): public domain, Internet Archive Great 78 Project. Sound: "WWS Projector running with the light on", Work With Sounds, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. #AmericanHistory #Nostalgia #GreatDepression