6.0.1 Life Photo Description

'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.)'

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

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