It would have been more rational to just throw the money in the trash…

In the 1950s, Danish housewives were experts at making ends meet and ensuring that nothing was wasted. Essentially, they seemed to be good at preventing useable resources from ending up as useless garbage. To address increasing problems with food waste today, the Danish magazine Samvirke encourages its readers to adopt these bygone household virtues. The assumption is that if modern consumers could learn how to keep produce fresh and repurpose last night’s dinner leftovers for today’s lunch, they too could create more sustainable households. But was it only this practical knowledge that made housewives skilled at preventing waste? Through an analysis of the everyday practices of women who were housewives in the 1950s, this article argues that they were able to make the most out of the resources available to them due to an ideological attribution of responsibility for the household’s resources simultaneously combined with the knowledge needed to implement this particular kind of frugality.