Waste Not, Want Not


Resourcefulness is the ability to use what you have to accomplish whatever it is you need doing. Growing up in the South, saying someone was “resourceful” meant two things: 1) they could adjust engine timing with an ashy lit cigarette and 2) they probably had a yard full of rusting crap that they might need for something one day. You always wanted to know someone like that, you just didn’t want them living next door to you.

But many things we take for granted today exist only because someone else was resourceful. Here’s a short list.

Tater Tots

In 1953, the bigwigs of Ore-Ida found themselves with a lot of leftover bits of potato from the french fry production process. Not wanting the slivers to go to waste (which is a roundabout way of saying “Looking for a way to get more money out of something they already paid for”), they diced the slivers up, pushed them through an extruder, sliced them and fried them. And tater tots were born.

Interestingly enough, because they were made with what was essentially food waste, Ore-Ida was able to sell them very cheaply. But consumers ignored them. Only after Ore-Ida increased the price did consumers see any value to them, and sales picked up. Think about that the next time you’re comparing an iPhone cable at $5 Below to the $29 Apple-branded cable at BestBuy, wondering what the difference is.

Doritos

One of the early restaurants at Disneyland was Casa de Fritos, a quick-service Mexican restaurant operated through a partnership between Disney and The Frito Company (later Frito-Lay Inc.). On days when business was slow, the restaurant found itself with unused, now-stale tortillas. Once again, not looking to waste anything they had already paid for, in the early 1960s the restaurant began cutting the stale tortillas into triangles, frying them up, and seasoning them. The surplus snack eventually became a menu mainstay, then found its way outside the park as a regional Frito offering, and was ultimately released nationwide in 1966.

In 1995, the chips were redesigned to be larger, thinner, and have rounder edges. If you ever scratched your throat on a jagged Dorito shard as a kid, you’ll understand why that was an improvement. Last year, Doritos accounted for $2.4 billion in sales revenue.

Charcoal Briquettes

By the early 1920s, Henry Ford was using so much wood to make his cars that he sought out his own lumber supply. His real estate agent and distant relative, Edward Kingsford, found him a large swath of timberland in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. With all that wood came a lot of sawdust and waste trimmings, and an Oregon-based chemist approached Ford with an idea to make a unique “pillow” style of charcoal. Ford, an avid camper, was intrigued, and he enlisted his camping buddy Thomas Edison to design & build a charcoal factory adjacent to his sawmill. Then he put Kingsford in charge of the plant.

The “Ford Charcoal” briquettes were sold to smokehouses first, but supply exceeded demand, so picnic kits with a small grill and a bag of charcoal soon appeared in Ford dealerships. In 1951, an investment group bought Ford Charcoal, renamed it “Kingsford Charcoal”, and rode the suburban barbecue boom into ubiquity.

These are just a few examples of American ingenuity and resourcefulness. They’re also great to bring up if your significant other is insistent that you clean out the shed or garage, or just throw away one of the hundred random cables you’ve shoved into a drawer. I’m not saying they’re convincing arguments… but they’re great to bring up regardless.

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