Sales of Spam are up more than 10 percent. It was reported that a San Francisco housewife is frying up Spam, a la the 1940s, to feed her family more economically.

Is there trouble in River City? In business it is critical to sort out hype and emotion from reality.

I actually like Spam, as did my father before me. Spam is short for spiced ham. It came out in 1937, during the midst of the Great Depression, and played a major role in World War II. My father fought at Leyte Gulf and felt Spam was a touch of home in the vastness of the Pacific. Some shipmates wondered whose side this ham-in-a-can was on.

So what about Spam frugality? I recently bought whole chicken for 99 cents a pound, excellent boneless pork for less than $2 per pound and hamburger for $2.25 per pound. Spam in my local grocery sells for $4.25 per pound, more than four times the price of that chicken.

This San Francisco frugality reminds me of Oklahoman Will Rogers' remark in truly tough times that Americans were the first people in history to be driving to the poorhouse in our own cars.

How tough is it out there today? Let us remember that we are a dynamic market economy of more than 300 million people. Dynamic means it goes both up and down.

Each month, 1.3 million Americans lose their jobs and 1.3 million others find jobs. Even in the best of times there are enough genuine economic hardship stories to fill our newspapers.

What's going on today can be traced to the days of my father. Hardened by the Depression and the fires of war, he knew hard times. Not only was he frugal but he developed "talking poor" to a fine art. Starvation was always just around the corner.

After an embarrassingly good year on the farm, he assured his brother that losses would be severe in the near future. If corn peaked at $2.35 a bushel, but we sold at $2.15, the word went out that the farm "lost" 20 cents a bushel that year. I know poor talk when I hear it and it is at a frenzy level today.

The 4 percent increase in food prices is creating a furor. Think of it: Americans on average spend just 10 percent to 11 percent of their incomes on food. This is the lowest in the world and includes the extravagance of all that processed food. A nominal increase in a small part of the budget should not be a big deal, but with food there are special emotions.

In business, we teach that every good or service in the family budget competes with the others. If travel and entertainment go up, we do less or possibly buy fewer clothes.

This is not quite true for the basics of air, water, food and shelter. When milk or bread the basic of basics goes up, our survival instincts go into overdrive. It is buy or die.

Dairy product prices are cyclical. Some weeks back, milk was $3.99 a gallon but recently could be found for $1.99 on sale. The price of wheat is up and I saw a loaf of bread at an outrageous $3.79 that contained only 25 cents worth of flour. A huge box of corn flakes contains 15 cents worth of corn.

Manufacturers are calculating that the farmer will get the blame as they raise prices. Don't buy it. Shop carefully.

Americans have an annual per capita income of $41,800. By contrast Western Europe's proud leader, Ireland, is at $31,800, followed closely by Germany, France and England. Gas is $8 there.

Recently, a major network asserted that Europeans have a higher standard of living than we do. When talking poor takes over, anything bad is believed.

More hardship was revealed by a major news magazine. The average cost of a wedding will drop from $28,700 to $28,400 this year. Try that number on a foreign visitor. I learned from Spencer Tracy and Steve Martin that guys shouldn't comment too much on wedding arrangements but I calculated the modern dollar cost of my own 1968 wedding in a small German village was $3,000. At $28,400 a pop that average American family is pretty well off - at least until the bills come due.

Shelter is about as basic as bread and milk so what about the foreclosure crisis? In the Bloomington-Normal area house prices are going up and foreclosures happen, but are rare. Problems are concentrated in southern California, Las Vegas and Florida.

Real estate typically gains 5 percent per year but these areas enjoyed a run of 15 percent or more annual increases, followed by a predictable 25 percent crash.

The road of the free market is bumpy and some of today's bumps are hard, but believing our own poor-talk propaganda is a mistake. When the cries of pain are loudest, that's the best time to invest.

Carson Varner is a professor of finance, insurance and law at Illinois State University.