check out the USDA’s Cost of Raising

While $37,440 over 18 years may not seem overwhelming, the

per-year cost is highest when children become teens. What a

typical family spends varies, of course, depending on the

number of kids, household income and general eating habits.

If you’re wondering how you stack up against a typical

family, check out the USDA’s Cost of Raising a Child

Calculator, which enables you to enter your family profile. I

entered a sample family (middle income, two adults, two

teenagers aged 13 and 15) and determined that the average

family of this make-up spends $5150 per year (or $429/month)

on food just for their teens. This comparative information

can provide a guideline for budgeting and give you a sense of

what average Americans are spending – but the dollars and

cents are clear; feeding teenagers can become a major

expense.

(MORE: Paying for Grades: What to Consider Before Promising

Your Kids Cash for A’s)

Regardless of your income, it’s important to understand your

own expenses and to be smart about you’re spending so that

you can continue to save for your financial goals, even with

ravenous teens. Try these steps to help manage family food

costs.

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Create a monthly food budget. First and foremost, understand

what you can afford on food based on your monthly income and

other expenses. Remember that your overall food budget

includes more than just groceries- factor in how much you and

your kids spend at convenience or specialty stores,

restaurants, school lunches and special events. If you don’t

know what you’re already spending, track your costs for a

few months and then sit down and evaluate where your dollars

are going. Include your kids in this process to help teach

good money habits.

MORE: Guide: The 31 Healthiest Foods of All Time (With

Recipes)

Bloating is one of the most disruptive

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You're not pregnant and you haven't gained weight, but your

jeans are straining at the waist. So what's going on?

Irritable bowel syndrome

Could be the cause if: You've been bloated on and off for a

long time and have also experienced symptoms including pain,

constipation and/or bouts of diarrhoea.

A common bowel condition, IBS is a functional disorder, which

means there's nothing wrong with the structure of the bowel

itself, but the way the gut works is abnormal.

Peter Whorwell, professor of medicine and gastroenterology at

the University of Manchester, says, "We think the gut is

over-sensitive in IBS sufferers so its normal processes cause

the symptoms." Bloating is one of the most disruptive side

effects of IBS.

Some women go up a couple of dress sizes and even need

different clothes depending on whether or not they are

bloated. For many, it tends to worsen towards the evening, so

it can disrupt your social life. There's no cure for IBS, but

you can manage the symptoms.

"Cutting out cereal fibre eases symptoms by between 30 per

cent and 40 per cent in the majority of sufferers," says

Professor Whorwell.

This means avoiding whole meal breads, oats, muesli,

digestive biscuits, cereal bars and all breakfast cereals

other than Rice Krispies, but white bread, cakes, cream

crackers and most biscuits are fine. Try doing this for three

months to see if it helps. Probiotics may also ease symptoms.

Try yoghurts, as the probiotic strain they contain has been

shown to help IBS.

Faust does not regard the butchering

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At all events, it would appear to matter less whether the body counts were as uniquely high as we have thought them to be, or whether the fighting was quite as ruthless as we had imagined, than that Americans, white and black, fought to the death over the future of slavery and, by extension, the future of their country. The "limits of destruction" may in fact have been most consequential not on the fields of war but on the fields of peace, when the federal government exercised restraint and refused to punish Confederate leaders and their supporters as traitors deserved to be.


Although she devotes relatively few pages to it, Faust does not regard the butchering of black troops as marginal to the Civil War fighting or as merely a product of racism. She sees enslavement--its experience, requirements, and political logic--at the very center. Black soldiers, Faust argues, approached the prospects of violence very differently than did most white Americans, not only because of their sense of the war's righteousness but also because of their collective suffering under slavery. As one African American at the time explained, "To suppose that slavery, the accursed thing, could be abolished peacefully and laid aside innocently, after having plundered cradles, separated husbands and wives, parents and children; and after having starved to death, worked to death, whipped to death, run to death ... and grieved to death ... would be the greatest ignorance under the sun." African Americans never imagined that the slavery question could be settled amicably. Most of them relished the opportunity to take up arms against their masters. And as black soldiers learned that the Confederates would give them no quarter, and as they suffered more and more brutality, they necessarily fought with even greater ferocity. "There is," one northern observer reported, "death to the rebel in every black mans [sic] eyes."