Depression practice

We watched that American Girl movie about the Great Depression last week, and ever since then I've found myself practicing for the one that feels like it's headed our way.
It's not quite the same as just being frugal. The way things are now -- the way we've lived for the past 15 years, really, ever since we cut out my full-time income, first to zero and then to part-time -- is we look for ways to be frugal that fit our lifestyle. What I'm talking about is different -- what would we do if we had no income at all?
Other than freak out, I mean.
So I've been noticing things. Like, we made Abe Lincoln pound cake on Lincoln's 200th birthday (also Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, but Darwin recipes are a lot harder to come by). And we had some real whipped cream from a cake our oldest was making for her Spanish class, so that naturally led me to thinking we ought to get some strawberries to go with it. And one of those plastic containers of strawberries doesn't go very far in a family of six, so I got two of them -- $5 worth of strawberries. So this was a dessert that was, right there, costing more than entire dinners at our place most nights.
It was a good treat. But you know, we didn't really taste Lincoln's pound cake -- it was just kind of a bed for the strawberries and whipped cream. So when I was reviewing my mental game film of this episode, during a session of "Depression practice," I thought, you know, we could've just eaten the pound cake plain. Lot of butter in that cake, it was probably very rich and tasty. And we didn't even know it.
Or I could've bought one strawberry per person, and cut it in two, and garnished the cake with that. Then we would've savored the cake and the strawberry.