Sunrise, Sunset

Although I'm not terribly happy about this photo (I generally avoid power lines and try to frame photographs without stray house bits, like the corner of the gable on the upper right), it and its companion below represent this post rather nicely, and were taken on the same day about a week ago. The "Sunrise" shot (above) was taken from the front porch with my new iPhone 7.

The "sunset" shot, taken in the back yard, also includes power lines, so there's an additional aspect of symmetry; I usually stand atop chairs and other furniture to try and avoid them. However, I wanted to submit something to Skywatch Friday for the first time in ages [as usual, thanks to the crew--and do go see what folks from all over have posted], so here we are; what you see is what I got, and I'm making do.

As I am with all manner of things these days. I will not be viewing any of the inaugural festivities tomorrow, and since the weather should be warmer, will instead be doing some early garden prep, reading some Wendell Berry and Joseph Wood Krutch, and watching a couple of episodes of Netflix's wonderful adaptation of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. I can't imagine anything more appropriate, given the state of the Union. Thus, the photos seem to hold out a little promise for a not completely bleak future, but I won't be holding my breath.

Despite my usual less-than-optimistic view of things, I've decided to find ways to muddle through the next four years. I'll be rethinking and redesigning my website (and changing the name from Owldroppings to Owl's Farm; this blog will be linked to it), clearing out the detritus in the garage and attic (in case we decide we just can't abide Texas any longer), and finding more ways to live more sustainable lives.

Inspiration for all this has come from several places, including my new subscription to Australia's Slow magazine, ecopoets like Krutch and Berry, and even the latest issue of American Craft. The editor, Monica Moses, has written a wonderful little essay on the role of craft in keeping one's sanity in uncertain times: "The Tough Make Art," in which she describes her own plan:
 

Like a lot of us, I’m looking for ways to cope with the discord, to feel hopeful again. I’m returning to the basics: eating well, exercising, trying to sleep, spending time with loved ones. But I’m also doubling down (as the pundits would say) on art. (American Craft, Feb/Mar 17, p. 10)

My own map of the next few months includes efforts to accomplish much the same sorts of things, including the art part. Her sentiments are in tune with much of what I read among the thoughtful writers whose works I frequent, now that I find myself sticking to the Arts & Life section and the funnies in the Daily Poop,  and the Books and Trilobites sections of the New York Times. Never have I felt more grateful for the library we've amassed, because it should prove most valuable over the next four years, reminding me that sanity might well prevail.

So, for what it's worth, here's what I have in mind:

Eat Real Food. I stole this designation from my Whole Foods Market newsletter, which offered its customers meal plans in several categories. But it's really what I've been trying to do for years, with the help of Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman and others. I've become rather more serious about it since my retirement awarded me with more time for contemplating and planning. We also recently invested in a smaller refrigerator, which facilitates consciousness of how much we buy and where we have to store it. It's also a terrific deterrent to food waste. The Beloved Spouse gave me Lidia Bastianich's new book, Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine, and The Big Book of Kombucha for the holidays (plus Cooking With Loula, a lovely Greek cookbook I noticed while shopping for other people's gifts). I have always loved cookbooks that are more about history, philosophy, and culture than technique, and these are all inspirational additions to the "food" segment of our aforementioned library. Over the last two weeks I've spent more time planning meals and enjoying the process than I'd been able to do for several years.

Get Real Exercise. The realization that the new, pricey drug I'm taking is likely to prolong my life significantly (and my favorite cardiologist's reminding me that exercise won't do squat for my cholesterol but will do massive amounts of good for my brain and overall well being) has made me more conscious than ever of movement. What finally got me perambulating the neighborhood was the death of our sweet dog Woody last summer. His brother Arlo no longer had a reliable source of exercise, so I started walking him, dropping him off at the house when he got tired, and then continued on my own several times a week. TBS would join me on weekends and holidays, and we've gotten to know the topography of the neighborhood better than we had in the previous sixteen years. Over his winter break from teaching we kept up the dog walking, but neighborhood exploration slacked off due to weather and family obligations.  But a movement-tracking app on my phone has helped keep me from being completely sedentary, and as the weather warms up and I get into the garden more (as I plan to this afternoon), I should hit the "active" category much more frequently (now "lightly active" rescues me from couch potatohood). The goal is to use my body better, get stronger, and get out much more.

Make Stuff.  Some time ago I bought a lovely journal with a William Morris design on it (actually, a sketch for a wallpaper design) in which I've been writing down and sketching out ideas for art books and other little projects. I'll try to get some of these done--including the redesign of my web pages. But I've been wanting to go back to painting and "making" things,  which I haven't done since my children were small. This includes working on the house and garden--painting and plastering and staining and the like, along with general homekeeping, mending, knitting, and quilting. Using one's creative juices seems to be a particularly satisfying way to make it through trying times.

Write More. Having received my first rejection slip (for a story in a science fiction anthology), you'd think I'd have sworn off any desire to publish more than for myself  (and my one or two faithful readers). But I've decided to do what I used to urge my students to do: take the criticism to heart, and use it well. I'm not sure I agree with all of the comments, but I'll have them in mind when I revise the story and submit it somewhere else. I also need to work on More News From Nowhere, and to go back to the old-bats-in-space novel I started working on a couple of years ago. I actually posted on the Cabinet recently, and have lots of ideas for more entries. Letters to friends are on the list, too.

Read Even More. I probably read more than I do anything else, but now that I've made it through the entire run of Midsomer Murders twice on Netflix, I've got no afternoon distractions from the telly. TBS and I have stuff we watch when he gets home (because he's too brain dead after teaching to accomplish anything more impressive), but when I'm not out moving and growing things, I have a huge stack of books to begin or to finish. And then there's always Cat-watching time in the garden, which will need to be extended as the weather improves. Emma likes company when she's out, and I can't leave her entirely unsupervised. In  addition, there's nothing quite as peaceful as watching a cat and a dog snoozing away in the afternoon sun.

This is all very ambitious, I know. But since I'm too old and tired to be politically active any more, if I get even a little of it done, I'll have accomplished something. And so, Dear Reader(s), may the future be better than we have any right, at this moment, to expect.

The Education of Desire: We are what we do, we are what we eat

Perhaps I'm a bit late in jumping on this particular bandwagon, because when I started searching for more information on a couple of closely related problems (obesity and food waste) I found more than I can handle in one post.  Other folks have also been thinking about the irony of this country's enormous waistlines and the equally enormous amounts of food waste making its way to the landfill.  We also hear talk of food deserts that help account for obesity among the poor, but I only recently began to wonder if anyone had been connecting the dots. Clearly they have.

This week's news media also reported on topics that are at least tangentially related to the waste/obesity problem: Herman Pontzer's articles in the New York Times,  pointed out that (as the Daily Poop version of the story put it) "It's the Sugar, Stupid," and that all the exercise in the world isn't going to make us as healthy as our distant ancestors if we're consuming crap. And in this week's New Scientist, the cover story ("Eat Your Way to Dementia") is about the relationship between type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease. 

The last two months of house-renovation have increased my awareness of food waste because the combination of beastly weather, minimal air conditioning, and odd sleeping accommodations has put the kibosh on cooking (I've been way too hot and tired)--with the result that I spent this morning cleaning out my fridge, ridding myself of spoilt food, shriveled limes and carrots, and a couple of mystery life forms.  Mind you, the compost and the Bokashi bins can handle almost all of this, so that I don't really have to throw much away.  But that's not the point. 

This stuff was bought at a premium, represents many folks' labor and time (from farm to market), and bloody well should have been eaten.  Not only eaten, but cooked well and healthfully.  What the news articles have done is to fortify my resolve to accomplish several items in a new program of food-consciousness. 

First, it's really a good idea to plan one's meals and not rely (except on rare occasions) on serendipity.  My daughter bragged in a text message last night that she had planned a week's meals for two and spent $57 on them at Whole Foods. She's also tracking how they use leftovers--which isn't a bad idea either.  Simplifying food preparation in hot weather so that ingredients can be used more than once saves time, energy, and effort, and it helps prevent waste. So I'm going to set aside an hour or so one day a week (probably Wednesday morning) to plan the week's meals in time to shop on the way home from school on Thursday, when I have an early morning class. 

In addition, since before too long I'm going to be pinching food pennies again (i.e. when I retire, which could be as early as a year from now), I'm going to need to be considerably more mindful of how much I spend. I won't scrimp on quality, but if I end up paying $5 a pound for really good tomatoes, I certainly need to make sure that we actually eat them before they go off. 

My biggest challenge will be to address the issues that Herman Pontzer raises about what we've evolved to eat.  This is actually something I've been aware of for rather a long time, having conducted research on breastfeeding and maternal nutrition in hunter-gatherer cultures as a grad student.  I'm also really puzzled by what seems to be an increasing intolerance to the kinds of grains that our Neolithic ancestors domesticated for us.  Purely gathering cultures didn't eat these grains, which came along after people settled down and began to raise animals and crops.  Still, I do wonder if modern modifications to wheat varieties and increased refinement (the quest for gummy white bread) might be at least partly responsible.  I've already started using farro in pilaf and risotto-like concoctions; now I'm thinking of grinding some and trying it in bread. 

Another article, on the effect of modern European diets on Native Americans, makes a similar point,   as does a report on the Westernization of Asian diets. Both of these populations suffer mightily from diabetes in increasing numbers, and at least part of the culprit is radical dietary change over a relatively small amount of time in evolutionary terms.

It just seems like plain common sense to eat whole foods, high in fiber, low in--but not absent--fats, and free of transmogrified sugars and other chemicalized foodstuffs that have been developed to entice us to eat "food" that's not good for us. (See the 60 Minutes programs on "Tweaking Tastes and Creating Cravings" and the toxicity of sugar for examples of how we're being seduced into desiring what's bad for us.)

The simplest path to health seems also to be the cheapest: eat simply, grow herbs to enhance flavors and provide micronutrients, stay away from heavily processed stuff that comes in fancy packaging, and cook from scratch as much as possible.  New information about fermented foods seems to back up the practices of many simpler cultures (sauerkraut, kimchee, miso, cheese), so taking your dairy foods in the form of a good yoghurt doesn't sound all that bad.  Thanks to Mark Bittman, I've recently reduced the amount of cow's milk I drink and have since suffered far less from heartburn.  I haven't completely sworn off the stuff, because I love it (1%) in coffee, and am not fond of completely eliminating things that still offer some nutritional benefits.

While it's clear that eating more like an Archevore or following some version of a paleo-diet might well improve overall health, that's fodder (sorry) for another post. After all, if everyone suddenly abandoned wheat, corn, dairy foods, and minimized fruit consumption because of its sugar content, the American economy would collapse.  But we certainly do need to pay a lot more attention to what we eat and what we throw away, and make decisions that lead producers away from creating more and more junk.  Spending a bit of time reading Dana Gunders's position paper for the National Resources Defense Council, "Wasted: How America Is Losing up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill", or Jonathan Bloom's book American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food (the link is to his blog, Wasted Food) can go a long way toward raising our collective awareness of the ironies and inconsistencies in American food-life; obesity, hunger, plenty, over-indulgence, and waste are all tightly woven into a culture riddled with greed, inattentiveness, consumerism, and advertising designed to make us keep doing what we're doing. But we ought not to be doing it, else we will become it.

I vote we stop. Soon.

Image credit: Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Crows seemed appropriate for this post, not least because the crows can be seen as harbingers of his death.  I showed this in my Art History 2 class a couple of weeks ago, along with Akira Kurasawa's short film, Crows, via Biblioklept (from Akira Kurosawa's Dreams); the painting is from Wikimedia Commons.

Fire

Human beings are always trying to figure out all the ways in which we're not only unique, but uniquely unique (different in ways that no other species is) among others in the animal kingdom. But as each of the previously identified means of being special have either evaporated or diminished, the fact that we cook our food seems to be holding. As far as we know, there isn't another species that deliberately starts a fire in order to hustle up some dinner.

We once thought that our possession of language was a significant marker, not shared even by other primates; but Koko the Gorilla and other apes after her have shown that they can communicate not only among themselves but with us, using a form of human language, and can pass that knowledge on to others. I used to think that the truly remarkable talent possessed by homo sapiens sapiens was not simply language, but the ability to make and use metaphors; I dubbed us homo translator, and built a good many lectures about human nature upon that seemingly clever designation.

But, alas, Koko also devised some nifty metaphors (her little roly-poly kitten was "All Ball"), so there went that theory. Since then we've discovered chimps (and even birds) that use tools (bye, bye, homo faber), long the measure of human specialness.

Human culinary proclivities, however, have held up pretty well over the years as a measure of human-ness. Claude Lévi-Strauss's important study of myth, The Raw and the Cooked, focused on the symbolic aspects of cooking, and a rather wonderful book that came out a few years ago--Food and Culture: A Reader (edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, Routledge, 1997) --includes most of the important anthropological musings on the topic by the likes of Margaret Mead, Roland Barthes, Marvin Harris, Mary Douglas, and Lévi-Strauss himself. The book has recently been updated (2008), which attests to continuing interest in the topic.

More recently, Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009) poses the possibility that moving from raw to cooked food actually promoted the transition into full humanitude, bringing with it all manner of social consequences. It's an engaging book, and even though I'm always suspicious of single-impetus theories, this one's more convincing than most. That may be because I'm such a foodie, but Wrangham does back his hypothesis up with substantial evidence and a good argument.

The cooking-made-us human notion also ties in with the cultural importance of fire--the main topic of today's musings. Few natural phenomena manage to connote both warmth and comfort and abject fear and dread at the same time. But fire does this: the cozy campfire all too often turns into the killer wildfire, as seems to be the case in Arizona's ongoing Wallow fire (which began a month ago and still isn't 100% contained). However it started, the currently burning Las Conchas fire is threatening Los Alamos National Laboratory's nuclear materials--piling one concern on top of another.

As I've been prepping for my up-coming class, Myth, Mythography, and Mythology, I keep coming across interesting articles about myth and natural phenomena--not the least of which is fire. One of the more potent symbols in human cultures, fire takes many forms in the stories people tell about themselves and nature. Our ambivalence about it shows up famously in the story of Prometheus (who steals it from the gods and suffers dire consequences), and I frequently remind students that the disastrous eruptions of Vesuvius and Thera are what preserved significant aspects of Roman and Minoan culture for us.

Just yesterday I discovered an article in Mosaic by the philosopher David Farrell Krell and his actor/producer daughter Salomé , "Why Santorini? A Response in Two Voices," in which he considers the caloric (and metaphorical) aspects of energy--produced by the heat of the sun, but more so by the underlying seismic activity in the Mediterranean. It was the continuing interaction of tectonic plates, after all, that produced the massive Bronze Age eruption that left behind the remnants we now call Santorini. The poetic value of marrying heat-driven energy to human hospitality brings us back to cooking: "human energy," Krell notes, "passes in good part through great food."

When I was thinking about how to illustrate this post with something appropriate for Skywatch Friday, I kept remembering a photo I took in Riverside, California about forty years ago, of the U. C. campus carillon tower against a flaming sky. When I found it, I realized that my memory was far more vivid than the actual image, which wasn't even worth scanning. But my evening sojourns in the back yard in recent years have contributed a large number of much more appropriate images, like the one I ended up using (taken last summer)--the kind of photograph that immediately brings fire to mind.

Fires are breaking out everywhere, both in nature and in politics. A world in which suicide bombers ignite hotel fires, demonstrators throw Molotov cocktails, planes drop bombs, human beings light barbecues for patriotic holidays and set off fireworks (which can, in turn, set off wildfires), is one in which fire holds power far above its physical presence. Few symbols maintain such an uneasy balance between the beneficial and the baneful. And as we settle into yet another very hot summer, the likelihood that the world will end in fire--in any combination of its many forms--seems entirely possible, if not inevitable.

--Since I haven't posted in a while, I thought it worth noting that the Farm turned five on June 22. To those of you who've read these "pages" on and off over the years, thanks for keeping me going.

Six Months Out

Some of the most aggravating pleonasms in use today include phrases like "first-year anniversary" or (even worse, and it's not really a pleonasm) "three-month anniversary." Anni is the Latin root for "year," so "first-year" (or second or third, or whatever) is redundant.

The proper way to mark the date is to say, simply, "first anniversary." Since a month is not a year, any "-month anniversary" is just plain wrong. Years ago, our family coined the term "mensaversary" (from the Latin mensa, month) to mark smaller celebratory events--like a baby's "first mensaversary" at age one month.

What brings the topic to mind is yesterday's sixth mensaversary of my valve replacement. Since I was, at the time, pretty sure I'd never get to this point, it probably is something worth celebrating--halfway to my first anniversary of not being dead (again).

Having already fallen off the rehab wagon (first the heat, and then the rain, and always the mosquitoes), I'm trying to celebrate by starting afresh, now that I've got a schedule that allows for a couple of days in which I can spend mornings gardening and taming the carbon sink, and more mornings I can use to get my butt moving.

As usual, however, I seem to have been waiting for a confluence of inspirations, and they've shown up in spades. First was Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, followed by Prevention magazine's September issue, which featured an article on fatty acids, a blog post in NutritionData on the benefits of the "Paleo Diet" vs. the Mediterranean Diet, and finally Andrew Weil's new book Why Our Health Matters.

Catching Fire is the kind of book I absolutely relish (and no, I'm not going to launch into a series of food puns). Its about anthropology and things culinary all at the same time. Wrangham's premise is that what makes us human (or "uniquely unique" among a large family of talented apes) is not using tools to make stuff, or using metaphor (as I once thought was the characteristic, until Koko the gorilla started making them), or acquiring language (since Koko and other apes can do that, too). Rather, it's the fact that our distant ancestors tamed fire and learned to cook their food--opening up a much wider variety of culinary sources than were available before somebody accidentally dropped a fish into the campfire and loved the results.

The cultural significance of cooking was recognized in my generation by Claude Levi-Strauss but, as Wrangham points out, Levi-Strauss and his heirs saw cooking as a primarily symbolic act. But Wrangham, a biological anthropologist, digs into the biochemical changes that cooking introduces and reveals some interesting cultural implications that lead up to modern human behavior.

I've been interested in the subject of food and culture (so much so that I've been busy designing a course on it for years--but have so far only managed a "Taste of Tut" presentation with one of the chef instructors in the culinary program) for quite a while. One of my research interests in graduate school was the relationship between breastfeeding and child-spacing in hunting and gathering cultures, and calorie intake turned out to be a major factor. Wrangham confirms the connection and goes on to explore the impact of cooked food and brain development, along with a plethora of other ramifications. The book is fascinating and a wonderful addition to your culinary history bookshelf.

Every week a bulletin from NutritionData (know what you eat) shows up in my e-mailbox, and its blog is on my weekly path through cyberspace. Monica Reinagel discusses various nutrition-related topics, and one recent post asked "Is Paleo the New Mediterranean?" and noted the results of a couple of small studies comparing the long-appreciated benefits of eating like a Greek peasant to eating like a "caveman" (their word, not mine). The paleo-adherants (who eschew all grains, legumes, and potatoes, among other things) improved their glucose tolerance and waist-circumferences far better than did the pasta-and-fava eaters.

So I looked up the Paleo Diet (the Next Big New Thing, as far as I can tell), which differs from the raw-food diet (a less recent entry in the revolutionary diet pantheon) in that food can be cooked. As is usual with such things, there's certainly something to be said about eating fewer of one item or another, or more of another. But I am always suspicious of "diets" that require one to abandon cultural connections or adhere to a strict list of guidelines that completely eliminate certain groups of food from consumption at all. Increasingly listening to the moderate voice, I'm with the Greeks here: nothing to excess. My days of being a Kosher vegetarian are long behind me.

Which is why I was glad to see Dr. Andrew Weil's new book Why Our Health Matters: A vision of Medicine that can Transform our Future on the shelf of the local B&N. I like Weil, because he's the consummate moderate: a traditionally-trained physician who sees value in many alternative or non-traditional (at least in the West) therapies. I'm not an avid follower of any of them, but Weil's critique of our so-called "health care system" is an eye-opener if you haven't already realized that what we're participating in is really a "disease management system."

Part of our ignorance about what's good for us stems from a lack of good information in the past. But we're learning more and more every day about what causes disease--and what can prevent it--and we're running out of excuses for not working to avoid illnesses rather than focusing on curing them.

My health history is a prime example of how different life could have been with the right information early on. Had we known about the dangers of genetically high cholesterol when I was a child, and had we tested for it; had we known what a huge role diet and exercise play in lowering cholesterol levels; had we known about metabolic syndrome and how to manage it when I was young; had we realized that my heart murmur signaled the possibility of valve disease. Had we known this stuff, could we have in fact prevented the necessity of two open-heart surgeries in fifteen years? A simple combination of diet, exercise, and drug therapy might have saved me and my family a great deal of angst and discomfort, and saved my employer, my insurance company, and me a large amount of money. But prevention only entered the picture after a lifetime of bad habits and lack of information had already taken their toll.

The current debate on health care reform needs to address much more fundamental issues than simply how it will affect The Deficit. Monetary cost is only part of the equation. We're living in a world that can't imagine living without plastics, but seems blissfully unaware of what making plastic costs--in environmental and human terms. We drive like maniacs down the highway, spewing particulate matter willy-nilly, and we use power that adds even more crap to the air we breathe. We just don't think about the health-related consequences of economic choices, but we'll never have really effective health care or disease prevention until we do.

In the meantime, there are probably some fairly useful and effective measures we can take on our own, beginning with diet and exercise. And while I can't subscribe whole-heartedly to the Paleo Diet or to the Raw Food doctrine, they do have something to teach us by reminding us that we havent' evolved our big brains by eating Twinkies and Big Macs. Our technologically infused age has turned the food we eat into complicated hashes of chemicals and monocultural, supermarket-focused uniformity.

Our ancestors lived on combinations of raw and cooked, minimally processed foods, hunted and gathered with restraint and care not to exhaust their sources. Their animals were not raised on feed lots and fed alien diets. Cattle grazed, in fact, on grasses rich in Omega 6 fatty acids, but our lot-fed cattle eat corn--leading (according to Prevention's article) to an imbalance between "spring" and "fall" fats and to our current growing waistlines. It certainly couldn't do us much harm to rethink how we eat and where our food comes from. Yes, grass-fed beef and bison are more expensive than conventionally "finished" beef. But we don't have to eat large amounts of it, and frankly I like the leaner (and ethically more comfortable) taste of a cow that's been allowed to graze instead of made to stand in its own excrement for the last few weeks of its life.

And now, on that happy note, I'll adjourn to the kitchen to try a new variation on Grandma Clarice's Applesauce Cake, full of all kinds of healthful ingredients, and if it turns out well, I'll post the results in the Cabinet of Wonders [linked 18 October]. Food--warm, cooked food on a nippy, dreary day in early autumn--is a terrific mood enhancer, and until I see the sun again, I'm going to need something yummy to add a psychological and/or symbolic lift to my sodden spirits. A nice sweet-potato and bean soup is waiting to be made for supper (haven't decided which Neolithic ingredients to add to the stock I made last spring), so things are looking up already.

Image credit: A stereoscopic card with a photo called "Cooking Supper" by Truman Ward Ingersoll, part of the Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views at the New York Library's Digital collection, via Wikimedia Commons. My grandmother had a stereoscope with a box of images that all the cousins loved to look at. Alas, I didn't inherit this bit of family treasure, but I don't begrudge the cousin who did, partly because images like these are so readily available online. The photo reminded me of the many campfire meals I've enjoyed throughout my life, many of them in Western national parks with my family.

Mrs. Rudkin's Cookbook

One of the problems with having multiple blogs, even when they're focused on different topics, is that sometimes I'm not sure where to post something. This conundrum arose yesterday when I came across a wonderful book about which I wanted to make note--but couldn't choose the proper venue. This morning I decided to post it on both. This sounds a bit lazy, but since it's the product of a serendipitous occurrence and about the idea of home and place, maybe the idea isn't as silly as it seems even as I write.

The book in question is The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook, illustrated by Erik Blegvad, and published by Atheneum in 1963. I found it in the "nostalgia" section of Half Price Books yesterday, where I'd gone to drown my sorrows after hearing about the resignation of a friend and colleague--the second in as many months--which left me feeling more than a little bereft. Beloved Spouse and I were on our way out when I noticed the rather Edward Gorey-ish spine of a book which, on first glance seemed to be another corporate promotional endeavor (some of which, like the Spice Islands Cookbook, also published in 1963, can be quite good)--but with amusing and well-crafted pictures scattered throughout. The dust jacket was missing, so what attracted me were the un-augmented images on the front (above) and back (below) covers.

Now, I'm as big a sucker for good illustration as I am for good cookbooks, so I said to myself, "What the hell; it's only ten bucks" and added it to my small pile of goodies.

When I got home, I started leafing through the book and discovered a treasure: a compendium of healthful recipes developed by the woman who had founded Pepperidge Farm (named for her own family's farm in Connecticut) and ended up serving on the board of Campbell Soup after she sold her company to them in 1961. In 2007, Fortune Magazine named her one of the century's fifty most powerful women. (Copies of the cookbook can be had from online used-book outlets like alibris for less than what I paid, but some may be the 1992 edition).

Margaret Fogarty Rudkin was born the same year as my Grandma Clarice, 1897, in New York. In 1937, when her son developed allergies that his doctor said could be addressed by feeding him bread made from whole grains, she began a journey that eventually led to the cookbook. 1963, when Rudkin published it, was the year after I returned from Taiwan and during which I lived with my grandmother, so the coincidence adds to my delight in finding the book when I did.

The illustrator, Erik Blegvad, is actually no stranger to my family. One of my children's favorite books growing up was Judith Viorst's The Tenth Good Thing About Barney (which I highly recommend to families for helping them deal with the death of a pet)--illustrated by none other than Mr. Blegvad.

During my recently aborted attempt to improve my typographic skills (I had to drop the class because midterm madness caught up with me), I had run across another book by Blegvad that's probably worth looking for: Types Best Remembered/Types Best Forgotten, published by Parsimony Press in 1994. But the cheapest edition I could find through alibris is $69. Guess I'll wait on that one.

At any rate, owning Rudkin's cookbook is really like having several books in one, because each chapter focuses on an entirely different topic: Childhood, Country Life, Pepperidge Farm, Cooking from Antique Cookbooks, and Ireland. Each features a chatty and informative introduction, and the "antique cookbooks" chapter offers modern versions of such goodies as a fifteenth-century pumpkin pie, although the original carries this warning: "Cassius, who was bothered by colic and stones, did not eat this. It is difficult to digest and nourishes badly." Rudkin's version is much more palatable (perhaps because she doesn't put in a half pound of sow's belly), and simple to make:

Preheat oven to 450.

Ingredients: (Plain pastry for a 9 inch single-crust pie.) 1.5 cups canned pumpkin, 2/3 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. ginger, 1/2 tsp. salt, 2 eggs, 1 c. milk, 1 c. cream.

Method: Line a 9-inch pie pan with pastry, making a high edge. Brush the pastry all over with egg white. Place in the refrigerator while preparing the filling. Mix together the pumpkin and the spices. Sift the brown sugar into the pumpkin and mix well. Beat the eggs and add them. The add the milk and cream and mix well. Pull out the shelf of the oven, set the prepared pie pan on the shelf and carefully pour the filling into the crust. Don't pour all onto one spot., but take a cupful at a time and spread the filling around to avoid breaking the crust. Filling the crust this way avoids spilling.

Bake at 450 F for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 and bake 45 minutes more until the custard is set.

The idea of simple food, lovingly prepared is always welcome, but I think we can especially appreciate it in times when folks no longer eat together all that often, and when grandmothers and their grandchildren can be separated by continents. My memories of times in my grandmother's kitchen come flooding back when I find a book like this, grounded in a similar view of the world and a similar notion of nurturing. My fondest wish is that more people come back to the practice of spending time cooking together as gas gets more expensive and makes folks less likely to run out to the Olive Garden for a family meal. There is absolutely nothing like a home-made pumpkin pie to make us feel secure and comfy--and nothing like a well-illustrated, well-written cookbook to help us recall the relationship between food and home.

Ruminations on Weaning

I was inspired this morning by an editorial article in the Dallas Morning News on breastfeeding, prompted by the death this week of La Leche League founder, Edwina Froehlich, at the age of 93. Thinking about nursing babies leads to reminiscences of "those days" around 30 years ago, when it seemed that I had a child attached to a nipple for the better part of six years of my life--and I only had two kids. But although I was not a La Leche League member until I moved to Dallas and was searching for some kind of community in this god-forsaken corner of the universe (sorry, Dallasites, but I never have been able to learn to love this place and still think of myself as living in exile), and even though I fondly referred to my fellow members as "the militant milkers," I nonetheless kept nursing my kids until long after "normal people" had weaned theirs and sent them off to pre-school.

I was gratified to learn that about 75% of American mothers now at least attempt to nurse their babies, but not at all surprised to discover that Texas is somewhere near the bottom of the stats. Once, when my daughter was about eight months old and we had visited a mall so my husband could take my son skating, I sat in the observation area happily watching them scoot around the ice, and nursed the baby, who was covered by a shawl so completely that only her little feet poked out. I noticed a woman glaring in my direction from a few seats down in the row ahead of me, and when she caught my eye, she scowled and said "That's just disgusting. Can''t you do it in the bathroom?"

Even then I was a bit of a snark, so I smiled pleasantly back at her and asked, "Why? Is that where you eat your dinner?"

She huffed out of the area, and I felt a bit smug, but also furious that anyone could view such an activity as "disgusting"--as if I had bared my breasts and gone prancing around the arena. Come to think of it, that might have brought on some applause (I was rather a babe in those days).

Remembering this incident also got me to thinking about the fact that because I nursed the kids for so long, they were each a bit difficult to wean. They were no longer nursing for nutrition but for comfort and security, and it was an easy way to get them to sleep. But when it came time, we literally weaned them on books: substituting reading time with Dad for nursing time with Mom.

If only it were that easy to wean ourselves from the comforts and conveniences of modern life: the fast food, the fast cars, the chemically laced products that permeate our daily lives.

My dear friend and former student, Jen, has essentially told me I'm nuts (see her comment on my last post) for suggesting that we wean ourselves from sugar--and so I'm here to defend myself, and to argue not for abstention but for moderation: To wean ourselves from the satisfying (but calorie-laden and nutritionally bankrupt) bowl of Tiramisù, toward a more moderate means of taking care of the culturally-induced cravings for sugar that we've all become prey to.

Every now and then, when I'm feeling my exile more deeply than usual (I need a mountain fix every couple of years, and it's getting near that limit again), I crave something to make me feel better. Usually, it's pie. I love pie: Key lime, lemon meringue, chocolate, strawberry, cherry, pecan--almost any kind of pie. I've been known to call my husband and ask him to pick up pie on the way home. Of course, this becomes more and more difficult as one becomes aware of all the crap that goes into commercially produced pies--the ones available in the freezer case at the supermarket (their in-house bakery versions are usually awful). So the poor, dear, man is confronted with the problem of locating the least environmentally and nutritionally problematic version of pie. Loaded with trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup (usually only one of several sugars), the ingredient list alone usually dissuades me if I'm the one on the pie hunt. But he's more tolerant than I am, and wants to help me out, so he comes home with the most inoffensive choice available.

Lately, however, we've discovered the wonders of nuts. And dried fruit mixed with nuts. Or a square of really good chocolate (preferably with nuts, and even better with a bit of dried fruit). A handful of Nature's Best "Nantucket Blend" from Costco (here's a recipe from the Paleo Recipes blog) will usually do the trick now, but I'm also going to try something else the next time I'm confronted with waves of desert-longing and nostalgia. I'm going to make Gram's Applesauce Cake. This is a spice cake my grandmother used to make, filled with raisins and occasionally walnuts. It calls for an indeterminate amount of powdered chocolate, and uses applesauce instead of fat. Except for the white flour, it's actually a nutritional godsend, full of fiber and wholesome nutrients, and now I make it with a blend of whole wheat and unbleached white flour, and add a bit of ground flaxseed to bump it up even more. I haven't made it in a while, though, so this week, in the cool of the morning, I'm going to make a double batch and freeze segments of it so that whenever I want to feed what's left of my sugar addiction, I can just pull a chunk out of the freezer and save my husband from the frustrating--and ultimately unsatisfying--pie hunt.

The other weaning issue that keeps coming up is this: How do we change our lives so that we depend less on gasoline and other petroleum-based products? Sunday's Dallas Morning News ran a story about how gas prices affect just about everything we buy--and it turns out that it's really hard to find stuff in the average supermarket that isn't in some way dependent on the industry. So the way to wean ourselves from this unhealthful dependence is to become aware not only ingredients (check labels for chemical information), but origins: where products come from, and how far they have to travel. Since everything from shampoo to toothpaste can contain petrochemicals, take a look at Ecology Center's Body Map: The True Cost of Petroleum to discover not only how pervasive these chemicals are, but how they affect our health as well as our economy.

Solutions don't have to involve buying pricey substitutes for fancy cosmetics at Whole Foods. It's fairly easy to make natural cosmetics (especially lotions and creams) from simple ingredients. Same with household cleansers. A few standbys like baking soda, vinegar, witch hazel, aloe gel, and olive oil, are cheap and easy to obtain and can be used to make everything from drain cleaner to night cream. If you need help getting started, Earth Easy has some great information on home-made cleaning products and non-toxic house care.

Since soap-making isn't one of those things we can do all that easily by ourselves (although some folks do it as a hobby), a jug of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap in your flavor of choice (I was once told that the Peppermint version is "better than sex," and although I don't think that's quite true, the soap's still a treat in the shower). By the way, forget any rumors you've heard about Dr. Bronner's containing a date-rape drug--any true soap will test positive for it as the company's president Michael Bronner shows on this video. Toothpaste isn't particularly easy to make, either, but you can get by with baking soda if you have to. We substituted Tom's Natural toothpaste for Arm & Hammer a few years ago, and our teeth are actually in better shape than they were with the commercially-hyped versions. The toothpaste is a bit more expensive, but Dr. Bronner's is cheaper than most fancy soaps, and is just plain nice to use.

Many of the suggestions I make on this blog are based on the notion of the thought experiment. So no, Jennifer, I do not think you really have to give up sugar--no more than I really think that people have to give up electricity, even though the folks in More News From Nowhere do so. But imagining a different life is a step toward making a different life. We are, after all, metaphor makers. It's one of the things we do that makes us human; we can see things differently and, if necessarily, act accordingly.

Around this house we've made a considerable number of changes over the last few years. The place is becoming a kind of laboratory for working through alternatives to our own personal status quo. We are finding that old dogs, in fact, can learn new tricks. And while I don't insist that everyone make the same changes, I do hope that the blog has begun to inspire folks to deal with the current economic situation with imagination and mindfulness--rather than despair.

Image credit: Stanisław Wyspiański Macierzynstwo, 1905. Wikimedia Commons.

Simpler Food, Better Lives

Some of my most treasured moments growing up in Taiwan involved taking a day off from school for an appointment with the Air Force dentist stationed at the "listening post" where my father worked as a radio code guy (we thought he was a spy). After the appointment, I was on my own until Daddy got off work, so I'd head for the base library for the afternoon, and this is where I discovered both science fiction and British children's adventure fiction in the guise of Enid Blyton.

I loved these stories (especially Island of Adventure and Five Go to Smuggler's Top) because the kids were much braver than I was and I could enjoy their perils vicariously. One remarkable (to me) aspect of these adventures, however, was the emphasis on food. The protagonists were always off on picnics or camping trips and would take enormous amounts of food with them. Or they'd buy freshly baked goods and fresh fruit and good cheese from an affable farmer's wife--or they'd come upon stores of tinned food (including, usually, potted meat and peaches) in pirate lairs.

On weekends we'd often head off to Bitan (Green Lake), near Taipei, where my parents and their friends would hire a canopied boat. It doesn't look all that attractive in some of these vintage photos I found, but we'd load the boat up with food, beer, sarsaparilla, and chisueh (a 7-Up clone), and chug out to the middle of the lake where we'd spend the day talking, eating, and swimming.

Many of my earliest memories, in fact, centered on the very particular combination of camaraderie, fun, and companionable eating and drinking. As a result, it's really no wonder why my own utopia is replete with these same associations--especially among eating, drinking, and talking. And it seems that the simplest food--picnic staples like sandwiches and fruit, grilled veg and meat--makes it possible for human beings not only to survive, but to create the background for lasting friendships and meaningful conversations. Summer, even here in the humid Southwest, brings out the legions of backyard barbecue mavens anxious to try out the latest marinade. Beer-swilling minions brave the heat and the mozzies to show off their cooking talent, and fill the breeze with the scent of roasting flesh--and lighter fluid.

Ah well. If only these folks would learn that they don't have to douse their charcoal with petrochemicals in order to make it burn. A simple chimney affair will get it lit within a few minutes and move us one step further from dependence on fossil fuels. But, I digress.

The nature of these activities is almost primal. Grilling our food takes us back to our roots and ties us into the first culinary traditions. Cooking outside also keeps the temperature in our houses down, and reduces the amount of electricity and/or gas we use, thus lowering our energy bills. But the sheer simplicity of it all is what attracts me: throw a few peppers on the grill along with assorted other bits, make up a simple salad, bake some flatbread, and voila: an al fresco feast worthy of our earliest ancestors. As long as we don't char everything, we can avoid the carcinogenic effects of grilling; as in everything else, moderation is the key--as is mindful preparation.

There's a lot to be said for peasant food, especially in times when folks are spending more and more of their budgets at the supermarket. The less processed the food, the cheaper (as I mentioned in my last post), and the more potential there is for creating truly healthful menus. In many ways, meals based on whole grains and pulses, with vegetables and fruits cooked or eaten raw alongside, would address a number of problems (including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer) and help transform the economy.

Unfortunately, the world-wide food picture looks rather grim. Here I am, suggesting that everyone eat more whole grains, while the price of grain is making even this basic "staff of life" more and more difficult to obtain for more and more people on earth. The causes are manifold, but among them is one ironic ingredient: the growing prosperity of formerly marginal economies is increasing the demand for meat--which in turn raises the price of the grain used to feed cattle. In addition, the growing demand for biofuels is further affecting the price we pay for a bowl of cereal or a loaf of bread. Supplies can't keep up with demand, and so prices go up--it's the law of the market economy. The situation provides yet another reason to decrease our intake of meat. Even if you can't bring yourself to become a vegetarian or a vegan, it's not all that hard to forgo being a carnivore a couple of times a week. It might also be time to make friends with a hunter or two.

Dairy products and eggs are also increasingly expensive, especially if one insists on buying from organic, free-range, grass fed sources. Few of us would like to give up our daily glass of moo-juice or grated Parmesan on our pasta. But these are essentially luxuries that can be extended with some imagination--or even done without altogether. I seldom use eggs, so that when I buy them I can afford a half-dozen organic cage-free versions from (preferably) local growers. In a pinch, dried skim milk will sub for the fresh variety in cooking, and a glass or two to drink is all we really need. We are, I'm constantly reminded by vegan friends, the only species that drinks the breast-milk of other lactating animals. So it's certainly not an absolute need. In truth, almost everything we can think of cooking can be made without dairy products at all. Well, maybe not real lasagna . . . .

Reading books on how people survived the Great Depression and rationing during the war years can be instructive, and the best of these is M. F. K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, originally published in 1942 (and reprinted, along with others, in the collection The Art of Eating). She goes off on everything from the idea of "balanced meals" (in her chapter, "How to be a Sage without Hemlock") to eating sparsely with friends ("How to Be Cheerful Though Starving"), and much of what she wrote then is still applicable today--and certainly timely. With the possible exception of Frances Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet, I don't think any other book has more thoroughly influenced my views of food and community as this one has.

I also recommend reading the recent reprint of Helen Nearing's Simple Food for the Good Life: Random Acts of Cooking and Pithy Quotations, from the doyenne of simple living. The original version was published in 1980, and there is no better source for solid advice on plain cooking with wholesome ingredients. If you're a confirmed carnivore, you could learn a lot about how to get by without eating animals from this book. The Nearings' work is being carried on these days at The Good Life Center, which deserves a visit, if only online. And for truly inspiring source on simple eating and building community, see Eat Grub--the organization founded by Anna Blythe Lappé (daughter of Frances) and "eco-chef" Bryant Terry.

And this is really the core of getting by and eating well: learning to enjoy basic foodstuffs, and to do without what isn't really necessary. Since I try not to eat tortured animals, I eat little meat. I could probably become a vegetarian again fairly easily, although I'm not particularly bothered by eating animals who've been humanely raised and not killed in horrible scary factory abbatoirs that haven't changed much, it seems, since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. But one could easily argue that killing anything is hardly humane, at the core. And that may be right, and I may come around to that way of seeing things in the end. Nevertheless, it is certainly wise to minimize the amount of meat one does consume, and to make sure that it's not plugged full of hormones and antibiotics and other crap. It just makes sense to eat any food in as natural a state as possible.

One encouraging sign, in addition to the proliferation of farmers' markets I mentioned in my last post, is the growing availability of so-called "heirloom" plants. A burgeoning effort to re-establish fruits and vegetable varieties now makes it easier to buy tastier versions of everyday items like tomatoes and apples, and easier to grow your own alternatives to Burpee Big Boys. At the moment, the supermarket offerings are pricey, and unless they're organic they've probably been sprayed abundantly with bug-murdering chemicals. But local markets are offering more and more alternative choices with the possibilities of different nutrients (according to color) and more varied flavors. Once you've bitten into a fresh, warm Mortgage Lifter tomato (an appropriate choice for the current economic moment), you'll never want to touch another Beefsteak. Try doing a Google search on "heirloom" tomatoes to see how pervasive this movement is becoming.

I'm not sure how it was that Americans became addicted to all things sweet, but we could easily do without all the sugar we consume. Of course lots of food contains various sugars, and it's not necessary to avoid them. But huge amounts of added sugars end up in processed foods, and are completely unnecessary to our existence on this planet. Another advantage to cooking from scratch is that you can control the sugar content by not adding any.

While I'm at it, the very idea that "dessert" has to be a part of everyone's evening meal is ludicrous. And if we really want to round out the experience of eating a lovingly prepared bean casserole and a salad, a nice fresh peach in season should do it.

Confections such as cakes and cookies do not have to be a regular part of our diets. They can certainly be eaten on occasion, but we do not have to have them every day in order to remain human, I promise you. We tend to add unnecessary sugar to everything, including bread, but why not bake wholesome, unsweetened whole grained flatbread (like pita or naan) most of the time, with the Friday night challah (made with whole wheat flour) ritually added as a weekly treat? While there's no reason to deny oneself of the celebretory slice of chocolate cake, there is also no reason to assume that we actually need this stuff. Buy yourself a good jar of honey and leave it at that. Don't keep sugars in your pantry, and you'll find other ways to satisfy your sweet tooth: a handful of dried cherries, a few dried figs, a nice cold apple.

The bottom line is this: simple food can be inexpensive, nutritious, and relatively easy to prepare. Minimize the meat and sweets, and concentrate on fiber, along with colorful vegetables and fruits. You need nine servings of the latter per day, but a serving is only the size of your fist--so it's pretty easy to accumulate the optimal number, and it's not terribly expensive if you buy in season--especially from local markets. We are extremely fortunate in this country to still have abundant food (far too much of it in many cases) at prices most of us can still afford. But if we could imagine, even for one day a week, what less affluent folk have to get by on, perhaps we could become wiser about what and how we eat.

Cooking simple, nourishing, traditional foods with friends not only provides companionship and builds communities, but it provides opportunities for sharing garden produce and learning new cuisines. The adventure of discovering new ways of cooking may not be as exciting as stumbling upon tinned peaches and Spam in a smuggler's cave, but it can have its moments--and you won't have to worry about being abducted by pirates.

Photo credits: "Peasant Meal," an illumination for Aristotle's Politiques et économiques, France, 15th century. Paris, Biblioteque nationale, Département des manuscrits. "Old tomato varieties" taken at Marché Beauveau, Place d'Aligre, Paris, by "Popolon." Photo of 6-braid whole-wheat challah in the process of being shaped for baking. Photo taken on March 30, 2006 by Yoninah. All from Wikimedia Commons.

Feeding and Clothing the Future

This is my final post on the Tikkun Olam (healing the world) project that began last week, and it's a difficult combination of topics to discuss. It's hard because the culinary arts and fashion design are both professions involved with basic needs, but both can also be seen as emblems of greed and excess (to many reformers, at least).

Mind you, I don't really teach culinary students much any more (except for the occasional graduating student in desperate need of an elective, and who thinks art history might be an easy grade), but some of my favorite former humanities students are now chefs, and the new BFA programs in fashion design and merchandising have meant an influx of students I'm not used to teaching. I've been enjoying them immensely, though, because they've so far proven bright, creative, and interested--and their superior grades have reflected these qualities.

Those who know me probably chortle at my having the chutzpah to discuss fashion, since my chief criterion for garments is comfort, and I'm not what you'd call a fashion maven. My priorities are such that clothing falls fairly far down on the great chain of being, although if I had my druthers (and a great deal more time) I'd make all my own out of sustainably harvested fibers woven and dyed (naturally) by well-paid garment workers in airy, pleasant surroundings.

And this is where the healing question comes in: why is it that Americans would rather pay bottom dollar for clothes and food whenever possible, despite the fact that the production of cheap food and clothing means that workers are exploited and the environment degraded in order to supply these markets? Food sustains us, clothing protects us, and both allow us to reflect our cultural affiliations and creativity, and yet we are extremely reluctant to pay real wages to the people who grow and harvest the basic materials. As Jubal Early would say (in the Firefly episode, "Objects in Space"), does that seem right to you?

While it's true that factory farms are raking in the dough and that high-dollar clothiers are rolling in it, most of the people who do the legwork (farmers, farm workers, stockers, cashiers, waiters, bussers, clerks, tailors, etc.) often do so for minimum wages or less, are seldom provided with insurance plans, and frequently work well beyond a forty-hour week. Some of these people are even experiencing situations that closely resemble slavery (see especially the information and links on the Alliance For Fair Food page). "The Working Poor" has become a buzzword, but the fact remains that too many of the people who work harder than the rest of us are paid much less and earn barely enough to survive.

I can't fix this, and neither can my students. But we can help by being much more mindful about how we use our talents and how we spend our money. We can, for example stop buying fast food altogether. We can eat less meat, and make sure what we do eat is humanely raised and killed and safely prepared, even if that means changing our eating and buying habits radically. For example, most of the world uses meat as a flavoring--not a honking great steak on a plate as the main course. A few bites of chicken in a well-prepared sauce heavy on the veg and eaten over a bowl of brown rice or other whole grain is not only more healthful, but pretty tasty as well. Cook up some rice to keep in the fridge for a couple of days, and you've got the basis for a number of quick meals that are better for you than stopping by McD's on the way home.

But "I can't," I hear my students say. "I can't live without meat." "I can't live without hamburgers." "I can't afford anything better." Baloney. Years ago, I lived (on purpose) for several months on a welfare mother's budget. It was another of my social experiments, designed to help me figure out what I need and what I merely want. Not only did I succeed, but my husband and son were better fed after I began to cook everything from scratch. When I began to grow some of my own fruit and veg, the repertoire expanded, and I managed to re-educate our tastes so that we were able to accumulate enough money for the down-payment on a house with what we saved on food alone. I'll admit that I was not working at the time (stay-at-home mom), but that meant I had no income of my own, and I was also going to grad school part time. And while my students may not be able to grow anything in their apartments, they certainly can learn how to feed themselves more healthfully and more economically. All one needs is will and education.

I've actually discussed questions of mindfulness and food on three other posts, Utopian Pizza, The Raw and the Cooked, and Tangled Webs, all of which consider cultural aspects of food and eating in greater depth. It's harder to rethink fashion, because the whole industry is founded on a couple of problematic principles: a designer's job is based on the idea that clothes go out of style, and the merchandiser wants those clothes to go out of style as quickly as possible in order to keep the industry profitable. I do, however, wonder what the world would be like if we were to design for sustainability instead: styles that never get "old" made from earth-friendly fabrics and dyes by people who aren't exploited.

"Style" based on comfort, practicality, and ethical considerations would be far more appealing to many of us than what's being turned out so frequently today: breast-, butt-, and belly-exposing designs that titillate and seduce, clothes that glorify less-than-desirable human foibles such as drug-use, war, or other forms of excess. Plenty of cultures rely on a few basic clothing items which vary in color and fabric, but little else. But just look at tribal designs in parts of Africa, or saris on a street in India, and you can see that clothing can be expressive without being simply trendy.

What if the quest for the latest fad were replaced by a quest for durability, originality, practicality, and true beauty? Wouldn't it be better to own a few garments that make us feel good, move with our bodies, keep us appropriately warm or cool, and express our sense of color and style without making us all fit into somebody else's idea of what a man or woman should look like? Wouldn't it be better to dress our kids in comfortable, durable, colorful clothes that enable them to move and play freely without trying to make them look like baby soldiers or hookers?

Clothing and feeding are two of the most important things we do for ourselves, in addition to finding a place to live. If we're going to keep this world working for the next few generations, we're going to have to start being much more mindful about how we address questions about how we go about satisfying our needs. And it's precisely because these are needs that they deserve the careful consideration of those who will be working in directly-related professions. Fashion designers and chefs will have a great deal of impact on our economic future. It would help, I think, to remember that "economics" refers not only to the financial well-being of the country, but to the the cultural and ecological well-being of our oikos--our home: this planet.

For resources on these topics, see the "Education of Desire" sites linked on the left. They're good places to start.

Addendum: It occurs to me, a day later, that my remarks about food's costing too little may seem facile and naive when many of the nation's working poor have to choose between spending money on food or on rent--or make any number of equally difficult choices. But a significant number of these same people are the ones who are providing food and food services to the rest of us. It's precisely because they're paid so little that food is relatively inexpensive in this country--especially compared to what it costs in other developed areas of the world, such as Europe. If people received pay equal to the value of their labor, and if profit weren't the major incentive for everything we do, a more equitable economy might result. A good article on the topic by Darra Goldstein can be found in the current issue of Gastronomica.

Photo: Female vendors sitting on the ground at a fruit and vegetable market in Kuchaman, Rajasthan, India. By John Haslam, on Wikimedia Commons.

Muddling Toward Frugality

It recently occurred to me that “frugality” might offer a nice substitute for the over-used and ill-understood notion of “simplicity.” People who talk about “simple living” these days don’t really mean it the way I do (simplifying life by making quicker dinners and spending less time cleaning house seems to miss the point), but maybe what I’m really talking about is being frugal: not wasting stuff, cutting down on excess, using time carefully, saving resources.

I stole the title for this post from Warren Johnson’s 1978 paean to decentralization and the inefficiency of the adaptive process. I’m sure that many of my ideas about utopia come from reading this book and others like it when I was coming of age and needed something to do while I was nursing babies. The only problem is that it may be a bit late now, thirty years later (with things going worse than many of us ever imagined back then), to rely on muddling—as a species, at least. But I think that ultimately most of my ideas about frugality as a laudable approach to life were gleaned from sources like my grandmother (whose father, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, drove a stagecoach) and M. F. K. Fisher—whose book How To Cook A Wolf (about surviving the Depression) was the first book I ever read that could be described as a philosophical approach to cooking.

The chapter I remember best is “How to Have a Sleek Pelt,” which considers the ethics of pet ownership in trying times, and allows for fellow-feeling between human beings and animals that’s not circumscribed by notions of human primacy. While feeding animals when people were having a hard time obtaining enough for themselves to eat might have seemed sentimental (or even problematic) at the time, it simply seems generous to me at this point in history.

My grandmother learned frugality the old-fashioned way—at her own mother’s knee—and she practiced it throughout her life. I find myself thinking of her frequently these days, as I rinse out a plastic sandwich bag or carefully fold lightly-used aluminum foil for later re-use. The standard recycling mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle” seems to have been born among people of my grandmother’s generation, who did so out of necessity rather than choice, and then later did so out of habit. And I’ve survived in meager enough economic circumstances during my own life to appreciate what she taught me, and to make use of her lessons even in times of relative plenty.

Being frugal, of course, is not the same thing as being stingy. Frugality implies a sort of wisdom, knowing where things come from, what they mean, where they end up. If you have a fair idea about the origins of aluminum foil and how long it takes to disintegrate, you’re more likely to be careful about how you use it; plastic is even more pernicious, so a frugal person will avoid using it in the first place, and then make damned sure that it’s re-used and at least recycled. I will admit to a certain amount of smug pleasure when I set out the single blue trash bin (my city’s recycling container), on Fridays when all but one other house on the block puts out one or two of the big green bins whose contents are destined for the landfill. But I’d be a better, more frugal person if I could further reduce the number of times the blue bin goes out per month.

In fact, recycling programs, laudable as they are, are something of a sop; they probably give us a false sense of security about our contribution to planetary destruction, when much more drastic measures are really called for. In truth, individual frugality is almost meaningless when the West is on a consumptive binge that shows few signs of letting up, but which cannot go on forever if we, or any other species on the planet, are survive. Not only that, but we’re teaching the Third World to be just like us, so that whatever frugality they’ve learned from poverty will be subverted by newer, profligate economies.

Out of curiosity, I just googled the word “frugality,” and now I’m sorry I did. It, like “simplicity,” has become what I’ve started calling a “lifestyle buzzword”—a bandwagon flag that promises a more fulfilling life if we save our Christmas cards and reuse them to make more crap. “Frugal living” is now also a synonym for “simple living” with its accompanying emphasis on saving money, and making more time for the family by cooking meals more quickly.

None of this, of course, is necessarily bad. But it is misdirected. What we need to save is the planet, not a few pennies on a loaf of bread so we can spend them on gas. Way too many people on this earth can’t afford to have “lifestyles.” It’s all they can do to stay alive.

A truly frugal approach to meals would involve growing as much of one’s own food as possible, to avoid wasting fossil fuels and other forms of energy. It would entail careful planning instead of “quick and easy” menus, and slow, deliberate, thoughtful cooking that involves the entire family rather than mom’s slapping something together so she has time to sit down with dad and the kids to eat before they rush off to the next planned activity.

A frugal approach to time would also involve deliberation: choosing carefully how one spends one’s time, so that learning, community, and communication take precedence over competition and consumerism. Families could play informal games of soccer rather than join organized teams, and stay home to play music instead of going shopping “for fun.”

I am thankful that I don’t have to prepare my own cats’ food, as Fisher once did; but at least I still know how, because her book owns pride of place on my shelf, and I read it whenever I need to be reminded of how easy—if only temporarily so—our lives are today, compared to what things were like in the decade before I was born. They didn't have "lifestyles" then, either.