The End of Plutopia?

I wrote about the United States as a "plutopia" back in 2008, and what follows is my latest take on the subject.

Recent political shenanigans regarding the debt ceiling have brought some interesting responses from thoughtful folks who have somehow risen above the snark and recognized a very painful but evident truth: We cannot go on as we are.

Last Sunday's Opinion section in the Daily Poop ran a reprint of David Leonhardt's New York Times article on consumer spending and its role in the current economic stagnation. In it he notes the chicken-or-egg dilemma: which comes first? Consumers spend less because the economy's bad, or the economy's bad because of consumers' new-found frugality?

This has been a burning question for many, and for some time. I know I'm not spending as much and am putting much more into savings, paying down remaining debt, and being much more mindful about what I buy. But for me it's not so much a cash issue as an environmental/philosophical one. I'm trying to practice what I preach, especially in my consumption choices: higher quality, more sustainably raised food; adhering to Morris's dictum about not having anything in my house I don't consider beautiful or useful; being miserly about utility use. I can't tell you when I last went shopping without a particular item in mind, and I've lost track of the number of things I haven't bought because I decided (after much contemplation) that I really didn't need it. That's, in fact, why I'm typing this post on my three-year-old Gateway PC notebook instead of a nice shiny new iMac.

I do still slip occasionally, but mostly it's small change: an app for the iPad (now over a year old), a new DVD (we tend to watch movies more than once, and don't go to the cineplex much because of the cheesy background music you have to listen to and ads you have to watch before the feature starts), a few books from Half Price. In Whole Foods the other day, I made my first impulse purchase in quite some time--three bars of lavender goat milk soap. I fell for the smell.

Even my support for the wine industry is dwindling, because I recently realized just how much we were spending, and just how much sleep I was losing (and weight I wasn't losing) thanks to an extra glass or two above my supposed limit of one glass per night. So now we're opting for fewer bottles per week, focusing on the highest quality we can afford.

But that's just it. Frugality on one end breeds job losses on the other. Mind you, I don't think my old friend Matt Lavelle is going to personally suffer if I cut back on the fermented grape juice (especially since I don't have easy access to his wines). But if everybody got this stingy (or perhaps this thoughtful?), it would make a huge difference. Which is why I wish people would start boycotting the crap loaded onto shelves in supermarkets and demanding better quality, more nutritious, less environmentally degrading stuff.

"Wait!" they say around here. "If we stop buying our high-fructose corn syrup beverage of choice (the one with no nutritional value at all, and enormous cost to the rest of us in terms of land-use and consequential medical costs), what happens to all those poor folks who work for Dr. Pepper (or Frito Lay, or whatever)? They'll lose their jobs!" Not to mention the fact that doing anything to deter folks from buying said liquid uselessness (like taxing it) means more nanny-statism, more big gummint interference in my god-given right to make stupid choices.

Well, maybe not. The other day, having not had time to drop by Starbucks for my weekly venti non-fat latte (major indulgence), I went to the school bistro for something with a tad of caffeine in it to get me through the afternoon. For a while they stocked HonesTea, but that was gone. Ultimately, the only thing I could find that wasn't simply vitamin-enhanced sugar water or HFCS laden anything (or ginseng-augmented "energy drink"), was "all-natural" Snapple Lemon Tea. A bit too sweet for me, but it only had water (filtered, of course), tea, lemon, and sugar. I'd have been happier with it unsweetened (having long ago weaned myself from sugary drinks), but at least this offered an alternative to the rest. Snapple, of course, is owned by Dr. Pepper. And get this; the company has a manifesto ("social responsibility report") that includes, among their five year goals, "Continue to provide a full range of products, with at least 50% of innovation projects in the pipeline focused on reducing calories, offering smaller sizes and improving nutrition."

I'm a bit suspicious of their motives for offering smaller sizes, for which they will probably ask current prices, but hey. It's a step.

Frito Lay, another big local employer, has already started marketing more healthful choices, although I've yet to take them up on any new, more nutritious offerings. I'll have to wait until I run out of Clif bars and have to run down to a machine for a snack. At any rate, Frito Lay, too, has a section on their website devoted to "Our Planet," and it includes 43 things they're doing or going to do to help save the earth (they apparently started recycling their packing materials back in 1939), including using renewable energy sources and other fairly expensive investments. There's also a "your health" section which is somewhat less convincing (potatoes and corn, although "all natural," are, after all, pretty low-quality carbs to load up on--especially since we all know that "you can't eat just one" chip). You can also pretty much bet that the farms that corn and those potatoes come from are laden with chemical fertilizers.

Given that we're not, as a still comparatively wealthy population, going to give up ours snacks, I guess all this represents a small step in the right direction. Especially when one considers the under-served poor in areas where few supermarkets exist and a cheap way to fill your stomach is to buy a bag of Fritos or down a slug of Snapple from the local ice house (Texan for convenience store).

When we look at what confronts a large part of the world, however, we're still an absurdly wealthy country. For example, we don't generally die of intestinal diseases because almost everybody has access to a toilet and we don't have raw sewage running through our neighborhoods. I actually attribute my iron gut and resistance to tummy upsets to my childhood in then-underdeveloped Asia, where I was exposed to all manner of bugs I'm now apparently immune to. But appallingly huge numbers of children and adults elsewhere die every year of diseases that could be eradicated with decent sanitation (and it doesn't have to be water-hungry flush-toilets, either).

What I do want to question here is the basic premise that in order to be a great nation, or even a fully-employed nation, we have to keep buying stuff. And we have to keep employing people to make stuff. And this stuff should be big and/or expensive: refrigerators, cars, washing machines, dishwashers, houses, computers. But in order to keep these folks in jobs, we have maintain the whole planned obsolescence ethos we bought into, probably as far back as when Henry Ford started turning people into automatons on assembly lines. None of this big stuff can last so long that we only buy it once, or twice, or even three times in our lives. We have to keep buying new ones, the more frequently, the better.

Now, I can see trading in the old energy-inefficient fridge for a shiny new one with LED lights and that uses far less electricity. I can even see trading in the ten-year-old Civic that gets 35-40 mpg (if you drive like an old lady) for a new hybrid that gets 50-55 (again, if you drive like an old lady). But there are people who buy or lease a new car every couple of years and actually go through dozens of automobiles in a lifetime. These folks are also more likely to buy bigger, more expensive vehicles that get much poorer mileage on a tank of gas. But that's what the Plutopian economy requires: buy more, more often.

But alternatives do exist, and before I go off on this any further, I'd like to recommend that folks take a look at Juliet Schor's web page on Plenitude. Her suggestions are rather radical--for example, perhaps we should work less rather than more to create a better economy--but I think truly promising. I've mentioned her before, but I'm in the process of re-reading her book (the first one I bought for the iPad) and she makes even more sense now than she did a year ago.

Your homework, Dear Reader, is to go to her blog and meander through it. That alone should give us more to talk about . . . And while you're at it, check out this week's Owls' Parliament for a related article, and a superb comment by one of my former students. It offers me hope for the future, because these folks are the ones who're going to have to live in it.

Image credit: A US Food & Drug Administration poster promoting corn, from 1918. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Eating and Being

I think it's time to begin a series of essays that look at what we gain, and what we stand to lose, by adopting behaviors and practices that can help us all heal the world. Tikkun Olam involves continuous rethinking of how our being in the world affects its other occupants, and aims to address that impact with measures that heal rather than continue to harm.

Economists sometimes call this sort of examination a "cost-benefit analysis" but such a notion doesn't work here, because both the costs and the benefits are often hidden (we don't know what will happen, so we can't gather enough beans to count), and so we can't project numbers or statistics--and that's what's wrong with most of these analyses anyway. They're only interested in numbers. If something "costs" (in terms of money, mostly) more than it "benefits" (especially if these are long-term) then what's cheapest wins, regardless of whether or not it's good for us.

In harsh economic times, suggesting an expensive, though beneficially promising, alternative often lands us in the dust bin. We don't have any money to spend, so we sure as hell can't spend that much money now, even if it will clean up our air, our water, or make better food available to us in the long run.

So I thought I'd begin by looking at some of the issues popping up around us. Some come from the President's campaign promises, some come from common sense, others from my particular interests (permaculture, for example). All have been proposed by different people or organizations as means for cleaning up the mess we've made over the last half century or so. The first of these general topics I'd like to tackle is food in general, but I need to divide it up into food sources and food consumption: how we get our food, and what we do with it.

It was a bit depressing that my first trip out since coming home from the hospital had to be to the local Super Target, where I could get the best bang for my buck in terms of picking up most of what I needed to buy in one spot. I can get around pretty well, but I tire rather easily, and I was damned if I was going to scoot around on one of those electric carts (I'm probably still afraid of getting a speeding ticket). So, knowing that I could buy organic milk and eggs, and a few other basics there, as well as some arthritis-strength acetaminophen (onto which I'm trying to wean myself, away from the real narcs) Owlspouse and I sallied forth into the afternoon.

I'm not in the store ten minutes before I'm almost overwhelmed by the depressing amount of sheer crap that's available in these places. The level of food-processing alone represented in one section of Target says more about American gluttony and waste than one would ever need to learn. Every package (over-packaging is the first of many sins committed by food manufacturers in this country) hides a much smaller amount of food than appears on its cover photo, and every ingredient list contains up to hundreds of chemicals added to preserve "freshness" or "maintain purity." Except in parts of the "healthy" sections of the refrigerated zones, every label also includes sweeteners (mostly high fructose corn syrup), way too much salt, and trans- or saturated fats far above reasonable daily allowances. Some of these actually look like they might be pretty good--until you read the label and see the amount of processing that's gone into a simple idea, like lemon-pepper tilapia, or some kind of "Mediterranean" pasta.

In a way this exercise was good for me, because I didn't go home with a couple of frozen entrees like I had planned (so we could eat if I didn't feel up to cooking). I went home with basic ingredients instead: a couple of whole wheat pizza crusts (can't roll my own yet), some fresh mozzarella, and a bit of natural, minimally processed ham. I bought frozen berries to mix with plain low-fat yoghurt. I did spring for some organic ketchup and a new ligher mayo made from olive oil (it had some sugar in it, but no HFCS). At some point I'll get back to making my own of both, but for now (with no tomato garden yet) I have to get 'em off the shelf. So the fridge is now stocked with a versatile collection of dinner possibilities, and I got to leave the store before I needed another nap.

Another depressing element of the trip was noticing the vast number of clearly obese human beings who buy the most inappropriate foods. I'm hyper conscious about my weight now, since I'm progressing toward a point where I can get back to losing the tonnage I've acquired over the last three years of feeling too lousy to get any regular, meaningful exercise. I am painfully aware that my bad eating habits (rather than my diet itself) are to blame for both diabetes and some aspects of my ongoing heart disease. Diabetics need to pace their meals and eat frequently to avoid glucose spikes and shifts--but I had been going entire mornings without eating anything, and then having a quick lunch and then eating again only when I was starving. I know full well, that small, nutritionally dense meals to keep me away from drugs and insulin are what I need, and that effort has begun despite my current wonky taste buds (another reason to get off the narcs).

But many people, even (as I discovered in the hospital) nurses, fall into a similar trap: too busy to eat well. This an issue that needs attention on its own, and I'll probably attack it in future. But for now, we need to become aware--as a nation--that "fast food" almost always equates with "bad food" and because it's often cheap, we end up with poor people in bad health because that's all they think they can afford. There's probably a great deal of literature out there on "the starving fat" and we need more than one book or documentary (Fast Food Nation) to knock some sense into our heads. If the only stores around you are convenience quick-stops and Taco Bueno, it's hard to buy nutritious food; and I don't see a lot of Whole Foods stores opening up in marginal neighborhoods.

Eating habits simply have to change. But how do we do this, bombarded as we are with advertisements that make all manner of grandiose claims about goodness and freshness and giving us "more time to spend with our families," or by all the cutsy promos for animated films that come "free" with a cheeseburger Happy Meal?

Goodness and freshness can only really be achieved by starting out with minimal processing. That means no fancy boxes and cute plastic containers that "steam" your food for you in two minutes in the microwave. If you don't have a way to steam something at work, then take a sandwich and a piece of fruit. Or take a container of soup or leftovers if you want to eat something hot (most offices have access to microwave ovens these days--but we don't need to keep manufacturing ways of making them do what they weren't designed to do if it means increasing the amount of plastic heading for the landfill).

The counter argument to all this is that Americans demand these conveniences and innovations from industry. Baloney. We're taught to demand them! Every day we learn about some new "necessity" on TV that we didn't previously know we "needed." Do people really wake up every morning thinking, "Gee, I wish somebody would invent a way for me to steam food in a microwave because I really need to be able to do this"? The microwave oven itself manages to have won me over by the fact that I can actually save a good deal of energy by "nuking" home-made frozen soup, or cocoa, or last night's dinner for lunch. Even so, if the Environmental Apocalypse came and I had to give it up to save the planet, out it would go.

Human beings aren't stupid. Or we weren't until TV was invented. We've managed to cook food ever since the Paleolithic, and all we've done through all those thousands of years is to invent more complicated, more dangerous, and more expensive gadgets to cook in and on. Yes cooking on a natural gas range is better for the planet than cooking over an open fire. But I doubt if simmering your evening meal on a six-burner Viking industrial model will win you any points in save-the-planet heaven. Cooking out-of-doors seems to spring from some sort of primal recognition of our ancestral roots, but cooking in an "outdoor kitchen" seems to defeat the purpose. Nor have I figured out quite why people find charcoal-lighting fluid a tasty addition to the flavoring of their slabs of brisket.

Once again William Morris's education of desire come to mind: What do we truly need, and what do we merely want?

If all of the fancy gadgets and maximally processed foods available have brought us to the point of being a wealthy nation of very sick people, why is that a good cost/benefit ratio? Sure we have more stuff. Sure it might be easier to whip up a meal. But what do we gain? I mean, besides weight and larger body/mass indices?

So here are my suggestions on how to combat the advertising industry's assault on our brains and our waistlines--without unduly taxing our wallets or decreasing the amount of time we have to spend with family and friends.

1. Invest in a really good cooking magazine. I know this sounds silly, but magazine subscriptions are generally quite cheap, and a single magazine that comes once a month can provide endless inspiration--especially if you sit down and talk to your kids about potential menus, what sounds good, what's in season, etc. My favorite of these is Eating Well, but Cooking Light and others can also be helpful. When you're finished with the magazine, pass it on to your doctor's office or a nursing home, or to a friend. Or (what I end up doing) create notebooks with your favorite recipes and put the remains of the magazine in the recycle bin--after the kids have made collages out of the pretty pictures. Some of these magazines have high-quality websites, too, providing access to recipe archives.

2. Take stock of your larder (pantry). Know what's in it, and focus on tinned tomatoes and beans, plus whole grains in moth-proof containers, whole wheat pasta, a couple of bottles of good pasta sauce, olive oil, dried beans, and ethnic bottled sauces--as well as the food you put up yourself from your own garden, or from shopping at the farmer's market for in-season fruits and produce. Know what's in your freezer, too, especially if you have a chest freezer for keeping the results of bulk buys. Be aware of expiry dates so that you don't end up with stuff you shouldn't be eating but can't bring yourself to toss. (I've had a couple of pounds of fresh--then--tuna steaks since a friend's fishing trip about 6 years ago. I keep forgetting to put it in the trash bin, because that only goes out to the street about once a month.)

3. Most of my readers already know about our adherence to the Only One Thing rule regarding children's activities. If your kids aren't overburdened with lessons and sports outside of school, they can spend more time with you on the design and preparation of meals. At the weekend, prep veggies for weekday meals, bake bread and healthful cookies, make soup, bottle jams, jellies, and seasonal veg. Use the time to plant gardens if you have the space, and involve the whole family. There is nothing about gardening that's intrinsically difficult, and there's something everyone can do--even if they're in a wheelchair. Make sure you have an active compost heap or bin, and that all your vegetable waste, garden weeds, grass trimmings (if you dont' just mulch them), etc. go into it. Put someone in charge of compost care, and then switch off periodically.

4. Stop drinking soda pop. Of any kind, especially diet. There is no earthly reason--beyond addiction--to drink this stuff. It's expensive, it's saturated with high-fructose corn syrup, it's wasteful of raw and manufactured materials, and it doesn't do you any good. Instead of sweet fizzy drinks, buy mineral water by the case (Costco sells San Pellegrino Water for under a buck a bottle when you buy it this way). Then add a bit of lemon, fruit juice, ginger syrup, or other flavoring if you don't like it plain. It won't take you long to wean yourself from your Diet Coke habit. Depending on how badly you're addicted, stopping this one habit could save you piles of money and/or hundreds of calories every day. Or, make "sun tea" from fruit- and herb-infused tisanes--like those made by Celestial Seasonings, or Tazo, or any of a huge number of other brands. If you need these to be sweet, add a little sugar or honey--but try to do without, or wean yourself from "needing" sweeteners. These and both black and green teas taste quite nice with a bit of lemon over ice. The result: no calories (if you don't add sugar), plus some herbal and/or antioxidant benefit.

5. Stop thinking of dessert as a regular part of every meal. There is no eleventh commandment that says "thou shalt have dessert every night or be forsaken by thy god." Desserts should be two things: occasional and nutritious. Perhaps for Shabbat or Sunday dinners, a special occasion, a holiday, a birthday, etc. But not every day. A cookie or two with milk after school, a whole-grain fruit muffin for breakfast, a sweet rather than savory vegetable dish (glazed carrots and mushrooms)--all of these can add sweetness and flavor without huge numbers of calories. One alternative for dessert is a fruit course following the main meal, but there's no reason that fruit can't be part of the meal itself. If it encourages lingering for conversation, a bit of fruit and cheese with the last of the wine might be encouraged. But not the obigatory pie a la mode.

6. Watch the alcohol intake. The general rule with frugal eating and drinking is that the less you consume in quantity, the more you can afford in quality. So instead of buying two $6 bottles of marginal wine, check the sales for a bargain $12 wine (sometimes knocked down from $20 or more), and drink it slowly, savoring it rather than just getting snockered. A little alcohol seems to be good for us, but drinking a bottle a night just adds useless calories. Do you really have to have a glass of wine with your veggie chili? Good beers are generally cheaper than good wines, but again, moderation in all things. It might not be necessary to have alcohol with every dinner, but opt for a nice fizzied fruit juice or glass of mineral water instead.

7. Care about your food. You don't have to have an overly-sentimental attitude about cows to be concerned about how they're treated before they land on your plate. If an animal suffers unnecessarily, why would you even want to eat it? Complete, abstract detachment from food leads to factory farming, disgusting abattoir practices, and an instrumental disregard for the welfare of the animals with whom we share this planet.

8. Minimize meat consumption. If you can't afford free-range chickens or pastured beef, try saving up for it, and make the meat meal a special one, requiring deliberation and careful preparation. We take way too much for granted as it is, but if we make food derived from the deaths of other animals, it should certainly be something particular in our lives. Even if you're not a religious person, realize that a living creature died to make this meal, and show it some respect. If you find the idea completely distasteful, maybe it's time to give up meat altogether. But if you can cut the number of meat meals down to two or so a week, you can afford that happy chicken or happy pig, and you'll support the people who go to the trouble to raise their animals properly.

9. Think about what you eat. Learn about the chemical properties of what you consume, and how it reacts with other nutrients in your body to become you. It's astonishing how ignorant people are about the origins of herbs, spices, fruits and vegetables. So turn suppertime into an exploration of science and culture by discussing where tonight's meal came from. Prepare meals with an ethnic theme and learn about the culture that developed it. Learn to make simple cheeses, and build a meal around a ball of home-made mozzarella. Learn traditional spice combinations from other parts of the world. Preserve a few lemons and experiment with recipes that use them. Cure some olives. Encourage your children to invite their friends (and their families) over for dinner. If the friends come from somewhere else, encourage a recipe exchange.

10. Enjoy your food. There is nothing more basically human than sitting around a table sharing food. If your family has prepared the meal together, you've sacrificed nothing. Your time has been well-spent, and you're acting more responsibly toward both yourself and the planet than if you'd rushed of the Micky Dee's for a couple of Big Macs and a Happy Meal. Oh. And turn off the TV.

End of sermon for the day, but this will continue. Happy eating!

Image credits: Alanya Market, Turkey, by NobbiP. Wikimedia Commons.

Eating Well in Troubled Times

One of the things I loved about reading News From Nowhere was Morris's descriptions of eating within the community "Guest" was visiting. Wholesome, nourishing food served by happy folk in pleasant surroundings:

. . . we fell to our breakfast, which was simple enough, but most delicately cooked, and set on the table with much daintiness. The bread was particularly good, and was of several different kinds, from the big, rather course, dark-colored, sweet-tasting farmhouse loaf, which was most to my liking, to the thin pipe-stems of wheaten crust, such as I have eaten in Turin. (Chapter III)

But it's getting tougher to look at food as much more than another pain in the pocketbook, despite the fact that (as I've noted previously) in terms of real costs, we're still paying too little.

A story on Thursday's All Things Considered (As Food Prices Rise, There is No Dancing in the Aisles) caused a bit of a stir--especially about the upper middle-class mom's complaining about not being able to buy organic food at Whole Foods Market anymore. She also complained about the prepared foods at the local supermarket, because everything available was "breaded" and there were many fewer choices. That told me a great deal right there.

At the other end of the spectrum was the mom who has to feed her three kids on less than $800 a month (and that's not just her food budget; that's the whole budget). She's given up twelve-grain bread for white, does without paper towels, bottled water, chips, cookies, candy, and toiletries of any kind. The story doesn't say what she does buy (other than white bread), but it probably includes meat (most likely cheap hamburger, which was a staple of my childhood when we were out of money), and perhaps some cheap prepared foods designed to make the meat go further. Shopping at places like the Mennonite grocery is certainly a help, but I truly wonder if part of the problem isn't one of education, or lack thereof, on food and nutrition.

I still haven't reached the point where I'm pinching pennies, because I'm used to paying more for what I eat--since where food comes from and its nutritional value are both philosophical considerations that inform my eating habits. I shop both at Whole Foods and Costco, and I buy premium natural dog and cat food at PetsMart. But we're a two-person, two-income family of empty nesters, who do little else but enjoy one another's company at home when we're not helping to turn the next generation into productive members of the workforce.

I do grow some of my own food (mostly herbs, but also tomatoes and peppers in season, and I'm trying squash this year--not very successfully), and should grow more, but that would require transforming my back yard into a farm, and I'm not ready (yet) to do so. The pecan trees that provided the bumper crop last year shade a large percentage of the available space, and the Carbon Sink (previously known as the Accidental Garden) has taken that area out of cultivation.

At any rate, I started thinking of what I might do with only $400 per month to spend on food, and several solutions came to mind. These are all strategies I have used in the past, including the time in Philadelphia when I lived on a food budget of $50 for each of two months (in the early '70s; it included feeding two cats and two adults, and entertaining several friends at least once a month). My usual food budget was around $75, and what I gave up was primarily booze.

First, never go to the supermarket hungry or without the week's basic menu in mind. The meal plan should not be set in stone because flexibility allows you to take advantage of special deals. But have an outline of meals and know what is missing from the pantry.

Second, whenever possible, buy unprocessed foods in favor of processed. Many chain supermarkets like Tom Thumb (Safeway) and Kroger offer store-brand organic products, so it's possible to buy dried beans, brown rice, pasta, and other fiber-sources that can serve as staples. My local Tom Thumb has a bulk-buy section (modeled after the ones at Whole Foods and Sprouts), that offers brown rice, barley, several kinds of beans, pasta, nuts, and dried fruit. These should form the basis of the diet anyway, and they're incredibly versatile. For the occasional need for quick food, buy a couple of cans of organic beans (kidney, chickpeas, cannellini, pinto). They're much more expensive than dried beans, but nutritious and still relatively inexpensive compared to the brand-named versions. Cook up a batch of beans or rice or whatever to keep in the fridge and use them within a couple of days in salads, pasta combos, and stir frys.

Third, buy organic produce when possible, but don't buy your lettuce pre-torn--buy the whole head of Romaine (NOT iceberg) and do your washing and tearing at home, where you can put it into a handy container to use as the basis for salads every day. Some fruits and veg are less problematic when not organically grown--those whose skins aren't eaten, so if you have to skimp, buy conventionally grown versions of bananas, but buy organic versions of the rest if possible. If you can get deals on frozen organic veg and fruit, take advantage of them, but canned versions (except in the case of tomatoes and beans) are seldom satisfactory. By the way, it's so easy to make a good pasta sauce from canned tomatoes and tomato paste that buying the stuff in bottles hardly ever makes sense.

Fourth, buy whole grain flour and yeast and make your own bread. Even if you have little time you can still make bread. And children need to be taught this very basic human activity anyway. Bread-making binds families and creates irreplaceable memories that involve taste, smell, and love.

If you can't afford fresh organic skim milk, buy it dried and reconstitute it at home. Use it sparingly for drinking, but make your own yogurt (buy a small tub of really good plain Greek style to use as a starter). Re-hydrated dried milk can be refreshing and it's quite possible to acquire a taste for it. I didn't have fresh milk for the entire five years during which I lived in Taiwan, and I lived to tell the tale. When my son was small, we had very little money to spend on food, so dried milk was a staple. Babies and toddlers can be nursed, so cow's milk is not an absolute necessity.

Finally, if you're not already a vegetarian, buy meat to use only as a flavoring (here's a blog where a mom gives the same advice). And buy lean pork (loins) in tenderloins or roasts, and cut them up into small cubes when you get home, to freeze for use in stews, soups, and stir-frys. Buy chickens whole, and use everything--cut them up or roast them whole and base meals around the bits. Freeze leftovers, including the carcass, for later meals and soup stock. Buy lean cuts of beef (again as roasts), but primarily for use in stews, soups, and stock. Buy fish when you can get a deal, but make sure it's sustainably raised or harvested. Keep canned tuna and salmon on hand, because it's much more versatile than fresh. Again, buy the store organic brand or check the label for sources.

A basic rule about food is that the more you make from scratch, the more money you'll save. If you involve the whole family in the cooking process (and in the cleaning up), you'll be teaching them more than they could ever learn in school on the subject, and you'll start your kids on the road to self-sufficiency when they leave the nest.

It's really instructive to see what other people do about feeding themselves, so check out this site on what people eat around the world (and how much it costs them). It's pretty clear from the photos that those with the lowest food costs are the ones who severely limit the number of processed foods they consume.

One of the best ways to manage food costs is to become aware of the role of food in the economy. The New York Times has a page of articles on this topic: The Food Chain, which provides a mini-course in the business of food, and information that can help even those with a tiny budget make wiser, more ethical decisions about what they eat.

Community gardens and co-ops can help people save money and put more nutritious food on the table. Unfortunately, the Community-Supported Agriculture movement has become so popular that most CSAs have waiting lists. If you can't join one, shop local farmers' markets where they're available, because then you're completely cutting out the middle man and paying farmers directly. Prices can be substantially lower (and quality immensely higher) than supermarket food. Farmers' markets have become really trendy lately, and thus more abundant--and Dallas has one of the best.

Food is a basic need, both in terms of sustaining our bodies and in sustaining our families and communities. Perhaps the rising costs will help forge new attitudes about it in this country and become the proverbial blessing in disguise. If people start banding together to grow and share food in order to survive, perhaps the "crisis" will retrain our thinking about how and what we eat. But the solution is certainly not to start eating gummy white processed bread. That doesn't sustain anyone but Mrs. Baird.

Next time: Cooking Well--some thoughts and sources on cooking and eating what we've managed to buy.

Photo credit: Vegetarian Diet, from the Agricultural Research Service, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The quoted passage is from the 1970 Routledge edition, edited by James Redmond (p. 12).

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.