Getting Back to Basics

I will no longer be updating this blog. My thanks to all the readers who shared your ideas with me.

I’ve been planning to delve into the adventures of the couple who spent a month on a dollar a day diet . From what I’d read in one article, it seemed that they had no idea what they were doing, and the experiment cost them dearly.

So, I just backtracked to the first couple of posts on their blog, and it’s already clear that they know nothing about a balanced diet, and not a whole lot more about cooking to save time. There are little things that don’t make any sense at all in the context of wanting to understand how people survive on very little money. I doubt that many third-worlders would have peanut better around, much less consider it a dessert — five cents for one tablespoon. Or how about twelve cents for a tablespoon of taco sauce? Continue Reading »

I read something recently about the possibility of fruit cellars making a comeback in this new age of frugality. The name is somewhat of a misnomer since fruit cellars were really a place to store just about any kind of food that could be kept edible until the next growing season. The well-stocked fruit cellar had rows of neatly arranged jars showing off not just canned fruit, but vegetables, jams and jellies, and pickles.

There were also bushel baskets and other containers with potatoes, onions, apples, and even cabbages and carrots, if your cellar’s temperature and humidity were suitable for storing them. Harvesting and canning were a large part of the household work, and it didn’t end when everything had been tucked neatly away. Not every apple, carrot or potato was destined to make it through the winter. The frugal housewife went through all the unprocessed fruits and vegetables regularly. First to get used was anything that looked as if it might be starting to go bad. Salvaging the good parts of anything that was starting to rot or shrivel was also part of the work. Continue Reading »

What would the response of Americans be if someone organized a massive tree-planting initiative? In light of the recent California wildfires, the example of Macedonia, a tiny country of only two million people, could inspire similar efforts.

Macedonia has had two summers of wild fires, with thousands of acres of forests destroyed. An opera singer, Boris Trajanov, decided that something had to be done. Yesterday, “Thousands of people were bused to the planting sites , including more than 1,000 soldiers who planted some 200,000 seedlings at 14 sites.” It seems that Macedonians are waking up to the reality of climate change and the need to protect the environment. Continue Reading »

I added a new website to my reading list the other day: Choosing Voluntary Simplicity . It’s not only a fascinating and inspiring site, full of ideas for developing a more frugal lifestyle and making your life less complicated and more enjoyable, it’s also a source for recipes that I’m itching to try, and for triggering ideas about life, the universe, and just about everything.

It answered one question that’s been rolling around in my head for quite a while: whatever happened to the concept of voluntary simplicity? Its principles are alive and well, of course, and becoming ever more healthy and vigorous as the economy sinks into a pool of quicksand. But the term itself disappeared from the media after a brief run that seemed fueled more by hype and bandwagon boosterism than by a deep commitment to our welfare as residents of the earth. Continue Reading »

I don’t think there’s ever been a time in my life when I took money for granted. Maybe being born at the tail end of the Great Depression meant that some of its lessons rubbed off on me, somehow. However it happened, my attitude toward money has always been pretty much the same, whether I had a lot of it (comparatively speaking), or very little. It’s useful, but not all-important. There are a lot of unrecognized advantages to having grown up at the lower end of the economic scale. At least they’re advantages if out and out grinding poverty didn’t traumatize you to the point where money did become the be all and end all.

When I hear these tales of woe, I’m often tempted to give a big “Well, boo hoo!” But I don’t. I think about the lives people lead, how hard they work for “stuff.” All that stuff doesn’t even make them particularly happy, but it’s a catastrophe when they lose it. I feel a twinge of pity, but I’ll be darned if I let them see it.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot of skills, including some that are comparatively rare these days. Some I learned some in response to necessity, even to emergencies, but most of them I learned because they were interesting or a challenge, or because I thought they would improve my life in some way.

There are probably skills I’ve completely forgotten about but that would take just a little practice to get up to speed if they entered my life again. Sort of like riding a bicycle for the first time in years. And an important thing about many skills is that they carry over and can be generalized to help us learn new skills in new situations. So the more skills you have in more areas, the more likely it is that if you bump up against something new and unfamiliar, you’ll be able to handle it.

Just out of curiosity, I decided to make a list of what I’d learned. I’m sure there’s more, but I think I can feel pretty optimistic about my ability to be moderately self-sufficient if the apocalypse showed up.

• Cooking from scratch, including ethnic dishes
• Baking bread — focaccia, anyone?
• Making jams and jellies — often from fruits gathered from the wild
• Canning and freezing — homemade peach pie for Thanksgiving. Yum.
• Gardening — growing vegetables and herbs, propagating new plants by division, cuttings, air layering, seeds
• Raising and butchering chickens — got old after a while, but store-bought can’t compare
• Electrical and plumbing repairs — rewiring lamps and outlets, replacing plastic pipe and faucets — fun occupation: crawling under a single wide trailer in the dead of winter to repair frozen pipes
• Drywall repairs and minor carpentry
• Crafts — crochet, knitting, macrame, needlepoint, quilting, and probably a bunch more
• Sewing — making clothes from scratch, repairs, and alterations

What are you waiting for? Go find something useful to learn.

Bread has traditionally been called “the staff of life.” It was made of whole grains, and together with a chunk of cheese, a loaf of bread could sustain a person through a day’s hard work. You could make it at home or buy it cheaply. Only the very rich could enjoy the luxury of white bread. Today, white bread is the norm, the very cheapest form of bread. And good quality whole grain bread, similar to what you could make at home, is priced far out of reach of the poor.

But far more has been lost than a food capable of sustaining life. Also gone are the necessary skills, which are more complex than those needed for baking cookies or a cake. You can get a little sloppy about following the cooky or cake recipe and still come out with a perfectly edible product. Baking bread is about more than the recipe. It requires the powers of observation, the willingness to do some physical work, and patience — lots of patience. Continue Reading »

In a forum discussion a few days ago, someone asked “Doesn’t anybody make anything these days?” He was lamenting lost skills, and even enjoyments, that seem to have fallen into disuse. He wondered whether any hands-on hobbies, like the woodworking that he does, still hold interest for very many people. A day or so later, I came across a news article discussing the fact that American children seem to be losing their problem-solving skills.

What’s the relationship? Problem-solving skills are developed by solving problems. But solving problems out of a book, with a teacher to tell you whether you got them right or wrong, isn’t real problem-solving. It’s just finding a pre-determined answer. If you want to learn to solve problems that matter, you have to do it in the real world. Just about the only hands-on skills that most people learn these days are how to use a keyboard or a game controller. Neither formatting a report nor negotiating your way through a virtual maze will teach you how to cope in an emergency situation, or how to do something for yourself when the person you will be paying to do it for you doesn’t show up. Continue Reading »

Paying off your smallest debts first isn’t the best choice when it comes to pure dollars and cents, but it can have beneficial psychological effects. The worst part of owing money to several different sources is that making real progress in becoming debt-free can seem impossible. If you have only so much extra to supplement your regular monthly payments, it’s hard to see where it can make a real dent.

The traditional recommendation is that you pay off the biggest debts first because they’re the ones that are piling up the interest charges. But quite a few financial advisors recommend getting the smallest ones out of the way first. If the biggest debt is going to take years to eliminate, the money you sink into it seems as if it’s going down a dark hole because the balance hardly budges with each payment. With a small debt, you can not only see real progress, you know that before long, you’ll have one monkey off your back.

When that happens, you can put the normal payments for that one, plus whatever extra you’ve been throwing in, to work on the next smallest. You’ve now increased the amount you have for those payments, and that debt will shrink even faster. Working from the small end means that every time you pay off one debt you have that much more to pay towards the next smallest one. It also gives you more choice about where you want to put the extra dollars. Once you have enough to make a difference, you can split it up and chop away at both ends, adding some of it towards the largest bill. One way to give yourself a good feeling about that big load at the top is to add the amount of the monthly interest to what you’re already paying.

Because the reward center of your brain responds more positively to accomplished goals than to small improvements, each debt that you get out of the way gives you an encouraging boost that helps you stick to the plan. Instead of staggering under a weight that never seems to get much lighter, you’re dumping one load after another. That psychological hand up could make the difference between being debt-free as a reward for your hard work, or giving way to frustration and despair, and plunging into bankruptcy and all its unpleasant complications.

I saw an article in the New York Times today that highlighted for me the degree to which people have lost basic skills, including the skill of spending their money wisely, and of thinking their way through problems to a sensible solution. I’ll be writing about that article in more depth another day, but its lessons are relevant today. It was about a couple that decided to try to live on $1.00 a day for food. The article didn’t say whether the dollar was for both of them, or whether they each had a dollar to spend, but in a way, that doesn’t matter. If you live in America, even if you get food stamps, you have more than one dollar a day for food, so the experiment was unnecessarily extreme to start with, and highly unrealistic.

More important, the couple didn’t have the skills to manage a very basic diet, and the month they spent on it was so miserable that they were overjoyed to leave it behind. Did they learn anything from their experiment? I doubt that they learned anything that would be of value to them in the future. Making tortillas from scratch every day after work only teaches you that making tortillas is hard work.

If you’re going to change your lifestyle, there are two simple rules to follow: 1. Do it gradually. You don’t learn how to eat more cheaply (and sensibly) by plunging into a near-starvation diet. 2. Learn the necessary skills first, if you can. If you have to learn them as you go along, that’s the best possible argument for going slow. Learn one skill and put it into practice before going on to the next. Learning and using new skills is supposed to improve your life, not make it worse. If it’s making you more miserable, hungry, and confused, you’re doing it wrong.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Time Enough For Love, Robert Heinlein

Some of the skills Heinlein proposed as necessities may be outmoded or unlikely to be called on — after all, how many of us would ever be called on to plan an invasion or conn a ship? The basic idea — that humans should have a basic set of survival skills, will never go out of date. But we now live in a society in which we can pay others to do things for us. We either don’t have the ability to do those things for ourselves, or we don’t have the time. We’ve also been taught that most of the things that need to be done in this world require formal learning, degrees or certificates, and membership in professional or trade organizations.

Grandparents no longer hand down their skills, because most of those skills are out of date. Parents don’t pass down skills because they don’t have any. And the current generation lives in a state of learned helplessness about anything but amusement and spending money.

What have you learned over a lifetime that could sustain you in a real emergency? If the electricity goes out for long periods — or forever? How would you feed yourself, stay warm in the winter, clothe yourself? What would you do if someone in your family became sick, with no doctors or medicines available?

There are many skills that I should have learned along the way and didn’t. I don’t know how to resuscitate someone who’s stopped breathing, though television has showed me how it’s done. Would that be adequate in an emergency? I don’t know. And how much does television teach that we can actually use? In his book, On Writing, Stephen King talked about being part of the last generation of writers before TV. Maybe he’s also part of the last generation to learn practical skills.