Getting Back to Basics

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 »

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.

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.