Staying on budget

Why this has taken so many years and so much thought and planning and effort, I’m not sure, but R and I are finally, finally, living within a budget that allows us to save. Granted, we live in a city where the cost of living is quite high, but we also make a reasonable middle-class income. If people can raise families on similiar incomes, than R and I should be able to stay within our means and save a little. And yet—this has proved difficult. We don’t live extravagently, I don’t think. We don’t buy a lot of stuff (not lots of clothes, electronics, no fancy cars, etc.). We don’t go out for a lot of fancy meals. We do travel a bit, so that adds up. But we’ve been realizing how much it adds up even to eat groceries in an inefficient manner. Quelle suprise! So maybe this isn’t much of a revelation, but it’s been a steep learning curve for us—buying more food than you need, and throwing out said food adds up quickly. As we’ve been getting better about using our food efficiently (making some, um, creative meals out of leftovers) that’s meant that we can not just offset the costs of buying food from the farmer’s market but actually end up saving money doing this.

As we have been buying food that is, item per item, more expensive when bought locally, we’ve also though been adjusting by making sure to actually eat this food (again, what a concept!), and to use food in its more basic, less processed form, can lead to substantial savings. Of course, you could do so to an even greater extent by buying exclusively at grocery stores, but for some reason I think R and I needed the extra encouragement of having an ethical investment in the food to start having an investment in thrift.

“Food Apartheid”

The title of this post comes courtesy of a Slate article by the same name (it’s so catchy and succinct that I had to plagiarize).  To summarize:  the city council of Los Angeles has passed a law banning fast food restaurants from opening in South LA, a “32 square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people.”  According to an article in the LA Times, residents of this area have a 30% rate of obesity among children, compared with a 25% rate in the rest of the city.  The moratorium is in affect for a year, and the city plans to offer incentives to restaurants and grocery stores, of which there’s apparently a shortage, in order to bring in more fresh produce and a healthier selection of food.

The writer of the Slate piece finds this a very problematic piece of legislation, especially because it treats poor people “like children”.  My initial response was total agreement:  it’s a law that seems based on a lot of classist assumptions about consumption.  When I taught freshman comp, I usually spent a few classes devoted to discussion of some basic components of an argument:  claims, evidence, and warrants.  Claims are the assertions you’re making about a problem or situation, evidence is what you use to support those claims.  Sounds simple enough.  Where you really get into the meat of the argument, where you can either win the confidence of a reader or destroy it, is how you link those claims to that evidence through use of a warrant, where you show how you’re able to arrive at a particular claim from a set of evidence.  Ideally, this means that the writer (or person making a claim) isn’t assuming that a body of evidence obviously means X because, duh, everyone just knows this.  Making your warrants explicit means (again, ideally) that you move away from the assumption that a piece of evidence has some sort of objective truth that doesn’t really require analysis and interpretation, and you instead begin the difficult work of digging into, and probably upsetting, the assumptions undergirding your reasoning and argument.  Upon initially reading the Slate article about this new policy, I was really suspicious of the city council because it seemed like the unarticulated warrants linking the evidence (rates of childhood obesity amongst the poor) to the implicit claim (the city should regulate food choices for the poor) were the following:  poor people are less able to make responsible choices than the middle-class and so need to have those choices regulated for them; poor people are uneducated about healthy eating and are obese because they just don’t know any better; obesity is a larger (excuse the pun) problem for the poor than the middle-class; if poor people have higher rates of obesity, it’s because of fast food; and, most problematic to me is this—educated, middle-class white people bear the “white man’s burden” of helping uplift the poor from their unhealthy lives and into a station more like that of their middle-class guardians, because naturally the lifestyle’s of the middle-class are superior to those of their lower-class brethren.

Ugh.  First, the rates of obesity amongst LA in general and South LA seemed not too terribly different to me—I don’t know much about statistics, but 5% doens’t seem that significant.  So why target South LA for these efforts?  It seems like there’s an assumption (or unstated warrant, to keep up a train of thought) that if middle class folks have a high rate of obesity, well, that’s up to them to deal with, as individuals.  They can make lifestyle choices on their own.  But if we see a high rate of obesity amongst low-income people, this calls for intervention and regulation.

But then I read some of the comments on the article, one of which noted that South LA has been systematically ignored in ways that have resulted in poor schools, poor housing, a lack of businesses, etc.  And then I realized that one of the, ahem, warrants upon which my initial reaction was based on was an assumption that, when it came to things like zoning, like business incentives, etc., all things were equal between a neighborhood like the one I live in (in which I can walk to either fast food or Whole Foods, the 7-11 or the farmer’s market) and one in which those options aren’t available.  I was ignoring the fact that there are already regulations and systems, I would imagine both economic and civic, in place ensuring, in a round about way, that I do have access to healthy choices.  (Starting on third and saying you’ve hit a home run)So by the city of LA stepping in, howerver clumsily, and putting in place this regulation, they’re in a way only leveling the playing field.  Regulations helping me make healthier decisions do exist in my neighborhood, they just might not be acknowledged or be framed in the sort of authoritarian language of the LA city council.

I still don’t know if this is the best way of going about addressing such inequities—I feel like on a purely psychological level it’s got to be demeaning to live in a neighborhood where certain businesses have been forbidden from coming in because you just can’t handle yourself in the way that wealthier people can.  I also have a problem with the warrant (sorry, I clearly miss teaching) that assumes that if you take something unhealthy away, healthfulness will naturally take its place.  Frankly, we live in a country where healthy food is available to a significant part of the population (well, I don’t have evidence for that other than my own experience which is probably pretty privileged)  But at least for people in the middle-class, they generally live near grocery stores which are lousy with produce, beans, nuts, fish, etc etc, all the staples of a heart-healthy diet.  And plenty of them are overweight and have health problems.  So just giving people the option of healthy eating doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make healthy choices.

Anyhow.  That’s a long enough post for now.

More about the market

As R and I continue to try to eat more locally/ethicially produced foods, we’ve run into the same issue as I think anyone does in this situation—it’s not cheap.  For instance, chicken from the farmer’s market runs about $4.25/lb for a whole chicken (more if you just buy the breast or legs).  I just went online, and at Safeway in the Arlington area you can get a whole organic chicken for $3.29/lb.  So, about 1/4 difference in price.  Where it gets really shocking is when you look at the Perdue brand chicken—$.94/lb.

Wow.

I went back and looked at what Safeway charges for Perdue boneless chicken breasts, and the price goes up to $6.66/lb.  So I feel like that helps a little with an economic argument for eating locally—if it’s important to you to do so, and if you’re willing to take on a little extra labor (which, honestly, I’d never really considered doing before) you can still come out eating cheaper than if you’re buying factory farmed meat.

So this is one of the unexpected consequences, for me, of trying to buy the majority of our food, especially of our meats and cheeses, from the farmers market:  it’s not just been a simple matter of substituting one food thing for another.  It’s a matter of changing eating and cooking practices, or I’d like to say of recovering thrifty cooking practices that I’ve conveniently ignored.  I remember when I first started taking French in high school, I thought that all I’d have to do was memorize a bunch of new words that were exact equivalents for their English partners.  Much to my disappointment, I soon discovered that although French is fairly similar to English (when compared with, say, Mandarin) it does require learning a new set of grammatical rules and a different way of using language.  It requires that you think a little differently.

In the same way, seeing our food bill go up by frequenting the farmer’s market, and of course by having a different selection of vegetables, breads, meats, etc than are available at the grocery store, has made us think a little differently about how we prepare food.  We’re not that good at it yet, but it’s a process of relearning some of the thrifty cooking tricks that my mom tried to teach, and that were an integral part of her and my grandmother’s kitchens. And also just learning that you can’t fill your diet with certain kinds of food.

Which brings up one last point:  I’ve been curious about the percentage of our budgets that we spend on food.  Since so much of the food we buy in the grocery store is fairly cheap because of processing techniques, industrial farming, factory farms, etc., wouldn’t that mean that people like my grandmother, or probably really people like my great-grandmother living in pre-WWII era America, actually had to spend more on food?  That their food prices perhaps looked something more like those at the farmer’s market?  Then I came across this article.  Check it out if you like, but here’s the most relevant paragraph:  “Americans are spending, on average, 9.9 percent of their disposable income on food. Twenty years ago, American consumers spent 11.7 percent of their disposable income on food. Thirty years ago, that figure was 15.1 percent. Going back in history, Americans spent about 20 percent of their income on food about the time today’s baby boomers were born. In 1933, the figure was more than 25 percent.”

If I’m any indication, that drop in money spent on food was accompanied also by a loss of set of “thrift” skills (I’d like to repeat this isn’t my mom’s fault—she really did try!), as well as that sense of the true value of a meal.  And I think that’s what this attempt to shop locally is really, essentially about, and effort to regain a sense of food and the place it comes from as valuable.

Back to basics

Due to some stomache…issues, R is temporarily on a bland-food diet.  We went grocery shopping tonight with this new diet in mind and it was, I thought, kind of an adventure (R might disagree—he was a bit dispirited). Potato blintzs, jello, spinach (for steaming), bananas, bagels, potatoes—I guess we do eat these things, with the exception of the blintzs & jello, generally, but they’re not the main focus of the diet.  R can’t eat:  beans, nuts, seeds, milk, cheese, red meat, vegetables that cause gas, berries, citrus fruit, anything spicy, greasy.  It’s an interesting set of restrictions that manages to cut out both unhealthy and healthy staples.  Can’t eat much meat, but also can’t eat the fats that usually replace meats.  Poor guy.  I’m trying to call it a basic diet instead of bland, but I don’t know that this is very helpful.

Oh, and we got applesauce.  Mom, I hate to say, it wasn’t Tree Top—Harris Teeter doesn’t carry it!  We got Whitehouse, which is as Virginia brand.  R will let you know how it is.*

*R just informed me that the Whitehouse applesauce is fine, “better than Motts” which apparently isn’t a ringing endorsement.

Butcher

What did I do this weekend. Watched several episodes of “Mad Men” (can’t decide if the lovely symetry of each episode really justifies the rave reviews its been getting or if the writers just know what structural notes to hit in order to make everyone fall over themselves but well, count me among the fooled if it is just a big scam). Also, went for a hike at Sky Meadows minutes after a thunder storm, which left behind gorgeous skies and a welcome temperature drop of several degrees. Also, spent too much money at the farmer’s market. Well, mom said it’s only too much if we don’t use the food and so far I’ve been doing, if I do say so myself, an admirable job of eating up the cheese (gouda and salt & pepper cheddar from an Amish dairy–used the gouda as a substitue in a quiche recipe mom should post to her site), peaches, chard, eggs, and chicken. Ok, haven’t yet ingested all of these, but I’ve made a fine start. One of the big problems with the farmer’s market—I feel entitled to eat a lot more because isn’t all the food good for you? Right, eggs, cheese, meat are suddenly good for the heart if you buy them at a stall from a friendly farmer. (But honestly, the meat seller at the farmer’s market is pretty great. Eco-Friendly Foods from western VA.)

Anyhow, tonight I cut up a half of a chicken into…parts. Chicken from the farmers market doesn’t come in easily distinguishable wings,legs, breasts that I’m used to seeing in the supermarket. I was hacking away at this poor dead creature with a pair of scizzors, trying to carve out something resembling a body part and I have to say, it wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as it sounds or as I’d anticipated. Is there something wrong with me that I kind of enjoyed it? I think it was some stupid feeling of self-reliance, some imagined affinity with the women who have come before me and who were more closely tied to the food they ate. I think this satisfaction is a defensive reaction—I still feel very uneasy about eating meat for any number of reasons, but I tell myself that the more directly I deal with it/force myself to deal with it, the more I can say I’ve made a conscious decision to eat in a certain way. I haven’t bought factory-farmed meat for years now, but even the meat stamped “organic” that you can get at the store still feels problematic. It still feels too centered around the health concerns of people —it’s always marked in such a way (no antibiotics, vegetarian fed, etc) that makes it clear that the farm/manufacturer is talking to the consumer about the consumer’s health. Which still means that the well-being of the animal is somewhat in question (probably better than a factory farm, but I feel like the labels & designations affixed to food by the FDA don’t always mean what they’d like you to believe. Like “natural”—what the hell does that mean? I know what it implies, but I feel like as a label its more of a gimmic). Anyhow, trying to purchase meat exclusively from the market and places like Eco-Friendly Farms (which is affiliated with a farm, Polyface, featured by Michael Polan in Omnivore’s Dilema and the owner of which is described in this article) seems like a way of ensuring knowledge of where the animal has come from and what kind of life he or she has led. I don’t know if this really explains how cutting up a bloody chicken into its ragged parts makes me feel better about eating meat, but it’s all I’ve got.

A Rant

So, there’s been something bugging me about the voice & rhetoric I adopt for this blog.  I guess any time we write we magnify a certain part of our identity (or of our aspirational identity) and in this case the part I’ve chosen to magnify just irks me a little.  It’s a voice I realize comes straight out of those fawning celebrity interviews I just hate (the nasty snarky ones, on the other hand…) The sort excelled at by Harper’s Bazaar, People, In Style, etc, where the interviewer visits some gorgeous celebrity in their gorgeous celebrity house and attempts to make the reader feel both entirely inadequate in the face of said gorgeousness while at the same time giving them tips on how to atain this beautiful (and yet so perfectly simple) way of life.  Consumption is, naturally enough, the method of attainment.  I want to focus especially on the narrative these interviews construct about food consumption (’cause I just don’t have the energy or time to go into the ridiculous “you can too!” narratives about investing in an essential “piece” ie $5,000 jacket).  Usually, if the story being told about the celebrity involves the simplicity, the wholesomeness of their lives, there is some detailed discussion about the simple food they eat, the wholesome manner in which its prepared, and their implied utter, utter dietary superiority to the complicated, messy, processed crap the reader currently enjoys. My particular favorites are the advice given by celebrities on how to treat oneself.  “I like to have some green tea and really good chocolate at the end of the day.”  “For a satisfying lunch, I cook up some free-range chicken the night before and then mix it with farmer’s market greens and some artisan cheese to make a delicious, indulgent salad.”  “There’s nothing I enjoy more than a bottle a glass of organic red wine from my friend Francis’s vinyard after my nanny puts I put the kids to bed.”

Ugh.

And yet that’s the same crap I find coming out of me, unbidden, when I try to talk about my habits of consumption, and my efforts to be healthier, use less stuff, etc.  Humorless, class-unconscious, and just a bit dishonest.  Not that I’m lying per se about trying out new recipes or finding creative ways of saving a little money and eating more vegetables and fruits.  Not that I’m lying even about getting a kick out of it.  It’s just that as I’m doing this I’m not saying how very much I would like to just eat french fries and cheeseburgers all day long, that there is some part of me that really doesn’t give a damn about being healthy, that there is some part of me that is in fact a bit suspicious of the trendiness and classism of the rhetoric around eating organic/local/name-yr-trend.

One problem I have with it is that I wonder if putting this sort of obsession with what we eat in terms like “health” “natural” “clean” etc. is that I worry it’s just another name for “dieting.” Dieting as in “yo-yo” “crash” etc.  I realize that supposedly the end goal of Whole Foods dieting is different than a crash diet–in one you eat to feel better, in the other you eat (or don’t) to look “better.”  And yet I think it really allows for a similar set of habits to set in.  Constantly measuring and counting and quantifying good v bad.  And this is really problematic I think for women especially.  Most of my friends are very, very food conscious in the same sort of Whole Foods way I am, and for most of them, and me, it’s also in a way that is both Whole Foods-y at the same time as it’s body-image-y.  And ultimately our conversations about food (and eating of it) end up feeling more like ways of controlling…something, I’m not sure what, but something rather that simply making a choice to do what feels good and natural.

More correctly I should say as a way of proving and performing something, some particular identity.  One that says less “I choose to eat this way because I feel its right and best for me and the world” (although that’s there) and more “I choose to eat this way because it proves I’m educated, not ignorant, that I’m on top of things, in charge of my body” etc.  And that the identity that is being performed is coded in a way that’s incredibly class-bound, in the same way that we’ll look to one and other and smirk a little when we pass someone who is overweight and eating ice cream or fried food.  Well, what way of talking about ourselves isn’t freighted with class? But this seems problematic to me because it intentionally tries to deny its class-consciousness and instead insist (as all problematic rhetorics about superiority do) on its very naturalness. “It is natural and best to eat brightly colored veggies from the farmers market instead of mac & cheese from Walmart.”  What this really saying, I think, is “The thing that people with some proximity to farmers markets and Whole Foods and a certain type of education and a certain amount of disposable income–well, that thing, those patterns of consumption they practice are best because those people know better.”

And of course I really do think that environmentally and personally it probably is way way healthier and better to eat a lot of fresh vegetables and unprocessed foods.  But I think to put it so much into a narrative of personal choice, something I completely participate in, without acknolweging the classist assumptions inherent in it and the overwhelming cultural and economic imperatives to consume in a way that is perhaps destructive, well, that’s problematic.  And of course people do point these things out, and people like Michael Pollan and many, many others find blame for these patterns of consumption on a corporate or political or systemtic level.  But still, the prevailing myth amongst the middle class, I think, about eating and eating well has to do with making the most “simple” and “natural” choice when I think its actually a choice freighted with an awful lot of aspiration, an awful lot of attempts at controling one’s image and body, and perhaps not that much that’s very simple or natural.

Not terribly well worked out, as I’m not quite sure what I’m arguing for.  I think I’m just trying to scold myself into writing in a way I don’t find quite as annoying.

Thrifty Lunch

Granted, lunch isn’t usually the place where my budget falls apart. I don’t leave the office often during the day (even though I should) and I try really hard not be tempted by all the tasty lunch places in Arlington. You’d be surprised, for such an apparently straight-laced sort of place (I think the block I work on is home to just about every military contractor and non-profit association known to man, and probably a few not known as well…) there’s a lot of good, interesting eating nearby. Great Indian, yummy Vietnamese & Thai, tasty Italian, etc. But I try for the most part to still eat in.

But I’ve been realizing that my eating in often consists of the same burrito day after day, and that’s when I start wanting to go out. So I’ve tried in the past week to both mix it up and cut back on costs by not eating any processed foods. Last week and earlier this week was a beans & rice kick. I made the rice (basmati with vegetable bullion) the night before and brought in some beans, cilantro, onions and cheese. Very tasty and pretty filling.

Today I think is my favorite—noodles, cooked in the microwave and then while the water was still hot I threw in spinach, cilantro (which you can get for .79 at H-Mart), fried tofu (again from H-Mart–it’s an Asian grocery store with cheap produce and soy stuff, and lots and lots of it) & green onions. And, I have to confess, a seasoning packet that came with the noodles. The noodles were in fact some sort of ramen noodle, but the packet was written completely in…Mandarin? Not sure. At any rate, since I couldn’t tell what was in the seasoning, I figured all the salt and MSG doesn’t count. Right?

Green Offices

(Er, wrote this at work the other day and then accidentally published it as a page instead of a post.  No doubt trying to close the screen as I heard the approaching footsteps of a coworker.  So shameful!)

This blog has prompted me to actually try to implement some tiny changes I’ve been thinking about for awhile.  I work in a tiny office, so it’s easy to change how we do things, and I’m finally pushing for us to get some reusable paper towels, or just towels, as well as a set of silverware as we currently use plastic.  Such a small thing, and so little effort–why has it taken me this long to get around to it?  I’m sure my coworkers don’t care one way or the other, so it’s not like I’m afraid they’ll mock me.  I don’t know what’s been stopping me.  Oh well, better late than never.

Fetish for order

That was a really interesting article mom linked to in the last post—talked about the spike in the amount of storage space people have begun renting (and that’s become available) in the last decade and how this naturally coincides with the dramatic increase in credit availablity and spending.  I had not drawn a correlation before between what I think is an accompanying phenomenon:  the fetishization of organizational goods.  There are now stores as well as magazines (indicators I think of an entire industry and aesthic, really) devoted to finding cute ways of organizing all that stuff you buy and can’t seem to live without. There are organizational experts you can bring into your home to help out with this, endless books and tv shows devoted to the subject.  I’d noticed that these appeals towards order (in the form of adorable canvas storage containers) were become a trend, and its one I’m really succeptible to (probably in part because I tend to be a little messy).  I’d not associated this surge though with the fact that, of course, people now just plain have more stuff.  And not just do they have stuff, but I think they feel somewhat guilty about it.  At least that’s how I’d read the popularity of places like the Container Store or that magazine devoted soley to organization.  If you look at the rhetoric employed by these companies, they always make an appeal to something more than just having a place to put stuff so you’re not tripping on it.  They make appeals towards a spectrum of things, from increased productivity towards the more spiritual:  peace of mind, calmness, clarity of thought.  Hard for me not to see these appeals as being directly descended from a fairly Purtian way of being in the world.  It seems a particularly American phenomenon, this.  The sort of over-consumptive gorging on things accompanied by a guilt about having aquired all that stuff, a need to tame it, tidy it up, or even just plain hide it.  It’s sort of the perfect storm, getting all caught up in buying things that you have an innate distrust of (or of a quantity you have an innate distrust of).  I’m certainly a sucker for the rhetoric, the fetishization of orderliness.  The thing though about these places, magazines, experts, etc.  is that they seem to say “its not the stuff itself thats the problem, its just how you’ve arranged it.”  Buying more things as a solution to having too much—not much of a solution.

R and I are going to try to keep this in mind as we go through another round of apartment organizing, an exercise that usually ends up at Ikea.

“Anti-Thrift Institutions”

Really interesting interview on Tom Ashbrook about debt culture. The woman he was interviewing, Barbara Defoe Whitehead, talked about the “anti-thrift institutions” that normalize debt as a way of life. Ties into mom’s comment earlier about how attitudes towards consumption, attitudes about what we have and what we use, have shifted. The show was interesting because Whitehead talked cultural attitudes towards thrift and the connotations people have towards the word (how it had been a few years ago considered really dorky but now is beginning to have a resurgence in popularity.) She said that thrift is actually a sort of freedom and liberation…which is certainly not how we’ve thought about that word recently. I think we think of it as the opposite, as freedom being the ability to buy what you want, when you want it, but she argues that it frees you from obligations to creditors. And it’s not a big stretch to say freedom from that endless desire for things that you can almost afford…