About the Project
During the summer of 2010, I started to realize how much my family of four (me, my husband, and our two daughters now ages five and seven) was spending on food – easily $800 a month – and how much of it we were throwing away. We kept forgetting about the leftovers in the back of the fridge – or we just didn’t feel like eating them. When they finally grew fuzz and blackened, we tossed them into the garbage or compost heap without a second thought.
The waste and expense shamed me a little, but every time I tried to shop more carefully, a week or two later I found myself with another monster food bill. Part of this was my love for food, but more of it was my lack of discipline. I have terrible self control when it comes to things like artisan bread and handcrafted cheese. And I love to cook; if I saw a recipe I wanted to try, I went out and bought the ingredients right away. I justified all of this by saying, “It’s good food, I’m feeding my kids well, it’s not like I’m spending money on frippery.”
Then, in late July, I made the eight-hour drive to visit my family. My father and my aunt traded stories about their early childhood in post-WWII Europe, and the food rations they’d endured in displaced persons camps. Dad mentioned that his mother kept chickens and rabbits to supplement the rations; later, after they immigrated to the US, she kept a garden and some geese. My aunt marveled over the gorgeous black soil of her mother’s American vegetable garden. I remembered running barefoot through that soil on cool evenings, my feet sinking and springing back on the loam. I remembered homemade peach jam, sticky sap on the plum trees, and huge sacks of potatoes purchased before the western New York snow began to gather. It was a world of enough because it was a world of thrift.
My maternal grandmother, Jackie, listened and then told her own stories. She grew up on a farm during the Depression, one of her jobs was to raise and slaughter the hogs, using every part, including the intestines for sausage casings. This wasn’t for business – it was how they survived. She also mentioned her mother’s kindness to strangers: no matter how little the family had, she fed hungry travelers come in from the road.
My grandmothers’ knowledge of food – whole food created by their hands, food whose value was understood through experiences of scarcity, and how food binds not just families, but strangers too – is the most valuable lesson they’ve shared. Sure, I’d been cooking traditional Polish food every Christmas Eve since I left home; I felt that this connected me to my heritage. But it turns out that the once-a-year poppyseed rolls and mushroom soup aren’t nearly as important as a daily connection to, and appreciation for, frugal food.
Silly as it sounds, I decided to try and be a good peasant, a good immigrant child who values food, community, and a great deal. Here are the three rules of my attempt at self discipline:
#1: Good food can and should be thrifty. So I resolved to halve the grocery budget. All food products - including staples and spices – have to come in at or under $100 a week. (Yes, this still sounds extravagant or ‘no big deal’ to some, but hang on and read through #2 …)
#2: Supporting small, local farms is just as important as, and must go hand-in-hand with, thrift. (Smallscale, local farmers tend to manage the land responsibly and treat animals with compassion. Plus shopping close to home is a greener option than purchasing meat and produce trucked over a continent or flown over an ocean.)
So all meat, dairy, and eggs has to come from local sources as often as possible. That’s why the $100 budget isn’t lower. I’d rather support small, local farmers who raise happy, healthy animals. I might get away with lamb cubes for $4.99/lb at the grocery store, but I’d rather pay $10/lb to Red Haven or Meadowset Farm.
Fruits and vegetables have to be local, too – at least until deep winter. Even then, I try to buy seasonally for my area and only rarely give in to strawberries from California in the midst of January.
#3: Take up a more hands-on kitchen. Bread-making and canning seemed the easiest things to start with in late summer 2010; also, our 1/3 acre (and its zoning) can’t support livestock. For 2011, I’ve resolved to plant a larger garden and use every single tomato, bean, and cucumber growing in the backyard beds. We’re also considering our own chickens and honeybees.
#4.) Wait a minute – didn’t you say three rules? Well, yes. But this one isn’t just about food. It’s about building a community of people interested in living well and eating well – while being mindful of resources – monetary and planetary. So, to build and help sustain that kind of community, I have to write at least one blog post per week, preferably two. That means keeping a consistent writing schedule and actually finishing what I start (something I struggle with as a writer).
Now, friends, feel free to participate! If there’s something you’d like me to try, a recipe you’d like to share, or even a cookbook to recommend, by all means leave a comment and let me know! I’ll do my best to answer questions or cook one of your creations. And if you know of a local farm that could be useful to me or other readers, be sure to tell us about them and post a link to their site if they have one.
As you browse the site, there are stories, recipes, cookbook reviews, even weekly menus if you’d like to try what I’m doing. The dropdown categories will let you search for what you want: a particular season, ingredient, or type of dish (soups, salads, etc.)
So please, join me and my family as we blunder and discover our way through a year’s adventure in restraint. We’d love to hear from you!
