Our little family is a happy crew. We live a relatively simple life and over dinner the other night an idea was put forth that maybe we should talk about it more openly. We’re not retro or pseudo-hippies. We don’t really cling to the “Green” lifestyle but we’re living simply and within our means. And honestly? It isn’t all that tough. Being responsible and enjoying life go well together so let’s talk about it.
When we found out that we had a little dude on the way it was decided that SG would retire from her career as a system administrator and take on the fulltime job of being a parent. This would require some adjustments to our lifestyle, but not big ones (we’ll talk about our experiences with the dual income myth in another post). We had already cancelled cable television as spending money on something we didn’t watch was silly. We never really ate out all that much because we love cooking and we’re pretty good at it. It’s hard to swallow shelling out good money for food you can make better at home for a fraction of the cost. And as most of our friends and family know, our idea of a vacation is a week in the mountains in a tent so we weren’t looking at a lot of extravagant spending (except at the bookstore or REI).
Our boy is 15 months old now and as the world economy continues to slow we’re seeing “the experts” advocate a style of living that we’re quite accustomed to and wondering where everybody has been all this time. Living simply is easy. The hardest part is throwing away the mental baggage and accepting that those of us in “Generation X” will be living more like our grandparents and less like our parents in short order. That’s what we want to talk about here.
After World War II America started to embrace the idea of making tasks less time consuming by using more industrial products. Women were the main targets here as the industrial food chain started to get itself into high gear. Michael Pollan does a great job of explaining all of that so we’ll leave that to him. As the years passed it became natural to open a can of green beans instead of buying them fresh or, Heaven forbid, growing them in the back yard. Back yard gardens disappeared in most places and we became a society that was perfectly happy to eat meals from a box with “just add ground beef or chicken” flambouyantly printed on it.
Around our house we’re not so big on that.
The fact is, vegetables from a can taste pretty bad. Most of the meat available at the grocery store is gross too. And eggs? Forget it. Our addiction to good food started small with SG hitting the farmers market for vegetables. From there we moved on to locally grown eggs. And then to a split quarter of pastured beef. The difference was astonishing. Our bottom line wasn’t really touched much either. We pay less for veggies, a little more for eggs, and buy meat once a year. We prepare our meals at home using things that we grow in the garden and make some seriously good food. Certainly better than anything you’d get at a restaurant without a reservation.
But making dinner takes time! Yes. Yes it does. We might spend up to 30 whole minutes preparing dinner. While we do that all three of us are in the kitchen talking about our day and being quite silly. Indeed we are missing a rerun of “Roseanne” on the SuperStation, but if that’s what we have to give up for a brilliant pasta in homemade sauce served with freshly baked bread then that’s the sacrifice we’re willing to make! And what kind of sacrifice is that? At the end of the day all of the promised time savings of the industrial food chain and the associated disposable lifestyle simply gave us more time to watch TV. When TV leaves the agenda there is more time for those million other things we’d like to try or do.
Please don’t misunderstand. TV and technology aren’t evil. A frozen pizza isn’t the worst thing in the world either. But it’s not the best. All things need to be done in moderation and moderation isn’t something that our generation has been taught very effectively. We will learn. The times that we’re living in now will be a great teacher. That said, we’re going to open up this space to talk about how we live. We’ll show the little things that we have done to make our lives more frugal, responsible, and fun.
