Adventures in Domesticity

CSA Weeks 7 & 8: Harry Potter and the Forgotten Vegetables

I failed in my vegetable-eating attempts over the past couple of weeks.  I was on a mission, you see.  A mission to read the entire Harry Potter series before the Deathly Hallows came out on Saturday, July 21.  That's all fine and good, but I didn't get around to starting until about Friday, July 13.  That's thousands of pages to read, with a full-time job, a Twins game, and a wedding thrown in there.  Once I started, I didn't do much other than read for the week, and things like housecleaning, meal planning, and cooking fell by the wayside.  Ah well - the bathroom is dirty and there's a nasty bag of mesclun mix in the fridge, but I know what happens to Harry, and that's enough at the moment.  I'll just consider the vegetables that I didn't get to as fallen warriors in the battle between Good and Evil.  What more could any cucumber aspire to be?

I did get around to using a few things.  Here's what happened:

• New potatoes and fresh green beans went into a warm potato salad from the Harmony Valley newsletter. 
• Purple potatoes and carrots are going into the crockpot with a beef roast today.  I haven't quite regained my usual cooking habits, but I could (barely) manage a crockpot dinner.
• At some point last week, I made some improvements on a box of "Asian" noodles from the grocery store, adding stir-fried cauliflower, zucchini, and carrots.
• I cooked some black currants down into a syrupy, jam-like sauce, and layered it with angel food cake and whipped cream for a trifle.  Neither Craig nor I liked it that much - the taste of the currants is just too deep and strong for the angel food, I think.  Next time I get currants, I'll make barbeque sauce instead.
• I did a lot of freezing last night - green beans from the CSA and the garden, as well as carrots from the CSA.  I made sure to blanch the beans before freezing them this time.  My last attempt at simply freezing the beans resulted in olive green mush that elementary school lunch ladies wouldn't even touch.
• There's a lot of zucchini and other summer squash waiting to be used, both from my garden and the CSA.  I've been sticking zucchini in pasta sauces, stir-fries, and anywhere else it could possibly go, but it's still hanging around.  I'll be exploring the world of baking with zucchini in the next few weeks - zucchini-coconut cookie bars look promising, I think.
• Still to be used (but storing well): beets, rainbow chard, and arugula.

Not Buying It

I'm pretty well-acquainted with the non-fiction genre dedicated to frugality, money, and consumption.  I own a well-thumbed copy of The Complete Tightwad Gazette, I've checked Your Money or Your Life out of the library at least five times in two different states, and I can tell you the difference between Jonni McCoy and Mary Hunt off the top of my head.  I strive to be careful with our money and not blow it on junk, and as a inveterate worrier, I'm in constant need of reassurance.

I really expected to like Judith Levine's Not Buying It.  The premise is intriguing - a freelance writer resolves to buy nothing for a year, excluding groceries and other essentials.  For the most part, she succeeds.  Unfortunately, it doesn't translate into a successful book.

The major flaw, I think, is that Levine doesn't ground her experiment in any sort of historical or psychological context.  She simply decides after Christmas 2003 to embark on a year of not-buying, and appears to be more concerned with The Rules of her own personal experiment than what the concepts she's addressing might mean for other people.  The (mildly interesting) accounts of her struggles with irrational longings for stuff, dilemmas about whether Q-tips qualify as necessary, and so on are accompanied by a good deal of political commentary and forays into various simplicity movements, but there's no attempt to explore WHY Americans buy so much stuff.  Consumerism has been around since the dawn of time, but from reading Not Buying It, you'd be forgiven for thinking that George W. Bush mandated it on his first day in office.

Levine's politics are what really stuck in my craw, though.  She and I are likely going to be voting the same way in any national election, but she presents herself as a caricature of the Snotty Liberal.  When she goes to movies, she sees French cinema in art-house theaters, and $4 milk in glass bottles is a justifiable expense.  She goes from looking at paint chips to grousing about presidential politics in two sentences.  ("I have better choices in paint than I do in presidents.")  The book is filled with two long examinations of a proposed cell-phone tower in her adopted Vermont hometown and the 2004 elections. 

Snotty, latte-sipping liberalism aside, what really gets me is the speed at which Levine moves from zero to political hysteria.  She downplays the economic and spiritual aspects of consuming less, concentrating instead on the political, declaring that "I don't want my country and everything in it to be sold to the highest bidder.  I don't want my government to be a plutocracy, or my presidency to be a consumer product."  That's a legitimate sentiment, but so is the belief that the meek shall inherit the earth and that people need to examine their desires, as espoused by a few of the book's much-maligned Voluntary Simplicity support group members.  There are a million different reasons to buy less, and she ignored all but one.  After all, plenty of individuals are rejecting mass consumer culture (at one level or another) for their own reasons, without an iota of desire for the kind of grand political gesture that Levine loves. 

Maybe the experience of voting for the first time in the 2000 elections has endowed me with the cynicism of a career politician, but I can't get comfortable with the idea that political activism is the only worthy application of anti-consumerism or any other concept.  Perhaps my reluctance to run up credit card debt, shop for the sake of shopping, or keep up with trends doesn't have any lasting political value, but it has significance to me, my values, and my checkbook.  And that's enough for me.

***

I searched around a bit for more commentary on this book, and found an interesting blog entry from someone who seems to feel the same way about it as I did: The Rage Diaries.  It's worth reading, if you'd like more of a (better-written) window into my mind.