Scrap Story #3: Swap-O-Rama Rama

It would be safe to say that clothes are not a passion of mine.

I remember going clothes shopping with my mom a long time ago, high school or college. She said, “Some day you’re going to have a job and you’re going to have to get dressed up every day so you better get used to it.” I said, “No I’m not.”

Guess who was right.

A few years ago my friend Ann, who is executive director at The Scrap Exchange, heard about an event that an artist named Wendy Tremayne had started: the Swap-O-Rama Rama. It was a giant community clothes swap with do-it-yourself stations for sewing, silkscreening, fabric painting, etc., where people could alter the clothes they’d picked up from what other people had brought in.

The event is designed to foster “creativity over consumerism” and to build community. (One of the interesting rules is no mirrors: this forces you to ask people around you what they think of something, if it works on you, if you should take it or leave it on the table.)

The mission of The Scrap Exchange is to promote creativity, environmental awareness, and community through reuse. This had Scrap Exchange written all over it.

In 2006, we did two small Swaps in our Liberty Warehouse location.

The next year, we got a $5,000 grant from the Durham Arts Council to do a blow-out Swap-O-Rama Rama. We held it at the Armory. We hooked up with the Swap-O-Rama Rama national sponsors to deliver sewing machines for the day. We hired See Saw Studio designers help us with the screenprinting. We had a DJ. We had an emcee and a fashion runway. We had a raffle. We had the Scene of the Crime Rovers marching band. Our board member David Solow was walking around in a rubber skirt and knee-high boots.

It was rock ‘n’ roll.

It cost $5,000.

We had another one at the Armory in spring 2009. No one was wearing a rubber skirt but it was also pretty happenin. We did one in fall 2009 at Marbles Kids Museum in Raleigh because we had free use of the Zanzibar Room there to hold a fundraiser, and we’re so not geared up for fundraising events that doing a Swap seemed like the best thing to do. That one was also pretty cool.

In 2010 we did a smaller-scale one in collaboration with Chapel Hill Parks & Rec as part of their Earth Day event. It was nice but didn’t have the same je ne sais quoi as the Durham ones.

Despite my lack of passion for clothes, I actually love the Swap. Most of my current favorite outfits have come from the Swap. (In fact probably about half of the things I regularly wear are Swap clothes.)

The big draw for me is that the Swap saves me from ever having to shop for clothes. It also gives me an excuse for wearing things that are way too big.

(My mom says, “Could you get some clothes that fit?” I say, “They come from the Swap! No mirrors! And I don’t even usually try them on. I just pull things that I like that seem like they’re not too small and see how they work when I get home. If they feel good and look okay, I keep them. If not, I take them back to the next Swap.” She shakes her head.)

Ann and I talked about things at the beginning of the year, she said she wasn’t going to do a Swap. Too much work, she needed to focus on other things. I wanted to have a Swap, I’m running out of clothes. I said I would do the Swap. Make it a Board event, get everyone involved, past Board members and everyone. Maybe even get David Solow out in his rubber skirt.

I had grand plans. Then roof fell. I was busy. But I said I was going to do a Swap in September and I wanted to do a Swap and I decided to go ahead and see if we could do a scaled-down version.

On Sunday, we had the Less is Enough Swap.

No announcer, no fashion runway, no raffle. The first version of the plan had silkscreening but we decided to drop it when we started thinking about everything involved — screens and sinks and people who know what they’re doing. Too much.

We went with clothes, sewing machines, stencils, paints. Music. People.

Less is enough.

The scaled-down Swap was still awesome. And it did not cost $5,000.

Creativity over consumerism.

Rock ‘n’ roll.

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Help! The Scrap Exchange Needs YOU!

Visit the Scrap Exchange website for full details on our fundraiser, or to make a tax-deductible, online donation through PayPal or Network for Good.

Rather go old school? Checks can be made payable to The Scrap Exchange and mailed to 923 Franklin St, Bay 1, Durham, NC 27701.

Scrap Story #2: Outreach

Creativity! Community! Reuse!

So I sent my $150 donation in to the Scrap exchange in spring 2000 and said I was interested in volunteering. The director called me but we kept missing each other, and right around that time, I started a database project at work and got really busy with that. We never managed to get together. And I never managed to make it to the store.

The organization sent out a fundraising letter in the fall, and I sent in a donation of $100. (Still hadn’t been in the store.)

About a year later I heard they were having serious financial problems, word was they might have to close. That was the last I heard, and I didn’t walk over that way much so wasn’t sure if they were even still there. The database project had taken off in unexpected directions, I was trying to figure things out, it was busy.

In fall 2002, I got a fundraising letter in the mail. Not out of business after all!

I sent in a donation of $50. (I had quit my job in January 2002 to focus on database work. No more salary, not quite so much to give away, but still wanted to help.) I still hadn’t been in the store. I got a thank you letter from a new director, she said she saw from my previous donations that I had been interested in volunteering. Was I still interested?

I went in to meet with her after the holidays, in January 2003. She asked what I did. I said I had worked in book publishing for a number of years, but for the past year I’d been working as a Filemaker developer. Her ears perked up. She said, “Really, you know Filemaker?” I said I did. She said they had someone try to do a Filemaker database for them but it wasn’t what they needed, they couldn’t get it to work.

She said they had an outreach program, event organizers would hire them to come to events, bring a vanload of materials, let people make things out of the materials. They needed a database to keep track of what events they were doing, who was working, whether they’d been paid.

I said sure, I could look at that.

She said we also need people to work at events, we actually pay people for that.

I wasn’t sure if that counted as volunteering, and wasn’t sure how I felt about going out and interacting with people making things out of scrap materials. I can only handle so much interpersonal interaction and I didn’t quite get how that would work. I thought maybe I’d start with the database and we could talk about the other stuff later.

So my first volunteer project was to try to figure out how to set up a database for the outreach program. Turned out to be pretty straightforward, I spent maybe 20 hours getting it all together and rolling. It was definitely a game-changer for them, trying to do that without a database was not easy. (They still run the whole outreach program out of a Filemaker database, though it’s undergone extensive revisions since that first one I set up, I think I’ve spent about 350 hours on it at this point.)

And then a few months later she called and asked if I wanted to work at an event, they were short one staff person for something at the Durham Public Library, could I fill in?

I said I could try.

I worked at the event and I’m not sure what I expected but honestly I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything quite like that before.

You put barrels of stuff in a room, a few boxes of smaller things (wire and plastic pointy thingies and ribbon and things like that), put scissors and staplers and tape on the tables, and tell people to make whatever they want out of whatever they can find. That’s it, just go on and do whatever you can think of.

Really? That’s how it works? Who does that? Who tells people to make anything they can think of — no instructions, no pictures, no templates. Can kids even do that anymore?

It turns out they can, you just need to give them the chance.

What do people make?

The event was to celebrate the release of the new Harry Potter book, so that had a built-in theme. People making wands and dressing up like witches and things like that. Parents helping their kids figure things out. I remember one little girl who wanted an outfit that included shorts, her dad was trying to put it together with her, he was doing the best he could but couldn’t get it quite the way she wanted. (In retrospect, it seems like he should have tried to talk her into a skirt; shorts with staplers and tape as your only fasteners are tough for even the most talented Scrap artist.) There’s definitely the potential for frustration at a Scrap event.

But mostly we encourage kids to do things on their own, that way they can get it exactly the way they want it, whatever it looks like in their head is what it is. (Early lesson learned: never say “Oh, I like your cat!” It could be a weasel. Say, “That’s awesome! Tell me about it.”)

Since that first event, I’ve worked at events in Alabama (Montgomery, Troy), Tennessee (Kingsport), Virginia (Fairfax, Roanoke, Suffolk), and all across North Carolina (Salisbury, Jacksonville, Rocky Mount, Kernersville, Concord, and of course Durham, Cary, Raleigh, Carrboro, Chapel Hill). In September I’m working at the madhouse that is BugFest (where the picture above was taken) and in October I’m going to Arkansas.

See the world, Scrap style.

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Help! The Scrap Exchange Needs YOU!

Visit the Scrap Exchange website for full details on our fundraiser, or to make a tax-deductible, online donation through PayPal or Network for Good.

Rather go old school? Checks can be made payable to The Scrap Exchange and mailed to 923 Franklin St, Bay 1, Durham, NC 27701.

Scrap Story #1: Giving

In early 2000, I was working with a friend on some financial problems she was having. It turned out that her problems were more psychological than financial and I was trying to figure out how to explain things to her so they made sense and she could get everything rolling again.

As part of this process, I was reading different financial books. I read Suze Orman’s Nine Steps to Financial Freedom, which talks a lot about a person’s relationship with money. One of the steps involves giving money away — Orman talks about how giving money makes you open to receiving money. She says the first payment you make every month should be money freely given, with no strings attached and no expectation of return. Just money you’re giving away and letting go of.

One day around this time, I was walking a new route from the post office downtown back to my house. I walked past a storefront on Foster Street, the sign above the window said The Scrap Exchange, and below the sign were four sets of mannequin legs dangling crazily over the sidewalk.

Naturally the sign caught my eye.

I paused and looked in the window but couldn’t quite tell what it was and wasn’t sure what I’d be in for if I walked through the door. I decided not to risk it and just kept walking.

Two days later, there was a big article in the N&O about the organization, a nonprofit creative reuse center that collected materials that would otherwise be thrown away and made them available at low cost to the community. The organization had recently moved to my neighborhood from its previous location at Northgate Mall. The new space was much bigger, and had great potential, but came with much higher expenses. The director said they were struggling, she wasn’t sure if they would be able to pull it off.

I thought the organization sounded amazing — what a great idea to take things that people want to get rid of and get them to people who can use them! I thought about Suze Orman and the idea of giving money away with no strings and no expectation of return. I sent a donation for $150, without ever having been in the store.

The next week, one of my colleagues at work who, like me, had started at a low salary and had received nothing but meager raises for many years, got a new job at a different organization with a much higher salary. Upon resigning, she said that the pay rate was a huge factor in her decision, and she pointed out that others were likely to make the same decision unless something was done.

For once, management listened, and quickly undertook a salary review. They realized that yes, many people were significantly underpaid, and put through across-the-board raises for all junior-level staff who had been in their position for more than a few years. My salary went up by $3,000.

I was like holy cow, this totally works!

I’ve been a philanthropist ever since.

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Help! The Scrap Exchange Needs YOU!

Visit the Scrap Exchange website for full details on our fundraiser, or to make a tax-deductible, online donation through PayPal or Network for Good.

PWS

I’ve had a lot of work lately, and when I have a lot of work, I have to make myself stay on my computer longer than I want to.

When I have the right amount of work, after working for two or three hours, I get to stop and go do something else — like go to bed. When I have a lot of work, I work for two or three hours then have to work some more. It’s hard for me to jump directly from one thing to another, so I take a little break with something unrelated — something that doesn’t involve leaving my computer, that I can do without using much of my brain, and that ideally won’t take too much time, because the break usually comes around 1am.

For a while, a few years ago, my break was reading the Carolyn Hax Tell Me About It archive. (I have a total weakness for advice columns.)

This spring, my break was the Brad Cooper trial. (And, for the record, I think that trial was a travesty of justice, there’s no way he should have been convicted on the evidence presented, it was totally ridiculous.)

Lately my obsession has been The Pioneer Woman Sux.

I’d never really looked at The Pioneer Woman until I read the New Yorker article about it, and I learned about PWS through that same article. I thought the Pioneer Woman Sux parody was vastly more entertaining than the “keepin it real” real thing, and in fact I often found it completely brilliant. I thought the comments section was even better than the posts.

So that turned into my between-project break, I would check in and see what was up and would read for way longer than I intended to then go back and work some more. Eventually I became pretty much addicted, checking in every day to see what was new. (Saw a recent comment from someone who said a friend had emailed her a link to the site with the subject line, “Best Time Suck Ever.” Yes, I would have to agree with that.)

Checked tonight and the site says it’s offline for comments until October.

What??

I have no idea what’s going on but it’s very strange that it happened so suddenly. A commenter on Marlboro Woman’s site suggested the possibility of a cease and desist letter. I’m keeping my eye out for news. If anyone hears anything, let me know. [Okay, false alarm on the PWS fan base freak out. Nothing nefarious, just too much going on to deal with a freaking blog, boy do I know that feeling. And I think probably way more people reading than she expected. Know that feeling too.]

Aside from the comedy, I’ve found the whole Pioneer Woman phenomenon fascinating from a sociological perspective, and it ties in to a lot of things I had been thinking about and reading about for the past year or so, in terms of homemaking and feminism and media representations of women’s lives and corporate commodification of all of those things. Then my life went off the rails — first with work then with roof/building/moving craziness then with work again — and my reading list went out the window.

But work is done, and craziness is back to the normal low hum, so hopefully I’ll be able to get back to that and start thinking about all of those things again, and maybe even put together something that’s worth reading.

But before that, it’s fundraising time here at Less Is Enough! It’s going to be like public radio, where regularly scheduled programming gets replaced by begging — I’m going to bring you stories about why I love The Scrap Exchange and why everyone should give it money. I promise I’ll make them worth reading.

Save the Chicken Livers

I was talking to a friend a few months ago about how sometimes I end up with a whole bunch of unrelated things that need to be used up, or I find myself unable to make it to the grocery store for too long of a stretch and don’t have anything obvious to fix for dinner. I end up with Weird Food Night.

My friend said, “Beets and popcorn! That’s what we called that when I was growing up.”

She said she’s not exactly sure how it started, she thinks it was some night when that was really all they had so that’s what they ate for dinner, beets and popcorn, but eventually it turned into this special thing that she and her mom would have, when it was just the two of them and they would eat some crazy thing for dinner, whatever they felt like. It was a special treat. Beets and popcorn night.

It feels like a really long time since I’ve had a good shopping trip and made a good dinner. It’s been hot, I’ve been busy, nothing has seemed appealing when I’ve been picking up groceries. It’s generally been fine, I have things to eat, but I’ve been working my way through them and it’s getting increasingly challenging to make an actual meal.

Today it occurred to me that I could make a passable pad thai — I have rice noodles and lime juice (freezer) and chicken (freezer) and carrots and eggs. I definitely have fish sauce — in fact I may have enough fish sauce to last me the rest of my life. (I brought back a box of Asian food items from a friend’s, she was cleaning out her kitchen in advance of a remodel and had a bunch of stuff she just wanted out of there, and there were at least two full bottles of fish sauce, and I had just bought a bottle. I think it takes me about five years to go through one bottle.)

While I was pulling things out of the freezer in preparation for the pad thai, I noticed that I had two packages of chicken giblets and another separate stash of chicken livers so I pulled those out too.

After doing whatever it was I was doing between thinking of making pad thai and actually getting around to cooking, I decided that upon further consideration, I wasn’t up for making pad thai after all.

It was beets and popcorn time. Or chicken livers and watermelon time, as the case may be.

Chicken livers really aren’t part of my standard repertoire, but most of the time when I buy a whole chicken at King’s, the giblets are included. (Whole Foods is pretty hit or miss these days; it used to include them, but it seems like lately they’re missing more often than they’re there.) If I’m making fried chicken, I cook them up with the rest of the chicken parts, but if I’m making anything else, I put them in the freezer for future use.

I feel like chicken giblets are one of those things like bread crumbs. You can save bread crumbs all you want, but unless you eventually make something with them, it’s not doing you any good.

Saving chicken livers is not useful unless I do something with them.

But what do you do with chicken livers if you’re not Southern frying them? I think I tried making pâté once but as I recall it didn’t turn out all that well. I needed another option, one that I could make with things I actually had on hand (which was, as noted, not much).

Half of the cookbooks I have are vegetarian so those are no help. The Pleasures of Cooking for One suggests putting chopped cooked chicken liver in an omelette. Not a bad idea, I did have eggs, but I wasn’t in an omelette mood, and honestly I think my omelette mood and my chicken liver mood are mutually exclusive, I don’t think that’s ever really going to work for me.

Joy of Cooking had a recipe for Calf or Chicken Liver Lyonnaise that looked easy and that I had all the ingredients for (except the mushrooms, which are noted as optional, and parsley, which is always optional).

Chicken Liver Lyonnaise it was.

It was delicious.

Julia Child was right. Save the chicken livers.

Calf or Chicken Liver Lyonnaise
from Joy of Cooking (Bobbs-Merrill, 1964 edition)

2 servings

Have sliced to a 1/3-inch even thickness:
1/2 lb calf liver or 12 chicken livers cut in half

Season with
salt and pepper

Coat on both sides with
flour
patting well between your hands to make the flour adhere and to remove the excess.

Sauté until golden brown in
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup sliced onions
(1/4 cup sliced mushrooms)
and set aside nearby. Now melt over high heat in a heavy skillet:
1 tablespoon butter

Heat it until it starts making slight crackling noises. Put the floured liver into the skillet, allowing 1 minute to each side. Remove the liver and discard the butter it was cooked in, which may be bitter. Put the liver on a hot plate, cover with the onion butter and:
chopped parsley

Serve at once. We hate to add this, because we feel liver should be rare — but if you don’t like it this way, cook it over medium heat 2 minutes to the side for medium doneness.

The Middle Ground

I was listening to Fresh Air last night and Terry Gross was interviewing Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse (and, more importantly, The Edible Schoolyard) fame. Terry noted that the fixed price dinner at Chez Panisse is currently around $90 per person, which is clearly out of reach for most people.

She said she feels like there is a divide when it comes to food and eating in this country, with cheap, super-sized sodas and fast food meals on one side and expensive, lovingly prepared foods made with locally sourced ingredients on the other. She asked if there was any middle ground.

I don’t remember Alice Waters’s exact response (and I’m too lazy to listen to the interview again right now) but I think it basically had to do with how food is artificially cheap in this country, and how good food will cost more, because it’s more expensive to produce. But it’s also worth more. That’s just how it is.

While Alice Waters was answering Terry Gross on the radio, I was answering her in my kitchen, telling them that indeed there is a middle ground — the middle ground is to cook your own food, at home, with the best ingredients you can afford. It will be much better than a fast food meal and a fraction of the cost of dinner at Chez Panisse. (In fact my entire month’s grocery bill, shopping almost exclusively at Whole Foods, is roughly the same as a single meal for one person at Chez Panisse. And my per-meal cost is actually a fraction of the cost of the fast food meal — for the past ten years, I have eaten for about a dollar per meal, which is approximately one-fifth the current cost of a Big Mac Meal at my local McDonald’s.)

It’s not complicated and it’s not out of reach. I firmly believe that anyone can do this.

Here’s how.

First, before you start, you need to think about why you want to. Are you doing it for health reasons (either yours or other family members)? Are you doing it so your kids get to eat good meals at home? Are you doing it to save money? Are you doing it so you can eat better food?

Try to figure out what your motivation is.

Knowing this will help keep you from getting derailed when the going gets tough, and can help you figure out which alternative approach you should focus on when you need to cut corners to get through. If you’re doing it primarily for health reasons, then you might be willing to spend more to have the same level of food — for instance buying pre-cut produce that you can throw together quickly when you get home after a long day at work. If you’re doing it for financial reasons and health is less of a concern, then you can go with a lowest common denominator approach (my preferred L.C.D. foods are fruit, breakfast cereal, and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches) until your schedule — or psyche, as the case may be — clears up and you can manage full-fledged meals again.

One you’ve gotten that figured out, this is what you need to do.

Step 1
Learn to cook.

Get your hands on a good beginner’s cookbook — my favorite is Learning to Cook with Marion Cunningham but there’s no shortage of cookbooks in the world. Stop by your local library and take a look at what’s on the shelves there so you can test drive some and see how it goes. When you find one you like, invest in a copy. Also try to pick up one or two comprehensive basic cookbooks, like the Joy of Cooking or Fannie Farmer or for a more recent take, How to Cook Everything. Or go retro and get the plaid Betty Crocker. Check out yard sales, thrift stores, used bookstores for cheap cookbooks.

Or you can stick with the internet and check out YouTube, where there are endless cooking videos, and also look at food blogs, of which there is also no end.

If you’ve never cooked anything, start with weekend breakfasts — pancakes, scrambled eggs, biscuits. You’ll be more relaxed and have more time to work things out. If it’s a disaster, you can just fix a bowl of cereal or a bagel and move on.

Once you’re comfortable with that, you can move on to easy dinners — pasta with vegetables, black beans and rice, mac and cheese. If it helps to get you going, use convenience products, but know that nearly everything you buy prepared (or partially prepared) in the grocery store you can make yourself, cheaper and better.

Keep looking at cookbooks and magazines and food blogs, where you can get new ideas for different meals, and keep trying out recipes to figure out what you like, what your family will eat, what works with your schedule.

If you start to feel sick of it and feel like it’s not worth it, remember why you wanted to do it in the first place, think about what’s not working, and try to come up with a different strategy. (In Holistic Management parlance, this is the monitoring phase. You don’t just come up with a plan and go, you have to constantly review it to see if it’s working. If it’s not working, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Look at what the problem is, address the problem, try again. Monitor, adjust, monitor, adjust.)

Once you’ve mastered following recipes, you’ll start to be more comfortable making adjustments and making recipes your own. And you’ll get a repertoire of things that don’t really have recipes, they’re just things you put together — being able to cook without needing a specific recipe for every dish (or to use the title of another book I like, How to Cook Without a Book) is a real time and energy saver.

Step 2
Learn to shop.

For starters, just go to the same store you usually go to; you don’t have to change everything at once. Start paying attention to prices and noticing what’s on special. If you shop according to price — buying fruits and vegetables when they are cheaper than normal — you will be buying seasonally. Congratulations, you’re now one of the cool kids.

There are multiple different shopping strategies, any of which can be successful. Some people like to shop once a month, because it saves running around and reduces impulse purchases. (This would not work for me at all because I want fresh produce more than once a month. Also I work from home and walking to the grocery store gets me out of the house, which is generally a good thing.)

Many people shop weekly. My brother likes to shop at 7am on Saturdays because he says no one else is there yet and the store is fully stocked for the busy day ahead — he said you get the best selection with the fewest people. (When his kids were little, he’d take them with him and they would explore the store while he shopped, which is definitely not something you want to do later in the day when the store is packed. Also I think this works better for men than women; a man grocery shopping with three kids is enough of an anomaly that all of the workers knew whose kids they were and would keep an eye on them. Also probably works better for my brother than most people, he’s got a special talent for things like that.)

I used to shop weekly but I found I ended up throwing out a lot of food because I would buy things based on what I thought I might want, and then I would go out to lunch and not be hungry for dinner or work late and decide I really wanted Chinese food, or whatever. So I wouldn’t eat the food I bought and then I would forget about it and go shopping again and get more and then throw things away.

When I started working from home, I decided I needed to fix this, and I started looking in the fridge before going to the store to see what I had and/or what was about to go bad and use that as the basis of the next meal I was preparing. Instead of trying to get everything I thought I might want to eat in the week, I decided I would buy just what I needed for the next meal I was making (assuming that that meal would provide at least two or three servings — one dinner and two lunches, and if it was more than that, the remainder would go in the freezer, I can only eat something three times before getting sick of it), and also restock pantry staples.

Basically I would stay focused and buy food for the next two to three days instead of anything I ever might want to eat. The grocery store was less than a mile from my house. If it turned out I didn’t get something I actually needed, I could either work around it and get it next time (after all I’d be back in a few days), or make a special trip for it. It would be fine.

It was fine.

My food costs dropped precipitously once I implemented this strategy. I would shop for two to three days worth of food, but would almost always end up with four to five days worth of food, so I would be going to the grocery store twice a week instead of once a week, which really isn’t so different.

Also I walk to the store, so I don’t tend to go crazy with impulse purchases, and I pay with cash, which also puts a serious curb on purchases.

As you cook more, you may find that the store you usually shop at doesn’t have the best produce or doesn’t have the best prices. Look around at other stores and see how things compare.

Generally different stores are cheaper for different things. As you pay attention to prices you’ll learn this. You might make a trip every month or every few months to one particular store to stock up on things that are cheap there while you do most of your shopping at the store that’s most convenient or that has the best meat or fish or produce or whatever you care about most.

For instance the vast majority of my shopping trips are to Whole Foods, because it’s a comfortable walk from my house (about a mile and a half), it’s convenient to other places I often walk, it’s a lovely store with a remarkable diversity of customers, and everyone there is nice. However I will not buy Asian foods there because I can get them for a fraction of the cost at the Asian Grocery. So I drive to the Asian Grocery a few times a year and get soy sauce, fish sauce, rice noodles, rice paper wrappers, bamboo shoots, and whatever else I regularly use in stir fries and other Asian dishes.

If you get really taken with sourcing ingredients and care a lot about where your food comes from, you can check out farmer’s markets, roadside stands, pick-your-own farms. You can talk to people with backyard chickens. You can join a CSA. You can plant a garden.

But you don’t have to do this.

Even the worst industrially farmed tomato in the worst grocery store in town is better than fast food — which is not only using the worst industrially farmed tomatoes but is also adding loads of sugar and salt, and charging you for the pleasure of serving you.

Don’t make things harder for yourself than they need to be.

When I started this post, I was thinking there were going to be more steps, and I might think of some others later, but I think for now this is it.

Learn to cook. Learn to shop. Shop and cook.

And eat.

And do the dishes.

There you have it.

The middle ground.

Cause and Effect

I was talking to my friend Ann the other day about a problem we’ve been having at The Scrap Exchange; something that’s supposed to happen every day isn’t always happening. However there’s a little bit of a trick to making it happen, it’s a two-step process and if it’s not something you’re used to doing, you might think it’s done after the first step, you won’t necessarily realize you need to do something else to finish up.

I said we need to figure out what the problem is, if it’s that people think they’re doing what they’re supposed but just aren’t doing it right, or if it’s that they’re not doing it at all. We can’t come up with a solution it until we know what’s going on.

I told her I’d been looking at Holistic Management, one of my favorite books of all time. She said, “I should read that.” I said, “No, you shouldn’t. It’s 600 pages long and is mostly about livestock ranching.” I told her I’d write some posts about it and she could read those. Here’s the first. (Though she heard this part already, so she’ll have to wait for the next one to get anything new.)

I said I’d just re-read the chapter on the cause and effect test (subtitled “stop the blows to the head before you take the aspirin”) that talks about how you need to make sure your solution addresses the cause of the problem and not just the symptoms. Because if your solution only treats symptoms, the symptom you focus on might go away, but the underlying problem will still be there, you haven’t really solved anything, and sooner or later it will come back.

I gave her the example that Allan Savory gives in the book, about his tractors breaking down. When he first asked why his maintenance costs were so high, people said it was because his tractors were old, the solution was to get new tractors. But he wasn’t sure if that was it. He looked at his repair records and it didn’t seem like age was the problem, it seemed like lack of maintenance was a much bigger  problem. He realized that his workers had no incentive to maintain the tractors; they got paid regardless of whether the tractors were running or were in the shop.

So instead of getting new tractors, he changed his pay structure and offered the operators a bonus for every day they met a specific list of maintenance criteria for the tractors (oil checked, belts and hoses checked, screws tightened, etc). Lo and behold his maintenance costs dropped to a fraction of their previous level.

His solution addressed the cause of the problem and the problem was solved.

This idea of making sure your solution addresses the cause of the problem came to mind for me again the other day when a friend sent a link about an article in Health Affairs concerning the cost of food. I said I had seen something about the study and made a note of it; I wanted to read the original paper and not just the news articles about it. It sounded to me like the logic behind the study’s conclusions was somewhat suspect.

I also said I was about ready to give up trying to argue that you can eat good-for-you food for less than you can eat bad-for-you food, it feels like a losing battle. And part of me thinks I should just let it go, but another part thinks there’s still a case worth making.

The intense focus on food costs implies that the reason most people eat badly is because healthy food is too expensive. If the cost of food is the problem, then the solution is to adjust the pricing structure of food—tax unhealthy food or subsidize healthy food or similar approaches.

But I don’t belive that the reason that people eat French fries instead of green beans is because green beans cost too much. People eat French fries instead of green beans because French fries taste better. And because you can buy them on every street corner. And the reason you can buy them on every street corner is because people will buy them on every street corner. As Brian Wansink notes in Mindless Eating

Companies want to make a profit. If, starting tomorrow at noon, we all went into Taco Bell and Burger King and ordered only salads, their menus would change faster than you could say “Lite Italian.” Within a year, people would be able to eat at a Taco Salad Bell anytime they wanted to make a run for the border. Within another year, there would be a Broccoli King.

The law of supply and demand says that the greater the supply of something, the lower the price. It’s true that some unhealthy foods are cheaper because of government subsidies, but it’s also true that many unhealthy foods are cheap because they are immensely popular, and the economies of scale for producing them are enormous. If you’re selling a million bags of Doritos a day, you don’t need to have much of a profit margin on each one to make the economics work.

Cause and effect.

I see the cause of Americans’ unhealthy diets stemming primarily from the following factors:

[1] Taste Preference
Once you’re used to eating it, junk food taste good. (Though if you stop eating it for long enough and then try to start again, most of it is pretty disgusting.) Most people have grown up eating processed food and have developed a taste for it. Eating healthy food feels like a punishment to them.

[2] Accessibility
Junk food is ubiquitous. If you’re not preparing your own food, getting things on the fly that aren’t unhealthy is a real challenge.

[3] Lack of Skills and Knowledge
People (okay, women) used to grow up learning how to cook. Most of the time people didn’t use recipes, they just made basic meals from basic ingredients. You had to cook if you wanted to eat — there weren’t 24-hour restaurants or convenience stores on every corner. However we now have several generations of people who have grown up eating processed, ready-to-eat foods, and who have never (or rarely) cooked anything from scratch. If you’ve never cooked before, it can be daunting. (Anything you’ve never done before is daunting.) And if you don’t cook on a regular basis, you’re always starting with nothing and have to think about it and expend energy on it and it all feels like a big pain, it just doesn’t seem worth it.

I actually would not put cost on the list at all, because preparing healthy food from scratch is in fact cheaper than buying prepared processed food. And buying healthy food, if you go about it the right way, can be cheaper — often much cheaper — than buying unhealthy food. It also takes less time than eating out. [Note: This link is to an interesting series of experiments that a blogger in California made: he ate every meal in for a month and then ate every meal out for a month and made some comparisons. If you scroll to the bottom of the page linked you'll see his note about how much longer it took him to eat out than to eat at home.]

As long as you know what you’re doing.

So then people say well yeah, but that’s because you know what to do and you know how to cook. Other people don’t know that.

And that is exactly my point.

The cause of the problem is not that food is too expensive, it’s that people don’t know how to shop for and cook healthy food. They don’t know how to quickly put a good meal on the table using what they have on hand. They don’t know what to buy that’s good for them and cost-effective, they don’t know what to do with food so it doesn’t spoil before they’re able to eat it, they don’t know how to fit cooking and shopping into their schedule. (And obviously there are other issues: accessibility to fresh food and general exhaustion from economic insecurity and all kinds of things that should not be dismissed, but that to a large extent can be worked around.)

And this is not a blame the victim thing, I’m not saying it’s their own fault. How would you know how to shop and eat if you’ve never done it before? I’m just pointing out that money is not the main impediment to people eating better, so money should not be the first solution that gets pointed to. I see increasing knowledge as the solution to people eating poorly.

I’m guessing I’m not going to convince anyone of this any time soon, and maybe I will just give up, but anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m a glutton for punishment so I decided to write this post anyway.

And now that I’ve provided this important and wide-ranging exposition on cause and effect, I will range a little wider and leave you with the other thing that the discussion of cause and effect reminded me of, which is the first chapter of one of my other favorite books of all time, Candide.

Master Pangloss taught the metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology. He could prove admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of all castles, and My Lady the best of all possible baronesses.

…

One day when Miss Cunégonde went to take a walk in a little neighboring woods, which was called a park, she saw, through the bushes the sage Dr. Pangloss giving a lecture in experimental philosophy to her mother’s chambermaid, a little brown wench, very pretty and very tractable. As Miss Cunégonde had a natural disposition toward the sciences, she observed with the utmost attention the experiments which were repeated before her eyes; she perfectly well understood the force of the doctor’s reasoning upon causes and effects. She returned home greatly flurried, quite pensive and filled with the desire of knowledge, imagining that she might be a sufficient reason for young Candide, and he for her.

On her way back she happened to meet Candide. She blushed, he blushed also. She wished him a good morning in a flattering tone, he returned the salute, without knowing what he said. The next day, as they were rising from the dinner table, Cunégonde and Candide slipped behind a screen. The miss dropped her handkerchief, the young man picked it up. She innocently took hold of his hand, and he as innocently kissed hers with a warmth, a sensibility, a grace—all very particular: their lips met; their eyes sparkled; their knees trembled; their hands strayed. The Baron chanced to come by; he took note of the cause and effect, and, without hesitation, saluted Candide with some notable kicks on the backside and drove him out of the castle. The lovely Miss Cunégonde fainted away, and, as soon as she came to herself, the Baroness boxed her ears.

Survival of the Hottest

Egg. Mayonnaise. Bagel.

It’s too hot to cook — it’s pretty much too hot to do anything — and my office lacks air conditioning. Right now, I’m thinking I might be able to make some extra cash by renting it out as a hot yoga studio. Bikram here we come.

For those of you who are working without benefit of air conditioning and are suffering from the heat, here are the things I’ve discovered are essential to survival

(1) fans
(2) ice water
(3) learning to accept the things you cannot change.

You cannot change the temperature of your room so don’t even think about it. Don’t talk about how hot it is, don’t think about how hot it is, don’t worry about it. (And whatever you do, don’t watch TV, you’ll be forced to listen to them tell you how hot it is and make up new metrics that make it sound ten degrees hotter than it actually is. Has anyone noticed this? They don’t tell you the actual temperature any more, they tell you what the heat index is — what it “feels like.” What it feels like to who? Enough with the damn heat index, just tell me what the temperature is, I’ll decide for myself how hot it feels.)

Go get yourself a giant cup — go to 7-11 and get a Super Big Gulp if you need to, you want a really big cup — and fill the whole thing with ice, all the way to the top, then pour cold water in then go sit in front of the fan and drink your ice water.

You’ll be fine.

But this post isn’t supposed to be about the weather, which we are not thinking about, it’s about my new favorite thing.

I wrote this a few weeks ago but didn’t have a picture, then I got the picture but then never made it back to the post to finish. But I had lunch at the Weathervane today and they had a Latta’s Farm egg salad sandwich on the menu for $8 and I was like okay I make that at home for fifty cents (with Latta’s Egg Ranch eggs and everything), so I’m definitely not ordering that. But it did inspire me to finish the post.

So even though part of me still thinks this is a really stupid thing to post, I’m not kidding when I say it’s my favorite thing right now, and it’s one of the cheapest and simplest things you can make — and you can boil a pan of water and cook a whole bunch of eggs at once and not have to heat up the kitchen again for days — so here it is.

I made this for the first time maybe a year ago when I was really hungry one afternoon and everything I thought of making was missing some key ingredient. After running through a dozen potential options in my head, all of which weren’t going to work for one reason or another, I was left with eggs as the only possibility. Scrambled eggs didn’t sound good or fried eggs either, I didn’t want breakfast, and then I realized I had mayonnaise and I could make egg salad.

Egg salad! Brilliant!

And it was fabulous. And then it was vastly improved the next time when I had it on an everything bagel.

So my new favorite thing is egg salad on an everything bagel.

And it seems sort of silly to give a recipe for this — like telling people how to pour a glass of milk — but I’m going to anyway, because it won’t hurt and it’s the first recipe I’ve put up in a really long time. You gotta to start somewhere.

My New Favorite Thing Egg Salad

[I think everyone knows how to make hard-boiled eggs but just in case ... place eggs in a single layer in a pot and cover with cold water. Cover the pot. Put over high heat and bring to a boil. Turn heat to low and let simmer for 15 minutes. Remove eggs and chill.]

Makes 1 large or 2 small servings

2 hard-boiled eggs
1 Tablespoon mayonnaise
1/2 teaspoon mustard
salt
pepper
paprika

Remove shell from eggs. Slice eggs crosswise, then chop. Put the chopped egg into a small bowl and add mayonnaise and mustard. Stir to mix. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and paprika.

I use yellow mustard, cause I’m a yellow mustard kind of person, but I think whatever kind of mustard you like and/or have around should work.

Serve on bread or crackers or a tortilla or a bagel. If it’s your lucky day, you’ll have an everything bagel in your house and you’ll get to eat it on that.

Yum.

Money for Nothing

So I’ve been thinking about fundraising lately.

We need to do a little fundraising campaign for The Scrap Exchange and I personally am going to try to raise $10,000. I’m putting in $5,000 of my own money and will try to match that with donations from friends/family/random people I run into on the street.

I had a morning meeting in Chapel Hill last week and took my bike on the bus and then rode home in the afternoon. It was lovely. (Between that and biking to a friend’s in South Durham to watch Women’s World Cup, I’m feeling like I should get a job just so I have a place to bike to every day. Though that seems like not the best reason to get a job.)

So I’m biking home from Chapel Hill and thinking about fundraising, and I was thinking about how when I did my food project and all these people were commenting and saying they were sad that the project was ending and they wanted to keep reading, one of my friends told me I needed to try to do something with this. She suggested I do some kind of pay-per-view thing where I tell people that if I get a certain amount in donations, I’ll write a post.

I’m not sure if that would have worked then, and it certainly won’t work now since I haven’t been writing enough to have any kind of following, but I was thinking about that as I was biking. I was wondering if there was any project that people would pay to see me do — if I get a certain amount in pledges I will do something and write about it every day for a certain period of time.

So I’m biking and thinking and really none of it is likely to bring in any money at all and it would all be a huge time suck. And I’m thinking about the meeting I just came out of and about how the person I was meeting with wants really a lot of things done and then I’m like wait, why don’t I just try to work like a normal person and get paid for it and donate that to The Scrap Exchange?

And I was thinking about how that would definitely make way more money per hour than anything I could do on the side, and I was kind of laughing about it thinking about the PR angle — Woman Works 40 Hours a Week to Make Money!

Could we pitch that to People magazine?

I mean I can just imagine the interview questions … Was it hard getting up every day and turning on your computer? Did you talk to a doctor before you started? Do you think this is going to damage your long-term health? How did you feel? This seems just crazy, where did you even get the idea?

I still like the idea of trying to raise $1,250 with 500 donations in every amount between one cent and five dollars but the logistics of that seem complicated, I’m pretty sure I don’t know 500 people who would make a donation, and I’m feeling pretty lazy right now. I’d rather just work and write a check.

But I am going to post some Scrap Exchange stories, things I like and what I like about it and why I think people should help us. So look for that coming up.

In other news I’ve been getting sucked in to the Pioneer Woman parody sites and have had a few nights down the rabbit hole where I learned a great deal of information I’d probably be better off not knowing about mommy bloggers, mommy blogger wars, and people who make loads of money off of their blogs. And I just have to say that that is totally not worth it. It’s like being reality tv star, Jon and Kate Plus Eight, you shamelessly expose your personal life for the sake of advertising income.

So if I wasn’t convinced before, I am now and the career as a professional blogger is definitely off the table.

Also I made food for Third Friday last week and two of the things I made were really good. So new recipes coming soon.

Hope all is well with everyone out there in world wide web world.

Remainders

Still working my way through the things that needed to be done before the roof fell plus the things that always need to be done plus the new things coming in. One of the things that both needed to be done before the roof fell and always needs to be done is to clean off the porches, which tend to get things piled on them especially when I’m in the middle of something. Which seems like most of the time these days.

Before the roof fell I was trying to wrap up painting the garage, so there was a bunch of painting stuff on the back porch, and the front porch always ends up with a little bit of everything on it, so that needs to be gone through and beaten back into submission every few months. The front porch also happened to be the place where Scrap things ended up when they came home with me (for whatever reason) as part of the moving tumult so it was in worse shape than usual.

I’ve taken some of the Scrap things back already but I’m listing what I still have here because I think it’s funny and gives an interesting snapshot of life at The Scrap Exchange and what the move was like. This is what I ended up with:

• a 90s-era all-in-one stereo system (receiver, turntable,  dual tape player, CD player) with a Japanese record on it
• a can of gold glitter spray paint
• a sewing machine
• a 3,210-page Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary from 1934
• a partially completed geometric art piece by Artie Barksdale
• two rolls of paper towels
• a container of table salt
• a Mac G4 tower with a power supply problem that I’ve been needing to try to fix for the past year. It was on the porch for a week before I noticed that the VGA to DVI monitor adapter that I’d torn my office apart looking for in March was attached to the back of it. Oh right, that’s where I put that.

There you have it. Japanese LPs, unabridged dictionaries, sewing machines, and glitter spray paint. All in one store. What more could you want?

So today after tackling the porches I decided to wash windows.

Window-washing is a much maligned activity — all those cleaning people saying they don’t do windows has made everyone think it’s horrible — but I really don’t think it deserves the bad rap and in fact I find it rather zen. You get some nice exercise and you can focus all of your attention on looking through the glass and making sure you got everything which leaves no energy at all to worry about all the other things you end up worrying about when you should be doing something else. And nothing makes your house feel cleaner than shiny, clean windows.

Next time you feel like your house is missing something and you need to redecorate, try cleaning the windows first. That might be all you need.

And if you’re so inclined, here are a few recipes for do-it-yourself window cleaners.

Use the first if you have ammonia lying around that you’d like to use up, but don’t go buy it just for this. If you’d like to be less-toxic, use either of the last two. I find that the recipes with a little detergent work better than plain vinegar and water. Though I’m still working my way through a bottle of ammonia I bought in 1998 so I use that first recipe and it works great.

I use crumpled newspaper to wipe with and have no trouble with streaking. (Note: Do not attempt with your iPad.)

For any of the recipes, combine ingredients in a spray bottle and then LABEL THE BOTTLE so you know what’s in it. Don’t skip that step. You’ll regret it the next time you go to wash your windows and have to dump out the stuff in the bottle under the sink because you’re not sure what it is and you decide you’d better mix up a new batch just to be safe.

Window Cleaners

All-Purpose Window Cleaner with Ammonia
adapted from Cheaper and Better by Nancy Birnes

2 Tablespoons ammonia
2 Tablespoons vinegar
1/2 teaspoon liquid detergent
2 cups water

All-Purpose Window Cleaner
1/4 cup vinegar
1/2 teaspoon liquid detergent
2 cups water

Vinegar Straight Up
1/2 cup vinegar
2 cups water

Happy cleaning!