The 11 best foods don't include corn

There's a new health blog on NYTimes.com, and the article today was "11 best foods you aren't eating." Swiss chard, sardines, pumpkin seeds. Nothing too surprising but it'll definitely make you happy there's a farmer's market/CSA near you.

Also, last night on BookTV I saw an interview with the fellow who directed "King Corn," a documentary recounting the adventures of two young men who rent an acre of farmland in Iowa, grow corn on it, and then follow that corn through its various processing possibilities, whether than be HFCS or fattening up feedlot cattle or whatever. It was like Michael Pollan on the screen, and in fact one of the experts extensively interviewed was...Michael Pollan. The film was on Independent Lens earlier in the year, I missed it but it is available through netflix, so now it's in my queue. Of course, I suppose you could buy it as well, I'm sure that would make the director happy! The website is attractive and has lots of good links, so go take a look.

And speaking of which, here's an interview with Pollan on Yale Environment360. Money quote:

The writer Wendell Berry was right a long time ago when he said the environmental crisis is a crisis of character. It’s really about how we live. The thought that we can swap out the fuel we’re putting in our cars to ethanol, and swap out the electricity to nuclear and everything else can stay the same, I think, is really a pipe dream. We’re going to have to change, and the beginning of knowing how to change is learning how to provide for yourself a little bit more.

If Pollan added a touch more values language to his writing, he could become this generation's Wendell Berry.

Breakfast: The most expensive meal of the day

Here's a post from Dollar Stretcher about breakfast, the most important - and in our house the most expensive - meal of the day.

I purchase most of our cereal from the health-food section of the supermarket, in an effort to avoid HFCS and GMOs - although of course, unless one buys organic, anything you buy from the supermarket is likely to contain GMOs. I only buy the cereals that are on sale, but that's still $3.50 / box, and we go through at least 3 or 4 boxes a week. Oy!

One way we tried to stretch it was by buying a generic honey-nut-o's substitute from the regular aisle and mixing it in, but it hasn't been overly popular. (Although DK2 eats it every day, with a couple hunks of cojack cheese and some raisins.) I also buy bulk granola from the health food store and eat that with yogurt once or twice a week, and DK1 likes that, but it's not much of a money saver, since I buy the expensive yogurt also! We also do homemade bread with cheese sometimes too, and once in a while DW makes homemade bars, and they always get scarfed right away. Nobody will eat oatmeal but me.

I assume that the rising price of grains will lead to higher prices on high-end cereals, and that will make it harder for me to justify buying them. We may be forced to move to more homemade options. I believe that if we made this granola recipe in the form of a bar, it would get eaten. And as with the breadmachine bread, my guess is that when the more attractive options disappear for a long enough period of time, the less attractive options will begin to look a whole lot better.

The end of the month

This is the time of month when all spending basically stops - 2 days before payday, at the end of the month. Even since the tax refund came through, we have been bouncing at $1000 rather than at 0, but the principle is the same - no extra money!

Summers are tough because income is lower - we don't teach Hebrew School over the summer, so no extra income there, and DW is the low man on the totem pole at her tutoring job, which means if things are slow there over the summer she doesn't get called in to work. And expenses that we don't usually see come in over the summer as well, camps and lessons for the kids particularly. And the electricity bill is high because of AC. So we were out-of-balance for June.

As far as the food budget goes - I've managed to get the main shopping down to about $150/week, give or take (I have seen some increase in some of the things I buy), but if I go to farmer's market and buy meat or dairy from the farm that can put it over. But I'm pretty clear that I'm trying to balance food activism with frugality, so I'm pretty comfortable with where we are with that right now. I had to skip both of them this week because I was determined to spend no more money until payday, and that's okay too. If I could get the supermarket back down in the $100-110 range it would be better, so that's my goal right now. I sort of have to do that so that we can make it to the end of the summer when the extra income things kick in again. And when J.D. at Get Rich Slowly said that he had gone out to eat 40 times already this year I felt much better, because my number is, oh, 3 maybe.

The major thing that makes our financial situation challenging is debt service. I spend $600/month on credit card payments, $450/month on student loan payments, and $340/month on the car payment. That's more than one-quarter of our monthly net income! If I didn't have all that, opening Quicken would be a lot less nerve-wracking! It seems to me that my life has always been like this. But at least now, I'm not adding more to the credit cards debt, and though it might make today more comfortable to pay less on the cards, I'm determined to keep it where it is so that we can get closer to a tomorrow that's free from all this debt. (This is leaving aside the 400-pound gorilla which is the house in IL - I also have utilities on it that I'm basically ignoring right now but which will have to be paid eventually. )

I had sort-of-ambitious vacation plans that I think I'm going to have to let go, so that it doesn't cost us our entire buffer. So I think we're going to stay close to home this summer - a couple of nights in KC, a couple of nights in Lawrence, maybe we'll go see the farm.

So I didn't go to the farmer's market this week. I made mushroom lasagna last night and it was good! We're not overdrawn this month. I'm broke today but for once in my life I have money put away if something goes wrong. I guess I'm on the good side of the knife's edge right now. And I get paid Monday.

Joseph in Pokeberry

A lovely post by Mary at Pokeberry Garden about Joseph in Egypt, how all that time he was waiting to be called into service by the king he wasn't really waiting at all, but living as best he could in whatever circumstance he found himself in.

But there is something I was struck by in Joseph's waiting time. He lived his life to the fullest as he waited. He didn't 'just wait' so to speak. The bible tells us that in every position Joseph found himself he was faithful, he did his work as best he could and he had the outlook of serving God in whatever it was he had to do.

She relates it to her own experience, losing a job, having to short-sell a house, having to move around a lot and work suboptimal (one might say) jobs. It's really a lovely post and I relate a lot to what she's talking about, of course.

DW and the DKs all pretty much looked at the house in Illinois as the perfect place - perfect town, perfect schools, etc. I always had my doubts because it seemed altogether too white and cul-de-sac-y for me, but in the end the decision was made for us. There has really been a sense of exile because of how much they liked it there. We also landed in a place which is for me (being from the east) the sort of quintessential place-you-never-expected-to-end-up-in. But I'm grateful that the community here gave us a place to land! We have a nice (rented) house and we are a lot closer to her folks and friends in KC.

We've been licking our wounds to a degree, but also doing what Joseph did, and doing the best we can. I wish the house would resolve itself but I'm not driving myself crazy about it. I felt sorry for myself the last 6 months in IL but when I got here I decided I didn't have time for that anymore, and I don't think DW does either. She has tomatoes planted in a pot. We're working on our debt. We're wrestling with the school district to get the DKs what they need. You know, living it.

Thanks, Mary, for reminding me that in the end, we're all on God's plan anyway.

Name-dropping

On blogcounter I can see what people were searching for when they found Jewish Simplicity. I wrote an entry a couple of weeks ago where I cited an interview with a certain famous tightwad - I didn't add anything, just linked to something I'd found - and since then people have found my site by searching her name more than twice as much as any other search item. The post also got far more hits than my posts usually do (like, 10 times as many) but interestingly, no one left a comment, even though that was one of the few posts in which I actually solicited them.

Apparently the well-dropped name can increase the traffic to one's blog. Who knew? So with this in mind, please allow me to say one thing:

Jimi Hendrix!

Rent

Op-ed by Paul Krugman in today's Times - maybe home ownership isn't all its cracked up to be.

In addition to the regular tax breaks that all home owners get (the deduction of mortgage interest), if you are clergy with a pulpit and no parsonage you get to knock the costs associated with homeownership (furniture, utilities, the lot) off your taxable income. This obviously made buying a home all the more attractive in the situation we were in in Illinois. Not to mention that at the time, prices were rising - not skyrocketing, but rising steadily. Then, of course, things went off a cliff - both for us, and in the housing market.

Krugman is right to point out the dangers. Home ownership can be a very effective way to build a nestegg, if you are planning to stay in your home for a long time and if you don't keep dipping into the equity. For people who can't or won't make that commitment, it's a big gamble that home prices will rise enough for you to make something out of the deal, or even just make back what you put into it. Or even, as in our case, that you'll be able to rid yourself of the house at all.

The one financial advantage to renting is that one doesn't have to pay property taxes. I suppose in most cases this is figured into the cost of the rent.

I'm not saying anything that anyone else doesn't know. But while we were in seminary we were constantly inundated with the "knowledge" that because we were renting, we were "throwing our money away" - and we believed it. Then there's the language of "putting down roots" - that if you don't buy, you're not doing it, as if one's presence in a place is only verified by a deed. All these factors led us to buy as soon as we landed in a job, which led to the distastrous situation we're in now - and now there's no danger that we're going to buying another house anytime soon. So I guess the real answer is - there's no such thing as a sure thing. Despite the civic-religious tenet of home ownership, sometimes renting is indeed the right thing to do.

Thinking it through

One of the benefits of doing this blog is that it makes me more conscious of the choices I make. Having to tell on myself means that I have to be more aware of when I'm too willing to let myself off the hook on that tenuous nexus between simple, sustainable, frugal, and green. So here are a couple of events from the last week that bore further reflection:

1 - Saturday morning (determined to take a week off from shul after the recent holiday) I was looking for something to do with the family so we decided to go fruit picking. I've already written about my inability to find berries at the farmers' markets so I thought I'd go direct to the source. We went to a place south of town and they weren't picking berries, they were picking cherries, and sour ones, that you put into pies. We thought, okay, and picked almost 10 pounds of them. $1.75/pund, much less than they would be at the store.

While we were there we were talking to a woman who was telling us what to do with them. She said, put them through a cherry pitter, freeze them with a little sugar and thaw them in time to wow your guests for Thanksgiving. We said, sounds good.

Now all we needed was a cherry pitter. In the best of all worlds we would have found one used or at a yard sale, but of course, as usual, the time you want to buy something is the time when you need it, and we called around a few of the second-hand stores and they didn't have what we needed. Williams-Sonoma only had a 1-at-a-time pitter, and that wouldn't work, so we ended up ordering one on-line. It cost $17. This now doubles the cost of the adventure, as well as the cost of the cherries.

While waiting for it to arrive, the cherries are starting to soften. We figure since we're going to cook them anyway it doesn't matter if they're soft, but we have them in the fridge in the hopes of preventing all-out rotting. Hopefully the pitter will arrive so that the adventure is just more expensive, rather than a complete flushing of the money. And we also have to convince ourselves that we're going to use our solid-gold cherry pitter more than this once, and that it's not going to end up at our yard sale, benefitting someone more forward thinking than we.

2 - I was in the store over the weekend and decided I would like some fish to have in the freezer. We haven't been having much fish lately and Pollan's book talked a lot about omega-3s. I made the mistake, once again, of not thinking it out ahead of time. I have been buying wild caught salmon lately - it's more expensive but I like it a lot better than the steroid-pumped, colorized pieces of protein that pass for salmon from the farm. But then, sometimes one gets tire of salmon altogether, so I thought I'd buy a white fish. So there I am at the counter, looking at the fish and comparing prices and whether they're wild- and farm-raised, and I ended up guessing, and buying wild-caught orange roughy. Why, you ask? Because it was on sale!

Problem 1 is that it's from New Zealand, so the food mile footprint is miles wide - 6000 miles, to be precise. Of course, one is not going to get "local fish" in the middle of Kansas, but still. To tell the truth, I was dazzled by the word "wild caught." As a rule, wild is better than farmed, because of all the damage fish farms can do to their environment - antibiotics especially. But on the other hand, wild can just as easily mean that they just throw the nets down there and pick up anything that moves...

...which appears to be the case with orange roughy. As soon as I got home, I did what I should have done before I left, and looked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch site. This is a wonderful resource which tells you a lot about what kind of seafood to buy, and why. There's also a wallet-sized print-out that you can bring to the store with you.

So I put "orange roughy" in the search engine and the answer is ... avoid! Darn! They are trawled ("wild caught" in this case is kind of a slogan; they're all wild caught), and also they take 20 years to reach sexual maturation so if you snag one there may not be another one for a long time. "Years of heavy fishing have decimated orange roughy populations."

I feel like I just got three lemons on a slot machine, but the truth is, if I had thought about it before I went I could have done the necessary research and bought the right kind. Let that be a lesson to me!