Bringing Home the Bacon

God bless my dad for suggesting this week that maybe my roommates and I should try buying bacon as a cheap and tasty option for our grocery list.

Through the volunteer program, we’ve got a household food budget of $80 per person each month. In a month with thirty days, that’s about $2.66 per person per day.  It’s such a discouraging figure that I barely know what to do with myself. On top of that, our community is not meshing well at all, and we can’t agree on anything for a grocery list, especially nothing that I actually want to eat. I hadn’t been thinking of simplicity in terms of not eating what I want–why shouldn’t we all be able to eat what we want? But we’re not in my economic dream world of everyone living at the mean; we’re being simple. At $2.66 a day, that amounts to a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and rice and beans. It makes me feel ridiculous, but the food situation has been far and away the biggest disappointment for me and the hardest thing to adjust to. I guess it’s hardest to give up the “wants” that we think are needs.

The Price of Gas

Thomas Friedman, sometimes I find you a little bit obnoxious, but I really dig this analogy for our fossil fuel consumption:

When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.

Conspicuous Consumption

A friend recently posted a link to this little column about how America needs GM to maintain the Hummer brand for its “symbolic fortitude.” Matthew DeBord seems sincerely concerned (I’m trying to see the irony in the piece, but I don’t think it’s there) that the end of Hummer would somehow represent the end of the American way of life:

For American life to work, the illusion of endless abundance must be maintained. Sure, we must adapt to a future of less-abundant natural resources. Our vehicles will need to become radically more efficient. But we require vestiges of the old dream to sustain our national optimism, which in turn nourishes our national character.

It’s something that I’ve been wondering about America–is this really a country based on having more than everyone else? More food, more gas, more money, more moral authority? Is anyone worried that implicit in this view is the fact that everyone else will have to make do with less? Even as he says it, DeBord seems in denial of the fact that we will one day be forced to cut back; forget the idea that we should. I hope the nourishment of our national character doesn’t require that we be blind to reality.