Power and Potential

Amber sent me this link to a blog detailing the experiences of various congressmen and -women as they accepted the challenge of eating on $21 for a week, or $3 per day. This is the average food stamp benefit in America. I took a moment to get over the fact that this is actually 33 cents more per than my housemates and I have per day. And then I poked through the posts.

I identify with all of what I read: sometimes it feels easy, like I’m getting used to being hungry; other times, I’m sure that it’s just not possible to do, and I go spend money outside of the budget on something more complicated and expensive than I need. And the post about the spilled milk? I was just jealous that she had been able to squeeze milk into the budget! Hands down my favorite thing to have the fridge, my roommates veto milk off the grocery list every time. If I have brittle bones as an old lady, I will blame this year.

Some days, I get so angry as I walk up the hill from the bus stop to our house. I’m always hungry during this walk, and when my stomach is growling, I spend it thinking about what we’ll have for dinner. There’s no chance it’ll ever be ready by the time I get home because most of my housemates commute farther than I do. On top of that, we can’t agree on how to spend our food budget, so we don’t shop much. The selection in the fridge–especially on nights when we haven’t designated anyone to cook–is meager at best.

I don’t have nearly enough perspective to know if I’m wining or not, but I definitely feel thoroughly insecure, both in terms of food and finances. I know that I have a support network, that I have money in the bank (no matter how quickly it’s being siphoned off by my cell phone and student loan bills), but this is about solidarity, and I’m not really tapping into those resources now because that’s not the point.

Last night, our lovely community mediator reminded us that money and food are both currencies of power.

It puts a lot of our household tension and my personal feelings into perspective. I feel totally powerless. I want to buy both binders for the kid in front of me in line at Rite Aid who finds out that he only has enough money for one. I want to help the person who approaches me on the street to buy lunch. These are things that I used to do in the past; now I’m reaching for what’s left when you don’t have much money or food.

Our mediator told us to act from a place of abundance. So far, this is probably even more difficult than not having (enough?) money or food.

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.

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.