Of Course That’s Not the Reason: Sustainability, Impossible Tasks and the Concept of Excuses

I’ve started edging back into sustainability culture now that we’re getting past ‘life or death, face your mortality to buy an orange’.

I’ve been watching some youtube channels for ideas on things like box services, swap outs, what products look like/handle in reality/are actually worth the money. I love the idea of the type of swaps that don’t actually cause an impact on the individual.

I found a channel I really like and one of the videos that got me was one talking about grocery shopping swaps, not so much what to buy but how to buy it. She had a point about bulk buying and the sheer insanity of telling everyone to drag glass jars to the stores for every purchase. Not every one can bring a full flat of canning jars to the grocery store with them, she said. Nor should they have to. Decant into a bag, even your favorite reusable bag, at the store and then rejar into the mason jar at home. This shouldn’t need to be said, she said. And yet here we are.

The thing is, this really did need to be said. This is actually a massive sustainability pet peeve of mine-I love glass. Over 90% of my kitchen is stored in glass and that other 10% is gifted storage like Tupperware. This isn’t a glass rant, it’s an unawareness of the realities of actual mundane existence rant. Glass is heavy, it’s clunky, it’s loud, it breaks. There is a finite amount of storage space to get to the grocery store even if you have your own transportation, you have to drag it around the actual store. You better know the tare of every jar you have. They just get heavier when decanted into. It’s just a horribly awkward set up if you need more than a jar or two.

There are places where glass or at least reusable plastic makes sense-don’t put the chicken into a cloth bag please (I have flashbacks to the ‘meat bag’ when I was a cashier- we had a customer with a dedicated cloth bag for meat transportation. Which is fine. Except it was obviously never washed. Ever.) There is no reason that you can’t put your oatmeal in a bag and deal with jars when you get home.

Except.

This comes to the concept of sustainability, excuses and the idea of the impossible task. The idea of the impossible task comes from the neurodivergent community- it’s the task that’s one thing too far and it will just not get done. It doesn’t matter that for anyone else, the task looks simplistic to the point where you’re just ‘lazy’. The thing will not get done, period, and you need an adaptation at best to work around it.

For some people it’s dishes. Some people it’s brushing their teeth. Some people it’s taking the garbage out. It changes from person to person and in some cases from day to day. It’s a complex balance of forces like exhaustion, executive dysfunction, overstimulation, and burn out.

If sustainability intends on being an inclusive enough movement to actually be useful to a range of people it needs to come to terms with neurodivergent needs like the impossible task. If a person literally cannot get the oatmeal out of the bag into a jar before it attracts pests, we need to figure out a work around to that impossible task. What does that look like? Is it oats in reusable packaging? Is it shopping bags that close tightly enough with a tight enough weave to go straight into a storage piece? Is it working on the carbon foot print of non bulk oat packaging? Honestly the answer is probably all of the above.

We need to stop framing these discussions around the idea of excuse. One of the videos on this channel was talking about paper plates and felt the need to point out that buying paper plates has a higher budget hit than using a regular ceramic plate (no shit). It also implied you just need to get over your ‘excuses’ around stuff like dishwashing. This video made me realize that movement access has to include the concept of mental health and neurodifference/neurodiversity if it’s going to actually be impactful-and it means we need to drop words like excuse from the language. The community does not use paper thinking it’s cheaper. And it’s not a matter of not wanting to bother washing a plate. Or rather, the neuronormative end of the community needs to shut up and listen to why depression, mental health advocates, and the ND community are saying that it’s not just a matter of ‘why can’t you wash a single dish’ (who the hell is only generating a single dish a day anyway. Especially when you’re pushing scratch cooking in tandem with the rest of the movement).

It’s the straw argument all over again- we are telling you what the barriers to access are, and you’re basically going, um no, you just can’t be bothered. I mean I’m busy and I work and I still manage to get this done. Good for you I guess? It was narrow minded pre pandemic and I think the issues and awareness around access and need that Covid has created has just intensified that divide, not weakened it. If you want to make the movement work for as many people as possible we need to drop the mentality that it’s walking into a co op with a fleet of mason jars, never touching plastic ever again with your sanctified hands.

Whole Use Cooking In Small Spaces

Whole use cooking is the idea that you are are extracting as much value out of the food you have in your possession as you can. You are using every part of the product to its farthest point before discarding it as a waste product.

Whole use cooking is often linked into meat products where there is such a heavy need to make sure we are getting as much out of the animal to make sure we’re making as much use out of the carbon footprint as possible. In terms of meat it’s things like sausage making (the fact that a hot dog is made out of like facial meat is sort of the point and ignores a lot of things like food history worldwide), bone broth, marrow dishes, jerky, rolling meat dishes forward, etc.

However this is a function that works best when you have the space to do this. Bone cooking requires the space to store bones. It sounds almost insultingly obvious but it needs to be said, whole use requires the ability to store the tools necessary as well as store product until you can run through an item to its natural end.

So what can you do in a small footprint situation? These are just examples, you can think through this as you will.

One of the easiest places to do this with in a small footprint spaces is with vegetables.

Take your veg scraps and throw them in the freezer.

When you have a decent stockpile or you need to access the space for other storage needs pull them out and throw them into a pot with water and various herbs and spices.

Cook that down into veg stock, use in your stock needs like soups and braises. You could also cook down and dehydrate for long term small footprint storage.

Assuming you didn’t do a long run cook you can then take the sort of spent veg and throw it onto the dehydrator. Powder once dry and use in sauces, stews, soups etc to up nutrients and flavor a little.

For things like fruit, if you buy organic citrus throw the peels into a different bag in the freezer. If you find yourself with a small batch that needs to go onto the dryer, throw those peels on and then pack whole into a bag or a jar. They can be powdered for citrus peels or you can simmer for a room deodorizer (as far as I’m concerned any use is a good use, even if it’s not food, and I’d rather use it at all then toss it and use a new orange for this purpose).

Not veg, but when you hit the ends of bread or have a batch that fails when you do home baked bread, throw that into the freezer (or do this on the fly, whichever) and make bread crumbs.

Whole use is a mentality that can sound a little terrifying and a little huge when you first start. Frankly, it can feel clunky even when you have been using it as a process, and I definitely don’t do it for everything-if I’m exhausted at the end of season the last thing I want to try to do is deal with tomato skins left over from canning (you can dry them for powders). Sometimes you have to say enough is enough.

Shopping the Stash, and 6 Months to Thanksgiving

(Unless you’re Canadian and then it’s like, 5)

I got to stash shop today and that was very exciting.

I have a back pantry set up right now (technically two but I’m trying to turn that space back into a normal closet). I have a space in a coat closet that I dedicated for long term foods that I want in the house but don’t need in the kitchen. Things like, I like having three or four containers of peanut butter in the house at all times but they don’t need to be in the kitchen.

This morning I noticed we didn’t have a peanut butter back up in the kitchen, we were out of wax paper bags for lunches, and I’m going to need to grind more coffee tomorrow. Just wander into the hallway and shop.

Maybe there’s something psychological about having stash outside of the main kitchen that makes this exciting but that’s like $25 I don’t need to fit into food budget right now. And I have close to 2 months to replace those bags at the rate of usage we have.

I got an email this week telling me that it’s six months to Thanksgiving. Fiveish if you factor in Canadian Thanksgiving.

That sounds like a lot of time but if you’re prepping to ‘inflation proof’ your food supply (I guess that’s the trendy phrasing for ‘rising food costs’ and ‘economic instability’) now is the time to start.

I had a much angrier post on that subject a few days ago, but the gist is that there is a specific skill set for prepping for monetary concerns, this is nothing new, people know how to do this because this is a central concern in the movement whether it be for social shifts, job loss, or illness. The grid going down is such lower concern for most people who have a kitchen stock that it’s normally not even mentioned.

So how do you do situational prepping like for Thanksgiving?

1. List out what you think you need. If you’ve been hosting/cooking for awhile you have a good idea of what you need. If you make pumpkin pie and not apple you know you don’t need to prep apple pie filling. That sort of thing
2. Figure out how much space you have to give to this. Do you want to give it a shelf? Are you one of those people with a massive walk in basement that they use for prep? Just don’t go out and drag home 97 cans of veg if you have no idea where you’re going to store it (I said last summer one of my personal limits is I will not sleep on my food. I had food in the bedroom last year but I will not use under my bed, my head says that’s about where my ‘this is extreme’ line kicks in. You may have different sensitivities.
3. What’s the baseline number of people you are cooking for/feeding for a meal like Thanksgiving? I’m not saying you don’t need 97 cans of veg, maybe you’re one of those people who are used to hosting 30 people for this holiday (or whatever holiday you’re prepping for). But if you feel like being able to comfortably feed your core family is your baseline, then you know you’re aiming for enough dry goods/shelf stable food for four people (or however many).
4. Now that you have an idea of what you eat, how many people you need to feed, and how much space you have to give to this you can work up a mock budget, or think about how much you roughly spend per year. Then split that budget against how many active weeks of shopping you want to do/actually do. If you shop once a month you want to split that by six knowing that at some point you’ll need to factor in any perishables. I don’t have the freezer space for a turkey and you will honestly get much better prices on them in the fall anyway, for example. That has to factor into this. Let’s say your budget as a completely made up number is $100 (I have spent that much on a Thanksgiving for multiple people at a conventional grocery store, but it’s just pulled out of the air. Adjust accordingly.) I shop weekly with filler orders to places like Shipt and my boxes. So let’s just go with weekly. Six months at four weeks a month is 24 weeks. Rounding it up for ease, that gives me about $4 a week I should be mentally earmarking for this prep (25 x 4 is $100).
5. You don’t need to shop for this prep every week, but be looking for good sales or looking for things that fit your budget weekly. Shop seasonally, it’ll help you save money (unless cranberries are in season where you are in May, either buy pre canned sauce or wait on that one over spending the inflated frozen prices, for example). Canned corn though is pretty consistent year round, and if you know there’s a point between now and then when your favored store does a canned good sale, hit that.
6. Don’t panic if you don’t/can’t do a full prep ahead of time. Anything is better than nothing.
7. Similarly don’t worry if you have to get into that prep for normal food needs. It’s a prep, it can be replaced.

Box Life

Y’all I can hear some of you rolling your eyes from here but just a reminder about what my ‘production space’ looks like: I’m urban homesteading in an apartment that falls somewhere between a condo and a normal apartment. I have a decent amount (though not huge) of storage space but I have no green space to plant in. The entire city has a rat problem, and this is Love Canal country. I also work in a traditional corporate job and while I have been home full time since March 13th 2020 I do still work a full time position. I don’t have the space, the sense of safety, or the time to garden full time and even if I put in a container garden I’m not convinced the rats wouldn’t eat it.

My normal work around for getting produce and such for food preservation and just general eating has been co ops, farmer’s markets and services like shipt and instacart. I like Shipt, I hate Instacart and only use it sparingly now (I used to have the monthly plan and ditched it when I realized how much better, and cheaper, Shipt is). However at some point I’m aware I will probably NOT be full work from home and the last few times I tried to do full grocery runs on foot my back informed me that we’re aging out of the time of life where this is really comfortable. I can do it, it’s not pleasant.

At some point this spring I decided to try those delivery boxes that send groceries via last mile delivery services, along with a couple online co ops for dry goods and cleaning supplies. I don’t intend to never step foot in a store ever again but whatever can speed up my trips I’m going to take at this phase of my life.

Very Short Overviews

Misfits Markets– I do really like this service, just be aware that some of their communication patterns a little weird especially if you’re neurodivergent. Like, as a person who works in the business world I have no idea why they do what they do. It’s not so bad now that I know what to expect but they do things like take upcoming orders off your account between when you set your order for the week and when you get charged for it (not the same day). I honestly panicked a little on Friday looking for a box that looked like it was cancelled on accident. They also never seem to ship on time. I have yet to have a box ship for delivery on the date that they said it would so if you absolutely have to have a box on a certain day this is not the service to use, at least at this current moment. BUT the food is gorgeous and is full organic (at least the produce is, I haven’t verified it for the dry goods). Nothing they sell is conventional and other than a couple battered oranges nothing has been problematic in quality. They do sell more than just produce, my last order had very cheap Muscle Milk on it. *I’ve heard that some people have issues with their quality but they’re out of NJ and I’m in NY. It could be a distance thing.

Imperfect Food– This site lets you choose all organic, all conventional, or a mix of both when you set up your account. Mine on this one is set to a mix, I prefer organic but I’ll buy conventional if the price difference is too high or on products where it legit doesn’t matter (some foods matter more than others for organic). They also have a ‘full’ dry goods and other grocery section. Some stuff is better priced than others and you sort of need to know what your local markets price things at-the Tillamook they carry is well above my local average pricing so I just don’t buy it. Unlike Misfits you start with a base box and you have to customize from there, and I have found I have to go in and see if any of the things they’re sending is cheaper via another option (they like to do things like default to organic potatoes for $1.50 a pound when there’s conventional on the site for $.80 a pound and that’s too much of a price difference for me to keep the higher item). I did have a completely inedible/rotten broccoli on my last box but they just comped the valu back onto my next box. Not a huge deal, but I’ve heard from other people to expect to be emailing them like all the time. I’ve also heard to avoid their meat, fish, and poultry but I can’t speak to that. *This is an inverse to Misfits, they’re in IL and I’m in NY, and the people who have the least amount of issues with them also ship out of the IL hub

Worthy Flavors-I will admit that I don’t actually have the box yet. This however is NOT a salvage box and you can buy single boxes at a time. I like that option because I don’t need three boxes a week. Even doing food preservation I don’t need three boxes a week lol. *I sort of bought this one on accident but the reviews for this box are great on youtube. One of the things to keep in mind with this one is that it’s conventional unless you buy the organic box for a higher price. However it’s also the cheapest box for produce I’ve tried and has free shipping.

Grove– I use Grove for stuff like cleaning products and personal care items. They sell natural and natural leaning products like Mrs. Meyers and Cora. They love to throw extras onto the orders, I easily doubled my value on my first order just in freebies. They will try to set up auto orders for basically everything you buy so make sure to go in and turn that off or adjust timing (I love produce bags, I don’t need an order of cloth produce bags once a month, thanks). Pricing is about average for around here so this is definitely a matter of they have scents I can’t get at Target/this is much more a matter of convenience than money.

Thrive-I do like Thrive. You do pay a membership fee but it works out to be like $5 a month which is not terrible, as far as I’m concerned, especially if you do order at least once a month. They carry cleaner groceries and household items. Their pricing is on the low end of average for around here and they also want to attempt auto ordering but speed and packaging have been great, and I use them for products that are bulky enough or heavy enough I don’t want to try to carry home.

*All services use low impact packing materials like paper and compostable clam shells when they can.

*I don’t do meat services by mail. I have found that even with their push that it’s ‘better quality meat’ than what you can get in stores, that’s not actually true for me and my local pricing is way better. The co op carries local grass fed, etc meat for dollars less a pound than what something like Seven Sons or Butcher Box carry. So I just don’t order them.

Links

Misfits (currently at $20 off first box at time of writing)

Imperfect Foods (currently at $20 off a handful of boxes but not for the life of the account)

Grove (apparently a free gift set)

Thrive (25% percent off first order)

If You Were to Be Truly Concerned With Food Prices and Shortages

(As Opposed to Looking for Youtube Hits or Political Talking Points)

*One heavy profanity at end of entry

Look.

I feel like I’ve been open in the past that I’m not a liberal but I’m not a conservative. I’m a moderate Independent (*not the same thing as a centrist, don’t try it).

What that means is I end up sitting in a sea of conflicting opinions swimming around sometimes not really agreeing with anyone.

In this particular case, it led me to wanting to do a live stream but both not really getting around to it as well as never really synthesizing whatever it was I wanted to say.

I’ve been meaning to do a video on negotiating food pricing. Like, yes, the world reality being what is right now there’s going to be an impact. You’d have to be naive to think we’re going to ride this out with no hits at all.

BUT. But. One of the central rules of information gathering needs to apply here-who is talking to you and why. If a monetized Youtube channel is screaming at you that we’re going to be priced out of beef by July, you need to be able to take a step back and ask yourself stuff like ‘did I just fall for a clickbait title’, ‘where is this information coming from’, ‘what feelings does this bring up in me and what do I think these feelings are intended to do to my next set of behaviors.’

If you were to be legitimately concerned about food pricing-or one of the groups that will be hardest hit because they’ve always been historically the hardest hit, there are actual things you can do. This isn’t necessarily just an entry on ‘please stop scaring the shit out of people until they create an artificial fuel shortage because you’re trying to get ad revenue on a social media platform.’

Keep in mind people have prepped for decades for basic economic instability and acting like food instability only occurs when the price of steak goes up relies on so much tunnel business it’s not comical, it’s actually scary. As in, acting like there’s no pre developed, tested sets of skills for this is where there is actual comedy- I think of that meme of the scaffold asking if it’s your first time.

Must be nice to be the first time you’ve been priced out of meat

Actual Tips From a Person Who Traditionally Preps For Economic Instability

1. Learn more than one food preservation technique- yes. Really. Sorry. It’s going to take some work. Learn to can, and learn to freeze, and learn to dry. I’m not even going to ask you to take up gardening because that requires a decent footprint, access to supplies, access to skills, and access to funding. Also it’s mid May. It’s a little late to start that particular project.
2. Actually use those skills-again, that’s gonna sound almost ridiculous but if you’re not actually throwing left over veg on your dryer or into the freezer it’s not necessarily going to help you at all.
3. Give up massive batch mentality- if you’re trying to hold produce you need to stop framing your preservation around the idea of waiting until you have full harvest or access to mass quantity. There’s a couple of ways to do this-my freezer is full of jars of one or two tomatoes that will be processed in a batch when I get enough to warrant it but I’m also micro canning jams as I get fruit at a good price.
4. Learn what meat stretching actually looks like- you want to overload meals with produce, grains, beans, whatever you can. If you do this successfully you’re naturally cutting the amount of meat consumed in a sitting and you don’t necessarily miss it. The point is to make it go longer not slide into deprivation
5. Explore different forms of proteins as a main food-fish, beans, tofu, heavier grains like wheatberries, different poultries other than chicken
6. Actually practice whole use cooking-get as mainly calories as you can out of what you have
7. Absolutely do not forget fat-part of where low cost cooking fails for people is the fat. In one of two places. Either they absolutely lose it at the fat content of a lot of dishes or they go too far in the other direction and end up with incredibly boring, utterly not satisfying dishes (your kids may not be eating the rice and beans because you make #$&%^$&#* boring rice and beans. It’s not supposed to just be rice and beans and nothing else.) Your body needs fat, you still need to pull calories, and you will be ultimately happier if you replace the mouth feel of missing hamburger in a taco with something like sour cream.
8. Learn how to work with cheaper cuts-we all love the good $#@%. We may need to be flexible and work with what we can-in a lot of cases ‘scratch cooking’ here is not nearly as labor intensive as they’re making it sound. Marinate and then cook low and slow
9. Look into unconventional food sources-I’ve been going online for a lot of food right now, for reasons that don’t necessarily have anything to do with shortages but if you can’t get your beans (or whatever) locally but you can get them online for a decent price just do it. I feel like this is something that’s not necessarily as big of an issue in terms of introduction/lack of awareness as it was prior to the start of the pandemic, but I mean, I got beans off of Vitacost recently for a decent price for organic and was making an order anyway.
10. This is not our first rodeo-For real, you need to ask the people who have done this before and look into the sources for stuff like ‘what did we actually eat in the depressions/recessions’. I’m not saying live off of ketchup soup, and I know some of y’all go exactly there when I say that. But we KNOW what food insecurity in true scarcity looks like, how did we navigate this before. Knowledge is a hell of a weapon and pride will do you in faster than true lack of access in a lot of situations.
11. What is actual interfering with ability and what’s an excuse-look. I am not unaware of things like ‘people work an incredible amount of hours’ and ‘people live in apartments the size of a shoe box’. (I think) I’ve talked about this on this blog before but there are certain arguments/talking points that will come up in relation to stuff like food security that while not being bad or inappropriate points also have nothing to do with every situation across the board. There are plenty of families that are/may be, at some point, facing food access issues where yes one person is working 80 hours but someone in that household can scratch cook. There are a lot of canners who work within the scope of New York apartments (Food in Jars has entire posts about this). What adaptations can you make to make this work, what can you do to make this even marginally more workable. There will be some people for whom we will need to have much more serious conversations about food access, and that is incredibly important and will need to include things like ‘Americans, will you stop fucking hoarding everything you can get your hands on’, but we need to make sure we’re being honest with ourselves that we’re just not interested in making an effort to pivot when we have to when we start attempting to derail conversations on how to increase stability by bringing up hypothetical underserved communities at every junction.