Critical Mass

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” 

― Mahatma Gandhi

Most of us have issues we would like to work on when we are not all caught up in getting through the day and convenience is king. We put them in a back burner to address it some day in the future. Some day when we find the time and energy to craft good solutions for it. Unfortunately, the number of burners in my back row is growing and none of them ever really move up to the front. But sometimes, as it happens with such things, once in a while, one of those issues reaches critical mass and then ...your focus shifts. You are pounded with a barrage of information that serves as reminders wherever you turn - a news segment, a sound byte, an essay, a conversation over dinner....

What surfaced up from the deep dark recesses of my mind is not something I am proud of. It is to do with how wasteful I am with produce in the kitchen. Perfectly good produce. I load up on vegetables, fruits and dairy for the week. And some weeks, it is all good when most of these get used up right away. But as I am writing this post, there are two bags of grapes, six plums, a couple of apples, oranges, a pear, two packets of herbs, slabs of cheese, a packet of baby carrots and a carton of milk that have been festering as fodder for a petri dish.

I buy these with the best of intentions. I stock up on fruits so I don’t ever run out of them. But for some reason or another, they never make it to the table. This despite all of us being fruit lovers in the family. So I must be buying more than we need or maybe we are not eating enough of them. Whatever it is, it ends up in the compost bin.

There are so many ways that food is wasted in this country and elsewhere. It happens every day and in huge amounts. Not to shift the blame onto someone else, but it seems that supermarkets and restaurants are two of the biggest transgressors. There was a story in the news about how one of the restaurants had hired a consulting company to evaluate how much waste they produce. But the whole exercise was viewed as an encumbrance. It was interrupting the kitchen’s workflow and the already overworked employees could not find the time for it. As it affected only about 2% of the cost, reducing food waste is not really a priority for restaurants.

So how about supermarkets and grocery stores? I assumed that they would have gotten better at planning and stocking to reduce the produce that ends up in the dumpster everyday. After all it is a percentage of their cost that they can do away with. But it doesn't appear to be so. It was an eyeopener for me to find out that there are people who have, for years, salvaged perfectly good produce that supermarkets throw in the dumpster. There are even freegan (I know, I had never heard of it either) websites that tell you where to go dumpster diving to get the best stuff.

Then there is wastefulness buried in regulation and bureaucracy. It is mind boggling to read how complicated it is to store and distribute food in this global market. And the most sacrilegious of all is to use food as a means of protest, and I am not talking about hunger strikes here. The European farmers protest in Brussels might be a valid fight for the farmers, but the way they went about it is, in my opinion, irresponsible. All this wastefulness is even more horrifying when considering the number of people who go hungry.

Of course there are people and organizations that try to tackle the problem. We are all reminded to be mindful consumers. Businesses are encouraged to donate leftover food to charity. There are tonnes of resources to educate ourselves on the imbalance of abundance and scarcity in the world.

To me, all of this information brings into focus the glaring ways I am wasteful at home. I don’t have any grand ideas for solving world hunger. Neither do I have any intelligent arguments on how to weave through the complexities of the global food crisis. But I do know that I should be grateful for the abundance around me. And to be conscious of the fact that what I throw away could have nourished someone starving.

From splurging to purging

You cannot dream yourself into a character: you must hammer and forge yourself into one.    -

Henry David Thoreau

I don’t like white walls. Though minimalism is endearing to me in all ways, when it comes to my living space, I need color. I have lived within white walls for a long time. I did not have a choice then. But when I did have the freedom to do whatever I wanted within my space, I went all out. Whenever anyone steps into my home for the first time, the first thing they exclaim is ‘Your place is very cheerful!’. Sometimes I wonder if it is a polite way of saying ‘What were you thinking?!’ But it doesn’t matter, because I love it. I love that whatever happens to be the weather outside, you can’t complain that it is dull and gloomy inside. Amid all the yellows, oranges and greens, there is no place for languor. Bedrooms are different though. The colors are much darker. So there is no jolt to the visual senses there. Though sometimes I do wish I had the same vibrant colors there too ..waking early would not be such a struggle (but that is a problem to be tackled in another post).

Now that I have indulged in all the colors of the rainbow in my home, I am ready to tone it down a bit, that is... if I have to. But I am not willing to go back to white. So that makes me think...do our decisions reflect our choices, both past and present? If I had been given free reign on my living space earlier in my life, would I have had my fill of colors and would my tastes have evolved into something entirely different than what it is now? Maybe. And so it is with many things in my life.

A decade ago, I never imagined that I would ever be on a vegan diet. I took pride in the fact that I am game to eat anything that moved. But then, over the years, my thoughts changed and my awareness shifted. I had to work through the effects of an unhealthy diet on my body and mind. I had to make my choice, one meal at a time. But what would have been my choice if I had been forced to shun meat in my diet during my childhood and through adulthood. What would my current choice be if I was not given the freedom to indulge in my liking for meat? I am sure I would have complied as I am no rebel, but would I have relished my food as much as I do now? I wonder.

Minimalism is subjective. What I think is minimalistic might seem wasteful to someone with a more stringent approach. Most of the concepts of minimalism that I embrace now would not have appealed to me a couple of decades ago. I was already minimalistic in some ways then, but certainly not out of choice. It was mostly out of necessity. If I like to have just 7 outfits in my closet now, it is because I like it that way and not because that is all I can afford to own. So the cushion of affordability makes my minimalistic aspirations that much more easier.  

That makes me wonder again....(yes, I wonder all the time).... Is it easier to give up luxury when we have experienced it and known what it is all about? Or is it easier to not take that path having never known how it felt to splurge? Is it easier to know contentment when we have experienced plenty or is it easier to give in to resentment when our dreams have never been indulged? Is it easier to pare down when we think of a minimalistic lifestyle as a lofty ideal? I don’t know if there are any definite answers. But pondering on these questions has made me realize that I am glad to have known and experienced cluttered spaces, materialistic dreams and consumerist tendencies before consciously choosing the opposite way.

I  find that when we have a scarcity mindset, then greed becomes our natural inclination. It is after all survivalism. Hoarding is a choice we make out of fear. Be it time, food, money, lifestyle...whatever it is, it is never enough. So when I wonder (there I go again..) about why I am drawn to minimalism, I think it is to learn contentment. In every aspect of my life.

To buy or not to buy

I am a big fan of minsumerism. I try to follow minimalism in all aspects of my life. And try is the keyword here. But one area that I find particularly challenging is my kitchen pantry. My pantry is a small space, a doored alcove in the kitchen. The shelves are stocked from floor to ceiling with dry goods that can feed an entire village, or so it seems.

Once in a blue moon, I organize the pantry. I get tired of not knowing what I have and don’t have. It gets on my nerves whenever I see overflowing shelves. The last straw is usually when I can’t find that one little thing that I rummage the entire place for and which I know is hiding in one of the baskets piled high with stuff.

In the process of decluttering the pantry, I purge most of what I have. Items that I haven’t used in a long while, items that are still in their original packaging, items that are part of a science experiment (not intentionally), items that I never knew I had...all of them go to the bin or the compost. It grieves me to realize that I am being wasteful, but I am relentless. I am on a mission. I have to pare it down to the bare essentials, at whatever cost. So that I can start with a clean slate and be mindful again of what goes in it. I solemnly vow not buy anything until the shelves are empty again.

While cleaning up, for a brief moment, I am tempted to throw everything in one big cauldron (not that I have one)  and make a concoction and freeze it, so it will nourish us for weeks to come. I say nourish because, everything in the pantry is healthy stuff, so the concoction has to be healthy, right? Anyway, I change my mind as I decide not to get minimalism and laziness mixed up.  

I don’t know what it is about shopping for produce that makes me a hoarder. Everytime I go grocery shopping, which is once a week, I shop like there is going to be an apocalypse..... tomorrow. As if I won’t have access to food in the foreseeable future. (Many times I eat like that too :-)) I go to the same store every week. It is my favorite grocery store. Just walking into it makes me feel like I have made a healthy choice. The sights, smells and sounds at the store are all terribly appealing to me. The whole ambience of the shop is conducive to creative culinary inspiration. It is a relatively small store. Browsing through the aisles is an education in itself. And they have live music performed by local artists that make the whole shopping experience feel like an excursion instead of a chore. Also, I love the free coffee and samples, especially the free coffee.

The shopping list I had judiciously prepared earlier in the day is at hand. I have to mention here that while making the list, my minimalist tendencies were still very much intact. But it all goes flying out the door when I am wandering the aisles all starry-eyed. My imagination runs rampant. My mind is flooded with wonderful creative ideas of recipes that never stand a chance outside the store doors.

The sight of fresh produce, a large part of it locally sourced and good, clean minimally processed food is mesmerising enough to trigger the chef in me. It inspires visions of healthy delectable dishes that I could make with a flourish that would appeal to everyone at home - kids and adults alike. So it is indeed a terrible misfortune and an injustice to the grocery bill that most of these ideas never transpire to the dinner table. Anyway, back at the store... I get ambitious and the shopping cart fills up, fast and so does the pantry.

A couple of weeks fly by. I am still mindful. I make one or two dishes out of the ordinary. Everyone at home is happily surprised, including me. And then....fantasy rears it ugly head again. It starts when I come across this uber healthy and sumptuous recipe that calls for an ingredient I don’t have. I plan to make it for the weekend. So I stock up. But things don’t quite pan out the way I had planned that weekend. I decide to postpone trying out the new recipe to the next weekend or the weekend after that. And thus the plan remains a plan indeterminately and the recipe slowly slides off into the deep dark recesses of my mind. What remains is the package in the pantry dolefully waiting to be used up.

I am not a good baker and neither am I a good cook. I don’t improvise or come up with new recipes. I don’t follow elaborate recipes. If there are 8 steps to make a dish, I lose interest at step 5. And until a couple of years ago, I followed recipes to the tee - if the ‘preparation method’  asked me to walk around in circles while the oven was heating up, I did it. Ok I am exaggerating a bit, but you get my drift. And then I relaxed my attitude and found out that I didn’t poison anyone if I deviated from the recipe. It gave me a tad bit of confidence in the kitchen when the end result was actually palatable. Even so, nothing in my cooking habits justify being wasteful.

To put it in perspective... I spend more time walking the aisles of the grocery store in a week than I spend shopping for everything else in a year combined. If I had saved half the amount I had spent on groceries these past six years, I would have been able to cross off at least 8 different places in my places-to-visit-before-I-die list that require crossing an ocean. Shopping for groceries is not like shopping for clothes or furniture, where it is easier to ignore the in-your-face advertising and avoid shopping altogether. I and my family have to eat and eat well. And it is one of my priorities that it should also be an enjoyable experience.

It is obvious that there is a big disconnect between my intention and execution. As with all things, it takes conscious effort to not be impulsive. To make my attempt sustainable, I need to start small and pause when I reach for something I don’t need. So... the next time I am at the grocery store, I will stick to my list and maybe get one, just one thing that I don’t know how to pronounce. What do you say?