No Buy February

I'm a day late, but it doesn't matter if I'm a dollar short, because February is "No Buy" month!

Basically what you're trying to do is not buy anything you don't need. What starts to happen is you begin to define "need." Clearly food, but how about clothes? Dinner out? Valentine's Day card or gift (can't you make something instead?).

I'll extend it this year and say if you do buy something not strictly necessary, no using the credit card. This month pay for what you buy, when you buy it. (Sorry, that means you can't buy anything on line, unless you use your debit account, which is not a good plan on line.)

Check out last year's post for the "rules."

What I didn't buy

Every time I thought of something I want/need this month, I wrote it down. Here's the tally:

Week one:
A new throw rug for the kitchen $40; gift for a friend, just because $40; black skirt $70; Funnels $12; Shark Steamer $60; Egg beater (mine broke) $12. Total: $244
Week two:
Cute note cards for mailing swapped seeds $15 (Fail. Bought them after all); those neat cloth boxes at Target to sort my mittens, scarves and hats $60; Kindle cover $28. Total: $88
Week three:
Books! Seven new novels by my favorite trash authors (perpetually out at the library), Ripe by Arthur Allen, Word Press for Dummies, $68; soda siphon (for making carbonated water) $93. Total $161
Week four:
Fell off the wagon: $35 for a jacket from the resale shop; Computer mouse: $25. Lost my favorite travel mug, new one $20. Total $45.

Total cost of things that I didn't buy: $538.00. We did go out to eat five times, and went to the movies twice. Oddly, this is more than we normally eat out or go to the movies. Not sure how that happened.

Some of these things I wouldn't have bought anyway. My family doesn't tend to accumulate stuff, on the "we've lived without it this long" principal. Some things we didn't buy we really do need, and will now buy. Some of them we really don't need, or could get free, or have an adequate alternate already. But because we don't tend to buy stuff, even though I imposed the proscription on myself, I found myself arguing-- "not fair, I never buy anything, it's all those people with the $7,000 credit card debt that need to stop buying stuff."

There are pages and pages of articles, digests, and scholarly works on how to reduce credit card debt, avoid credit card debt, make credit card debt work for you; about what the average debt is, or what a "typical" family's average monthly credit card payment is. You can find out how much the average family spends on housing, or food, or clothes.

Nowhere can I find a statistic on how much NEW debt people are adding to their balance each month, or how much they are spending in cash. It's like we don't even think about what we are spending, but only about what we owe. You can find out what we buy and when we buy, but not how much it's costing us. We have accepted it as normal to be owned by someone else. We have little or no concept of doing without anymore.

Our culture has trained us to consider shopping as a right, if not a patriotic duty. We have elevated immediate personal gratification over community health and called it "personal responsibility." We need a new paradigm, one that rewards creation over consumption, and tribal or familial relationships over the superficial relationships of the marketplace.

Where our sh*t goes

I was thinking about this recently, I won't tell you where I was, but one of the disconnects in our society is that we don't really care where our sh*t goes.

And by sh*t I mean, um sh*t. Our waste matter. You just flush it away and it's gone. You mostly don't have to think about it. For some reason, there are people who get jobs as sanitary workers and engineers, and politicians who run the Water District, but I'm guessing the ratio of them to us is fairly staggering.

Our sh*t is not our problem.

And this is exactly our problem. In a society where you don't have to worry where the nasty stuff goes, you also don't worry about where the old stuff goes, or the excess stuff, or the unused stuff, or the I-don't-need-it-anymore stuff. But it all goes somewhere. It goes to the communities where those sanitation workers live. It goes to incinerators that aren't sufficiently regulated, so that the children who live near them have life-threatening asthma. It goes onto barges and gets hauled to countries with an even more cavalier attitude toward regulation and no body politic at all, places where children feed their families by pawing through your old sh*t that you threw out without giving it a thought.

You need to think about your sh*t. You need to think about the food that goes into your mouth because it affects the environment when it comes out the other end. You need to think about growth hormones in your chicken and beef. You need to think about the drugs you ingest,or discard.

And you need to think about the clothing and packaging and appliances and books and electronics that we casually consume and discard. It all has to go somewhere.

I think the next challenge needs to be a month with no trash. Your body is going to produce a lot of sh*t in your lifetime. Your lifestyle doesn't have to.

How are we doing?

If you’re just finding this, I’m trying to spend February not spending money on things I don’t need. I’ve defined need rather broadly. This is not about spending no money. It’s about being aware of what you’re buying and why you’re buying it. It’s about stepping off the consumer treadmill, and insisting that we are more than Homo economicus. We are Homo sapiens sapiens—the creature that is aware that it is aware.

No Buy February’s followers have taken the concept to heart. Just Another Day on The Farm, amysflock, and Put the Fork Down hardly seemed to need to be reminded not to spend money.As my friend Sage at The Flowerweaver explains it, this is a phenomenon of rural living--it’s a lot harder to spend money when you have to drive 25 miles to do so. The suburban road less traveled also has it going on—from reading her, I’m not sure that she doesn’t actually have sheep tucked away somewhere on that surburban lot so she can weave her own wool cloth. (remember Good Neighbors?)

Chiot’s Run has added their own challenge, with Make-Your-Own how to’s on Wednesdays. These terrific folks also made our fantastic No-Buy badge. Grab it from my sidebar (haven’t been able to find someone to code it for me, or however you do that, so it’s just a pdf right now).

Chiot’s Run also blogs at Not Dabbling at Normal, along with several other wonderful sustainability and householding bloggers like Jen at Unearthing This Life. Jen helped get the challenge going by posting the No Buy February challenge at NDIN.

The World According to Julie has been tracking progress on a daily basis with wonderful humor. The post that starts “I made it out of [Costco] only buying food” kind of sums up the whole issue. Julie also posts her kids’ adventures in eating and some fantastic recipes at Just Eat It Already. Jenn’s Cooking Garden has been cooking, and growing, and, of all things, preserving lemons.

As for me, I’ve had some moments, some failures, some successes. I’ve started a list of the things that cross my mind that I “need” which I’ll post on the last day of the month. I’m not sure that I would have bought them anyway, even without the challenge to hold me back, but it’s astonishing the money that my animal brain wants me to spend. I was afforded dispensation by the community (such as it is) for what I thought of as my “foodie” grocery shopping (to which I’m going to have to add coconut oil, thanks to Chiot’s Run). I’ve been out to eat twice, just can’t resist my husband’s big brown eyes when he says we should go out to lunch.

And I confess, on the way to a party last week I couldn’t stand the old, unfashionable, slightly too small in the waist pants I was wearing for another second, and impulsively pulled into the mall and bought a pair of black pants that fit me.

It’s hard to resist the call of Homo economicus.

Groceries

You may have noticed that I like to cook. Here's what I ran out of this week, while I was snowed in with nothing to do but hang out in the kitchen:

Flour: unbleached, cake, oat, bread
Oil: sesame, walnut, canola
Rice: arborio, brown, wild mix
Mustard: stone ground, dijon
Popcorn

In addition to the items above, I did not run out of whole wheat flour or corn meal, olive oil, long grain rice, basmati rice, couscous, or pastina, and I always keep a jar of yellow mustard, as well as ground dry mustard. I'm guessing these are things that most people don't have in their kitchens and never miss. But I always have them, and never think twice about restocking when I run out.

There is nothing on that list that I can't do without. I can make perfectly good meals with olive oil and plain old white rice, and I really shouldn't indulge my taste for white flour anyway when wheat is so much better for you (plus you can't find organic white flour to save your life, plus I have plenty of wheat). Bread flour is just a lazy indulgence (although it does make better bread, I swear it).

I stood there with my shopping cart full of these items (and they aren't cheap either) and dithered and rationalized. I am, after all a cook. It's food, not luxury goods. I use all of these things all the time. Just because "ordinary" people wouldn't know a bag of wild rice if it hit them over the head doesn't mean I shouldn't get it. After all, it's ordinary to me. Furthermore, I haven't bought any vegetables in nearly 8 months, since I was so successful at preserving the harvest this year, so that balances it out, right?

Ah, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. I skipped the wild rice and the stone ground mustard. Everything else is in my pantry now.

What's the verdict? Did I violate my rules?

Convenient stuff

I need a phone.

Mind you, I have a phone. In fact, several phones. I have a cell phone, as does my son, my daughter, and my husband. Then there's "Phone Henge," an archeological site of marginally functional cell phones that we mine for plugs, headsets, and exchanges. They need to be recycled, but recycling phones is another errand, plus my brother-in-law never lets us get rid of electronic items because he's convinced the evil-doers are out there just waiting to get into the memory chips and get numbers from old bank accounts, from which they will reconstruct our lives and steal all our money.

I also have two truly ancient old-fashioned wired phones and a wireless. They were all purchased for a couple of bucks at the resale shop. I consider wired phones a necessity. I always have phone service in emergencies, because the wired sets don't need either the house electricity or a cell phone grid. They work even when the power goes out. This is the number I give to stores when they won't accept "you don't need my phone number" or "000-000-0000."

But there isn't a phone in the kitchen anymore, because the resale specimen that was there died. When the phone rings and I'm in the kitchen, I have to go two whole rooms over to answer it.

I understand there are people who feel this way about tvs.

Peppery shortbread cheese crackers

3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup corn meal
4 oz. of cheese (cheddar, gruyere or Parmesan) grated
6 T (3/4 stick) of unsalted butter, cut into pieces
about 3 T heavy cream
seasoning: 1 teaspoon each white and green peppercorns, 1 1/2 teaspoons coarse sea salt, ground together, 1-2 teaspoons pepper flakes, or use the pre-mixed seasoning of your choice


Mix all ingredients except cream in a food processor; run the machine until dough forms a clump, adding the cream a little at a time to get a nice maleable texture. (I only have a 3 cup foot processor, so I had to divide the dough into thirds). Form into three 1 1/2 x 8" logs, roll in plastic wrap or wax paper and place in freezer until firm (a couple of hours). Slice into 1/4" or thinner rounds. Only have one log out at a time; leave the others in the freezer until you're ready to use them. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and bake at 350 for 15 minutes.

Update, Feb 27: Made these again using a pepper-jack cheese instead of the seasoning. Also good.

Okay, What *Do* I Need?

No Buy February

The things I actually need to live and can't obtain without buying are easy to identify. Food and shelter. I also need warm clothing, of course, since I live in Chicago. But it's pretty easy not to buy any more clothing. I like new things, but I can go a month without buying more clothes; I think most people could.

What about drink? Technically, I don't have to buy drinks. Water comes out of my tap. Do I go super hard-core and only drink water for a month? Something tells me my long-suffering husband would not be on board with not buying beer for a month.

Which brings us to the family. Right now just my husband and me. I think that when embarking on something like this, it ought to be the household. (I'd love to try to extend this to my daughter, but I simply cannot wrap my brain around her going a month without buying anything. Does not compute. My son barely buys the stuff he needs to live, anyway.) So I'll be selling my husband on this over the next few days.

Okay, so I need food and shelter, but not clothes, and we're on the shelf about drink. Now comes the hard part.

Valentine's Day.

I like presents. I really like presents. But I think this holiday exemplifies one of the reasons I do this. Our culture has either co-opted holidays or simply cut new ones from whole cloth as an excuse to buy stuff. Valentine's Day is right up there in the second category. It is a "marketing" holiday, created to make us spend money on consumer goods. Granted, it's one of the older ones, but it's not a religious, historical, or cultural holiday in any way. The single way we celebrate Valentine's Day is by buying stuff.

So it's got to go. As does my husband's birthday (sorry sweetie).

Now, does this mean no presents? Of course not. If the point is to replace the extractive, consumptive economy with a productive creative one, here's the place to create something-- a card, a meal, a song, a day spent together.

Take the month to think about what you need. If what you need is love, and what you're getting is a box of chocolates, you're not really getting what you need.

And don't worry, more recipes coming up. After all, if I'm not buying stuff, I'll have more time to cook.

Read about No Buy February here.

Don't buy anything in February

We all have a lot of stuff. George Carlin has a famous monologue on the subject. Americans love stuff. Our entire culture, if you can call it one, and economy is based on our acquisition of it. Recently we've been getting blamed for the slow recovery, because apparently we aren't buying enough of it. Well, we knew that eventually the power brokers would find a way to deflect from their own criminal mismanagement and rapacious self-interest.

I don't know about you, but I have enough stuff. There's no more room to put it. I'm tired of seeing big box stores getting built and schools getting torn down. I'm tired of spending my taxes on all the stuff the military needs, and I'm tired of my stuff being taxed to pay for Big Oil transporting stuff and Big Ag stuffing it down our throats.

Fine. Let's slow down the recovery even more, and turn this behemoth that's been bearing us towards disaster away from the consumptive, extractive economy. Let's stop buying stuff.

Take the pledge with me for a NoBuyFebruary. If you don't need it to live, don't buy it. Taken to extremes, this means only buy groceries, because I'm guessing you have plenty of clothes, and you certainly don't need any more dust catchers. If you can make it at home, you can't buy it. Coffee. Meals. I'm including electronic expenditures, too, so that means no Kindle books or online subscriptions. Just go for a month without spending any money that you don't have to spend. No fair using the last 5 days of January to go on a buying binge either.

February is a short month. Take the pledge. Just 28 days to Just Say No to consumerism. Live with and on what you've already got.