Evidence of how our Jasmine makes our home excellent, every day

Unpaid Household Labor, of which I (Dan) am the great (and grateful) beneficiary (= "taker"):

Note the third (and most important) member of our household, or at least his grandest appendage.  According to Mitt Romney, he's actually a maker.

I wonder how many Republican politicians are actually "takers" of their spouses unpaid household labor in the same way I am?

Value a major secret to living well: unpaid household work

If some people have been following our blog and been attracted to and impressed by what we've been eating--from Fried Rice to Dal & Aloo Gobi, or even just sausages with peppers & onions and mashed peas, you've hopefully realized that the reason we eat so well is all the cooking Jasmine does, how well she does it, and perhaps most importantly (especially for the SNAP challenge), that she cooks from scratch.

This last means that not only are our meals more healthy, because they don't have a lot of processing or preserving chemicals in them, but also that the cost of food is quite low, compared to pre-prepared or partly-prepared foods that I used to eat (like jarred spaghetti sauce, Trader Joe's Mandarin Orange Chicken, etc) before Jasmine was in my life.

But we can eat this way only because we, as a unit, have the time, energy, and willingness to invest in this unpaid household labor.  And by "we," I mean Jasmine, who does almost all of it in our house. We've been able to afford mostly because, until I quit Colgate, I was making a lot more money than she, as she was teaching part-time, on an adjunct basis, and not put upon with any (in truth, I should say "as many") extra administrative responsibilities as I was.  So she has had time & energy to spare for unpaid household labor.

This rather traditional (but not un-progressive) arrangement seemed to come rather naturally to us, partly because for Jasmine to achieve greatness as a poet doesn't necessarily depend on slogging through the trenches of typical academia, whereas for me to achieve . . . well greatness is not exactly the right word . . . as a political scientist, does require it.  But also because Jasmine has a knack and a penchant for performing such household labor excellently.  While I would be slogging at the office, Jasmine has always been willing to slog through the trenches of baking no-knead bread, perfecting new recipes, taking charge of nutrition & shopping, not to mention other important aspects of unpaid household work, like doing laundry, cleaning, doing the dishes.

We were lucky, though, because of how much money I earned: in fact, it put us in the top 25% of households according to income.  My salary alone was only around $15k less than couples where both work.

But this is not most people's experience: in 2008, the median income for (heterosexual) couples where only the husband worked was about $30k less than if they both worked; among couples where only the wife worked, it was $40k less.  Those differences of $30k-$40k of annual income in America makes the difference between a secure place in the upper-middle class (the median income of a family where both parents work would place them above about 85% of households in our country), and a struggle to pay for even some of the many accoutrements of middle-class life: nice house, two cars, vacations, sports or lessons for kids, family vacations, ample retirement funds & college funds, a TV or two, cable, smartphones etc.

And indeed, all this is aside from the constantly hard-pressed situation of single-parent families, whom the combination of government + consumption demands expect to work at least one full-time job, and often more, and who also get almost no help paying for child-care.  The idea that a single-parent ought to stay home most of the day and perform the kind of unpaid labor that Jasmine does to make our lives excellent, much less to provide care, and solid parenting, self esteem, and life-lessons for his (or, as well all know is far more frequently the case, her) own children would be anathema to most of the political & budgetary establishment of this country, who would never countenance the idea of such "takers" getting any outside support for the task of raising the next generation of Americans instead of working multiple low-wage jobs and paying through the nose for childcare.

Why do we live in a society where so many of the things that make family life rich, delicious, and a good environment for raising children are considered "luxuries" that ought to give place to retirement & college savings, and other "normal" middle-class consumption expectations (unless you're really rich)?

It's a tough question, and it's not all about politics or policy, but there are ways that policy can support people bucking the trends of our society, and does, in other countries, like Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, which Bernie wants to emulate.  In America, it will take a revolution to change these kinds of things--the political revolution that Bernie is calling us to is not the whole solution (just as getting Bernie elected president is not the whole of the political revolution this country needs; we need big change in Congress, too!).  But a political revolution is a good beginning to get people thinking about how lots of things need to be different in this country, including the how we value (and how our government encourages us to value) to value family & labor (both unpaid in the house, as well as outside the home).  That's one big reason why we're for Bernie.

Day 3 & Day 4 dinners, plus extra pics of Dan's most recent salon experience

Black Beans and fixins.

The best thing about leftover rice: Tamar Adler's Thai Fried Rice. Just don't expect to poach an egg that perfectly every time.

Another method of economizing that we've been employing for a year or so: I'm not great at cutting hair, but I'm as good as a lot of the people in Boston Dan paid $15 to do it. So I do it.

Home Economics and How Easy it is to Think Food Costs Less than it Does

First, a picture of our first challenge Lunch, Saturday Oct 3, then some thoughts from Jasmine on economics.

Broccoli soup with cheddar cheese & the first slice of the week's homemade bread: wheat/oat.

The Food Stamp Challenge is in some ways made for me (Jasmine). Not only, as Dan pointed out, are we living on a budget and likely to do so for some time, but I’ve been practicing home economics for as long as I can remember and I am an inveterate planner of groceries and meals. Growing up, I always went to the grocery store with my mom, who taught me pretty much everything there is to know about shrewd shopping. I cannot remember a time when I  didn’t understand the principle of price-per-unit, and I also can’t remember as far back as the first time I realized that stores frequently confuse even this solid indication of price by measuring different brands of the same product in different units (one can of tomatoes in fluid ounces with another in grams: neither the same system not the same measure—this really happens!). My mom was also a throwback to the generation before her own when it came to maximizing, saving and reusing things in the home. She is a baby boomer and did not experience the want of food growing up, while her mother grew up during the Depression raising chickens that the family could rarely afford to kill for their own table. Yet my grandmother wasn’t overly economical, and my mother is. When she and my dad were first married they lived on a witheringly small graduate student stipend and food stamps with a small child; perhaps that left its mark. And although she enjoyed a period of relative comfort when my family lived in Saudi Arabia, for many years of my childhood money was tight. After they moved back it took my dad a long time to find a teaching job, and he painted houses and adjuncted while she worked full-time as a waitress. Even after he began his tenure-track job, the long payless summers in sweltering south Jersey had an unshakable drear to them and September was something she and I, sharing the problem of how to have a nice home and life without lots of resources, often openly longed for.  In September, we could go out to dinner on Fridays and buy whatever we wanted at ShopRite.

I don’t wish to falsify that I grew up poor; my family was middle class and I never experienced hunger. If we could have used more money, it was in part because I was sent to private violin lessons. We were in that kind of situation. I am unusual in that I was aware of the pinch of limited money and involved in helping to solve the problems it presents from a young age. Although I can imagine wanting to hide any sense of limitation and privation from a child, I am glad my mom let me in on these things, in part because I find household management really interesting and rewarding, and even more because there was never a time in which I didn’t know thoroughly how money works, that it is possible to get through not having a lot of it, and how that can be done.

But the situation I’ve been in, and which I am to some degree in today, is really different from what a lot of people experience. I do not know what it is like to have nothing in my pantry. My dad has stories from his childhood when there was one thing in the kitchen (oatmeal) which he tried to make into cookies but ended up ruining the last of the food; in another, he hallucinates from hunger while watching a strange Sunday afternoon tv program when his mother opens the door carrying a bag of groceries with the fronds of a bunch of celery sticking out of the top like some kind of tropical saint. I haven’t had those experiences, and I know they are on a whole other order of desperation than the challenges I’ve faced. I also recognize that the fact that I cook at all, that I bake, that I read the store circular every week, grow a garden and shop at multiple stores for the best prices, and that I know not only how to do things in the kitchen but how to do them in the way that maximizes their value, is something not everyone has. The fact that I have the time to do these things is also a privilege that not everyone has. I have heard that there is a saying in southern Italy along the lines of, “We don’t have money but we have time.” This implies that humble ingredients can be wonderful if cooked with skill and not rushed, and it also implies that time is free. But many poor people cannot afford time, and most working Americans, poor or rich, would certainly say that time is a rare and valuable commodity.

Privilege is something that it is impossible to disentangle from your life for the sake of experiencing what someone else goes through. Planning for this week has been difficult in part for that very reason: we have a garden and a CSA farm share. Because we can afford the several-hundred-dollar up-front investment in this local farm, I have to buy almost no produce for five months of the year, and we get lots of the highest-quality organic produce for an embarrassingly low price-per-unit. But what about somebody on minimum wage, for whom a share costs 2/3 of a month's after-tax income? Through that farm and our community garden, we also have unlimited herbs and for a little longer this year tomatoes, zucchini and hot peppers. We also have an Amish population here so we can get terrific eggs for $2 a dozen. Most people just don’t have access to any of these things which enable great eating for little money, and I have had to go to some lengths to create a more representative food situation for us: I have used several crops from the farm and calculated their value according to the prices our local supermarket charges. We will not have anything not available at that store (Price Chopper) or whose price wouldn’t fit the budget. In fact, we on our last night before the challenge we feasted ourselves and a few friends on perishable produce that wouldn’t fit in the budget, and I imagine that many people on SNAP, on the last night before the new week of benefits begins, end up eating the dregs of their week’s groceries rather than enjoying a final seasonal feast. Still, I am relieved that the week is beginning because it was so difficult trying to get it right ahead of time, and now we’ll just have to see if I did. I am very aware that if I misplanned, we do have other options, and that’s just what many people on food stamps don’t have.

At first I thought $58 for two people for a week sounded like a lot. I’m embarrassed about that now, but it should be said because I bet a lot of people whose endless appetite for spending cuts fixates on SNAP think the same thing: “That seems like plenty of money to me!” I rarely spend as much as $58 in one trip to the grocery store, primarily because of our farm share, but also because I buy a lot of things at multiple locations that have better prices or quality whenever I have the opportunity. When we go to a big city, we often go to Trader Joe’s to stock up on grains, pasta, meats, coffee and toiletries. When we go to Utica I buy brown Jasmine rice and Asian sauces at the Asian market there. I make a trip to our local health food store about once a month for bulk legumes and spices, which are the only things there I consider affordable. All those shopping trips assume a car, gas money, and that you are not living on a week-to-week budget. One thing a person on SNAP might be hard-pressed to finance is a big, impromptu antibiotic-free meat purchase at Trader Joes. So when I jotted down some probable meals for the Challenge week, I had to completely re-think how to shop for dinner.

I knew, for example, that we would have black beans. It’s pretty much Dan’s favorite food, and we have it often anyway. It’s cheap and it makes a lot. My mind initially went to all the things I normally buy to put in it or with it: green and jalapeno pepper, yogurt and cheese if we could fit them into hte $58 budget, some raw vegetable or salsa, and tortillas. I forgot to put the beans and rice on the list. That’s because I always have beans and rice. I never buy them acutely, so to speak. That is the essence of the privilege we need to consider in a challenge like this. Once I added those to the list, there was $4 less for everything else, and I knew this round of black beans would be a more sober version of what is often a rather lavish meal for all that it is vegetarian and relatively cheap.

Picture of Dinner from Saturday Night--a night when the fruit of the vine would always otherwise enliven our dinner and evening's entertainment. But tonight, it was not to be . . .

Note four bowls for a half-pound of pasta: two dinner portions & two pyrex dishes for Sunday's lunch