Today is election day. I am not going to tell you how I voted. Really I'd prefer not to discuss the election at all, other than to acknowledge its presence, and hope that everyone who hasn't voted does indeed do so. But I don't recall when I have seen so much vitriol and hatred spew forth, on all sides, and even from sources I would have once considered reasonable. We live in a time of great change, and I am sure there are moments when every one of us might wish we did not.
Instead I will write about a recent experiment. I decided to see if I could live on $300.00 for one month. It is not what it seems and so I will explain.
I was working with a woman here in Knoxville, attempting to devise a plan to rid her of crippling debt and work out a budget on which she could live without incurring further debt. Suffice it say her income is above the Federal Poverty level for a single adult and below the poverty level for a family of 4. Tennessee is a relatively low income state, and Knoxville has a larger percentage of its population in the middle and lower tiers than some other cities, with an accompanying lower cost of living. That does not make actual process of living at the lower levels easy.
We had worked out her expenses for a series of 3 months. The first month included rather large expenditures for debt repayment, without which she risked losing her apartment. After rent, utilities, phone, television, and debt repayment she would be left with $300 for food, transportation and all personal and incidentals for the remainder of the month, or an average of $75.00 per week. The second month she would have more, and an even greater amount in the third month. She thought she could do it, and I agreed.
But it is easy for me to agree that someone else can endure a hardship from my comfortable, upper middle-class vantage point. After I left her house, I wondered if I could really do the same thing. I decided to attempt a similar experiment, realizing full-well, that my circumstances were not the same and that my experiment would not prove anything. Yet I felt the need to attempt it. As per my client, I allowed myself $300. I took the money out of the bank and put it in four envelopes, one for each week. Like my client, the money did not cover housing, utilities, phone, or television. I also did not cancel my newspaper subscription, which had already been paid, and I did not cancel my monthly mani/pedi even though I paid for it outside of the $300, and I accepted that if I truly lived on a more limited income that would be one of the first items to go.
The first week was tough. I had a breakfast meeting at Panera, where I knew I would be expected to buy something. I had also arranged to go out for lunch with a friend one day, and to take my son-in-law out for lunch another day. I needed to put gas in my car. I had back to back meetings most days and little time to cook. It was doubtful that I would get through that week without going over my $75 limit and indeed I did not. I did not cancel any of my plans simply because I knew that people often make bad decisions, the woman I am working with often makes bad decisions, and I needed to cope with and learn from the decisions I made. That first week I spent $95.00, and I duly took $10 out of the envelopes for each of the next two weeks. But I did not overspend again and made it to the end of the month without a hitch.
As you can imagine it was not always as easy at it sounds here. But I also had advantages, advantages many in this situation do not have, and I was constantly aware of these distinctions. That first week, I ran out of food because I spent money at restaurants, because I had not shopped with a plan, because I bought gas, although this was the first time in years that I filled my tank only to a certain dollar amount, because I had already decided not to pull nice grass fed meats from my freezer unless I had money in the budget to cover their cost. My client started the week with a freezer full of food, and she gets meals on wheels. But I was determined not to rely too heavily on my abundance.
I was also fortunate in that I cook, that I know something about nutrition, and that I do not generally purchase much in the way of prepared foods, believing them to be expensive and basically unhealthy. That first week I did buy a rotisserie chicken one day, when I was running home from meetings to an empty larder. But that chicken lasted me for many meals. The first night I ate the wings and the drumsticks (did I say I was hungry?) and still had the thighs to warm up with sauerkraut for a couple of meals and the breasts to turn into chicken salad and to use for soup. The bones, along with celery and onion trimmings went into a batch of stock, cooked overnight in the slow cooker. That stock, the remaining chicken meat, and a few vegetables became soup. Although I realize that the slow cooker may be a privilege, basic models go on sale for $20 to $25 frequently at WalMart and they have many benefits.
I did get to the store. I realized very quickly that my own penchant for making my own mayonnaise was far cheaper than buying the cheapest brand, even if I used pure olive oil instead of the cheapest oil available. One of the reasons I make my own mayonnaise is that it is made with unhealthy oils, and I use olive oil for its health benefits. But if the budget were paramount over the refinements of unhealthy foods, I would opt for the cheapest oil, and make my mayo at home with eggs and oil for pennies, figuring that cooking real food, even in poor oil would still be an improvement over packaged and processed foods. So this defined some of my choices. Pure olive oil and butter, even the cheapest pure butter in the store, were chosen over vegetable oils, and I chose pure foods: vegetables, dried beans (much cheaper than the canned variety), and meat on sale. I might prefer grass-fed and pastured animals, but the data seems to show that the difference between pastured and CAFO meats is not as significant as the difference between healthy and unhealthy oils, or the very high levels of sugar and salt in packaged foods. My goal was to get as much nutrition as possible for my dollars.
But I'm sure you already recognize my educated and privileged bias. I make these decisions because I have the privilege of the knowledge and skill to make these decisions. I also recognize that many do not. And so my experiment is not truly fair unless one also offers education to those who are struggling and even that thought is arrogant, as it presupposes that my values should be everyone's values. I did end up going to the farmer's market and buying some produce even though it was more expensive than the cheapest produce in the store, yet I feel I got value for my money. I bought local meat when I could, although I balanced more expensive cuts with cheaper cuts of stew meat, and organ meats like kidneys and heart, cuts that are flll of important nutrients. I grew up eating these things as my family bought purchased shares of cows and lambs from the local agricultural college. I grew up on the idea of nose-to-tail eating before it was trendy, and in fact it was once the way of life in the western world, as it still is in some areas.
That second week I made a batch of chickpea and cabbage soup from a recipe by Madhur Jaffrey that I have made since my 20s. The original version was vegetarian and called for dill, but George hadn't liked dill, despite his German and Austrian roots, so I hadn't used it in a long time. Besides, fresh dill was relatively expensive and I don't have it in my garden. I did not make a vegetarian version. I used thinned out chicken stock from the previous week's chicken, and added bone-in chicken thighs while the chickpeas were cooking. I had removed the skin to render for chicken fat, and the bones (which flavored the cooking liquid) were retrieved to use again for the next batch of stock. For about $8.00 I had 12 big bowls of nutritious, filling soup, soup that was a meal in and of itself, soup that helped see me through the second, leaner week. And at 69 cents a pound, I had cabbage left over to refresh my sauerkraut supply.
But it wasn't all about food. And for the first time in a long time I woke up in the middle of the night worried, worried about how I would pay for things. It began with simple things like the car. How would I pay for gas? What if something went wrong with the car, or I needed oil, or brakes? How would I pay for that? Gas is really the least part of the cost of owning a car, and I realized early on that I would not be able to afford to keep a car were I to live with the same budgetary constraints. There is a bus stop a mile from my house. I could walk there and take the bus, but bus routes and access are limited. I am about 2 1/2 miles from Walmart. I could in fact walk there, and even though I live off a busy road without sidewalks, I may have to risk it. My life would be radically different.
I woke up in the middle of the night worried about how I would pay for food for Tikka and Moises. I woke up regularly and fretted in the wee hours. I realized that, although my house is paid for, and my taxes average out to less than the cost of a small apartment in a less than stellar complex, the house actually costs more than that alone: there is the homeowners insurance, and because I live in a condo, the association fees. I couldn't afford to live in my house. Of course I could sell it, and perhaps buy a much smaller house in and throw the difference in savings. Perhaps the savings could pay for my car. But even if I did that, how would I pay for my health insurance? Of course, if I earned less, I would qualify for reductions in the cost of my health insurance. But could I still afford it?
I came away from this brief experiment with a far greater sympathy for many, for some who feel they are owed more, for several elderly women in the condo complex next to mine (perhaps in mine as well, I don't know) who struggle to make ends meet on small social security stipends, women for whom even a small increase in association fees means they have to do without something else.
I came away from this experiment thinking more about things I tend to take for granted, with a renewed appreciation for what I need, and what I don't need. I also leaned a lot about myself, renewed my acquaintance with that part of myself that would walk to the bus, would find whatever work or means of earning money I could to get through, that young girl I once was, the girl who snuck into a church basement and hid in the ladies room while the doors were locked at night because I had no place to live, no place to go and $30.00 to live on until I received the first paycheck at my new job, a paycheck that was still three weeks away, that girl who had put all her money into the rent of an apartment I was unable to occupy because the previous tenants had refused to vacate, that girl whose belongings had been stolen from the storage locker of that same apartment by those same tenents, that girl whose determination would see her through. And I realized also that that girl also was privileged. She had an education. She knew she would survive and even thrive, and that, in and of itself is a gift we should not take lightly.