I joined a book club a few months ago and this time we are reading The Good Earth. I'm about halfway through right now, but basically it's about a Chinese peasant farmer in maybe the early 1900's and his life. He really loves the earth and growing things and he comes off today as quite the environmentalist, but really most of the things he does he does because he's poor and he has to. He saves paper that a street corner speaker hands him to sew into padding for his children's shoes. He cherishes every seed and every drop of rain because he knows that is what he needs to eat and care for his family.
And then it occurred to me, I'm not so much an environmentalist as I am poor. If money were not an issue I will still own a car. I would probably still bake, but just for fun every once in a while and I would buy bread at the store for daily use. I would probably buy canned beans instead of dry. I would have bought the specific shade of brown paint I wanted instead of buying a cheap gallon of recycled paint. I would buy paper towels instead of using cloth ones. I would have a smaller garden and would have grown things like artichokes that are fun, but not very practical. I would have bought paper plates for our party. But, money is an issue, especially now.
The next thing on my agenda is to learn to sew, at least a little, so I can put some buttons back on pants and repair a torn seam in one of Mike's favorite sweaters. And the truth is, I'm not doing it because I don't want to waste a sweater, I'm doing it because I can't afford a sweater. I'm baking bread because I can either spend $5 on 10 pounds of flour to make a dozen loafs of bread, or $5 on one loaf of artisan bread. I cook from dry beans because I can buy probably five times the amount of food for the same money if I cook it myself. I use real towels instead of paper so I don't have to buy towels every time I go to the store. I want to get rain barrels so my water bill won't be so high more than to conserve water. I have a garden to feed myself. I know that if money gets tight in a few months, at least I'll have food.
It's not to say that I don't enjoy making things from scratch and doing things with my hands, I really do enjoy it. But I think that living on a fixed income in a recession sure puts the pressure on to do it as much as you can. And I don't think that's a bad thing at all. That's what environmentalism is; it's not wasting things. It's using everything that you have and reusing what you can.
So, now when I harvest radishes from my garden I eat the tops. I definitely do not throw them away because I now see it as fuel for my body. Why would I throw away an edible part of a plant that I have cultivated and watched grow. It just seems crazy to me. All my life I have tossed my radish tops, but not anymore.
