Household is an art, getting rich too. I should have followed in the footsteps of Warren Buffett or those of Jeff Bezos, but in high school we were taught home economics rather than “How to pay less than 1% in taxes” or “Dow Jones 101 “. Instead, I know how to make a béchamel without lumps, soy milk, and reuse dry bread. My trifle (a way to pass the leftover cakes by soaking them in rum or kirsch) is claimed from me every Christmas by my B who finds it “nasty”. I had improvised it a year when I had missed my log. Improvisation is the mother of all savings. This is true in the kitchen as in politics.
Given the galloping inflation at the grocery store, the highest in 40 years according to Statistics Canada, I decided to empty my cupboards, the freezer and the fridge before buying anything, except chocolate and romaine lettuce (on sale). With my veg lifestyle, intermittent fasting, two light meals a day, I should be good to last at least six months, if not longer, thanks to my jars of legumes. We eat too much anyway. I only have to look at the size of the plates in my grandmother’s dinnerware set.
Like you, perhaps, I adopted the low-cost chains, Maxi or Super C. The magazine Protect yourself conducted a survey last summer to find out where to buy groceries and, along with Walmart, these are the three brands that offer us the most for our meager dollar attacked from all sides by the price of oil, climate change, the shortage of labor and geopolitical tensions, including Ukraine.
The American Southwest has experienced its worst droughts in 1,200 years (!) according to the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), affecting commodity prices. The current floods in California will not reverse this trend. It’s only just begun, according to economists better informed than me who are in Davos this week to talk about recession at the World Economic Forum.
You have to know how to spare the goat and the cabbage when you are a scapegoat
So, while waiting for MP Marwah Rizqy, a specialist in international tax planning, to succeed in getting the rich to pay off in their tax havens, I stretch out the soup and taste my compost; my son eats his kiwi peels well. I cultivate household arts as my grandmothers used to recycle old fabrics into catalognes. My mother darned our stockings and our sweaters, cut our hair, made her vegetable garden and her broths herself. This art was mainly transmitted from mother to daughter. We were making new out of old, whereas today we are making old out of new, planned obsolescence.
Go back
My friend Céline, who hesitated between theater and veterinary medicine, makes funny tutorials on FB to teach us how to do our laundry with hearth ashes, as in Caleb’s daughtersmy cult vintage series (with Six Feet Under and Sex and the City). I tried its very economical detergent: ashes, water and essential oils. Zero plastic, zero waste, and no one saw a difference after washing. I’ll be able to sell my hearth ashes to the boiler, I’m on fire!
I have young friends in their twenties who garden in the country in the summer and also knead their bread, make their sauerkraut and kimchi and make their ceramic plates, as a bonus. They have a circle of knitters by the fire, like the Cercles des fermières, but more woke. I feel a resurgence of interest in homemade everywhere around me. The Sharpened workshops bear witness to this. We want soul, no matter the outcome. A craftsman slumbers deep within each of us if we dig a little into the fertile soil of the imagination and cultivate indulgence there.
while reading the book Do more with less, I immediately loved the thoughts of Vicky Payeur (vivreavecmoins.com), who used the example of our grandparents and other ancestors to choose frugality and repay her debts. When we make things ourselves, patch them up or repair them, we become aware of their value and they become precious. It is more difficult to give in to fads, to the syndrome of the “inflatable neighbour” (he has it, I want it), to overconsumption and to the throwaway.
Every time you use your bank card, you just delayed the time, day and year of achieving your freedom
Vicky Payeur is interested in the Great Depression, the period from 1929 to 1939, to learn from it: cooking with nothing, repairing, having fun at home, making your own, bartering, spending only the money you we have, reuse. In 1929, my grandfather Alban had just arrived in Montreal, he was 20 years old and, like many workers, did not have enough money to take the tram, the “little tanks” at five cents . He walked from the Gaspésiens district (near Radio-Canada) to the University of Montreal, then under construction.
Reconnect with respect
We didn’t pick up a latte to take out on the way to work in 1930. The example of coffee often comes up in books that tell us how to retire at 40. A $5 latte every morning, invested in the stock market (ideally a few years before a crash), will earn you $26,300 ten years later, according to Jean-Sébastien Pilote, a young retiree I’ve previously interviewed here: bit. ly/3HfnuwW.
Without becoming the pinch of service, there is a way to review many habits. In his excellent essay/practical book To end food wastebio-intensive farmer Estelle Richard points out that the cost of this waste at home is estimated at $1,000 to $1,700 per Quebec household annually.
She explains that over the decades, we have gone from eaters to consumers of food, no longer having direct links with producers. In the past, “in these tight-knit, traditional, rural communities, agriculture, food, cultivators and eaters were almost inseparable, the dependence of one on the other commanding respect, not only for the skills of everyone, but also of the fruits of their labour”.
Respect, the key word. Money doesn’t grow on trees, it does in our garbage cans.
(And in the shade of palm trees in tax havens…)