Frog in the Pot

I had an epiphany last weekend. Being the frog in the pot isn’t always a bad thing. My wife asked if we would have time Sunday to make the trip to the nearest Costco thirty five miles away. When you live in a small Northern California city and want to shop at any large non-specialty store other than Wal-Mart you have to drive. She doesn’t normally ask to make that drive on weekends; she makes it on weekdays to teach at a local college. That may be why we hadn’t been to Costco in two or more years.

Costco is such a unique experience; stacks of products, furniture, clothing, produce and box upon box of room-filling plasma televisions. Carts loaded to the point of spilling, abandoned in the aisles by shoppers pulled mid-stride to the scent of mini pizzas baking in a toaster oven. Traffic rules apply at rush hour, but no such etiquette exists at Costco on a Sunday afternoon. All these things ran through my mind as our schedule was planned, that and any trip to Costco is guaranteed to cost five to six hundred dollars. When last we made the trip to Costco we knew the economy of size. If buying one in a conventional market was sufficient, there we could buy a case, store it in our pantry and save. If I dig deep I’m sure I’d still find some Kirkland products frozen in the permafrost of our freezer surrounded unidentifiable bones. We were convinced we would save money when we brought that product home. It had taken us years to develop that philosophy, but economy of volume was important, and our freezer and pantry bulged under the excess. Our home had become a warehouse.

Well Costco isn’t so bad, and it hasn’t changed much. You enter to discover stacks of HD and plasma televisions, you battle your way past jewelry, cell phones, clothing, and cookware, you break free of the strolling shoppers to find yourself entering the liquor dept. For a moment economy of volume takes over, if I buy all those I can save. Beef and Pork come in multifamily packs, farmed Salmon and Chilean Sea Bass are packaged for family dinners of twenty. Produce comes in wonderful packages that dare you to try and finish it before it expires. Bottled water, beer and soft drinks seem to come in the multi-case package. Freezers are loaded with boxes of Pot Stickers large enough to supply an Asian restaurant for a week. Frozen waffles and pancakes are packaged to supply the next Kiwanis pancake breakfast, with maple syrup is in bottles a small person can’t lift. We used to buy it all. Nearing the front end checkout my wife realized we had just walked past nearly every aisle. It wasn’t rebellion, or dislike for the products, we just didn’t need any of it.

Somewhere in the past two or so years we stopped being consumers of industrially produced foods. I wouldn’t say people who need that volume shouldn’t buy it, restaurants and charitable organizations need easy access to pre packaged foods. As the frog in the pot we hadn’t decided to not buy those things, we just started making them ourselves. It had started simple, we made Kim chi, I had found a recipe and tried making my own. Over the following years we began making and growing nearly anything we desired. Changing to local, organic, and sustainable foods requires a logical progression, you simply commit to the first step by changing one product. Each improvement is a stepping stone to the next. Purchasing local and seasonal tomatoes leads to canning so “you can still taste the sunshine in winter” as my wife says. Peaches, plums, okra, all followed, bread and pasta were made in advance, pesto waited in the freezer for quick meals on busy nights. Suddenly we found nearly anything we wanted to buy we could make. We no longer had to read ingredient lists with every container we opened, we knew what it contained, because we added it. We found ourselves comforted knowing that recalls, preservatives, natural flavors, and food coloring was in our control. We had been the frog in the pot with the first steps being only a sight warming, now the water is like a hot tub and still rising as we progress to partnering with another family to raise our own livestock.

Today our home is a warehouse, the pantry has been doubled in size and still bulges. The freezer’s overflow is moved to my parents’ house for storage in theirs. We have become convinced by the economy of size, but now it’s our economy to control. Today we build our meals around seasonal availability and wait eagerly for the end of tomato season so we can move on to the greens and root vegetables. We never recognized how dramatically changed our lives had become in the past few years until that stroll through Costco. Lifestyle changes need not be difficult, they just need to be the slow building of heat as the pot comes to a boil. You just need to light the burner. It was a slow process; we were goaded by the need to know what we were eating and have choice over the quality of the food and chemicals we consumed.

Can anyone and everyone take control of their food supply? Sure just climb into the pot and start warming the water.

p.s. we were going to Costco to buy some plushy bath towels. Haven’t figured how to grow those yet…