On Jun 16, 9:30Â am, bmo...@
nyx.net wrote:
> On Jun 16, 9:27Â am, PaPaPeng
yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>>> Interesting article below. Â If you are Chinese you'll be wonder what's
>> so great about it. Â That's how myself and everybody I know had always
>> lived. Â What's your take?
>
>
>> As a teenager, Anna Shepard was mortified by her mother's thrifty
>> habits
>> - no heating, lukewarm baths and yesterday's leftovers. Now she's
>> inherited the 'frugal gene' - and she's proud of it
>
>> Saturday June 14, 2008
>> The Guardian
>
>> It's 1985. I am five years old and I'm staring at my lunchbox. All
>> around me, children are ripping into packets of Monster Munch and
>> Peperamis. I've got yesterday's quiche and a tomato sliced in half,
>> spilling seeds everywhere. And there's something else at the bottom,
>> possibly a homemade rock bun, but I can't be sure. There isn't enough
>> clingfilm to stop it from becoming unidentifiably soggy.
>
>> My school lunchbox was a testament to my mother's thrifty habits.
>> Today
>> it would be celebrated as green and resourceful, a low-carbon meal
>> made
>> from leftovers. Back then, I didn't give a hoot about food waste and
>> packaging. I wanted pickled onion crisps and a Penguin for pudding.
>
>> Article continues
>> It wasn't that my parents were tofu-munching hippies who spent
>> weekends
>> waving banners. Growing up in a village outside Cambridge in the 80s,
>> I
>> don't remember any of us having environmental worries, other than my
>> long-standing concern about African elephants being killed for their
>> tusks. But I did appreciate at an early age that we were spectacularly
>> good at saving resources. Electricity, gas, food, water: you name it,
>> we
>> made it stretch further.
>
>> To do so, we called on the considerable powers of "eke, eke". This was
>> my granny's phrase (on my mother's side), and it described being
>> sparing
>> with resources. If it sounds rather dour and puritanical for a
>> much-loved family philosophy, it never seemed like that to me. I
>> remember Granny peering into her larder to work out what we were going
>> to have for supper. She'd eye some meagre leftovers, giggle, and then
>> shriek "Eke, eke!" with a characteristically naughty expression. It
>> would be muttered when a modest-sized chicken was required to feed a
>> large number of Sunday lunch guests, or when we were expected to hold
>> back at an expensive restaurant.
>
>> My mother took pleasure in following her mother's lead. She would dash
>> around the house closing curtains to keep the heat in the moment it
>> was
>> dark and stubbornly refuse to bin the mouldiest lump of cheese. Today,
>> if you were to walk into her kitchen, chances are she'd be baking
>> bread
>> - one of her favourite pastimes as it provides a satisfying end for
>> all
>> sorts of dry ingredients that need using up, from porridge oats to
>> stale
>> bran flakes.
>
>> Over by the sink, you'd find a soggy tea bag, maybe two, awaiting
>> second
>> use, and dotted around the Aga would be several saucers of leftovers -
>> some likely to contain as little as a few peas or a handful of pasta
>> shells. Meanwhile, upstairs, you'd doubtless come across a toothpaste
>> tube, or maybe a bottle of moisturiser, cut open with nail scissors to
>> reveal its final scrape.
>
>> This is not about saving money, although I'm sure finances played a
>> part. We weren't seriously hard-up. It was something else. A hangover
>> from wartime austerity, perhaps,...#65279; which both sets of
>> grandparents passed on to my parents when they were growing up in the
>> 50s. An almost moral sense of obligation not to waste what you have
>> but
>> make it go as far as possible.
>
>> Only as a teenager did it bother me. "Own up! Who left the kitchen
>> door
>> open?" my father would bellow if anyone dared let the precious warmth
>> from the Aga escape. This, combined with my mother's insistence that
>> we
>> all take lukewarm, shallow baths rather than turn on the immersion
>> heater, would leave me mortified when I had friends, never mind
>> boyfriends, to stay.
>
>> Invariably, when friends did arrive, the first thing we had to do was
>> to
>> issue woolly jumpers and blankets. I did try to warn them, but my
>> friends seemed to think that a cold house meant you might need an
>> extra
>> cotton pullover, not that the upstairs sink would freeze solid in
>> winter
>> and you wouldn't dream of putting a toe into bed unless it was clad in
>> thick socks and there was a hot...#8209;water bottle there to greet
>> it.
>
>> But it didn't take long after I left school to realise that there was
>> value in my upbringing. As a student, being able to throw together a
>> quick bean stew from store-cupboard basics and jazz up your wardrobe
>> for
>> less than a tenner at Help the Aged are skills worthy of respect. I
>> stopped longing to live in a house heated to bikini-friendly
>> temperatures and began to make peace with my inner thriftiness.
>
>> In my final year at university, studying the home front in the second
>> world war, I learned of a different context for making do and mending.
>> I
>> liked the idea of rationing and digging for victory. It reminded me of
>> home. And it began to occur to me that the habits I'd been brought up
>> with weren't weird and stingy; they were planet-saving. I could be
>> pea-green and all I'd have to do would be to follow my mother's lead.
>
>> So what began as a gradual absorption of family habits grew into a
>> personal passion and then into a career. That I am now a journalist
>> writing about green living is largely thanks to the good fortune of
>> having a mother who lived by waste-not want-not principles; the same
>> ones we are advised to get back in touch with to fight climate change.
>> A
>> long line of thrifty women behind her, whose domestic habits were seen
>> as nothing more than good housekeeping, are responsible for making me
>> the eco-minded adult I am today.
>
>> This came to light last year when I started writing a book with the
>> aim
>> of encouraging people to tweak their life to make it greener. "You're
>> not eco; you're 'eke, eke'," my mother announced proudly when I
>> explained the synopsis.
>
>> My boyfriend is less impressed. I infuriate him with what he calls
>> "false economies". Saving stale lumps of bread to turn into
>> breadcrumbs
>> and storing them in jam jars, and requesting that he brings back the
>> silver foil from his sandwiches so I can wipe it, fold it and use it
>> again, are two such practices that provoke raised eyebrows. "You're
>> kidding yourself if you think this makes a difference," he mutters.
>> But
>> he is slowly learning that this is a family compulsion. That I have
>> managed to turn these stingy habits into something green and valuable
>> is
>> the wonder of it.
>
>> Unlike my teenage self, I now delight in telling people about my
>> mother's latest experiment using a giant roll of clingfilm to insulate
>> windows, or the henhouse that is being built at the bottom of the
>> garden
>> for four feathery new arrivals. And in the past few years, the
>> exchange
>> of green habits has flowed in both directions. When I raved about my
>> new
>> wormery, my mother quietly listened. "I'd quite like one of those
>> myself," she mused. A few months later, she announced that she, too,
>> had
>> her own worm bin - having waited until there was a secondhand one
>> going
>> cheap in the village.
>
>> Now that I'm five months pregnant, my latest eco worry is whether I'll
>> ever reach this point with my own children and inspire enthusiasm in
>> all
>> things green. I can't help wondering how I'll cope if my frugally
>> reared
>> sprogs announce their plans to scoot around in gas guzzlers or embark
>> on
>> ethically dubious careers. And when I face the inevitable lunchbox
>> dilemma, will I stay strong on my devotion to leftovers or submit to
>> popular demand as I longed for my mother to do?
>
>> Whatever lies ahead, experience tells me that family values usually
>> emerge triumphant, if not when your children are teenagers, then later
>> when they are twentysomethings. It is harder than you might think to
>> turn your back on frugal genes, and there is nothing like moving away
>> from home, establishing your own domestic regime and embarking on a
>> family, to make you think fondly about habits that you grew up with.
>> I'm
>> sure I'm not alone in doing many things - from peeling potatoes to
>> storing elastic bands - in certain ways, for no other reason than
>> because that is how they were done when I was young.
>
>> Perhaps it is nostalgia, but I'm also aware that as I grow older, so,
>> too, does my mother. The time we have to share recipes and gardening
>> tips no longer stretches out beyond what is imaginable. Reality dawns,
>> and I know it will end one day, and I'll be left alone with her voice
>> in
>> my head but no more opportunities to learn from her.
>
>> That's why, every month or so, I abandon my independent life, my
>> London
>> flat, even my fledgling courgette plants, to go home. To pull up a
>> kitchen chair, while my mother kneads the bread dough, and to feast on
>> one of her "eke, eke" stews (a dish made from a leftover roast that
>> started life perfectly normally but after several days ends up as
>> carrots and gravy), brings me more pleasure than ever before.
>
>> And when I re-enter my own life and find myself polishing off pasta
>> for
>> breakfast rather than let it go to waste, or topping yesterday's
>> bolognese with last weekend's mashed potato, I am proud to admit that
>> it
>> is not only green concerns motivating me; it is also because I am my
>> mother's daughter.
>
>> · How Green Are My Wellies? Small Steps and Giant Leaps to Green
>> Living
>> with Style, by Anna Shepard, is published by Eden Project Books
>
> There's a fine line between frugality and insanity.
And PaPaPend is right in the middle.
