Autarky

[degringolade]

 

Impressionism / Claude Monet/ Snow Scene at Argenteuil

Day before Xmas.  Gonna head over to spend the night in the spare room at the boys place to be there on Christmas day since the winter storm is heading this way and it stands a decent chance of being a whopper for the Oregonian/Washingtonians up here in this neck of the clear cut.

One of the things that I need to work seriously on is the way of backing off from the food chain that us working folks use.  Since I am going to be relatively poor, I will need to act it out and reduce to insignificance my eating out and eating fancy.  This shouldn’t be hard, having the time to cook is a huge help.  I am going to have around 10.5 hours each day suddenly made available so a lot of what seems to be complicated cooking is easily within my reach.

I am seriously pondering spending some nickels on a pressure cooker.  A big 23-quart presto that can double as a hot water canner.  I will have to get rid of my current brewing pot (5-gallon from WallyWorld) and use the new pressure cooker as a brew-pot as well.  

Pressure cookers allow for preservation of sauces and such.  With a busy day (one that I will be tired at the end of and sleep like a baby) I should be able to prepare a bunch of stuff to eat for the upcoming month or so.  

I will need to change how I approach eating, I am not going to be radical and claim to go vegan all the sudden, but the world is ‘a changing and I need to figure out how to keep up.  No man is an island, and you do have to figure out how to live in a world of diminished expectations.  Autarky isn’t possible for an individual, but reducing the links to those who want to control you by holding your lifestyle hostage can only be defeated by taking away your need to defend that lifestyle.

Comments

THE TUBE STEAK SOLUTION

[mschmidt]

The way to get inauthentic environmental brownie points without giving up meat, is to authentically like things like bologna and hot dogs. In other words, to like animal by-products rather than the expensive actual products like a steak or a whole part from a chicken. The brownie points are for eating food that others would throw away – reducing waste and, importantly, pointing it out, while enjoying the meats you liked as a child, and still like.

This way a person gets plenty of meat - and they get to feel/be superior to the people who think they are superior for refusing to eat a tube steak. Since rich people would throw away the by-products, the truly superior person is in essence a dumpster diver, which is ironic in a capitalist culture. The way to remove some of the irony, is to somehow make the rich people feel guilty and inferior when they decide to eat a big steak.

This plan would be dumb if rich people might stop eating steak, because if they did, there would be no hot dogs. So, if all goes well, when rich people eat steak, they will feel superior and inferior at the same time, instead of just superior like they always have.

If meat might provide a means of making rich people feel inferior in some way, then why not use meat for this purpose, as long as it does not screw up the hot dog supply?

One more point is that an expensive hot dog, should arouse suspicion. Nobody said that rich people are not smart. The more expensive the hot dog gets, the cheaper the steak gets, and vice versa. As any environmentalist will say, steak needs to get more expensive, not less. This means that hot dogs need to get less expensive, for environmental reasons.