Merry Christmas to All

Once again, this is a bit off topic, but I had kind of an annoying experience today. My "Tip Hero" newsletter, which is a weekly compendium of frugal tidbits, included an article called "Christmas Spirit and Frugality." It talks about classic holiday movies and how they show the true spirit of Christmas, which is "A time of joy, celebration, peace and love - all things that you can't buy." It was kinda sappy, I'll admit, but its heart was in the right place. However, it was not well received by readers. The first response it got was:

"One BIG problem: Christmas is about the CHRIST! The word Cgristmas [sic] reflects it! The scriptures proclaim it! It is not about you and me and family and feelings, it is about HIM! God who condescended to robe Himself in flesh and give us what we need most: salvation! Pick another time to feel warm and fuzzy or look at cartoons or other of your "meaningful" stories. This story has been written already and it's not up for grabs so you can have joy, celebration, peace and love without HIM! There is no Christmas without Christ - PERIOD!"

Now, I have no problem with anyone celebrating Christmas as a religious holiday, and I can even sympathize with those who feel that the holiday has moved too far from its religious origins and plead to "keep Christ in Christmas." What I do have a serious problem with is folks who get up on their high horses and declare that everyone else is celebrating Christmas wrong. Hey, you, cut out all that celebrating and bonding with family! Knock it off with the "warm and fuzzy" stuff! It's about Jesus or nothing!

Do these people actually think this is a "Christian" attitude to take? Honestly, do they think their faith requires them to condemn other people's feelings of "joy, celebration, peace and love"? (It reminds me of this 10-year-old story from The Onion: "Religious Cousin Ruins Family's Christmas.")

So, in what I hope is a more appropriate Christmas spirit, I'd like to offer this little playlist of Christmas tunes that show the holiday in all its aspects—sacred and secular, positive and not so positive. (By the way, I tried to publish this as an iMix, but iTunes wasn't being cooperative, so I'm just listing the titles and artists instead.)

Shepherds Arise (Finest Kind)
Twelve Days After Christmas (Caltech Chamber Singers)
Wachet auf (Canadian Brass)
Jack Frost and the Hooded Crow (Jethro Tull)
River (Joni Mitchell)
Gaudete (Steeleye Span)
Chiron Beta Prime (Jonathan Coulton)
Straw Against the Chill (Bob Franke)
A Christmas Carol (Tom Lehrer)
O Holy Night (Studio 60 Soundtrack)
Homeless Wassail (Broadside Electric)
Christmas Trilogy (Finest Kind)
Oh Come Emmanuel (Aliqua)
Fairytale of New York (The Pogues)
Christmas / Sarajevo 12/24 (Trans-Siberian Orchestra)
Home By Another Way (Grant Baynham)
Christmas Letter Song (Lou & Peter Berryman)
This Mountain (Hugh Blumenfeld)

And as Tiny Tim says: God bless us, every one.

Buying the label

The most recent Freakanomics Radio podcast, available on the New York Times website, poses the interesting question: "Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?" It's worth listening to the entire story, but in a nutshell, the answer seems to be: yes, but only if you know they're expensive. When people know the price, they overwhelmingly prefer more expensive wines. But in blind taste tests, cheap wines actually do slightly better than pricey vintages. And that holds true across all groups of people, from wine-club newbies to highly trained sommeliers.

Now, I'm not a wine drinker, so I can't comment on this story from personal experience. But I have seen similar studies that highlight the same phenomenon for other products. For example, as I observed back in September, tap water is just as good, objectively speaking, as bottled water—it's just as clean, if not cleaner, and it does as well or better in blind taste tests. Yet bottled water drinkers consistently claim that bottled water in general, and their brand in particular, tastes better than tap water. In an episode of "Penn and Teller: Bullshit!" (which you can see here on YouTube) patrons in a fancy L.A. restaurant discourse at length about the differences in taste among bottled waters, even though each made-up brand is really the same L.A. tap water in a different bottle. (Amusingly, one of the varieties is called "L'Eau Du Robinet"—French for "tap water." You'd think at least a few of those highbrow diners would have been tipped off by that.) Also, Vance Packard reported sixty years ago in The Hidden Persuaders that most cigarette smokers are loyal to a specific brand, yet the majority of them can't correctly identify their own brand in a blind taste test.

And when you think about it, this same kind of misplaced brand loyalty really applies to all kinds of products, not just the ones you can taste. The Mercedes first became a status car because old-money types chose it for its reliability (eschewing the flashier models that were status cars at the time). But the Mercedes models of today no longer have a particularly good reliability record, yet people continue to buy them just for the name. And I've already mentioned how little premium in you get in terms of style or quality by buying designer clothes.

So what's the moral of this story? Well, there are probably all sorts of conclusions you could draw from it about social class, how expectations influence experience, the nature of brand loyalty, and the dangers of putting too much faith in of so-called experts. But for me, the most useful lesson for us ecofrugal folks is: the best snobbery is inverted snobbery. It's a lot cheaper than the other kind, and just as much fun. So if you're a wine fancier, I urge you to go pick up one of the best cheap wines and serve it at your next party. Depending on your inclinations, you could put it in a decanter and wait to surprise your guests with the name, or openly flaunt the cheap bottle (or box) and chat about how remarkable it is what a great wine 12 bucks will buy. "I just don't understand why some people pay hundreds of dollars for a bottle of wine," you can muse as make the rounds with the bottle, dressed in your best thrift-shop togs. "I mean, it's really just the label they're buying, isn't it? People who really appreciate wine only care about the taste."

What a crock!

I thought of something else that should go on the list of Stuff Ecofrugal People Like: slow cookers. We used ours a few nights back to prepare a mushroom-barley soup that we've made many times before, a delicious and hearty soup with only one real drawback: it takes about an hour and a half to cook. As a result, it's always been a weekends-only recipe. But last Friday we decided to just throw all the ingredients in the Crock-Pot and see how it came out, and behold, it was good. Brian actually thought the long slow cooking made it better, because the flavors had more time to blend.

Okay, that's all very nice, but what's so ecofrugal about it? Simple: by making it easier for us to cook at home on nights when we're busy, our slow cooker helps us avoid falling prey to the temptation of restaurant meals or convenience foods. And that's only one way that a slow cooker can contribute to the ecofrugal lifestyle. It can also:

• make it easier to use dry beans instead of the pricier, more packaging-intensive canned beans. The biggest barrier to cooking with dry beans is the prep time involved: they have to be soaked overnight, then drained, rinsed and cooked for at least two hours before you can use them in your recipe. A slow cooker doesn't eliminate the need for advance preparation, but it does eliminate most of the active work involved. You can just throw the beans in the crock the night before, cover them with water, drain and add fresh water in the morning, and set the pot on low. By the time you get home in the evening, the beans will be ready to use in whatever you're cooking. And if you cook up extra beans, which takes no extra work, you can freeze the rest and have beans in your freezer, ready to use (after just a few minutes in the microwave) on those occasions when you can't soak and cook them ahead of time.
• help you make your own veggie stock. This is a trick we learned from The Clueless Vegetarian (my favorite vegetarian cookbook and one I highly recommend for newcomers to vegetarian cooking). Basically, you keep a bag in your freezer in which you store all the vegetable scraps that you would normally discard: potato and carrot peelings, cut-off ends of onions, the innards of green peppers, mushroom stems (very flavorful), celery leaves, etc. When the bag gets full, you just dump it all into a pot of boiling water and cook it down. Normally, this would keep you tied to the house for two hours while the pot boils away on the stove, but with a slow cooker, you can just throw the veggies and water in first thing in the morning, set it on low, and strain it in the evening. (Or, if you prefer, you can throw everything in before bedtime, let it cook overnight, and strain it in the morning.) This is an ecofrugal three-fer: you get something for free that you'd ordinarily have to pay for, you avoid the packaging waste involved with canned stock, and you get additional use out of scraps that would normally be discarded. And the boiled-down mush that's left after you've strained off the stock can still go into the compost bin—you've just given it a head start on decomposition.
• make a small amount of meat go farther. We're not exclusively vegetarians, but we eat only meats that are humanely farmed, and those tend to be expensive. Roasting a whole chicken would run into money, but a single package of chicken legs makes several meals when cooked up with chick peas, onions, almonds and cinnamon in a Moroccan chicken stew. (Note: no tomatoes. Most recipes seem to call for tomatoes, but mine doesn't, and I like it without.) Stretching the meat out with other ingredients makes the meal much cheaper, and (since meat is more resource-intensive than veggies) greener as well. And, another bonus for meat-eaters: slow cooking is an ideal way to tenderize tougher, and thus cheaper, cuts of meat.

And those are just the ways I've tried personally. I've heard of other, less conventional uses as well, like setting up a batch of steel-cut oats overnight so you can have a hot breakfast in the morning. Cold cereal is one of the priciest items in our grocery cart, so eating oatmeal more often would certainly be a money-saver—and because it's less processed, it's greener too, not to mention chock-full of healthful whole grains. And the slow cooker could replace other convenience-type foods, too, like dessert. I've even heard of people baking cakes in it, though I've never quite understood how that works. Clearly, this ecofrugal tool has benefits far beyond my current knowledge—a rich field for further exploration.

Veggie Thanksgiving

This question came up at dinner tonight, and I thought I'd put it to all of you: if you wanted, for some reason, to serve a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner, how would you do it?

This isn't the same thing, mind you, as serving a Thanksgiving dinner at which some vegetarians will be present. Nowadays, my folks get a free-range bird for Thanksgiving from Griggstown Quail Farm (they ain't cheap, but it's only once a year) so that I can partake, but before they started doing that, I used to manage quite nicely on the potatoes and veggies and dressing and cranberries and salad and, of course, pie. I never ran any risk of going hungry. But supposing that you had to accommodate a crowd composed mostly of vegetarians, or that you yourself didn't want to serve any meat, how would you go about it?

Would you try to create a new, vegetarian centerpiece for the meal to take the place of the turkey? (This is the approach a lot of vegetarian magazines seem to take, which gives them an opportunity to shoot gorgeous cover photos of some show-stopping dish.) Or would you have just the traditional side dishes that usually surround the turkey, as described above, but without the bird? Or would you throw out the whole idea of the traditional Thanksgiving meal and do something else entirely?

I think my favorite approach is a sort of middle ground. I wouldn't scrap the traditional Thanksgiving menu entirely, but I wouldn't be limited by it. So rather than trying to construct a meal with one big main dish and a bunch of sides, I'd serve several hearty, seasonable dishes that would complement each other: butternut squash soufflé, succotash, "half baked" potatoes (i.e., cut in half and then baked, so they get nice and crispy), and of course, cranberry sauce. Probably some sort of green veggie, too, like that wonderful sesame spinach someone brought to the last Folk Project Evening of Music (note to whoever it was: if you're reading this, please send me the recipe). I might do some sort of dressing (you can't call it "stuffing" if it's not served in the bird) in place of the potatoes, since that's normally my favorite part of the meal and I think I'd miss it if it weren't there. On the other hand, it's really not the same without any gravy. Perhaps I'd just make a mushroom gravy to serve with it.

What do y'all think?

The Gates of Heaven

Well, it's official: I don't hate Bill Gates anymore.

I was already on the fence about him, because on the one hand, he turned Windows—which I loathe in all its forms—into the dominant operating system in the world, so that now even those of us who hate it have to use it in order to be compatible with everyone else. But on the other hand, he has taken the billions he made from this venture and invested them in things like worldwide vaccination and better agricultural techniques, helping to ward off famine and pestilence around the globe.

Then today, I read in my "Climate Minute" newsletter that Gates is devoting millions of dollars to the goal of developing carbon-free energy sources—the silver bullet as far as alleviating global warming is concerned. Here's a quote:

Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted—all the things you have in the house, the way industry works. I'm interested in making sure the poorest countries don't get left behind, so figuring out how they can get cheap energy is very, very important. Whether it's fertilizing crops or building housing, a lot of it comes down to energy.

Investigating further, I discovered that back in February, Bill Gates gave a talk about clean energy at the TED conference. One of the big technologies he highlighted in the talk was a new type of nuclear reactor that can run entirely on depleted uranium—something we already have enough of in this country to meet our energy needs for the next 100 years. The company in question is named TerraPower, and the new reactor it's developing is called a traveling wave reactor, or TWR. And Bill Gates is one of its biggest investors. So I'd definitely bet on it to be a financial success, because if that man can out-compete every rival with an inferior product, then just think what he'll be able to do with a truly superior technology. (I'd have bought some of their stock myself, but it's a privately held company.)

The point is, we're talking about a machine that can take spent nuclear fuel, something we desperately need to get rid of safely, and turn it into cheap, clean energy, something we desperately need more of. This is ecofrugality on a grander scale than anything I've ever conceived of before, and Bill Gates is the guy who's going to make it happen. How can I possibly go on hating him?

I still hate Windows, though.

Stuff Green People Like

Yesterday, my uncle Jay forwarded me this link to the blog "Stuff White People Like." It's a reference to the late, lamented TV show "My So-Called Life," which played out its first and only season during my senior year of college. I was indeed a huge fan of the show, but I was actually kind of ticked off by the implication that this is a characteristic I share with all "white people." After all, if all white people liked the show that much, then how come it got canceled after one season? Back at the time, liking that show was something that actually set us fans apart from mainstream America. So how does this guy Christian Lander reckon that being a fan of it now is simply a part of mainstream, white-American culture?

Perusing the blog in more detail, I found that what annoyed me about this one entry was really typical of the blog as a whole. It's obvious from the title of the blog that it's going to be nothing but blatant stereotypes, but that would be pardonable if the stereotypes were incisive and funny. The problem is, Lander is actually promulgating a stereotype of a very specific subculture of white America (and Canada)—the upper-middle-class, northeastern liberal elite so despised by the Tea Party—as belonging to "white people" in general. It's not just an invidious stereotype; it's an invidious, inaccurate stereotype. Sarah Palin probably hates everything on Lander's full list of Stuff White People Like, from organic food to Bob Marley.

Aside from the fact that this just promotes the idea that racial profiling is okay, as long as it's aimed at a privileged group (they're stereotypes of white people! Get it?), I couldn't help being annoyed at the wooliness of the stereotype itself. I pretty clearly belong to the group Lander is trying to satirize, and many of the things on his list (farmer's markets, David Sedaris, recycling) are things I like a lot. Yet there were also quite a few things on the list (having two last names, modern furniture, being offended) that I positively dislike, or at a minimum, have no interest in. And as I ticked my way down the list, I kept finding items that are antithetical to my ecofrugal lifestyle: you'll never catch me going to a place that charges $9 for a sandwich, especially when most of the items on the menu aren't vegetarian, nor am I about to pay $10 for a Moleskine notebook that isn't even made with recycled paper.

So I've decided to start my own list. It's called "Stuff Ecofrugal People Like," and it's for people who are really part of my tribe—regardless of skin color.

1. Public libraries. More books than one person could ever read, plus music recordings, movies, Internet access, and even community gatherings like film screenings, poetry readings, and classes for kids. All for free! (Well, not exactly free, since it's paid for by your tax dollars. But if you have to pay them anyway, you might as well get your money's worth, right?)

2. Creative reuse. Take an object that's no longer useful for its original purpose, and turn it into something else—the more unexpected, the better. Plant flowers in an old boot. Turn an obsolete Macintosh computer into a fish tank. Make coasters out of unwanted CD-ROMs. Make your own notebooks out of scrap paper (much more frugal than Moleskine). This is an ecofrugal three-fer: it keeps waste out of landfills, saves the money and resources that would otherwise be used on new stuff, and gives you the creative kick of seeing an old object in a new way.

3. Freecycle. Also a three-fer, this allows you to prevent waste, get rid of stuff you don't want, and get useful stuff for free. It's even better than thrift shops and yard sales, which ecofrugal people also love.

4. The Habitat ReStore, where you can get all manner of useful stuff for your home (from a single nail to a complete set of kitchen cabinets), save resources, and support a good cause all at the same time.

5. Wasted Spaces, a home-improvement show hosted by a sexy Australian who actually makes an existing space work better instead of tearing everything out and replacing it. A typical budget for this show is around $500 rather than $5,000 or $15,000 or $25,000, and it's great fun to see all the creative ways Karl finds to make use of space that the homeowner probably never realized was there. (Did I mention he's a sexy Australian?)

6. Trader Joe's, which sells green goodies like organic raisins, Fair-Trade coffee, and free-range chicken for lower prices than anyplace else, along with a tempting array of tasty prepared treats like maple sandwich cookies, crumpets, and fizzy limeade. (To keep the frugal in ecofrugal, we limit ourselves to one non-list purchase per visit.)

7. Biking to work. Hybrid cars are nice, but they ain't cheap. A bike, by contrast, costs little to buy and maintain, uses no gas at all, and gives you some exercise into the bargain. Plus it enables you to skirt right around traffic jams and feel smug.

That's all I have so far. If there's anything else you think really needs to be on the list, post a comment and let me know.

Oops

Meant to post this here on November 2, but I accidentally put it up on the old blog instead:

Waah, no election day freebies!

Remember back in 2008, when you could get free coffee, ice cream, and other goodies just for voting? I missed out on the free ice cream that year, so this year I was determined to find out just what kinds of free stuff were available. So, before running out to vote, I did a quick Google search on "election day freebies." Sorting through the results was a bit tricky, because most of them were actually from 2008. At last I found a link specifically about the 2010 election—but instead of listing free goodies, it talked about the lack of any. Yes, it appears that all those companies that were so eager to help get out the vote back in 2008 have now decided that there's nothing wrong with voter apathy after all.

OK, I realize that participating in the democratic process is supposed to be its own reward, but it's still a disappointment. It's like going to give blood and finding they're all out of cookies.