The Rationing Challenge

The Dollar Stretcher recently ran an interesting article on food rationing during World War II. It talked about the challenges of learning to make do with less of certain foods and speculated about how difficult it might be for Americans today to deal with the same kind of restrictions. This struck me as a much more interesting idea than the basic Food Stamp Challenge, in which people try to get by for a week on the same grocery budget they'd have on SNAP, the program formerly known as food stamps. NJ political superstar Cory Booker made headlines by doing one of these last year, and he said the hardest part for him was going without caffeine all week. However, when I contemplated taking this challenge back in 2011, I concluded that for me, the challenge would actually be a waste of money; in order to stick to a food-stamp budget for only one week, I'd have to abandon many of the money-saving strategies I normally use, like buying in bulk and stocking up. Trying to live under the rules of WWII-style rationing, by contrast, sounded like it might be interesting and even instructive.

Before I could decide whether to try it, though, I first had to figure out just what the exact rules were for rationing in this country. This proved to be a much harder question to answer than I had expected. I tried Googling phrases like "World War II rationing amounts" and "WWII rationing rules," and I kept getting pages that named the allotted amounts for some foodstuffs but not others. Every time I found a page with what I was looking for—a complete list of all rationed foods and the amounts allowed—it turned out to be about wartime Britain, rather than the United States.

After looking at lots of different sources, I finally figured out that the reason I couldn't find a site with a comprehensive list was that the rules for rationing in the United States were actually really complicated. For some foods, like sugar and coffee, you just got coupons entitling you to a set amount. However, most foods were distributed using a point-based system. Each household received two different coupon books, red and blue, each containing a number of stamps with different point values. Each foodstuff had two prices, one in dollars and one in ration points, and both prices fluctuated based on available supplies. If you think shopping on a budget today is complicated, just imagine trying to do it with two entirely separate budgets and two entirely separate prices for each item—all back in the days before pocket calculators, let alone smartphones.

Eventually, I found a reliable, comprehensive source: a middle school history lesson backed up by primary and secondary sources. Based on these sources, together with Wikipedia, I was able to put together the following list for a Rationing Challenge:

• Sugar: limited to 1/2 pound per person per week. (This includes table sugar only; honey, molasses, and syrup were not rationed.)
• Coffee: limited to 1 pound per person every 5 weeks.
• Red stamp items (includes meat, cheese, and fats/oils): 16 points per person per week. Point costs for different items are shown on this chart. The chart does not include fish and poultry, which were not rationed. [EDIT, 4/21/26: The link above no longer works, but there's are similar charts on this page from the National Park Service and this page from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.]
• Blue stamp items (includes canned and frozen fruits, vegetables, and juices): 48 points per person per week. Point prices for different items appear on the same chart.

Eggs, flour, and fresh milk were not rationed in this country, so a U.S. Rationing Challenge would be a lot less severe than the British version, which would impose limits of just three pints of milk and one egg per person per week. (According to the BBC, vegetarians could swap their meat coupons for other items, but it isn't clear how much you could get for them.) However, lots of nonfood items were rationed on this side of the pond, including shoes, tires, fuel oil, and gasoline. Gas rations varied depending on how "essential" your job was, but most families got just 3 to 4 gallons per week. In addition, a nationwide speed limit of 35 miles per hour was imposed—not to conserve fuel so much as tire rubber. I can't begin to imagine Americans putting up with that today, war or no war.

So, if I attempt this challenge, I think I should ration my use of gasoline as well as foodstuffs, just to get the full historical picture as accurately as possible. However, I do not intend to follow the 35-mile-per-hour speed limit, which would be counterproductive for today's cars (which get their best gas mileage at around 45 mph rather than 35) and unsafe on today's highways (which hadn't been built yet during WWII and which often have a required minimum speed of 45 mph). As for the restrictions on items like shoes and car tires, those wouldn't really apply for a one-week challenge, since those aren't items I would typically buy in any given week.

One difference between this and a Food Stamp Challenge is that it wouldn't require us to do all our shopping for the challenge week at once, eschewing all items already in our pantry and fridge. We could continue to use food we already have in the house, just as long as we didn't use more of it than our weekly ration stamps would allow. So we would not have to risk overspending on certain items just to stay within the limits of the challenge.

On the whole, I think this is worth a try. My plan is to do a little bit of number crunching over the weekend and start the challenge on Monday. This shouldn't interfere with my plans to attend the opening of the local farmers' market next Friday, as fresh produce was not rationed. In fact, since we already have our own little backyard garden planted, we can include eating from our own Victory Garden as part of the historical experience. (It may seem like cheating to do this challenge in summertime, when there's lots of fresh produce available, but I think it's actually more realistic than doing it in the winter, when there is still lots of fresh produce in the stores, but it's mostly imported from California or Mexico. Under those conditions, it would be much harder to figure out which items should be allowable, because I don't know how much fresh out-of-season produce was available in stores back in the '40s. If we do the challenge in June, we can realistically eat whatever's in season.)

So, assuming all goes according to plan, I will be posting throughout the next week to let you know how the challenge progresses.

Cherries!

Wow, these little cherry bushes are real little troopers. They've only been in the ground a couple of months, they're not even three feet high, and yet here they are already trying to set fruit. Four of the five plants have at least one little berry on them. One of them, the largest Joy bush, has so many that she became top-heavy and started to flop over; Brian had to add a stake to help hold her head up.

So, while I don't like to count my cherries before they're ripe, it looks like there is at least a chance that the Fruit of the Month for September might be our very first tiny crop of Meader bush cherries.

Postscript: I just heard from a friend and regular reader of the blog that she has been having trouble posting comments. So I've altered the format of the comments page (again) to see if that works better. Would all you folks out there in Readerland mind trying to post a comment on this post just to see if it works? If I don't get any comments, I'll know something is amiss that may require a chat with Google support. Thanks.

Necessities versus luxuries

About a week ago, the Live Like a Mensch blog ran a post arguing that the secret to living below your means is to lower your standards. The basic argument was that it's much easier to meet all your needs if you simply redefine certain necessities as luxuries. One example she gave from her own life was the 20-year-old Volvo that her husband drives despite the merciless teasing of friends and coworkers. For them, having a safe and reliable car is a necessity; having a car that looks good, or one that was built in this century, would be a luxury. She then invited her readers to name some things that they'd determined to be wants rather than needs, regardless of what others may think.

Interestingly, a similar question had been posed that same week in my Tip Hero newsletter: "What 'Necessity' Do You Think Is a Waste of Money?" Readers' responses included new clothes, coffeehouse brews, makeup, bottled water, paper towels, and high-end cell phones. It particularly interested me to see how the definition of a necessity differed from person to person. Some, for instance, declared a cell phone to be a luxury rather than a necessity, while others said that a landline phone was a luxury because they can use their cell (or VOIP) for everything. One reader declared central air conditioning a luxury, while readers who lived in South Carolina and Texas insisted that air conditioning was a necessity for them.

All this got me thinking, as I often have before, about where the line between luxuries and necessities lies in my own life. I suspect that many of the things I consider luxuries would be necessities for many of my peers, yet some of the things that are necessities for me might be luxuries for others. For example:

• High-speed Internet is a necessity; I've tried working from home without it, and it literally wasn't feasible. Cable TV, by contrast, is a luxury—especially since we already have high-speed Internet, which gives us access to nearly as rich a field of entertainment choices.
• A landline phone is a necessity; a cell phone is a luxury. This, again, is because of my job. It's essential to me to have a reliable connection in my home, which is also my workplace, but it's not important—or even desirable—to be reachable everywhere I go. For someone with a different job, one that required them to be on the road a lot, the cell phone might be a necessity and the landline a luxury.
• Central heating in my home is a necessity; air conditioning is a luxury. (An air conditioner in my car, by contrast, I consider a necessity—not so much for cooling as for defogging the windows. Around here, heat is unpleasant but not usually dangerous, while windows you can't see through can be deadly.)
• Hot and cold running water is a necessity. Separate sinks in the bathroom are a luxury.
• A dishwasher is a luxury. A microwave oven is a necessity.
• Having all the meats we purchase be free-range/humanely raised is a necessity, though it isn't a necessity to eat very much of them. Convenience foods of all kinds are luxuries. (Well, maybe not breakfast cereal.)

None of this is meant as an argument that the only things worth spending money on are necessities. On the contrary, for me the main point of frugality is that it frees up money to spend on things that are important to you, and that category is bound to include some luxuries along with the necessities. As Rose Schneiderman observed back in 1911, "The worker must have bread, but she must also have roses." We all need to feed our souls, as well as our bodies. The meaning of frugality is not, and never should be, to do without roses; it's to provide both bread and roses in as inexpensive and sustainable a way as possible. Homemade Golden Egg Bread, for instance, at about 85 cents a loaf, and roses cut from our very own backyard rosebush for free.

Ambrosia

I'm down to my last champagne mango, and I think I may have to go get more, because I've just discovered something absolutely amazing to do with them.

You start with a piece of this Korean popped snack, which I discovered at the H-Mart. I'm absolutely enthralled by this stuff. As far as I can tell, they just make a slurry of rice flour, wheat flour, water, and a bit of oil, and then they put it in this machine that sort of flash-cooks it at high heat until it shoots out with a loud popping sound. (You can watch this fascinating process here.) The result is a feather-light, crispy cake with a taste and texture that I can best describe as something like a giant Rice Krispie. They literally melt in your mouth, especially when dunked first in a cup of hot chocolate or coffee. Best of all, they're only about 15 calories each, so I can indulge to my heart's delight without putting my waistline in any real danger. The only snag is that they're a bit pricey—three dollars for a bag of 15 cakes—so I have to try to pace myself and not gobble the whole thing in two days.

Anyway, when trying to analyze what I found so addictive about these things, I mentally compared the lightness of their texture to whipped cream (which I also adore), and that put the idea in my head of trying one topped with some whipped cream and diced fruit. So I diced up half of my last champagne mango, arranged it on a cake, added a puff of whipped cream, and ohhhhhhhmigod.

This stuff is ambrosia. It's a lot like a Pavlova, only much easier to make. The juice from the mango just barely softens the cake, so it's already melting a little bit when you put it in your mouth. And with the sweet, juicy fruit tucked between the puffy rice cake and the fluffy whipped cream, it's like biting into a fruit-filled cloud. The only fault I can find with it is that it's a bit difficult to eat neatly; the bits of fruit tend to spill off the edge. But that's easily remedied by breaking the cake into pieces before adding the topping.

As desserts go, this is incredibly light in calories as well as in texture. A single champagne mango has 110 calories, which means that half of one has only 55. A piece of popped snack has 15, and a 2-tablespoon puff of whipped cream also has 15. Of course, I have no illusions that I actually used only 2 tablespoons of whipped cream making this, but if I managed to keep it down to four tablespoons, that's only 30 calories, for a total of exactly 100 calories. That's about the same as two Oreos, and way more decadent.

For an Epicurean delight, it's not that expensive, either. The popped snack costs $3.00 for 15 cakes, so that's 20 cents each; the champagne mangoes cost $5.00 for eight, so that's another 31 cents. The can of whipped cream I just bought for $1.50 says that it contains 37 servings, so if I use two servings to make this dessert, that's another 8 cents. Total: 59 cents per serving, making this a decidedly affordable luxury.

The tricky part, I suspect, is going to be talking myself out of using the low cost and calorie count as an excuse to scarf down two or three of these in a row.

Book bounty

Last weekend, our local library held its annual book sale. This event is always a madhouse. The library spends the whole week collecting donated books and recordings from residents, and sorting them into boxes in a back room. Then on Saturday morning, even before the library is officially open, they unlock a back door and let in half the population of Highland Park, as it usually seems at the time, to paw through the thousands of volumes that are roughly grouped into categories on tables in that small back room...and in boxes under those tables...and on additional tables lining the back hallway...and spilling out onto the back lawn.

We go to this sale every year, and every year I forget until I get there just what a zoo it is. The outdoor area isn't too bad; although the books are just loosely (and not always accurately) grouped into boxes laid out in rows on the ground, there's generally enough room for more than one person at a time to examine each row. But the crowd grows much denser once you pass through the door, and denser still when you push your way into the little back room. The tables are so tightly packed together that there's just enough room for one person to squeeze between them, and no room at all for a second person to slip past while the first is browsing the books. This means that if I want to look at the contents of a particular table, I often have to wait for someone else to get out of the way first—and even after I gain access, I don't really feel free to take my time browsing, knowing that I might be blocking someone else's way to the books.

The upshot of this is that, although we're surrounded by thousands of temptingly cheap books, we usually end up actually buying very few. Personally, I no longer even attempt to look at every volume that's on offer. Outdoors, I may take the time to at least glance at every title in the boxes of cheap sci-fi and romance paperbacks, but once I get inside, I concentrate on pushing my way through to the few sections that particularly interest me—gardening, games, economics—and thumbing through the volumes there as quickly as possible to see if there's anything worth a more careful look. If I do find something of interest, I take just a few seconds to read the cover blurb and maybe flip through the pages before making a decision and either adding it to my stack or putting it back. As I make my way through the room, I'll give a cursory glance to the rows of novels arranged on the tables, and maybe even pick up a title that jumps out at me, but I don't take the time to read every title—and I don't even try to look at the ones on the floor. This year, after about half an hour of fighting our way through the crowd, we ended up buying just four books:

• a hardcover collection of mystery stories from the '70s
• an Inspector Morse mystery
• a fantasy novel by Garth Nix (author of the Keys to the Kingdom series)
• The Starving Student's Vegetarian Cookbook

At $2 for the hardcover and $1 per paperback, we spent a total of 5 bucks.

So how is it that I now have a stack of nine additional books on the table in the back room, which has become our unofficial holding area for books waiting in line to be read? Answer: the real bonanza of the library book sale comes on the Monday after the sale officially ends, when the library offers up the leftover books for free to anyone who's willing to take them. I usually take home a lot more books from the post-sale than I do from the sale, not just because they're free, but also because I can actually take the time to consider books that I barely glanced at on Saturday. There are usually a couple of other people in the room browsing through the discarded books along with me, but nothing like the kind of crowds there were over the weekend, so I can "shop" at leisure. I can examine every title instead of just taking in a box at a glance and picking up anything that jumps out at me. If something looks potentially interesting, I can actually take the time to pick it up and read the first page; if it holds my attention that long, I have no reason not to go ahead and add it to the stack, because what the heck, it's free. As a result, I'm a lot more likely to end up with intriguing-looking titles by authors I've never even heard of, like Waiting for the Galactic Bus or The Dyke and the Dybbuk, which I'd most likely pass over unexamined during the hurly-burly of the sale itself. I even picked up a couple today that I probably would have been willing to pay for, like the Mother Earth News publication Living on Less (a potential treasure trove of material for this blog) and a collection of little-known writings by Ben Franklin, bearing the giggle-inspiring title Fart Proudly. These would almost surely have ended up in our bag if I'd spotted them on Saturday, but they were either hidden in the boxes under the tables or buried in a mass of other volumes that I couldn't take the time to examine carefully.

So, on the one hand, I'm quite pleased with my haul, which now totals 13 books for a mere 5 bucks. But at the same time, I'm a little disappointed to see how much potential revenue the library is losing out on by having so many books that clearly are of interest to people like me go unsold. I wonder if there's anything they could do to improve the shopping conditions at the sale so that people would find it easier to browse the books and, potentially, pick up more of them. The biggest problem is that the little back room where the sale is held is so small, so I'm wondering whether the sale might be able to spread into some additional spaces in the library, such as the individual study rooms. Perhaps each of these small rooms could house a different category of books, so that people interested in one specific genre could focus on those areas and avoid getting in the way of others who prefer different subjects.

The problem, I suspect, is that the librarians don't want the noise and bustle of the sale to interfere, any more than necessary, with the regular functions of the library. But I wonder whether maybe they would be better off just declaring the library officially closed for those two days and turning over the entire space to the sale. The library is already closed on alternating Saturdays and Sundays, so it would only be one day of library access lost. Of course, that would mean that those who use the library every weekend would have to go a week without, and it seems like that happens often enough as it is, with the library closing all weekend for every conceivable holiday from Presidents' Day to Labor Day. But then, maybe if they could raise enough money with the book sale, they might actually be able to keep it open more often, so the patrons would gain more library time in the long run.

On the other hand, maybe the sale is about as successful already as it can stand to be, and I should quit looking a gift book in the mouth.

Herb drying

Recently, "dried oregano" showed up on our grocery list. This is a spice we don't go through very quickly, and in fact, I couldn't really remember the last time we'd bought it. We do have a fresh oregano plant outside in our rather makeshift herb garden, which could probably supply more than enough to season our pizza sauce—but we also use oregano in our homemade chili powder, and for that it has to be dried so that you can pulverize it. Still, it seemed like a shame to buy dried oregano when we already had plenty of nice fresh oregano right outside our door, so I started wondering whether we could just pick some and dry it.

My first thought was to hang the branches up to dry, as we'd done earlier in the spring, when we trimmed back our overgrown sage plant. We tied the trimmings up in a bunch with an old bit of clothesline and hung it up in our shed, and after a couple of weeks it was dry enough to crumble by hand, yielding a nice jarful of dried sage. But the other day I came across an old ConsumerSearch blog entry of mine on unusual ways to use your microwave, and I was reminded that I'd read about a method of microwave-drying herbs in a matter of minutes. So I figured this was a good opportunity to put this technique to the test.

First, I picked a nice bunch of fresh oregano. I didn't have any idea how much I'd need, so I just broke off stems until I had a good handful.

Then, following the procedure on TheKitchn.com, I pulled the leaves off several of the stems and arranged them on a plate. They took up a lot more room this way, so I was only to use two or three of the stems I'd picked. The article said to put them on a paper towel to absorb moisture, but I don't keep paper towels in the house, so I used a paper napkin I'd saved from a takeout meal. If I hadn't had that either, I might have ventured to try it with a cloth instead, but for my first attempt, I figured I'd stick as close to the recipe as possible.

I zapped the plate for 30 seconds at a time, examining the leaves after each round. After just one zap, they'd shriveled to a fraction of their former size but still felt limp to the touch. After the second, they were mostly desiccated, but a couple of the leaves didn't feel completely stiff. I gave them 15 more seconds and they crumbled right in my hands.

As you can see, they shrunk considerably in the process, and crushing them reduced their volume still more. What I finally ended up with was no more than a tablespoon or two of dried oregano.

So while this process is indeed faster than air-drying, it has a very small yield. But since it only takes about ten minutes total, we can always use it again if we ever actually run out of oregano—or we could just pick a bigger bunch and dry it the old-fashioned way.

Too Many Projects, update

So, those of you who read my post a week ago may have been wondering whether we ever got around to the two Projects we had on our list—the broken desk fan and the persnickety toilet—or whether we decided to give in and just buy something new. Well, as it turns out, once we actually took a minute to look at these Projects carefully, they weren't quite so imposing after all. In fact, we were able to complete each one with just a few minutes of work, a little ingenuity, and some parts we already had.

Here's Project #1: the toilet chain and flapper. After it got stuck yet again on Monday, I got fed up and did a quick Google search on "toilet keeps running," and I found a Wikihow article with some troubleshooting instructions. It suggested feeding the chain through a plastic soda straw to keep it from snagging. We had plenty of soda straws, so I cut one down to what seemed a reasonable length, unhooked the chain, and fed it through. That worked somewhat, except that the chain was too rigid; its full weight now rested on the flapper, forcing it closed too soon instead of letting it drop slowly into place. So Brian modified my fix by cutting the straw in half at the middle, and then he replaced the hook at the end with a small key ring so that it couldn't slip off. Total time: 10 to 15 minutes. Total cost: $0.

Project #2, the old clip-on desk fan, was even more straightforward, though it did require a couple of tools. Brian simply took a slab of scrap wood (about 6 inches by 9) and screwed it to the bottom of the fan, first drilling out a hole in the middle of the wood to accommodate the head of the screw. He plunked it down on my desk and said, "That should do for now; I can make it look nicer later." But as I was looking at this slightly kludgey construct and wondering what would be the best way to go about making it look nicer, my eye happened to fall on the stack of gift cards I've accumulated over the past few years, hoping to find some way of reusing or recycling them. And just on an impulse, I picked up the stack and fanned it out around the base of the fan, as you see here. Okay, maybe it's not exactly elegant, but then, a cheap plastic fan isn't going to look elegant no matter what you do to it, so you might as well go for whimsical instead. Total time: about 10 minutes. Total cost: $0. Bonus: a way to put something that had been just taking up space on my desk to good use.

So I'm revising my views on the subject of turning things into Projects. I now think that the real problem is not an unwillingness to spend money to fix a problem: it's the assumption that solving a problem without spending money is going to require a major investment of time, and thus should be put off until you have a large block of time free. Sometimes, it turns out, a cheap fix is also a quick fix.