More-With-Less: What Shopping at the Co-op has to do with Wallstreet Protests

I have this cookbook: a spiral-bound number made of a cardboard cover and sun-yellowed typing paper. The cover is adorned with a photo of dried beans, millet, rice, a bit of rolled out dough, making the shape of what I can assume is a dove. It's very flower-child, which is why I was surprised during college to discover it in my parents' collection of homemade church-lady cookbooks (one for every season, every church?) and Joy of Cooking tome. Then I read the subtitle: "suggestions by Mennonites on how to eat better and consume less of the world's limited food resources". Agh. So the hippies had a Jesus-angle.

Turns out, the copyright is the year of my parents' wedding, 1976. As I appropriated the book (as my mom said, "just take it, we never used it much anyway") I've found the recipes for just about every country's version of rice and beans (except, of course, from Western Europe and Scandinavia), cheese dishes from souffle to fondu to torta, stews made from peanuts, and breads from soy flour. As a strict vegetarian, this book became a God-send (thank you, Jesus!), even though there are dishes with meat ("basic meat curry" and "hamburger stew"). Because the cookbook is premised on the idea that there is limited food and a world hunger problem, the Mennonites understand that having a more plant-based diet is beneficial for stretching the world's nutritional resources.

Since then: nutritional research has blown up in the past 35 years. We now understand a plant-based diet is really beneficial for the majority of Americans who have really sedentary lifestyles (hello! I literally read and write for a living). Less heart disease, less obesity if done in a balanced way (and this cookbook leads the way in balancing proteins and grains for you!), more energy. So to know what's good for the individual body is also good for social justice makes cooking more-with-less that much more appealing.

But here's the other, really important thing about this cookbook: it gives you the opportunity to avoid corporate food sources. Recipes involve dried beans and legumes and grains like millet and barley. At the "giant" grocery store next to my apartment complex, I can barely find any of this stuff in more than a one pound/bag quantity. And it's usually in the "ethnic" food aisle. But I'm lucky. I live two blocks from The Community Market, a local food co-op. It's part of the reason I'm paying a slightly higher rent to be in the neighborhood I'm in. Once a month, I walk to the market, load up a couple totes with 60 bucks of dried bulk goods, keeping my grocery bill to 20 bucks a week the rest of the month (unless I buy wine). I haven't actually had a co-op membership before but I've realized something this week: investing in my co-op will encourage me to avoid corporate food as much as possible; it will put money back into my community and my pocket (by my getting a small percentage of the proceeds at the end of the year), and it will be one tiny thing I can do to support the Wallstreet protests.

My food politics have changed since I was an out-and-proud vegetarian (perhaps another post) but one thing remains the same since my early treatment days: I care about social justice and understand that what I consume is part of it. So this week, more-with-less is my stand in solidarity.