The company my husband works for has challenged their employees to eat for a week at the World Poverty Income Level: $1.50 a day person.
In our household, the challenge falls to me, the main preparer of meals, and if not preparer, certainly the main planner.
With just a tiny bit of hesitation, I accepted the challenge. 17 became a self-proclaimed vegetarian at age ten, in a family of mostly meat-eaters, so I have relied on a repertoire of vegetarian dishes that most of us enjoy. I knew the only way to pull of the challenge would be to eliminate meat from our diet. I allowed myself a cheat on eggs, since my chickens are producing at least two dozen a week now.
With this is mind, I planned our menu for the week:
Sunday: Quiche and Green Beans
Monday: Macaroni and Cheese and Baby Broccoli (on sale at the grocery store)
Tuesday: Black Beans (soaked overnight and cooked on the stove Monday afternoon) and Rice and Salad
Wednesday: Vegetable Soup and my homemade English Muffin Bread
Thursday: Black Bean and Cornbread Casserole and Salad
Friday: another family favorite, my One Pot Lentil Casserole
Sunday afternoon, I made one trip to the grocery store. I purchased no meat, no sweets, no snacks (with the exception of the store brand version of Ritz crackers for my husband, who often works through lunch and comes home starving). Because I am not starting my pantry from scratch, I also did not have to buy coffee, tea, butter, oil or spices. I stuck to my list, and spent just under $48. By my calculations, I was only technically allowed $40. 50; already I had gone over budget. In addtion to eggs, this amount didn't include milk, which we have delivered every Tuesday. I did splurge on an Angel Food Cake on the bakery clearance rack for $1.50. With the strawberries I purchased, I would be able to serve dessert one night.
Still, I decided, the lesson would be learned.
For me, it means that when I add cooking to copying Anna Karenina pages, my creative time begins to feel endangered.
Sophia Tolstoy did a good chunk of the cooking for her family. She likely had the help of a servant or two, but Leo was a particular eater. At some point, he became a strict vegetarian for philosophical and health reasons. He stopped drinking milk. Sophia had to plan his meals carefully and planned additional dishes for the rest of the family. And remember too that this was a time when most foods were produced at home. Jams, eggs, milk: all these were harvested at home. Bread too would have to be baked. Meat hunted or purchased at the market. The stove heated with a fire which must be regularly stoked.
While Leo Tolstoy wrote and preached equality for the peasants, his own creative time came at the cost of his wife's.
So why am I not feeling overwhelmed? Why am I feeling energetic and motivated this morning to get to my chores AND my writing?
The answer, I think, is twofold.
First, as Grace Paley once told a journalist, the best way to be a successful a writer is to keep your overhead low. If I can go to the grocery store and spend one-fourth of what I usually do, I am exchanging one kind of work for another. And is there perhaps something more grounding and more connected to my creativity in spending my time soaking and cooking beans, baking my own bread, cutting up the stale end pieces to make croutons, feeding and collecting eggs from the chickens rather than getting dressed in appropriate clothes and driving my car to a job so that I can make money to buy the items I need to feed my family?
The second part of my answer is something that I believe Leo Tolstoy himself may stumbled upon. In our over-fed, giant-portioned, dessert-every-day-because-we-deserve-it, can't-have-an-afterschool-activity-without-providing-a-snack, have we left room for yearning? For hunger? For wanting something? What drives us to get up off the couch, turn off the television, and create?
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