NON-Consumptive Eating
I know, I know. It’s a weird way to talk about eating, as if we can eat WITHOUT consuming something! Sort of an oxymoron, I know.
But I came up with this term a few years ago as I was looking through my cupboards for something to add to dinner. I realized I was looking for something NON-CONSUMPTIVE.
What did I mean by that?
I’m a pretty frugal person in the kitchen. I got it honest…my parents are wonderfully frugal! (Frugal, by the way, not cheap. There’s a difference, and it’s easy to misjudge. “I” - spoken in tones of pious virtue - “am FRUGAL. HE” - sneering down my nose - “is CHEAP!”) Anyway, that frugality was then honed in the fires of raising 5 kids on one income. Yep, we had our share of financial struggles over the years; it wasn’t always pretty, and we couldn’t always afford organic!
Even back then, though, when the kids started having health issues prescriptions couldn’t fix, we found ways to buy good food. Folks, we ALL decide where to put our money! Disney vacations, high-dollar concert tickets, and Gap Kids clothes just never were that important to us. Eating well to get rid of gut issues like candida WAS.
Now, saying I’m frugal in the kitchen is kind of funny, because I rarely choose the cheap options when it comes to food! First, over the years of raising kids, I’ve seen what “cheap food” does to our bodies, brains, and moods. (In fact, I chatted about it in my “Every Mom Knows” post.) Plus, being a small farmer myself and understanding the costs involved in raising real food, I am happy to support other local farmers to get the things I can’t or don’t want to grow myself…and let’s hope they’re charging enough to stay in business so I can buy their food next year, too! Things like grains, beans, beef, and pork. And even for the things I still buy at the grocery store, quite often I’m springing for the organic option. Not ALWAYS…I don’t want to give a false impression. I’m no perfectionist! But when I reasonably CAN buy organic, I do.
And yet even being willing to spend top dollar for good food, when I look at what the average American family spends on groceries, we spend about half that amount. Probably less, since I include toilet paper, shampoo, and dryer sheets in my “grocery” budget. One important factor in that has been my focus on Non-Consumptive Eating.
Now, before I jump into the “topic proper,” let me acknowledge that I DO raise a large garden, which obviously helps in keeping our grocery bill down! Those of you who work full-time outside the home may not have the flexibility to do that. But if you’ll think outside the box, you will think of things that will help keep YOUR bill down, as well, such as buying in bulk and in season. Get to know your farmers! For instance, I am friends with some folks who supply organic food to a large grocery chain. However, the grocery chain only accepts the “firsts,” the perfect veggies, so we are able to snap up the seconds for a great price. Fresh, local, in-season, organic…and a bargain, to boot! How great is that?
Another hint here is to get yourself on a little bit of a rhythm. My family enjoys Taco Tuesday (supplemented with inexpensive pinto beans to cut down on pricey meat), sourdough pizza every Friday, and biscuits & gravy every Sunday morning. Besides reducing the “what’s for dinner” panic, this also keeps my grocery bill low, because I can easily keep these simple ingredients on hand. I’m not apt to run out of them and waste time & money going to the grocery store, where I’m also likely to pick up “just a few” impulse items $!$!$!
So what is CONSUMPTIVE Eating, and how do we go NON-consumptive?
Consumptive eating is making something NEW when you still have leftovers in the fridge. Consumptive eating is making your grocery list according to whim or what sounds good at the moment rather than first looking to see what you’ve already got waiting on your shelves. Consumptive eating is wasting gas, time, and energy going to the grocery store because you don’t remember what you put in the freezer two months ago.
Consumptive eating is getting take-out because you don’t have a game plan for feeding your family when you’re “too tired to cook”!
Now, I’ve already mentioned it, but let me say it again: I AM NOT A PERFECTIONIST! I’m just like you…sometimes I, too, decide Chinese take-out is JUST the thing…especially after a busy day of processing chickens. Suddenly a “date night” with my hubby (the kids are pretty well grown up and probably aren’t home, anyway) sounds pretty darned good!
But if you find that instead of just being the occasional treat, grabbing take-out or swinging into the drive-thru is becoming a weekly routine, then you’ve fallen into the habit of…Consumptive Eating. And given enough time, it’ll become even MORE habitual, MORE firmly entrenched in your family rhythms, and a few things will happen.
You - and, worse, your children - will get addicted to junk food. We know it intellectually, but we forget that junk food is specifically DESIGNED, via added sugars, added sodium, and MSG’s, to be addicting! And once we get addicted to the bad stuff, the good stuff just doesn’t have the same appeal.
Our health will decline. Do I need to prove this? We’ve experienced it in our family; you’ve probably seen it in yours. Just watch the documentary SuperSize Me. ‘nuff said.
Our budgets will suffer. Keep a notebook for one month of your expenditures. You might be surprised how much all that “cheap food” is actually costing you. Believe me…good food, even “EXPENSIVE” food, well-prepared and well-managed, is a bargain in comparison.
So, as someone who puts up a lot of her own food, consumptive eating for me would be buying that fun can of Rotel tomatoes when I could grab a jar of my own home-canned tomatoes and just crumble up some of my dehydrated chili peppers. Consumptive eating might even be deciding to fix a pot of tomato-based chili after my own tomatoes are gone, meaning I’ve got to buy more from the store. NON-consumptive eating in this case would be going with white-bean chicken chili (if chili I MUST have), if those are the ingredients I’ve GOT.
Non-consumptive eating takes us back to Grandma’s kitchen. I’m “your local chicken lady,” so let’s start there. What did Grandma do with the chicken carcass after dinner? Grandma stood there and picked every last little bit of chicken off of those bones. That became the basis of her next meal or went into a sandwich for Grandpa’s lunch box. Those chicken bones turned into broth for soup…and if there was a family pet, the bones, softened by l-o-n-g cooking, went to Fido. (Heck, if there was an invalid in the house, the bones were cooked until soft and blended up into the soup for extra nutrition. Nope, I don’t do that…but I would.)
Non-consumptive eating is adding some rice or beans to my soup, stew, or enchiladas so there’s enough for tomorrow’s lunches.
Non-consumptive eating is daring to peek into the back corner of my pantry to see what I’ve forgotten about…and putting it on the menu. Who knows? You might come up with your new family favorite! And even if it isn’t just to-die-for-scrumptious, well, to quote my mom, “It’ll keep body and soul together.”
Non-consumptive eating is deciding THIS week I’m going to go through one shelf of my freezer and use SOMETHING from it in every meal, until it’s all gone.
As a Christian, a couple verses often run through my mind:
The slothful man roasteth not that which he took in hunting: but the substance of a diligent man is precious. Proverbs 12:27.
When I go to the trouble of growing something in the garden, only to let it rot on the ground, I’m a slothful woman. When I take the money my hard-working husband made and buy groceries with it and then I let them wither away in the fridge, “burn” in the freezer, or expire in the pantry, I’m a slothful woman. Slothful: it’s a harsh word, but sometimes I need to be brought up hard against truth.
Much food is in the tillage of the poor: but there is that is destroyed for want of judgment, Proverbs 13:23.
I allowed some of my garden produce last year to go to waste, because I was “busy.” What that really means is that there was much food in my tillage, but through want of judgment (I didn’t use my time wisely), that food was destroyed. Or when I decide make something new and exciting for dinner because I’m bored with my leftovers, and those leftovers go to waste, I have no right to complain about the price of groceries, because I allowed what I DID have to be destroyed!
So you see I’m not perfect on this. But my dad has a saying: “Just because I'm not 100% consistent doesn't mean I'm 100% inconsistent.” This is a journey. There’s always room for improvement!
An area I would personally like to improve is in how I feed my egg layers. Their eating is extremely consumptive! Even though, yes, they eat bugs and grass and kitchen scraps, the vast majority of their food is carted in. Yep…it’s good feed. Yep…it’s organic. Yep…it’s from a local farmer, and I love supporting him. But how wonderful, how much more sustainable it would be if I grew more of their food here! Maybe a corn plot just for them…maybe some barley they could self-harvest. Then they’re still consuming…but in a less consumptive way, if that makes sense. Like I said, it’s a journey, and we get there, as we get anywhere, one step at a time.
Want one more hint for going “non-consumptive”? Learn the Traditional Skills you need to do it yourself! We’re in the midst of our Everyday Sourdough classes right now. Sourdough bread, so VERY good for your gut health, is SUPER expensive to buy and SUPER cheap to make yourself! CLICK HERE to register for Saturday, February 21; CLICK HERE to register for Thursday, February 26.