There was a man named Jim Cawquest who lived in a tiny Cape Cod style house that overlooked Delaware Bay along southern coastal Delaware. At just a few hundred square feet, you could call it a "tiny house". A natural born control freak, Jim loved the tiny house in part because he had one hundred percent control of everything in it and could run his household with the precision and efficiency of a Swiss watch. A solar-powered Swiss watch I should add, since one hundred percent of the house's power was generated on site with a small array of American-made solar panels.
He wasn't from Delaware but he liked the vibrations and the people he met there seemed sensible and grounded. The place was refreshingly different from where he grew up in New York State, and an interesting contrast to the West Coast, where he had spent much of his adult life.
Among other things, Jim loved to micromanage his kitchen and put what he dubbed a "zero-waste policy" into full effect.
He detested what he called "mainstream American food behaviors" and swore to himself as a child that when he got older he would exact revenge on those behaviors.
There were memories of going to the supermarket with his mother, who like the other suburban housewives filled their shopping cart to the brim with groceries enough for a large family. Then there was the eternal waiting in line at the checkout counter as one overflowing shopping cart after another was slowly checked out - so slowly that for a child in the prime of their youth it was torture.
There were also memories of the stress placed on his mother to buy enough food and plan the meals for a large family - enough stress at times that it undermined the whole pleasure of nourishing oneself. And what was the point of that?
"Not on my watch" he thought.
His motto both in general and in the kitchen was "Have only what you need and use all of what you have".
It wasn't only the "mainstream" kitchen behaviors that he clashed with. When he was in his twenties he lived for a year in a house share in Oregon with people who were very health conscious and into organic food and preparing healthy meals. At the time Jim thought this might be exactly what he needed.
But the kitchen behaviors there also drove him crazy. His housemate Newton loved to cook and would not shy from grandiose undertakings. That part was fine, but Jim - who helped with the shopping - noticed that large amounts of food waste were generated on two ends. First, the raw materials that weren't used in the cooking projects tended to sit in the fridge until they went bad, and secondly, Newton always prepared too much food, so that the abundant leftovers also sat around until they went bad as well.
This did not sit well with Jim, who at the time was living on a very tight budget. He wasn't sure which bothered him more: expired foods taking up valuable space in the refrigerator, or the sight of all of it being heaved in the trash.
One day he confronted Newton with what he thought was a very well thought-out syllogism : "If you buy food, and you don't actually eat it, and it winds up in the trash instead, you are by extension putting your hard-earned money in the trash".
For some crazy reason Newton saw things differently, but Jim could never fully figure it out. It seemed that even for these enlightened folks who valued organic meals prepared at home, certain "mainstream American food behaviors" were at work. These behaviors included buying too many ingredients and generating too many leftovers.
By contrast, in Jim's compact kitchen in the Delaware house, every square inch of counter, cupboard and refrigerator space was accounted for. Containers of food never expired, because Jim consumed their contents well ahead of their expiration dates and placed the well cleaned containers in his recycling bin.
He appreciated that his neighbors, Dr. and Mrs. Silverfish, were as fastidious as he was when it came to recycling. They all shared, even bonded on, a distaste for dirty recycling bins and did what they had to do to keep them clean. This included wiping them out with wet wipes, hosing them down, and letting them air dry in the sun. All three agreed that if they ever caught someone putting any sort of "real" garbage in any of the bins they would chase them down and give them a long-winded lecture on America's overflowing landfills and poor history of reducing and properly dealing with waste.
Good people they were, the Silverfish's.
Anyway, the recyclable containers of banana yogurt in Jim's fridge were carefully monitored. Like a supermarket, he had it down to a science: how many containers would fit, his general rate of consumption, and in theory how often he should head to the store to restock. But some weeks he didn't crave banana yogurt as much, so rather than mindlessly restocking the shelf, he mindfully explored how it felt not to have banana yogurt. There was no point in buying more until the craving returned, he reasoned.
This was the principle that he also applied to food generally. There were days, and weeks even, when he didn't crave food as much. His body was telling him to slow down and apply some "intermittent fasting". Doing so had multiple benefits.
Not only was he saving money by slowing down consumption, and helping reduce Delaware's solid waste burden, but he took great pleasure in watching his shelves empty out. With every bowl of organic white popcorn he ate, and every can of tomato bisque he prepared, the amount of free space in his kitchen increased. This he saw as a positive metaphor for what was going on in his body: an emptying out, a cleansing. It was healthy to periodically drain the pipes.
After the pipes were drained and flushed out with copious amounts of lemon water, and a period of rest had been achieved, that thing called "hunger" would eventually rear its head... and with uncanny specificity would announce what it needed. "Get me some banana yogurt!" Or, "Warm me up some of that tomato bisque!" And Jim would dutifully get to work.
His subsequent trip to market would be strategically planned and enjoyable. The coupons that had been patiently waiting on his refrigerator would all get used.
Back home he would say "Stomach knows best" out loud while slicing blue cheese stuffed olives. "Stomach knows best".
- Copyright 2017 by P.T. Gachot
