7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess

by Jen Hatmaker

  Society was much kinder to the planet before this century. Granted, earth gave society minor problems like the plague and smallpox, but we got the last laugh with deforestation and global warming. Can we unlearn our destructive habits and reimagine a way to live lighter on this earth? What if we changed our label from “consumers” to “stewards”? Would it change the way we shop? The way we think?

  My luxuries come at the expense of some of God’s best handiwork: forests, petroleum, clean air, healthy ecosystems. We also ravage the lands of vulnerable countries, stripping their resources for consumption. The wealthy world has a sordid history of colonization, ruling by force over indigenous people and profiting from their natural resources and local labor. Yes Africa, we’ll take your diamonds, gold, and oil, but you can keep your crushing poverty and disease.

  What does it mean to be a godly consumer? What if God’s creation is more than just a commodity? If we acknowledged the sacredness of creation, I suspect it would alter the way we treated it. I agree with Tracey Bianchi, author of Green Mama:

  There are a limited number of resources in this world, and when we take more than we need, simply put, we are stealing from others. By pillaging the earth for more than our share, we break the eighth commandment. . . . To my dismay, I realized that even in my own, sort-of-green world, I was stealing from people, present and future. Turns out I constantly steal from my kids (and yours). I’m snatching up goodies like clean air and water while millions of families clamor for a drink and struggle with disease. I’m throwing away excess paper and packaging while rain forests disappear. I’m a kleptomaniac. But I am determined to address my failings.10

  I am too.

  Day 17

  The following account by Molly is true. I’ve seen the recovered bottles lined up by her trash can, and I literally have a picture of her hubby Chris wading through their flooded street to retrieve the recycling box as it floated away like Noah’s ark. Perhaps media month made her feel violent, but Molly is the Queen of Green.

  It all started four years ago when my daughter was two and my son was a couple of months old. We were the most consumption-driven family in America. The teeny tiny two hundred gallon trash can the city gave us wasn’t enough to hold all the diaper boxes, baby toy packaging, wine bottles (clearly the neighbors were sneaking those in), soda cans, junk, and whatever else we just used up and tossed.

  I was sneaking our trash into the can next door when I realized those people had a small green bin for their plastic, glass, cardboard, and cans. If I got rid of that stuff from my microscopic trash can, I would have tons of room! That’s when I found our city-issued green bin in the garage holding a busted water hose and some garden lights. I cleaned it out and started our Family Recycling Initiative of 2006.

  I needed more room for trash so I started to recycle.

  Fast-forward four years. My husband has weekly poker games in which everyone brings their own drinks. At the end of every poker night, I dig through the trash for rogue bottles or cans that were tossed instead of placed neatly on the counter to be recycled. A couple of weeks ago, I crept to my new neighbor’s curb, took some huge boxes out of their trash can, and broke them down for my recycling bin. I think I may have a problem at this point.

  It started as a selfish act and has turned into a way of life. I can’t stand to watch someone throw anything away that belongs in my green bin. I take my own bags to the grocery store, I rarely use a disposable baggie in my kids lunches, and I helped plant a huge garden this spring. I grew up in a house always set at 67 degrees; we leave ours on 73. I know that’s still cool, but I’m making progress. Maybe next year I can stand 74.

  There are areas we can improve upon, but those small changes have our families calling us hippies. I wonder where we got our disregard for the earth?

  Day 18

  Good news, everyone.

  My melons grew.

  Sydney, our resident gardening enthusiast, came running inside breathless, dragging me out to inspect our late bloomer. As I live and breathe, we had six preadolescent fruits exhibiting the firm, round blossoming of youth. Oh sure, they’re only a handful right now, but those babies haven’t seen the end of their girth. I told you, Watermelon Vine. Mama knew your buds would grow. (Who’s laughing now, Tomato?)

  As her rite of passage, we outfitted WV with wires and string to hold up her new developments. She perked right up, thrilled with her admission into the fruit club.

  Watermelon was the last of our garden babies to sprout. We have green beans, yellow squash, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, two different kinds of melons, and enough basil to supply the greater Austin area. Our garden is producing despite our profound ignorance. It’s a miracle. Treat the earth with care, and it will give you food.

  Sydney deserves the credit for the general maintenance of our little plot. She has become a ten-year-old farmer, inspecting her plants and reporting their progress. She plucks the day’s ripened produce, proclaiming over every vegetable with the same manic enthusiasm her peers direct at Justin Bieber. Sydney and Steven—our KP partner—are totally in cahoots. (“Steven taught me how to detect squash bores.” “Steven says to cut basil at least five segments from the top.” “Steven says the cherry tomatoes are ready when they are bright orange.”)

  The KP team harvests once a week, and we’ve delightfully worked alongside the volunteers and formerly homeless. The residents who benefit from the KP project live in an RV community in east Austin, relocated through an initiative called Community First. CF works with chronically homeless men and women, providing recreational vehicle housing and empowering them with support, community, and income to help effect positive change in their lives.

  The KP project is an arm of Community First; the residents have several community gardens in the RV park in addition to the backyard gardens they help maintain. They enjoy “Stone Soup Breakfast” every Friday morning at the community trailer in the RV park, bringing fresh produce from their gardens and cooking together. KP partners and residents meet once a month for dinner, supplied by our own produce. Steven and Jen, the oh-so-passionate innovators of the KP project, moved into the park themselves, making that rare transition from advocates to neighbors.

  The KP project has kinks to work out, of course. Like any start-up, some things are just trial and error. But I’m so grateful to be a part of its inaugural year. I’ve learned so much; about soil, about produce, about loving my neighbor. There is something so healthy about working the ground together, moving beyond the cultural boundaries that normally divide us. Bearing good fruit has many facets—in agriculture, in hearts, in the community. It’s as much about the human being as it is the zucchini.

  Some of us were on the streets three months ago, some of us have master’s degrees, lots of us are battling addictions, and all of us have failed, but the ground is leveled when together we turn the soil, plant the seeds, cut back the leaves, pluck a perfectly gorgeous tomato, each learning the same ancient practices that have sustained humanity since Eden. The earth brings us together. It is common ground that is becoming holy ground.

  Day 22

  When I was ten, I watched Sybil at a sleepover and didn’t tell my parents. That movie was certainly prohibited, but my friend had HBO and MTV, two forbidden fruits I devoured with reckless abandon since we had one console television with manual knobs to flip through all four channels. Oh, Cable, you elusive siren!

  Sybil freaked me out. This was the true story of a woman who developed multiple personalities to deal with psychological trauma inflicted by her schizophrenic mom, who abused her in ways that made zero sense to my fourth-grade mind. The emergence of Sybil’s sixteen different selves caused me no end of grief.

  For months I feared my alternate personalities were preparing to assert themselves. I self-inspected my brain daily, watching for signs of a split or clues of impending pathology. If my preadolescence suc
cumbed to a moment of hysteria, I’d sit cross-legged on my floor and chant a mantra: “Sybil, you cannot take me over.” (I merged the concepts of “multiple personality disorder” and “demon possession.” I was a Southern Baptist GA who watched HBO. Thank you for understanding.) Anytime a renegade thought passed through, I wondered: Is that me? Or my alter ego Savannah?

  Friends, my fear of dissociative disorder appears to be manifesting now that I am comfortably in my thirties. And it was triggered not by abuse but by 7, a creation of my own making. After five months of retraining my thoughts, I now have competing voices in my head, struggling for domination as I attempt to shop like a responsible human.

  Sometimes my organic personality, Sage Moonjava, emerges; and my top priority is to buy real food with wholesome ingredients. Sage Moonjava doesn’t blink at spending $11.99/lb for bulk organic cashews, because they were harvested responsibly and not doused in partially hydrogenated oil. Grocery chains are the bane of Sage Moonjava’s existence; the produce is covered in vegetable petroleum, beeswax, and lac resin; the aisles contain ten thousand combinations of high fructose corn syrup, refined grains, and chemicals; and the meats are genetically modified and pumped full of antibiotics. I’ve abandoned a half-filled cart and walked out in utter defeat.

  But at other times my “buy local” personality, Ryvre, materializes. Attempting to support the local economy and diminish the high ecological impact of importing goods, this seems like the winning approach. Buying from corporate chains is paying The Man; I like the little guy, the Mom and Pop store, the imaginative small-business owner. I’d rather subsidize local vendors who retain creative ownership and feed back into our local economy. Ryvre is into “Live here, give here,” and shopping at Wal-Mart solidifies my place in the flock, contributing to a questionable supply chain and putting thousands of locally owned stores out of business every year.

  However, my third alter ego, Freedom Shakra, whom you’ll meet more next month, is trying to unhook from the consumer machine, and all this buying is not helping. Freedom Shakra is just trying to spend less, way less. This is a numbers game, and the winners are off-brands, generic products, knockoffs, and used goods. F. Shakra understands that name brands and chic labels are the marketing brainchildren of The People Who Sell Us Stuff We Don’t Need. There is no good reason to buy designer water, over-priced spaghetti, or two sprigs of basil for $3.99 when it enjoys prolific growth in my own backyard from a $.25 cut. Addressing our embarrassing overconsumption is practically the whole point of 7, and Freedom Shakra is knocking the budget down by purchasing cheaper things, fewer things, smaller things.

  Here’s the rub.

  Ryvre spots an adorable chocolate brown wrap sweater at local boutique The Red Door right here in our little town. Talk about spending local! It’s five minutes away in historic Downtown Buda, and the owner lives up the street. Adios, mall. No Gap for Ryvre! She’s supporting the local gal.

  But Freedom Shakra emerges and says, “Wait just a minute, Ryvre!” (And she rolls her eyes and pronounces Ryvre sarcastically to make it clear she is mentally spelling it “River.”) Because that wrap sweater is $45, and my bank account couldn’t care less whether it went to The Red Door or straight into the pockets of Sam Walton. All Freedom Shakra knows is she’s down fifty large for a sweater with a two-year shelf life, and I don’t care where it came from, that’s lame. Buying local is often synonymous with overspending.

  FS is winning the day, so off she goes to the grocery store where she spies a carton of eggs for $.99. Hooray! At nine cents per egg, that is a purchasing victory for this Thrifty Mama. Add the $2.99 package of bacon and $1.69 can of biscuits, and we’re talking about breakfast for five for $5.00. Beat that, Dave Ramsey!

  But out pops Sage Moonjava, who gravely reads the biscuit ingredients. All twenty-nine of them. She recalls the dreadful farming practices that produced those hormone-injected, antibiotic laden-eggs. SMJ scolds Freedom Shakra for skipping after this processed, additive-packed bacon like it was the Pied Piper:

  Fiddle-dee-dee I sing,

  Cheap processed food is king!

  Who needs organic?

  Such ridiculous panic!

  GMO products ain’t nothing but a thing . . .

  Sage Moonjava would buy the $3.50 eggs from grass-fed, free-roaming chickens, the $5.99 organic bacon from responsibly raised pigs; and the day she feeds canned processed biscuits to her family is the day she puts her kids up for adoption so a mom who genuinely cares about their health can raise them.

  Sprouts is an organic grocery store, but it’s not local.

  Central Market is a local gourmet grocery store, but it’s not economical.

  HEB is the most economical grocery store, but it’s not organic.

  So Ryvre is horrified by Freedom Shakra’s priority to buy cheap, and Freedom Shakra outright mocks Sage Moonjava and Ryvre for spending more on “local” and “organic” (she uses finger air quotes when she says this). The competing voices confuse me, and I’m not sure which personality should dominate. This leaves me in a mess half the time, and I manage to feel guilty one way or another, no matter which purchasing priority wins the day. I’ve either spent too much, bought cheap processed junk, or I’ve subsidized the sweatshop industry. Evidently simplifying can be complicated. GAH!

  Sybil, you cannot take me over!

  Day 23

  This month of 7 has really gotten into my bloodstream. I think about my choices constantly, rescuing recyclable items and second-guessing pretty much everything we consume. All my default habits are up for debate.

  The latest matter to enjoy an awkward solo dance in the spotlight of Month Five is school lunches. As school just started, I’m confronted with my dependence on plastic baggies and prepackaged food, two thorns in the flesh of green living. These cause me at least one rock-and-a-hard-place moment every morning. Susana may have discovered the solution:

  Never mind the frozen, sodium-filled, processed garbage the school lunch system is feeding our kids. It turns out even those of us feeding our kids the good stuff are doing some serious environmental damage. Between the organic juice and the individual edamame packs with SpongeBob on the front, not to mention the plastic bags filled with carrot sticks and almonds (I know! Yeah me!), my three kids are discarding about two hundred pounds of packaging waste per year. (Oh, wait. Boo, me.)

  Great, now I have guilt.

  So, like I overhauled their lunch menu from sugar-water and Cheetos to the current healthy choices, this year I decided to overhaul the packaging situation.

  First step, no more zipper bags. I went through these things like water. I vowed a zipper-bag-free school year for my kids. I took a $20 plunge at The Container Store and bought three super-cool lunch boxes with what my freakish six-year old calls “a center protective barrier” and what I call a flappy-thingie, that allows for three separate compartments you can fill with food without any intermingling. The whole thing snaps shut nearly airtight and—get this—is dishwasher safe. Sold. Even Adrian Monk would approve.

  The next step: prepackaged foods. I’m a sucker for string cheese and juice boxes. As it happens, my kids like Colby-jack just as much as mozzarella. So now I buy the two-pound block, whip out the cheese cutter, and voila! Problem solved. I’m still working on the juice box problem. I just like juice boxes so much. (It’s a childhood deprivation issue. Don’t ask.) It’s silly, because my kids got BPA-free water bottles with their lunch boxes, so really all I need to do is fill them. Okay, fine. I’ll do it. And then, the final step . . . cloth napkins. Yeah. Ahem. So . . . I hate laundry. We’ll just have to see about this last one.

  The bonus is, this system is way cheaper. Buying in bulk is saving my family money. Big food corporations are making a killing off lunch-sized packaging. Individually wrapped string cheese averages $9/pound and I get my Colby-jack for about $4/pound. A no-brainer. Juice boxes a
re about $.50 to $.75 each, and water is—oh yeah—free. Seems to be adding up quite nicely.

  If waste-free school lunches were a hassle, as some environmentally friendly things can be, I might complain. But this is pretty easy. It is also a lesson I’m passing to my kids, the future generation. And that might be the most important part of this equation.

  Day 25

  Okey dokey.

  I need to hem and haw a bit before I say what I need to say. Sooo, hey everyone! Thank you for making it this far with me. Wow! Five months of this business. Um. My kids are back in school, so if my writing seems more coherent lately, that’s why. If not, disregard the previous sentence. What else? Oh! This is actually relevant. We just submitted our dossier to Ethiopia! Hooray! We are officially in line for our referral now, and I’ve started dreaming about our African kids like I did during pregnancy. Last week I dreamed we brought our baby (?) back from Ethiopia, but we had to pick her up at baggage claim. Another mama was waiting for her baby, too, and I was petrified she was going to take mine so I kept edging her out. Finally my baby came around the turnstile, and she had a giant afro. I named her Kyla.

  We bought a used Suburban during green month.

  Okay there. I’ve said it, but better news is coming, so keep reading. You might remember we only drove one car this month, which was not as challenging as expected. However, we are now on official adoption notice, meaning shortly we will have five children. This will require a big vehicle. The end. I’ve pulled my hair out, wrung my hands, and shaken my head from side to side, but there is no getting around it. A family of seven doesn’t arrive at their destinations so much as they invade.