Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

Stop for a moment. Think about your life without ice cubes. Without cold beer. Without convenient frozen dinners. I perish at the thought!

A few weeks ago while I was home with my mom and dad, we were talking about breakfast. My mom has this prune and honey spread she and my dad like to eat on toast. I don’t quite know how to describe it. It’s basically some fresh onion pureed with some dried prunes. Then you mix in some honey and let it ferment for about a month. When you taste it, it’s sweet and slightly savory without the harsh bite of raw onion. Fascinating, but I also instantly got an allergic reaction to the fruit in it. My mom likes it because she can make it in small batches and put in an old jam jar and it keeps without refrigeration.

My folks grew up without refrigeration in pre-war Korea. Visiting the old farmstead where my father lived, it’s not hard to see that there wasn’t electricity running to the house. Visiting Korean Folk Village (kind of the Colonial Williamsburg of Korea with re-enactors, etc.), my mom clapped her hands with joy over an old provincial farmhouse which she said was just like where she grew up. I was agog at the huge ceramic amphorae buried underground for long-term kimchee storage. (Amphora is probably a bad term for them since they technically aren’t Greek and don’t store wine, but I digress.)

Years ago while on a work project, my sibling was working on a home in West Virgina for an old lady who had no refrigeration in the house. The resident still kept her perishable items in the cold mountain stream out back of the house. This was in the late 1980’s. I don’t know if that lady ever got refrigeration, but it surprises me that she lived that way. I cannot tell if it was poverty or a choice. Given the work project criteria for selecting homes to fix, probably the latter compounded by the former.

Conceptually, I think it’s hard for people to grasp what it’s like to live without refrigeration. I know there is a simple pleasure to popping open a can of chilled mandarin oranges on a hot summer day. (One of the few fruits I can eat.) I have been contemplating my mom’s onion, prune and honey spread for a few days and I can only think that the natural anti-microbial properties of onion and honey must do some sort of natural preservation.

Sometimes I like to think about how people lived without the modern conveniences of the 20th and 21st centuries. I try to appreciate what it is that I have and remember what is non-essential about life and living. Counting our blessings in a way, I suppose. Next time I look at a super charged Audi A3 fully loaded at nearly $35K, I will have to remember that I really don’t need a car like that. My Altima still gets me from Point A to Point B reliably.