You can live with less. I know I did as a child. I was the middle of five children, spanning eight years from the oldest to the youngest. My father was a dairy and mixed farmer, my mother a farmer’s wife. In some previous time we had a hired man, but from the time of my active memory, my mother was the hired man as well.
We grew much of our own food – vegetables rather than meat, but certainly meat substitutes such as milk and eggs. My parents went to the grocery store once a month when the milk cheque came. We would have fresh meat for a few days and the rest was frozen and reserved for some future date. We knew that inevitably, sometime before the next milk cheque, we would be on a vegetarian diet (although we wouldn’t have used that word) consisting of eggs from the hen house, cheese from the general store wrapped in butcher’s paper (not plastic) and milk from the cow via a milking machine, a cooler and a pail. Sometimes our diet before the cheque arrived would be supplemented with a can of salmon. My mother had a wonderful salmon recipe: canned salmon, hard boiled eggs, peas, cubes of toast in a white sauce spiced with black pepper and sage. Sadly, knowledge of this recipe will end with me as my modern family will have none of it.
Water for household use came from a cistern and went to a septic tank. Water for drinking came from a well and was kept in the kitchen, retrieved from a pail by a communal dipper.
We had no garbage pick-up because we had no garbage. We bought less. Disposable plastic containers almost didn’t exist and glass jars, in our home at least, were mostly mason jars used summer after summer and filled with preserves, pickles, fruits and jams. Any other glass jars were reused in some way rather than being thrown away. What we called tin cans, like that monthly salmon can, were taken to the shed where my father would crush them with a sledge hammer. They took up very little space, and he’d store them for close to five years. When there were enough crushed cans to fill say a bushel basket, he would bury it in a gully on the farm, trying to prevent erosion by a small river.
My mother, a child of the Depression, threw out nothing. She kept the strings from the roast, washed them and tied them together to form a ball which she kept in a drawer. The same was true for elastics. She used the string for tying up tomato plants and come fall, might even reuse them again.
We had three large gardens and a small orchard, all fertilized by manure. Two of these were vegetable and flower gardens and one was a pea patch planted by the seed drill. By the end of summer we had a freezer full of frozen peas.
If there were ever any leftovers after dinner, the dog would eat them. Peelings would be thrown over the fence and the cattle would help themselves. What they didn’t want would be left to compost (again, not a word we used). Paper garbage was put in the wood box and used to start fires in the wood stove or the furnace. Our house, a large, four bedroom farmhouse, was heated by two wood stoves and a coal and wood burning furnace. Flannelette sheets and pajamas were (trust me) required in the winter.
We had one radio in the kitchen. My father listened to the CFRB Farm Report. He loved Gordon Sinclair. When I was three years old, we got our first TV. At the house we got the CBC, and later CTV and all three major American networks. Electrical kitchen gadgets included a toaster – just a toaster. Other than that we had a hand beater, hand can opener, a butcher knife, meat cleaver and nothing else.
As children, we had one pair of shoes at a time, bought the last week of August. On Sunday mornings, my mother lined up five pairs of shoes and shined them before church. Oh how I longed for the T-strap patent leather shoes that some of my friends wore. Years later I bought such a pair . . . . I told my husband to bury me in them! In winter we wore galoshes over that one pair of shoes.
We had all that we needed, and besides those patent leather T-strap shoes, I can’t say we were missing anything. I’m not suggesting that you all plant gardens or become farmers yourselves, but I do think something can be gained by having a look around your home and asking yourself some simple questions. What do you have that I didn’t have? Do you really need it? Do we need meat every day? Can things be reused? At the end of it, you may find that, even in an urban setting, we can all live a more sustainable, and satisfying, life.
6 hard boiled eggs
8 slices of wholewheat bread, toasted and heavily buttered
1 can of drained salmon
2 cups of white sauce (recipe below)
1 cup of frozen peas, boiled
Dried sage, salt and pepper to taste
Cut the toast into 2.5 cm squares and roughly chop the edges. Mix all the ingredients together, adding salt, pepper and dried sage to taste. Serve hot.
White sauce:
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
Dried sage, salt and pepper to taste
Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan. Stir in 2 tablespoons of flour and let cook for a couple of minutes. Slowly stir in milk, a little at a time. Continue to stir over medium heat until thickened. Season to taste with salt, pepper and dried sage.
Related Links
Downtown apartment dwellers unplug from the grid (CBC News, July 1, 2013) 
The Sustainable Life (with less)
