A habit that sticks
Dear friends,
I’m debating buying a 25-pound bag of flour from a mill in Maine. In the past few weeks, I’ve been making two loaves of bread every three days (plus the waffles and the pancakes and the cookies and the cakes). Supplies run low fast with a bread habit like this. Pants get tight.
I’m a quarantine cliche.
The last time I baked bread before all this was 2015, and though I like the feeling of resourcefulness it brings me, I’m not convinced we’re going to become a country of bread bakers. We might come out of this time with more economic precarity, more income inequality, and a social safety net that’s even less coherent than the one we have now. It’s hard to make time for bread baking when you have to hustle that much harder to stay ahead of the next round of layoffs or to land one more client to make your goals for the quarter.
If we want to be a country of people who bake bread and and engage in a sharing economy with our neighbors and friends on the regular (oh friends, I miss seeing your family’s real faces so much it hurts)…
…we’re going to have to be a country of people who organize for the common good on a policy level. We need to reject fossil fuel culture, end mass incarceration, enact Medicare for all, and support policies that give robust support to our most vulnerable workers and communities. Sounds a lot like the progressive agenda. Is Joe Biden up for the job? I’m not actually sure if that’s the right question. We need to ask if we are.
But back to my bulk flour. I can see the structural change that needs to happen if we want to come through this time as a more resilient and cohesive society with less stress and more security, and it’s daunting. So I also like to focus on the changes we’ve made in our household that I’d like to see stick.
When it comes to spending money, I want to help keep small business afloat in any way I can. No more Amazon, including their grocery store. Why further enrich this company? Regional food producers and suppliers get close to 100% of my food dollars right now. I want to keep this intact, though maybe with slightly less from-scratch carb production.
When it comes to spending time, in the past few weeks I’ve made watercolor paintings, built block cities and LEGO ships, taken many runs, played a lot of vinyl records from start to finish, had a few dance parties, and read more excellent writing than usual. Of course it’s all interspersed with violent disagreements about screen time and boredom and people refusing to do chores, but it’s also good, slow, quality time that I want to protect when we come out of this. But how can a watercolor painting session compete with a ball game or a trip to the trampoline park? A question to be asked.
Leaving you with a few questions and this amazing little video. Thanks to the Ann Friedman newsletter for this gem. Go to lunch!
XO
Leigh