While doing our weekly grocery shopping at Whole Foods this past weekend, I spied a display of prepared one-dish family-sized meals that had been marked down from $11.99 to $5.99. I am genetically lacking the ability to walk past cheap food without stopping to contemplate it. There was eggplant parmesan, macaroni and cheese, and a spiced pumpkin risotto that looked particularly tempting and semi-healthful. After squinting through the plastic covering to inspect the texture and crumble of the risotto, I scooped up a package and walked back to the carriage.
“What is that thing?” Mr. P asked. (This is his standard way of phrasing “what’s that?” and I think it’s so adorable that I’ve never tried to refine it.)
“It’s pumpkin risotto,” I said. “It’s going to be my lunch this week.” I pointed at the price tag. “6 bucks, and it should last for 4 lunches. Bam, I save $20 this week.”
“Are we poor?” Mr. P asked, another standard response whenever I bust out cost-saving strategies in the grocery store. Before I could answer “Not if we buy this pumpkin risotto,” he darted away to the cheese counter to recoup my lunch savings with Camembert and Mahon.
All over the country, people like me — who aren’t poor, haven’t lost their jobs (yet), and aren’t grimly beholden to a mortgage or a falling 401K — we’re cutting back nonetheless. The media’s doomy vibe has us terrified about what the future will bring. I hear that tent towns are springing up in urban areas in the West, that lines are forming outside of soup kitchens and food pantries in North Carolina, that unemployed white-collar workers who once aspired to humble Wall Street are now flocking to bartending schools. A recent New York Times article about the upsurge of garage sales in the Midwest reports that some towns have passed laws to limit the number of garage sales per home per month. The article also described one woman who sold her toddler’s tricycle to a stranger for $3 even as the child was riding it.
Buying discounted pumpkin risotto and consuming it for 4 straight lunches in order to save $20 sounds a little lame in comparison, as if I’m ‘playing recession’ in a virtuous bid to escape the guilt that comes from eating $7 Cosi sandwiches every day. But after 2 days of pumpkin risotto, the full weight of my sacrifice rests in my stomach like a tasteless, non-digestible ball of short-grain rice.
