Co-operative buying
picture by NatalieMaynor
Our family have been co-operatively buying organic fruit, veg and groceries for six years now. People often ask me why we buy co-operatively.
Well, first of all, because it offers us more choice. Supermarkets control the supply of specified varieties of fruits and vegetables. It might seem like there is plenty of choice, but really, only a limited selection of what is available ends up in the supermarket fruit and veg section. If you prefer to buy organic fruit and vegetables the selection can be even more limited and produce may be of inferior quality. So buying directly from the distributor, or the fresh food market, or the farmer, gives us access to a greater variety of fresher, produce in season.
Second of all, co-operative buying offers less choice. The impulse to buy a packet of chocolate biscuits or a tub of Maggie Beer ice-cream is eliminated when you shop from a spreadsheet. Less choice keeps it short and simple. I can shop for my staples in the space of five minutes and be done with it until I collect my box a few days later.
We buy co-operatively with a network of like-minded friends. Not all friends participate in the same co-ops. Our most formal co-operative is structured as a not-for-profit association and supplies us with the majority of our fresh food, bread, dairy and packaged grocery items. We have a bank account and we use a roster system to manage the running of the co-op. Our co-op buys fortnightly and we take turns to gather and box up each others’ individual orders.
In the off week I buy our other groceries in bulk; things like toilet paper, cleaning products and the packaged breakfast cereals we’ve become addicted to.
On a quarterly basis, we open the co-op to a wider network to buy fresh organic flours, grains and spices, seeds for sprouting and assorted baking staples.
Through yet another network of friends, our family buys bulk organic meat, direct from the farmer.
It sounds complicated, and for those who love their conveniences, maybe it is. But to have a superior organic product for a cheaper price is worth it. There are other benefits too.
Our distributor complimented us saying that we’re one of the longest lasting co-operatives he’s known. Many co-operatives come and go. It can be hard for a group of people to come to consensus on decisions, and get along as well. How is that we’ve managed to exist for these past six years?
Keeping a co-operative together requires some strict rules, and quite a few bendy ones. It demands good communication of every member, and sometimes that can be hard to facilitate. It requires a sense of ownership and accountability. And it helps to be punctual and keep commitments. Goodness, why would anyone want to buy co-operatively if it requires so much personal investment?
Good question.
I find co-operative buying such a life-enriching way to shop. We’re not dependent on the major supermarket chains for our dietary choices, and we feel like we’re part of a community of people who care about where their food comes from. We’ve become familiar with each others’ families, watched each others’ children grow and shared some really good, and frustrating, times. In equal measure.
Maybe I secretly yearn for the village green, and a way of life that is more connected to the immediate environment. I don’t believe life is to be lived in isolation from my neighbours. Maybe this social way of buying fills a personal need that modern supermarkets, and their anonymous shoppers, can’t fulfil. And maybe it gives me that modicum of additional control over who gets my shopper dollar, and maybe I like having that power.
June 27th, 2010 - Posted in consumerism, community, sustainability, ritual, wisdom, friendship, money | | 0 Comments
Conspicuous consumption
picture by permanently scatterbrained
Cars slow down on our street to check out the progress on our front yard landscaping. It’s a big job, including a swimming pool and a kabana-type shelter. I know what they’re thinking. They’re wondering how much it is costing to build this monster and where we got the money from in this economic climate. They’re probably figuring out whether we’ve met before, at the neighbourhood Christmas party maybe, or perhaps our kids go to the same school. Even worse, we probably have, they probably do, and I don’t remember their names. And they don’t like us anymore.
These things are so simple for my husband. He works hard, we both agree, so he should be able to spend the money however he sees fit, knowing it will enhance our family time, provide a place to engage with our community, be an asset for our lifestyle. “Imagine us years into the future,” he assures me, “having our family around us.”
Of course, I come at it from a different angle, worried that we’re wasting our season ticket to the local community pool, that we won’t have the pleasure of bumping into (or making) friends there anymore, that the kids will get ’soft’ and be unable to swim in the local creeks with their friends where the rocks are slimy and scary-but-harmless creatures lurk below the surface. I worry that people will make assumptions about our family and our lifestyle and I’m worried that those assumptions might turn out to be correct. What happened to our goal to live simply, frugally, and maintain a small footprint? Shouldn’t we be chopping wood for our combustion stove so we can bake the bread before tending the composting toilet?
But it hasn’t turned out that way. It seems like, in order to live frugally, we need to spend money upgrading this or that appliance to a higher energy rating, getting more solar panels, even a back-up battery system for power outages (because the power does go out regularly here). I get terribly confused about what is reasonable consumption for a human being in a single life-time and whether we are setting our family up to feel entitled to consume. Or is the infrastructure we’re creating (swimming pool and all) a way for the next generation to not consume as we once did, because everything we need to live well is already here? I dunno. It just doesn’t come in black and white.
Eilleen from Consumption Rebellion doesn’t seem to have these dilemmas. She lives a beautiful life with so much less. When she was deliberating about needing/wanting a new digital camera and a new mobile phone, I was like, “Honey, you can do both.” But that’s not the point. The point is to consume conscientiously - and a big part of that word ‘conscientiously’ is ‘conscience’; that part of me from which my crisis originates.
If ‘frugal’ is a lifestyle I’ll admit, this isn’t it.
May 22nd, 2010 - Posted in partnership, consumerism, play, beliefs, wisdom, money, self-care | | 8 Comments
On Gratitude
picture by Dean Ayers
What am I complaining about creative U-turns for? I live a most privileged life, with a robustly healthy family, a loving, attentive husband and a luxurious home. We recently had a holiday in Japan. Who am I kidding when I whinge about how hard my life is?
I used to keep a gratitude journal. I don’t know why I no longer do. This blog was intended to be an extension of that gratitude journal but somewhere along the way I seem to have lost the gratitude mindset I keep preaching about. And I have so much to be thankful for.
For instance, I go to uni, and take music lessons, just because I can. I don’t have to worry about things like child care because I don’t have to leave the home to generate an income for my family. I have a wide network of friends with varied interests, from co-operative buying, to music, writing and parenting. We have an abundance of food in the pantry, and a garden with the potential to feed us very well–if we could only get it more co-ordinated. We have good neighbours, and a nice community school for the kids. We have family who live locally, in fact we live with extended family and it is working out really well. Abundance has well and truly found us and seems to like us so much it’s gonna stick around.
In fact, life really is quite perfect. I have no personal dramas, no petty distractions, nothing to complain about. I’m not being facetious and I’m not being a brag. I just think it’s important to acknowledge the good things, no matter how small, and keep the complaints in check. I promise, there’ll be a lot more gratitude in my posts from now on.
Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.
~Lao Tzu
May 15th, 2010 - Posted in gratitude, happiness, consumerism, health | | 4 Comments
Cold turkey
picture by m.a.r.c.
Coffee, sugar and alcohol would have to be my three main vices. Consistent over-consumption of all three lead to the sudden onset of a bacterial infection this week, which has seen me clean up my diet and lifestyle as a matter of necessity. It has been four days without all three and at last the aches and pains and constant dull headache from my detox are beginning to subside.
The UTI that I have to thank for this lifestyle overhaul has persisted, despite my attempt to beat it naturally with cranberry preparations, golden seal capsules, pearl barley tea and litres and litres of water. The combination has worked for me in times past but not this time. Feeling weary and feverish, I made a visit to the doctor for antibiotics. Oh no! The dreaded antibiotics! For shame, I have failed in my quest to beat the bug.
Leaving the doctor’s with script in hand, I bypassed the pharmacy, telling myself I’d give it another 24 hours to see if I could beat it naturally but I soon came to regret that decision. Long story short, I sent darling hubby out to procure the drugs and upon his return I couldn’t get those suckers into me fast enough. I still feel like crap, but at least I know I’ll get better soon.
The upside of this health challenge is that I have managed to put a bit of distance between myself and my addictions. At this point in time, I feel very committed to keeping my three enemies off the menu for a good while yet. Easy to say while I still feel the uncomfortable symptoms of a UTI, but by putting my diet in the spotlight, maybe, just maybe, I can redeem my inner-addict and keep my enemies at bay.
March 13th, 2010 - Posted in personal growth, happiness, consumerism, health, self-care | | 7 Comments
Romance
picture by DaveFeyram
The great thing about this time of year is the urge to purge that tends to come along with Xmas and New Year. I suppose I subscribe to that Chinese tradition of ritualistically cleansing the house ever year, what we in the West all know as the De-clutter. Please, it has earned its capital ‘D’. Life is never the same once you make the commitment.
Several years ago I began Linda Breen Pierce’s Simplicity Lessons but never quite made my way through all twelve lessons. I can’t even find it on my book shelf now so no doubt I passed it on to some needful soul. I can’t say it changed my life, but it did confirm the path I was drawn to take. I want a simpler life with a smaller carbon footrprint. I’ve had mixed success and I’m still on that journey.
Then last year I did Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way via an online working group, which further challenged my thinking about work and career and life in general. I suppose I came to trust my instincts a little more, to let myself feel instead of having to intellectualise everything - as I am wont to do.
So it was kinda humorous, and with just a bit of ‘caution to the wind’, that I indulged darling hubby’s desire to move a red hued painting by a friend of mine from a prominent place in the house to the right hand opposite ‘romance’ corner of our marital room. Was he trying to tell me something, I wonder?
Feng shui? Of course, I’m a sceptic. On the other hand, what reading I have done on the subject suggests it’s all about enabling efficiency and flow in our living environments. Flow, being that state where amazing things become possible, is what I’m all about. My inner sceptic, however, isn’t dazzled by the flutes and mirrors.
I must explain that we have not had an official ‘bedroom’ since children came on the scene. When they were small, our mattress remained sensibly on the floor, pressed up against one wall, giving space for other mattresses so that we might accommodate any combination of sleeping babies and children, with washing baskets crammed in the corners, or any other crap that didn’t have a rightful place to go. It was surely a metaphor for the time. Partnership and parenthood were one and the same and there was no space for romance. (Remind me again how four children are conceived??) We had not, until recently, even owned a proper western style bed (who cares really, but it is symbolic).
The process began when someone in my study group for The Artist’s Way raised a discussion about where we keep our most personal symbols of our relationship with our significant other. I had to take note that hubby and I kept our wedding album stuffed in a dusty space under our (recently acquired, Western style) bed. Not exactly a fortuitous place to keep it, that much was obvious.
So I moved it to the bottom drawer in our chest of bedroom drawers, alongside our winter knits and long johns. Also not somewhere we regularly access, as Queenslanders in Australia, the climate is decidedly sub-tropical, but it was still a cosy place, regularly accessed and containing many warm couple and family memories. It’s not who we are now, but it’s who we once were, and it’s good to remember. We’re not inclined to pull out the wedding album and reminisce. That’s not us. But the album seems somehow more contained, more nurtured, and more protected there. That was a year ago and it is still the right place for now.
The most ‘feng shui’ thing about our recent choice, to switch a simple picture on the bedroom wall, was that it resulted in the two of us swapping sides of the bed (for purely logistical reasons) and rearranging the furniture and giving our space a complete clean up. Now it feels so fresh in there!
So the bedroom is tidy now (relatively), and the new furniture arrangement has better flow and efficiency than it previously had. And the cobwebs have been cleaned from under the bed, the dust has been wiped from those hard to reach places. And communication has flowed as a matter of course - as though that’s what happens when couples get in and clean out a room, their room, together. Romance. It’s not what we think it is.
January 28th, 2010 - Posted in happiness, partnership, consumerism, ritual, beliefs, health, self-care | | 2 Comments
