Back to the Land, Reluctantly

By SUSAN GREGORY THOMAS

Susan Gregory Thomas is the author of “In Spite of Everything: A Memoir.”
I’M not interested in being hip or a hippie. Nor does my happiness particularly hinge on artisanal cheese. (Odd, perhaps, given that I grew up a stone fruit’s throw away from Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.)
As a 42-year-old Brooklyn mother of three, what I care about is lunch, and feeding my family on a tenuous and unpredictable income. And so I have 20 fresh-egg-producing hens and a little garden that yields everything from blackberries to butternut squash to burdock root.
My turn with spade and hoe started a few years ago when I found myself divorced and flat broke. My livelihood as a freelance writer went out the window when the economy tanked. I literally could afford beans, the dried kind, which I’d thought were for school art projects or teaching elementary math. And I didn’t know how to cook.

Luckily, my late father had hammered into me that grit was more important than talent. So, when I couldn’t afford fancy food — never mind paraben-free shampoo — for my babies, I figured, if peasants in 11th-century Sicily did all this, how hard could it be?
 I researched how to raise hens from chicks so we could get our omega-3-filled eggs. I learned to stretch a single piece of cheap meat into nearly a week’s worth of dinners. I made my own cleaning products. Not because I liked it. Because it was cheap.
My goal was to have healthy, unprocessed food for $10 or less a day. Cereal was the first thing to go. It dawned on me that making granola was a matter of tossing oatmeal and nuts into a bowl with a little oil, honey and spices — and then baking until brown. No more $14 boxes of fancy grains with pomegranate antioxidants.


Bread wasn’t hard either; it was just a drawn-out procedure. Yeast, water, a little honey, salt, whole wheat flour, and assorted seeds. Mix; wait for rising; knead; wait; knead; wait; bake. I made batches and froze them. So long, Eli Zabar’s 10-buck Health Loaf. Hi there, homemade loaf for less than $1. I soon realized that it’s not necessary to follow every recipe to a T, particularly if it calls for expensive items. For example, if a recipe called for red wine, I used diluted balsamic vinegar, or even apple cider vinegar and a wee bit of honey mixed with water. If the recipe called for saffron I used turmeric, which is cheap in bulk at Patel Brothers in Jackson Heights, Queens. And I always added twice as much garlic to everything.
With all the fetishizing about terroirs and concerns about lead in urban soil in the eco-foodie blogosphere, I was scared to grow vegetables, period. But my kids and I planted seeds, bulbs and rhizomes inside in midwinter in little cups; we started a universe of tomatoes, squash, green beans, kale, beets, garlic and standard herbs. They were ready for planting by spring.
We quelled concerns about lead in the soil by hammering together boards to make a raised bed, and made “good” dirt from compost of decaying leaves and coffee grounds and the cheap soil at Home Depot. It quickly became obvious that anyone with a rectangle of sunny ground outside can grow stuff; you just need to think about what grows up and what grows sideways so that you can get it all in there properly.
We lived off the land all summer, supplementing our diet with dried beans, nuts, baking basics, dairy products, olive oil, and the occasional long-lasting protein (pork shoulder, chicken, canned anchovies and sardines). The children snipped off the fixings for homemade pizza, pasta, tarts and Mediterranean-like bean salads. I made yogurt and even got the hang of making ricotta and mozzarella by heating up milk in a pot and squirting a little animal rennet in it. And it was not a hassle. Plus, homemade ricotta, with a little olive oil, honey and fresh basil for dessert? Homemade frozen yogurt pops with just-plucked blackberries? Crazy. We were locavore, organic kings.
I had to be sold on the chicken idea, two years later. It seemed like a lot of work, flies and yucky upkeep. But an out-of-work antiques restorer (who later became my boyfriend and is now my husband) persuaded me to do it. We ordered 2-day-old peeping chicks for $2.75 apiece by mail and kept them under heat lamps in a Pack ’n Play in my daughters’ room for about a month, and they became the coolest pets and science lesson ever. Five months later, we had a coop and four hens.
Today, we eat a mostly vegetarian diet, with plenty of protein. My cleaning products are distilled white vinegar for wiping and baking soda for scouring (and also for tooth brushing). Our soap and shampoo is Castile mixed with olive oil. We live this way for $100 a week. And I’m still the sole breadwinner.
IT is a lot of work. You have to be organized and able to improvise on your feet. But, frankly, it’s awesome. Before we embarked on this Waldenesque life, the only thing I had ever used my hands for was picking up a book or typing on my keyboard; today, my family and I are living our own scrappy take on President Obama’s promise of “Yes, we can!”
Even if things turn around financially, I don’t think I could stomach going to Whole Foods (except maybe for olive oil) because my biggest revelation in terms of self-sufficiency is this: It is no big deal. You can tell yourself anything is too difficult, or you can just do it. And you do not need to reconstruct your worldview or take issue with others.
You just need to be hungry.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 9, 2011
An earlier version of a recipe related to this article incorrectly stated where pesto can be left. It should be refrigerated, not placed on a shelf.