A letter to Amy Dacyczyn fans

I have often said how lucky I am to have such loyal, kind readers. I don’t get the kind of comments a lot of other bloggers are destined to face for baring their souls on the internet. Other frugal bloggers I know have had their parenting skills challenged, their weight mocked, their relationships criticized. I know most bloggers, at one point or another, encounter comments that reveal shameless ignorance and even hate.  I’ve seen none of this.

It’s kind of laughable that the most heat that this blog has generated has been on a few incredibly benign topics.

Two notable posts that got some people hot and bothered include the following:

1. The question of whether or not to use old, wet coffee grinds to remove cellulite. In a post titled, “What not to do with used coffee grounds,” I drew my own frugal line in the sand when I mocked the idea of scrubbing my bum with soggy coffee grinds in the shower.  Honestly, the post was meant to be humorous, and most of my readers laughed along with me, or shyly admitted that they had tried it and that it wasn’t so bad.  But a few new readers accused me of being “too pessimistic” and “too ignorant.”

2. My post titled “Jamie Oliver v/s Amy Dacyczyn: Finding a frugal balance in the search for foodie fulfillment” was met with appreciation by my regular readers, but some loyal Amy Dacyczyn fans got a little pissed off.  And I’ve really wanted to follow up on this post because, although I got some positive comments on this one, I also had a number of Amy Dacyczyn fans complain, and so I wanted to clarify. or re-emphasize, what this post was really all about.

So here goes.

First of all, it’s great seeing so many Amy Dacyczyn fans out there. I’m a fan of hers too! Amy Dacyczyn inspired me in many ways. I became inspired to make my own granola, my own pizza dough and bread, and lots of other things. Amy Dacyczyn could be credited in inspiring me to write my most recent post on community engagement, as she was an advocate for community building through sharing, borrowing, and bartering with friends and neighbours, and she was a tremendous advocate of thrift store and garage sale shopping.

My reason for writing that post on finding foodie fulfillment was not to rag on Amy Dacyczyn; in fact, the reason why I mentioned her at all was only because something she said that I disagreed with became a catalyst for a post on a point that had very little to do with her.  When I read about her leftover strategy (continually dump all dinner leftovers into one plastic bucket, keep it in the freezer, and make a soup out of it when the bucket is full), I thought about how much better we can do with leftovers.

This comment irked me, not because I think Amy Dacyczyn is a bad person or even a bad cook, but because my blog is about bursting the myths that are often associated with frugality.

The myths include:

1. People who are poor necessarily have to have poor diets

2. People who are poor must eat a lot of convenience foods

3. People who are poor might be able to eat nutritious food, but they will have to sacrifice taste and quality in doing so

I have aimed to bust open myth number one for the nearly two years I’ve been writing this blog, and I busted myth number two when I wrote “the high cost of low brow foods” - which is my favourite blog post to date.

In the Amy Dacyczyn post, I aimed to bust open myth number three.  My central thesis of this post was:

1. Eating food that tastes good and that is healthy, delicious, interesting, and adds new dimensions to the palate can significantly increase a person’s quality of life, and although it is difficult, this can be accomplished even on a very low budget.

2. Imagination is key in this process. If we are creative, if we give thought to what we have and the multitude of different options and opportunities that our resources provide us with (in this case, leftover scraps) then we can end up with a life that feels abundant and meals that appeal to our senses.

3. Eating food that is delicious is not by extension wasteful; there are ways of preserving leftovers for the benefit of taste and quality that can enhance one’s dinnertime options.

(And in this specific post, I’m simply suggesting that perhaps instead of throwing weeks’ worth of leftovers into the same pot, why not freeze them separately so that they can be then used in the best way possible, for different soups, stews, casseroles, or other dishes that best complement the ingredients and give the cook the most options.)

If you’d like examples on how to reduce waste that don’t include the leftover bucket, see “Reducing waste and Eating well for less” and “What are you wasting?”

Ultimately, creativity is key. For some people, they are happy to eat food as long as it is nutritious and cheap. In this case, the leftover bucket may work for you. But for those of you who love to cook, who love food, who want to honour food and extract maximum enjoyment from it, just know that there are options.

For the last two years, I have been aiming to emphasize that frugality does not have to be equated with deprivation. After all, the subtitle of my blog is, “loving the frugal life.”  My approach in this blog is to demonstrate my own journey towards finding a life that is meaningful, abundant, and joyful.  Great food can be a part of that joy.