Waste Not Want Not

I am writing this from a hotel room in Flagstaff where my husband's choir is participating in the NAU Jazz and Madrigal Festival. As I mentioned in a previous post, the school no longer reimburses teachers for the cost of meals on a trip. So, I decided to handle this like an extended picnic. Last night I made crunchy, oven-baked chicken for dinner, but doubled the batch so we could bring it along on the trip. I packed the orangy chicken fingers in heavy plastic take out containers we have accumulated from Pei Wei. I also packed some baby carrots and celery sticks, ranch and barbecue sauces for dipping, and some sandwich makings (roast beef from the deli, Swiss cheese slices, and rye bread), along with an assortment of soft drinks, tea, and juice. All of this fit into two small coolers, plus my husband provided goody bags with chips, crackers, raisins, etc. that he assembled for everyone on the trip. (The kids love these. Every year he springs for some small toys from Oriental Trading Company and creates a music-based puzzle book. All of this accompanies the snacks in a decorative bag for each student. This bag gives the kids something to do and something to eat while we drive up to Flagstaff from the East Valley, and keeps them from wanting to make a million pit stops along the way.)

When we arrived at NAU we spent the first hour watching the ajudicator (who will be judging our school first thing in the morning) work with other groups. When the competition took a lunch hiatus, so did we. The kids and another chaperone went off in groups to eat at the student union - which has a vast array of fast food as well as school meal options - while Jeff and I headed back to the bus where we munched on sandwiches, chips, and pudding cups while discussing what the judge was looking for in the groups we had seen. After this short break, we took a walk around campus and shopped at the college book store before meeting the kids to tour Riordan Mansion, an Arizona state park.

Jeff and I have been to Riordan Mansion several times, but none of the kids had seen it before. The park's purpose is to preserve a beautiful arts and crafts style 1904 mansion that was built as a 13,000+ square foot duplex (two family homes built as mirror images and connected by a great room/game room that is over 1,000 square feet by itself) by a pair of brothers who married a pair of sisters. The Riorden family, which played a huge role in developing Flagstaff, donated the house to the state in the 1980's. We are lucky to have taken this tour today because the park is scheduled to be closed 10 days from now due to our state's budget woes.

As we toured the house (perhaps for the last time ever), Jeff and I discussed the ingenuity and thriftiness of the people who designed, built, and lived in it. For example, the ice box (which holds a 100-pound block of ice) has pipes connecting it to the laundry room so that as the ice melts the water can be used to wash clothes. In addition, the water heater's pipes are connected to the old, cast-iron stove so that as the stove is used to cook dinner, it also heats the water for family baths following the meal. Another ingenious creation is the "air-conditioning" system created by a large, built-in hole (for lack of a better description) in the middle of the upstairs hallway. This open area provides light and ventilation from windows in the ceiling to the bottom floor of the house. In the summer time, the outer downstairs windows and the ceiling windows are all opened to create a cooling updraft through the entire mansion.

The tour itself consists of a park ranger guiding visitors through one of the houses which contains original furnishings, clothing, and other artifacts. The other house is a museum with information about the Riordans and turn-of-the-century Flagstaff. It contains a couple of antique pianos and multiple rotating displays. What struck me most today was a collection of World War I era food conservation signs. These signs urged people to use every scrap of food possible, to deny themselves something in an effort to provide food for starving refugees in Europe, to recycle their dinner scraps into animal food and other products, to not use sugar on fruit or in desserts so it could be sent overseas. The signs made it clear that every American should be carefully conserving and recycling as much food as possible. As I studied these signs and pondered the conservation efforts modeled in this early 1900's home, I thought about how wasteful we are as a nation. We hear repeated cries about going green, recycling, and not wasting our resources as if they are new to us, but they're not. We have simply been ignoring the wisdom of "waste not, want not" in favor of the folly of "gimme, gimme, gimme."

This evening as Jeff and I ate the chicken we brought from home, we discussed how much better it tasted than fast food and how happy we were to have more time to relax before tonight's festivities (a concert by Take 6!). This feels like conservation to me. We brought our own food, so we're not wasting money. We didn't have to walk all over creation in the cold, so we're not wasting time and energy. Perhaps that's really what this project is about - learning to reconnect with some of the simple things that worked for us as individuals and as a nation.