This month I’ve cut my food budget to five dollars a week. This is totally going to change the way I eat. Already I’m running out of things I’m used to eating. The Clif Bars, at $1.50/day, went first. Also the hard candies I was buying to entertain myself with – they’re gone, which is a good thing because I realized they were made with corn syrup which is one of the greatest blights on humanity.

I ‘m getting to the point where I may soon be able to see real life. By this I mean that by having bad food habits I’ve been in a deep canyon all my life. By eliminating certain foods I will be able to emerge from that canyon into a better environment which will include clearer consciousness, greater insights, and other spiritual gifts which at this time I have no knowledge of.

It is a tragedy of this century that food manufacturers have placed most of humanity – especially Americans – into this canyon of ignorance because of two main influences. (1) Bad eating habits based on processed and poisoned foods, and (2) Learned helplessness. By that I mean we have learned to be dependent on large manufacturing industries for our food and jobs and without them we would be helpless – and the jobs are just about gone. What will happen if the economy pulls the food off our grocery shelves too? How many of us will be able to adjust and find ways to get enough food to live on?

I’m just guessing – but if 10% of Americans know how to garden and preserve food and are prepared and ready to do so, and the other 90% are dependent on food manufacturers for processed foods including breakfast bars and cereals, canned foods, imported coffee and tea, potato chips, mayonnaise and other condiments, store bought bread and pasta, etc, not to forget the incredible bottled beverage industry… if 90% of Americans are dependent on all this JUNK FOOD then what will happen if your NWO overlords decide to pull all that off the grocery store shelves – or if/when the dollar is devalued to the point where you can’t afford to buy a can of beans because it costs $100 and your unemployment check was just spent on rent? And those who eat meat – who are still convinced they can’t live without it – if you can’t get that, are you prepared to go out and kill something – a rat perhaps – then skin it and eat it? I mean, bletch! I personally cannot stand the thought of eating meat and have realized that the myth that we need high protein levels to thrive is just plain wrong. That could be propaganda from the meat industry!

The point here is that if you are not able and ready for a self-sustaining lifestyle you’re likely to suffer including watching your children starve to death before you do – like those families in Africa. Do you really think the world didn’t have enough food to feed them? I think they could have been saved if it were not for greed of food barons in other lands. Surely there’s a better way to manage the food resources of this planet.

All this to say – I hope you are ready to be part of the small percentage of Americans capable of being self-sufficient and able to eat during the recession years. Are you ready? I’m not, but I’m working on it.

These days of spending only five dollars a week on food have opened my eyes to some amazing revelations. For example, food addiction. I am actually having withdrawal symptoms as I wean myself of first one food then another. It distresses me to think that the economy could get so bad that entire families would be deprived and going through the same thing I’m going through now.

Now keep in mind, my challenge here is to buy no more than $5.00 worth of new food weekly, but I still have my stored food to eat. I also have a devoted boyfriend who gifted me with three items in the past two weeks. (1) Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, (2) tortillas worth over $6.00, and (3) a bunch of bananas. I must have pigged out on the tortillas because they are gone already, and this was a big thick bag. I will not replace them. I’ve decided to eat the filling alone —- or maybe make tortillas once a week as I still have flour.

The ice cream comes in a very small pint container. I decided to eat only ½ scoop daily. The last few days I’ve combined that with strawberries that I took from my freezer. So, I have plenty to eat – but I’m not eating what I’m used to, and there’s where withdrawals come in as I’m forced to make little dietary changes. Last night I did EFT for “food addictions” and it helped me feel a lot better.

So that’s the report for now. I’ve allowed myself one $5.00 shopping trip so far and that was spent on an onion, tomatoes, green pepper, candy and … I think that was all. The candy is gone now and won’t be replaced. This week I’ll resist tortillas and go for fresh veggies … especially potatoes and carrots as I’ve now run out of all that was in my garden except for one stray carrot I found in the garden today that I’ve now pulled with glee. It is in my kitchen veggie box. Next time I make steamed rice and lentils and veggies I’ll use it.

Onward toward the light and toward freedom from dependence on food manufacturers. Wish me luck and prepare yourselves for hard times ahead, because they are coming . The American dollar is worth less all the time. Please watch this video and stay informed.

Movie produced by George at Inflation US

My goal, between now and the end of the year, is to spend only $5 per week on food.

Can I do it? We will soon find out.

Why the strict budget? Well, my income went down and now I’m finding out I can still pay all my bills (that’s good) but I will have to choose between firewood and food (not so good.) As it gets really cold here in the mountains, I definitely want to buy the firewood. A nice young man comes by and dumps the wood, a cord at a time, in my front yard right in front of the flower bed. We pay him $190 for all his labor, and usually need more than a cord per month once winter gets rolling.

I have a lot of food stored up here. I have canned foods I almost never touch. I was saving them for an emergency. They’re about a year old now and I really should consume them and then replace the stored items when I’m feeling more prosperous. I’ve also got lots of stored beans and rice, and other dry foods… you know, flours and things like that. I think this will serve to sustain me.

I’m nearly through consuming all the vegetables from my summer garden. I need to plant a winter garden soon… but that won’t suffice for this six-week budgeting experience. Therefore I expect that some of the weekly shopping money will be spent on vegetables. I’ll also need to buy tortillas, though if need be I can make them.

One thing I’m giving up entirely is bread. All it does is make me fat and fill me with candida. It may be the primary reason why I’ve had trouble losing weight. Whoever said bread is the “staff of life” really hooked me. All these years I thought of bread as essential… but no more. The supermarket here sells quality bread (the only kind I’d eat) for $4.50 a loaf. Obviously that will be too much for my $5 per week food budget. I’d rather spend my money on other things.

Another thing I’ll have to give up is my beloved Clif Bars. I’ve been buying them for breakfasts and snacks for a couple years now, and I’ll sure miss them. But at $1.50 a pop, I just can’t afford them now. I’ll probably make myself bowls of oatmeal to get the same effect without the high cost.

I’ll post my results after my first weekly shopping trip.

Oh, I also should mention — I will no longer go into town more often than once weekly to pick up mail and get groceries. Staying away from shopping areas is sure to help keep me from spending money!

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Now for a word on what I’m eating today. I recently bought a rice steamer and I’m just loving it! I make brown rice with lentils (2 cups rice, one cup lentils) in the bottom of the steamer and put vegetables in the steamer tray on top. This week the veggies were potatoes and carrots. I take the resulting rice/lentils/veggies and fry them in a bit of olive oil, adding garlic powder, pepper, turmeric and ginger. This goes into a warm tortilla with fresh diced onion and a bit of hot sauce. A delicious, healthy and filling meal. Very vegan!

What do people have against hippies these days?? I am appalled at some of the derision I hear. For example, when I was working at a local restaurant last year a young woman was hired. You know how people chat while they work. One day she informed me “I hate hippies! I can’t stand them!”

She didn’t know I was one.

What venom! I guessed I didn’t look like much of a hippie that day. Mostly these days I just look like a little old lady with gray hair and too much baby fat (after five children some of us unfortunately get that way.) Well, I pretended not to be insulted and let it go, but purchased several tie dye shirts just to make it clear that I’m still quite the hippie even in my old age. I needed a little self-identification, apparently.

I guess the word “hippie” means different things to different people. To some it might refer to a dirt-bag unwashed, unkempt drug user - indulging in heavy drugs like heroin - perhaps. …Or just a stoner looking to take advantage of others. (Just a guess at what people might be thinking when they’re all negative about the hippie counter-culture movement.)

But hippies are more than that.

The most important aspect of being a hippie is the creativity: the desire for inventing new modes of art and the ability to be unique enough to put those arts into form. Hippiedom also is a form of spirituality for me. It is an acknowledgement that I’m able to develop my own spiritual connection with the divine apart from rituals and set forms devised by others for their organization into groups of spiritual worship realities. My spirituality is my own alone. It encompasses nearness to the divine source through creativity.

God is creative, and so am I, so when I’m involved in an act of creativity I’m closer to God than at any other time. Plus there’s the fact that love is an expression of god-self within. For me, loving everyone was the most important aspect of hippieness, plus these realizations of the reality of God through being in nature, through aligning oneself with nature and all that is natural. To me, those are the qualities of being a hippie, and drugs and free-love type sex have nothing to do with that which is natural and pure… other than use of herbs of course which sometimes includes something as amazing as marijuana which is a very cool herb helpful in many medical need situations.

Anyhow, I don’t see why people should speak badly about hippies and make people like me think we need to hide our hippieness. I’m not going to hide anymore. Too many years I’ve been diverted from what is really me. I’ve been a hippie since the sixties. Just because I’m almost sixty years old doesn’t mean I should change and be someone else’s idea of the perfect little old lady grandma … you know what I mean?

Well, this week I was reading two different books that mentioned hippies. One was Tribal Bigfoot. I was in the middle of an absolutely awesome story about a guy who had been in a forest in Del Norte County, California when he was surrounded by Sasquatches… and then the author told of his own walk into this area. He was approached on the trail by a man. He wrote: “I hadn’t seen anyone on the trail or in the parking lot for two hours. I held my ground and watched as a derelict looking hippie walked up to me and asked what I was doing there. I was a little miffed, but I couldn’t tell what kind of weapon he might have had under his tie-died sweater and coat. He wasn’t a large man, but he smelled and looked like he’d been in the woods too long…. It was a little nerve wracking having that encounter unarmed.” (Tribal Bigfoot, Paulides, Pg. 285)

Okay, now I’m a little miffed. Are hippies so bad you have to suspect them of being dangerous? The author of the book is a former law enforcement agent who I guess has decided that hippies are to be avoided unless you can arrest them.

This morning I was reading a book of Bigfoot fiction when I got to a page that said, “We needed more scientists with real clout in the community to come forward, look at the data and see that the hard evidence was already there…. Instead we get sociopaths and rednecks and hippie cultists.” (North American Primates, Durgee, Pg. 209)

Can you see why I feel hippies are under fire from the misperceptions of prejudice?

Now I know I’m not going to change the opinions of millions who have already made up their minds one way or another on whether or not hippies are good or bad. I happen to live in a community, however tiny, where there’s a lot of drug users. I see more than my share of them. MOST of them are not old enough to have been part of the hippie movement. My neighbors are huge users of drugs, ex methies, current full-time potheads [and I should add this is medical marijuana at this point, and quite legal]… they aren’t but in their forties and not wise enough to know what being a hippie really meant. They just want the drugs, not the spirituality and lifestyle of creativity that the early hippies brought into focus.

There are a few young people hereabouts that have the beauty and spirit of real hippies, but not many. Most are completely clueless… they just want drugs. Pathetic, in my humble opinion! And there are a few old hippie artists in the community who are carrying on the mysticism of true hippie life, with love.

Hippiedom is a liberation of the spirit, an expansion of consciousness, a flight of amazement on the journey to reach forth toward world consciousness and love. To denigrate it into a ‘hey we want drugs’ thing is to entirely miss the point of what the movement was actually about.

What do Bigfoot eat?

You may think this a trite question, but for me it isn’t. That’s because I’m a Bigfoot researcher. You may be shocked at this revelation about the character of this old hippie with a cooking blog, but please try to understand where I’m coming from. I live in a cabin surrounded by many miles of forest on all sides. There’s a little town nearby, about 1200 people, but I’m in the forest, surrounded by trees. There have been quite a few Bigfoot sightings within a mile of my little dwelling place. So I think wondering what Bigfoot would like to eat is a fair question.

One woman I talked to had a sighting a mile or two from where I live. She said it came into her yard so she set out apples and other fruit for it. This creature apparently ate what she left out. One day it came to her kitchen window and looked in. She said it had a kind and grateful face, and yellow eyes.

Now I’m not asking a Bigfoot to come look into my window though I think that would be cool. What I need to know is what is best to feed it. An acquaintance in Santa Cruz area says they won’t eat bananas unless you demonstrate how to peel and eat them while they’re watching. You see, often Bigfoot watch quietly and undetected from behind trees. They blend in with tree trunks and sometimes imitate tree stumps by crouching down when they think they might be detected and there’s no trees to hide behind.

You might think I’m wacko… I know most people don’t read Bigfoot literature. But there’s a lot of new anecdotal evidence on the internet and in Bigfoot books these days that make it almost impossible not to believe once you’ve allowed yourself to learn more. Many of the sightings are by very credible people, like this Bigfoot Sighting at Oregon Caves National Monument.

Add to that the books by scientists about Bigfoot, and it is a certainty. Right now I’m about to read a book called Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence by Dr. Grover Krantz. I’m nearly finished reading Tribal Bigfoot by David Paulides.

Superb book, that one.

Did you know there’s a new hobby called “squatching”? It means that people go out into the forest where there have been Bigfoot sightings, and do things to try to attract Bigfoot into the area so that they will hopefully have a Bigfoot sighting or at the very least, find some footprints, or hear vocalizations, or tree knocks. The closest I’ve gotten so far is to hear vocalizations and to get that weird feeling of someone watching and telling me mentally to go away.

Part of squatching is to go into the forest to set up an area where the dirt is cleared enough to bear footprints. Soft raked dirt is needed because often ground is packed too tightly to show any footprints at all. In the morning after raking a baiting site, hopefully you’ll find footprint tracks if you’ve done it right.

I’m thinking… watermelon. I have a bunch of little watermelon in my garden that might do. But would a Bigfoot know what to do with it? And if I put this bait out, would a bear get it instead, or a raccoon? More than likely.

I know a place where the dirt is already soft and mainly dusty… all I’d need to do is take a rake and some food, then camp nearby … I definitely want to try that soon… but first want to figure out what to offer Sasquatch, and rig a way to hang food in a tree in such a way that a Sasquatch could reach it but a bear or raccoon couldn’t.

Strange desires we have here in the forest, no?

I know many Bigfoot researchers say that Bigfoot eats meat. No doubt they need lots of food to sustain the growth of such a large, strong body. But they’re also into berries and roots. Maybe they’d like potatoes and strawberries!

I just found a couple of pages a friend of mine wrote about stocking and organizing a pantry… and of course I wanted to pass on the information to you since the intent of this blog so closely matches Dianne’s articles.

First I noticed her article on Gather.Com, one of my favorite article-writing sites. Her article, A Well-Stocked Pantry, caught my eye… because pantries are often on my mind… especially as my tomatoes are getting ripe and I’m wondering how I’m going to can and store them all!

In her article she linked to a related Squidoo page about kitchen pantries on which she shows examples of why having a well stocked kitchen pantry will be invaluable in a number of situations. I too look for the sales to buy supplies in quantity. She has a poll there, “Is your pantry organized and well-stocked?”… I had to admit, mine is well-stocked, but not organized. I love her organization suggestions!