My grandmother used to be looked down upon by her neighbors because she grew ”misshapen” tomatoes in her backyard. Today I pay a lot of money to buy these misshapen heirloom organic tomatoes that she grew. She also grew herbs in her kitchen garden and would always sing to them. Today some scientists claim that music can make plants more productive. She always said that we should eat food the way it is produced in nature: raw. Today a growing subculture promotes the consumption of uncooked, unprocessed, organic foods (although I personally don’t support drinking raw milk or eating raw meat).
My grandmother would always buy things only after she was sure she had the money to spend. Today with the credit crunch, we may want to follow her example. Her slogan was, “If you don’t have the money, you don’t need it.”
Everything got recycled in my grandmother’s house. Newspaper was used for packaging, stuffing and wrapping; old clothes were stuffed into pillows, bedding and insulation; vegetable and garden waste was given to the animals. Today we pay to send our waste to the local garbage companies for recycling and pay even more to buy it back (as 100% consumer recycled paper). How about using newspaper to wrap your gifts this winter holiday season?
My grandmother objected to moving into our larger new home. She always said that she could only sleep in one bedroom. Today, after a few decades of growth in home sizes, we are considering how we can reduce our carbon footprint by building smaller and more energy efficient homes. My grandmother asked her cousins to stay with us because she thought their presence would maximize the use of space in the new house, while helping them save money for the future. How many of us today can think of getting extended families together to live under one roof peacefully?
Almost 40 years ago, when the nearest grocery store started packaging items in recycled brown paper bags, my grandmother became very upset. She thought the bags were extremely wasteful. She spent day and night making burlap grocery bags for each member of the family, with their names carefully embossed on them. Every three days, all the grandkids would follow her in a line to the grocery store and carry the produce home, with everyone carrying a small load. Obviously, we would all walk to and from the store. After all these years of going through fancy plastic and paper bags, my wife just bought a couple of green canvas bags (with the logo of the grocery store). We don’t have to use paper or plastic bags any more, although we still end up driving to the grocery store.
My grandmother was always “green” without claiming to be so. I don’t know how she would react if she were here to see people who claim they are green by buying $30,000 hybrid cars and drinking $5 cups of coffee from recycled paper cups, or large corporations “going green” while their CEOs still fly around the globe in corporate jets.
My grandmother taught me values and habits that are so needed in our current era: the importance of “being a family”; the importance of an education; the importance of respect, of self-reliance, of being ethical and conscientious, and of sharing with people less fortunate than me. But I know that even now I am not as smart as my grandmother.
E-mail: santarosadoc@aol.com