recession

How will you dress for the Bush Depression this winter? Me, I'm counting on my slightly tattered but super-toasty flannel-lined OshKosh overalls--so old they were actually made in OshKosh. That, and the sweaters I'll be wearing à la Jimmy Carter, since our thermostat and our bank balance will both be chillingly low.

President Carter tried, and failed, to make cardigans and conservation cool during the seventies energy crisis. He warned of "the serious consequences of our long delay in creating a comprehensive national energy policy" in a speech announcing the Emergency Natural Gas Act of 1977, and called on us all to buckle down and bundle up:

Sadly, the sole American family willing to heed Carter's "make do with less" message was the Waltons, who, alas, resided only in the corn pone-filled cranium of Earl Hamner Jr. Two years later, a frustrated Carter asked, plaintively, "Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?" He blamed the loss of community and the rise of materialism in our culture:

Again, Carter channeled the Waltons while the rest of us stayed glued to the oily exploits of the Ewings. We bought into the more-is-more mania, and our collective carbon footprint expanded exponentially. Houses and cars and waistlines grew bigger, while an endless geyser of consumer goods gushed all around us. Will it ever run out of steam?

Consider this astounding statistic I came across in the October issue of Organic Gardening: In 1995, the average number of food items sold in supermarkets was 3,000; by 2006, it had jumped to 45,000. And most it is cartons and cans and clamshells filled with industrially grown stuff that's been processed to death and then schlepped over land and sea. That's why Michael Pollan's "eater's manifesto," In Defense Of Food, advises us to avoid supermarkets altogether and seek out fresh food from local farmers--and our own front yards--instead.

Sure, some folks will continue to fill their cupboards with Campbell's soup--the only stock that didn't tank when the Dow sank. But more and more Americans are rejecting pre-fab faux foods in favor of DIY dining. Today's New York Times cites a report that, as of May, "53 percent of consumers said they were cooking from scratch more than they did just six months before," driven by the rising cost of convenience foods. Hey, when you're unemployed, there's plenty of time to hone those handy Depression-era skills like how to make your own stock, grow your own veggies, and can tomatoes.

We're reverting to old-timey modes of transportation, too--there's been a dramatic spike in bike sales and train travel in recent months. And many of us are buying less, learning to make do, and turning off the lights when we leave the room. We are, at last, achieving Jimmy Carter's dream of a simpler, less-stuff driven life--a dream, by the way, that he shared with another recent U.S. president, George H. W. Bush.

Poppy Bush declared back in 1992 that he wanted to "make American families a lot more like The Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons". How gratified he must be to see that Waltons-style austerity is finally in vogue. And all it took was his son's catastrophic stewardship of our country.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen’s proposed overhaul of our financial markets was unveiled on Monday, a day too early to qualify as an April Fool’s Day prank, but it was a joke, nonetheless. Forget about voodoo economics; this is doodoo economics. No wonder the rest of the world is turning up its nose at our once-almighty dollar as if it were dipped in dung. Paulsen’s proposals do nothing to address the mortgage mess, and they won’t prevent the next free market free-for-all, either—or freefall.

The foreclosure fiasco’s left a landscape littered with pre-fab ghost towns, a NeverLand of never-lived-in condos and sorry-we-had-to-split-levels. Folks are drowning in debt, our consumer-fueled economy’s lurching into obsolescence, but the Powers That Used To Be can barely bring themselves to say the “R” word.

More daring, less deluded folks are tossing around the “D” word. My favorite economics columnist, David R. Francis, wrote a column last week entitled “Recession is a Given. Can We Avoid Depression?”

Francis cites economist Robert Parks’ recent remark in an e-mail to colleagues “that there was more than a 60 percent probability the current financial meltdown in the United States would lead to the "Bush depression." Parks’ pessimism sent tremors down the it’s-not-our-faultline from K Street to Wall Street. But while the Federal Reserve’s frantically trying to jumpstart our stalling economy, Parks thinks the Fed’s interest rate cuts aren’t gonna cut it:

Starvation. Crazy talk from some crackpot Cassandra? Consider the source:

Here in New York, the newly needy are showing up at food banks and soup kitchens in droves, just when donations are dropping to the lowest they’ve been in decades. Same thing’s happening all over the country, according to the Wall Street Journal, and there’s a global food crisis brewing beyond our borders, from Argentina to Africa. The World Bank estimates that 33 countries are facing social unrest fueled by higher food and energy prices.

Are we facing an upheaval here at home? For many tapped-out Americans, rising food and fuel costs are catastrophic. But for “the food-should-cost-more cadre,” as food writer Kim Severson calls us in today’s NY Times, the demise of the dollar burger would be cause for celebration. Admittedly, we’re in the minority in a culture that views low-cost food “as a national triumph.”

As Ephraim Leibtag of the USDA’s Economic Research Service tells Severson, “If you think that mass production and vast distribution predicated on cheap energy is a good system, then the dollar hamburger is a good thing."

Severson cites the hopes of folks like Michael Pollan and Alice Waters that the advent of not-so-cheap fast foods could help level the playing field for locally grown fruits and vegetables and pasture-raised meat and dairy products:

Oh, and while we’re at it, could we have a chat about the high cost of cheap oil, too, now that it’s not so cheap? A congressional committee held a hearing yesterday to ask the heads of our five largest oil companies how they can justify raking in record profits and receiving $18 billion in tax breaks at a time when average Americans are struggling to fill their gas tanks and independent truckers are seeing their profits vanish.

John Hofmeister, the president of Shell Oil, smugly told ABC News, “When our costs are too high for Shell, we make choices about what not to do. And one choice that consumers could make is to drive less.”

Sure, because, you know, we’ve got such great mass transit. And we’ve built all those communities where walking or biking to work is a real option. Oh, wait! That was just a dream I had. Nevermind.

Sadly, an awful lot of folks can only get where they need to go by car. So they can’t cut back on their gas consumption. I guess, to paraphrase Mr. Hofmeister, one choice that consumers could make is to eat less.

Or at least to buy less food. What better way to offset the high cost of your commute than to save on your food bills by eating weeds? It’s high time for lawn-loving suburbanites to just say “whoa!” to Roundup and start harvesting those delicious and nutritious weeds they’ve been treating like trash.

Not sure what’s edible? Martha Stewart’s got a “wild edibles” guide in the April issue of Martha Stewart Living. Sure, life as we know it is ending, but there’s a whole new world of possibilities opening up right before your eyes! So go forage for food in your front yard—it’s a good thing.