I’ve charted the microtrends on social media — scraggly scallion butts taking root in water; hungry sourdough starters burping on kitchen counters; more and more dishes built sensibly, and creatively, from scraps that some home cooks once considered garbage.
Many of the people lucky enough to isolate seem to be shopping more thoughtfully, from local businesses, and buying only what they need. But it’s hard to say which of these customs, if any, will endure.
Frugality forms a pattern that repeats itself in different times, among different communities, for different reasons.
It can point to the struggles of poverty, the hardships of wartime, a commitment to sustainability, a response to trauma or food scarcity. Some Depression-era habits have been lost, while others have been passed down, again and again, like an inheritance of the previous generation’s values and anxieties.
When I was growing up, I often noticed the way other children’s parents casually tossed things away — the same things that my immigrant parents saved, trimmed or reused.
Take the plastic quart containers that previously held yogurt. My father carried leftovers in these to the office for lunch, then brought them back to wash and use again. Envelopes that arrived in the mail were cut into pieces, so the blank squares could be stacked by the phone in a bulldog clip and used as scrap paper.
Our broken kitchen appliances got new parts — they were repaired, not replaced. Ripped clothes were mended, passed down or saved for another family member’s continuing project of sewing cute aprons, bibs or patchwork blankets.
I still cut used envelopes up into scrap paper — a quirk that isn’t mine, or even my father’s, but his father’s. No one can predict which practices will outlast the people who taught them to us.
When I asked people on Twitter this week which frugal habits of their parents or grandparents really stuck with them, I got a wide range of answers.
Khushbu Shah, the restaurant editor of Food and Wine magazine, said her mother saved old T-shirts to cut into cleaning rags. The writer Shauna M. Ahern said she saved the vegetables from a pot of stock, then blended them to stir into sauces, or rice. Venessa Wong, a reporter for BuzzFeed News, said she still splits paper napkins in half, as her grandfather did.
Others wrote about reusing wrapping paper, Ziploc bags and aluminum foil. They recalled their parents’ saving stacks of napkins from fast-food restaurants, or emptying the tiny packets of pepper flakes from delivery pizzas to amass in a larger container.
Some people store their butter wrappers in the freezer to grease cake tins (genius), or cut open tubes and bottles when they’re almost empty, to get out the very last bits of tomato paste or lotion. Danish cookie tins are a theme (their reuse as a sewing kit is so familiar, particularly to immigrant children, that the image exists as a meme in several languages).
Recently, the writer Jenny G. Zhang called the trend of growing scallions in jars “Victory Sills.” A perfect name, and a nod to the food gardens people were first encouraged to grow as their civic duty during World War I.
But liberty or victory gardens, fueled by wartime scarcity, were a relatively short-lived movement (though provision gardening has made a comeback recently). As soon as many Americans realized that gardens weren’t totally necessary, that all the extra work of maintaining them year round was, well, work, millions of gardens were abandoned.
The end of self-isolation could mean a return to all the conveniences of a pre-pandemic food era, to an unstable, fragile food system. But for those who live through the pandemic, it could also shape a collective response, and all of these small habits could add up to a meaningful shift that changes our food culture.
For now, documenting a single scallion as it regenerates on the windowsill is a small gesture of hope. I can’t get enough of the image on Twitter and Instagram, in Slack channels and text messages. Every scallion, every tiny green shoot, makes me inexplicably happy.
But when I’m feeling skeptical, it’s easy to picture very little changing beyond small gestures — to picture people, decades from now, plopping scallion roots into water, and wondering what it meant to their parents and grandparents, and why it became a habit.