Confessions of a Tupperware Junkie

I have recently been to a rash of Tupperware parties, and been reminded why I loathe them.  It hasn’t always been this way: a few years ago I hosted Tupperware parties, went to every party brimming with excitement about new products, and even considered becoming a consultant myself.  In those days, like many others, particularly women, I got excited about Tupperware and bought mountains of it because it was Tupperware. It is expensive, but it has a lifetime guarantee, and can save money in the long run. Besides, it’s Tupperware, it must be good. 

Tupperware do make a good product, and there is a lot of it that I do love. The Modular Mates keep my pantry tidy and organised.  The FridgeSmart containers really do keep my vegies lasting longer in the fridge.   A few of the utensils - the spatula, corkscrew, vegetable peeler - do a fantastic job, though no doubt other brands make something similar.  The quality of the plastic and the effectiveness of the seals on many of the plastic containers are second to none.  

But for a year or two I went to a ridiculous number of Tupperware parties. A few friends had become consultants and would put on demonstrations to drum up business, and other friends would have parties to support them.  Of course, I would dutifully go along to the parties.  But the more parties I attended, and the more products I bought that didn’t quite meet my expectations, the more I began to see through the spiel and the pretty brochures.   

This is the thing that I’ve learnt about Tupperware: they goal isn’t to make your kitchen more organised, their goal is to make money.  Tupperware know that they can make money from women who want an organised kitchen, and to save time with their innovative products.  Products come and go from seasonal catalogues, and limited edition products show up in monthly specials catalogues. Colours changed every few years, so that the Tupperware junkie just has to have the Rock ‘n’ Serve in that gorgeous new purple colour, even though they have more than they need in the previous blue, orange and black. 

Some of the innovation, to me at least, is more gimmick than innovation.  I bought a mixing bowl set from the Bake 2 Basics range as a hostess gift once when I hosted a party.  It seemed a such great idea, with its ergonomic design to make it easy to hold with one hand while mixing and pouring and it’s splatter guard to stop bits of meringue or flour coating the kitchen when using handbeaters.  Actually, I used the splatter guard once.  It’s easier to just to put the wet ingredients on top of the dry, or to stir it all through gently first, and to pay attention to what I’m beating!  The bowls are really just plastic bowls that don’t stack neatly, and don’t fit well in either my dishwasher or dish drainer. 

I’ve sold some of my unused Tupperware on Ebay, where it can fetch a reasonable price. Some of it just sits in my cupboard.  Some of it gets used regularly.  

I can’t imagine a need to buy any more Tupperware for a long time.  In fact, there is very little I can imagine needing to buy for my kitchen for a long time, short of a broken wooden spoon, and the Kitchenaid Mixer I have been drooling over.  

And next time I get invited to a Tupperware party I need to consider whether the opportunity to chat with friends over a cuppa is worth the sitting through the demonstration, and whether to bother going at all.

Eating for (more than) two

I have lost 8 or 9 kg since the Small Boy was born, almost a year ago.

I had put on over 10kg in the four years between babies, and it was frustrating me because I couldn't quite work out how.  I know I probably could have exercised a bit more, but it wasn't like I was sitting on my backside all day.  I wasn't eating a lot of junk food or takeaway, but probably snacked a little more than I should have, though not that much more.

After the Small Boy was born, I was less than happy that I'd ended up 3 or 4 kilos heavier than my already-too-much pre-pregnancy weight.  I wasn't ridiculously overweight, but it was enough to be bothersome to me, and the trend was upwards and that was a problem.

A few months after he was born I happened to read an article when I was flipping through a magazine, and I was finally able to recognise my problem.  (The Old Me would have torn out the article and kept it for later, but I just left it in the magazine and changed my way of thinking, and my way of eating.)

This is what I learnt: stop eating for Just In Case.

I have no idea if I took away the message the author had intended, but what I realised was that I was eating for in case I got hungry, not because I was hungry.  I have stopped eating a mid-afternoon snack most days because I'm not actually hungry in the mid-afternoon.   If I don't feel like much lunch, it doesn't matter, I'll just eat something small.  I'm also trying to make just enough for the evening meal, rather than feeling like if I don't make enough we'll be hungry.  If anyone is still hungry after they've eaten, well there is fruit in the fridge!

A Taxing Issue

On Sunday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced her Clean Energy Future and the details of the Carbon Tax.  

The idea, from what I understand, is that the biggest polluters will be charged a tax based on how much carbon dioxide they emit.  The big polluters are required to clean up their proceedings, but because of the extra costs to them, some costs will be passed on to the consumer through raised gas and electricity prices amongst other things.  Because prices will be higher, households will reduce their consumption, which in turn will reduce the amount of electricity etc that needs to be produced, and that will reduce carbon dioxide emissions.  The government is restructuring the tax system and increasing family assistance and pension payments to help cover the increased costs for those who can least afford them.  The proceeds of the tax will be invested in renewable energies and clean energy production. The opposition to the scheme is that everything will become more expensive, people are being overcompensated and will have no incentive to reduce consumption, it will destroy our economy, and it won't work anyway.

That's it in a nutshell.  I think.  Correct me if you think I've got it wrong!  I think a lot of Australians are a bit confused (at least, I hope I'm not the only one).

I have no idea whether this is a good thing or not.  I think we should be investing in renewable energy, and cleaning up our air is a brilliant idea, and if lots of countries do a little bit it all adds up to a lot. I have no idea if this is the right or wrong way of going about it.

However, from what I've seen everyone is talking about how much it's going to cost and avoiding the big elephant in the room: we need to reduce consumption.

This new scheme, if it does indeed come to pass, will cost the average household $10.10 per week, but the average household compensation will be $9.90 per week.   See, it's going to cost us all a lot!  But hang on, if they average household reduces consumption by $10.10 per week, won't they actually come out ahead?   That seems incentive to me to switch off more unused lights.

Cleaning up the air is only half the problem.  How have we got ourselves in the position of needing to reduce our carbon emissions? Overconsumption.   Whether you believe climate change is real or not, and if it is caused by human activity or not, can you accept that the insatiable desire for more stuff is not good?   Personally, I'm a 'climate change agnostic' who thinks it's better that we do something rather than nothing.  I am quite certain that there is only so much coal and copper in the ground, and only so much space we can devote to landfill. Eventually we will run out, whether it's very soon or not for a hundred years or more.

Everyone is saying we need to cut our carbon emissions, but no-one is saying that we need to change our lifestyle.  We are happy enough to save electricity, but we don't want to give up the good things we've got.   It's become normal that every driver has their own car, and that we live 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, two hours away from where we work.  We live on our own 'private estate' on a block of land in the suburbs and chew up agricultural land to do so, and so need to import more and more food.  We expect to be able to eat apples and tomatoes and bananas and broccoli and beans all year round and so we artificially ripen some, and ship the shortfall from the other side of the world.  And the food we do grow here: tomatoes grown in Bowen get sent to the distribution centres in Brisbane and Sydney, then back to Townsville. My tomatoes are being shipped thousands of kilometres when they are grown two hundred kilometres away!  And I was horrified to see when I visited Melbourne that tropical fruit cost less than it did here in the tropics.  On that, we expect to fly from one city to another whenever we want a holiday.  We want a bedroom for each of our children (plus a study) so they can house their own television, iPod and the mountain of toys we are told they need.  One cannot survive the Australian summer without a fully air-conditioned house, and pools are no longer for only the wealthy. We expect to do what we want, when we want, any time of day or night.  We need new clothes every season because the old ones are 'out of fashion' and we want them dirt cheap, so we send our cotton to China and they send it back as $5 t-shirts.  I say 'we' because I'm included.

If we in Australia are only contributing 2% of carbon emissions, and China contributes 20%, but we ship our resources to China so that they can make all sorts of goodies to ship back to us so we can buy them as washing machines and shoes and homewares and dolls so doesn't that make us responsible for some of China's emissions?

Sure, we can slap a tax on the big polluters and make them clean up their act so we can all feel good about ourselves,  but we aren't solving the problem.  

I am cutting my consumption - and not just of electricity - so that my kids can grow up in the beautiful and prosperous Australia that I love.   Will you join me?

Camping

It’s a long weekend here.  Our church is holding it’s annual camp, and we are going.  I wasn’t planning on going this year because of the logistics of camping with a baby, but Big Boy has been asking for the last eleven months when we would be going on Family Camp again, so off we go.  

The problem with camping is the amount of equipment we need, and how much I need to get organised.  Tent, sleeping bags, something to sleep on, cooking equipment, food, chairs, clothes. It’s hard to pack small when you have to fit everything in the car with four people.  And I have to do it all myself this time because my husband is working overtime to get his report cards written.

I’m doing my best to take only what we need, which is a fair bit when we are travelling with small children who need entertaining during the grown-ups talks, and who are likely to get too dirty to re-wear clothes. We need a table and stand for our little BBQ to make meals easier and safer.  We don’t need chairs, but I’d rather have a chair to sit in while breastfeeding, and it’s nice to chill back in a comfy folding chair.  It’s also expected to be a little colder than usual this weekend. I’m doing fairly simple food so as to take as little equipment as possible  , but I need to make sure we have enough food so that we aren’t caught short.

We do love camping, but unfortunately we haven’t done much of it for the last few years.  I think we have only used our tent five times in the last 2 1/2 years since we bought it.   Our options for going camping are for a one night trip on a weekend, but weekends during term time are full of doing schoolwork and “stuff maintenance”, or we can go for a few days during on or more of the school holidays, two of which we spend travelling down to visit my in-laws who are unable to come to us because of ill health, and we spend the other two holidays catching up on “stuff maintenance” that we’ve fallen behind on during the school terms.  And it all seems like a lot of effort with little kids when we can’t find others who want to come with us.  

If we had less “stuff maintenance” because we had less “stuff” - lawns, windows, overstuffed cupboards that need sorting, that sort of thing - then we could spend more weekends or a few days in the holidays, throwing a tent and some food in the back of the car and spending a night in a National Park somewhere.  Being too busy with “stuff” means we are missing out on an activity that we actually like doing, and have to allocate a portion of our house for storing camping equipment that we only use once a year.   In reality, we need to either ditch the surplus “stuff” or ditch the camping gear.

The removal of another shopping temptation

Yesterday I found myself in Bunnings because I wanted a nice trellis to grow my beans up.  I didn't need it: I surely could have worked out a cheaper, simpler option, but I wanted obelisk shaped trellises to look pretty.   Bunnings was on my way to where I was going, so it was a good place to shop.  I haven't been to Bunnings for a long time, definitely not since I have taken on minimalism, and probably not in almost a year.   I have been doing so well avoiding temptation buying stuff and yet in Bunnings I felt compelled to buy.  I didn't buy anything I didn't need - I left with only the trellises, and a hose nozzle that I remembered my husband had asked me to get - but it was hard work to do so.

For those outside of Australia and New Zealand, Bunnings Warehouse is a hardware store.  A massive hardware store, with a tagline of 'Lowest prices are just the beginning'.  My local Bunnings is directly under the flight path, about 2km from the runway.  When you see the planes go overhead, they look as though they could probably fit inside the massive shed.  Inside are rows and rows of timber and nails and tools and fertilisers and taps and light fittings and barbeques and outdoor furniture and mosquito repelling candles, and outside are rows and rows of playground equipment and plants and pots and bricks. They advertise as having over 45000 products, and have an awful lot of those on display.  There are plenty of staff running around in red shirts, and if you are lucky enough you might be able to get the attention of one of them, who may or may not belong in the department you need help in.

Most things in Bunnings are cheap, or at least appear so.  Because they are so big they can buy in big quantities and get a better deal.  Bunnings advertise that they will beat any price by 10%, which makes them appear a whole lot cheaper than what they are, but it is a little sneaky.  There is a noticeboard in the doorway which shows pages from other store's catalogues, with items highlighted and the Bunnings price shown as comparison.  Yesterday I noticed a packet of batteries for $3 in the Kmart catalogue with the Bunnings price: $2.97.  But, the vast majority of products are Bunnings' own lines.  They don't say 'Bunnings' on them anywhere, but neither will you find them in any other stores.  These products are comparatively priced to something you might find in another hardware store, or another department store such as Kmart (who are, incidentally, owned by the some company).  So even though they say they will beat any price by 10%, they know full well that the customer aren't going to find a lot of their products elsewhere, anyway. The quality of their own lines of products are ordinary at best.

The truth is that there is so much more in the store than we need.  And by 'we' I mean 'most people who live in Townsville'.  Yesterday I saw braziers and brussels sprouts seeds: it is not cold enough here for either!   (Okay, I'll be honest tonight it is cold enough for a brazier, but it is one of about ten nights of the year.)   Bunnings plays on our desire to have the beautiful gardens we see on Better Homes and Gardens, to renovate our kitchen like on Domestic Blitz, and be our own home handymen like real Aussie blokes.  Bunnings run DIY workshops every weekend then direct you to where to buy all the equipment.  Everything to make your 'castle' more beautiful is there, out on display, tempting you to take it home.

It's not just the things to make our lives more beautiful that are out on display, it's all the practical stuff as well.  Down the main aisles are bins of goods like buckets, extension leads, WD40, lightbulbs, spray bottles.  Oh, that is a good price, and I could always do with another - , I'll get one.  But isn't that how most department stores make their money, lots of people buying lots of little things they don't really need?  The reality is I just don't NEED all the things that they are throwing in my face.  Those extra torches, extra fertiliser, the metal butterfly for my my garden, and the pack of five rolls of masking tape, all just end up in my cupboard doing nothing.

Yesterday was my final trip to Bunnings.  It doesn't matter if they are actually cheaper.  There are other hardware stores on the odd occasion that I actually need one.  Like the True Value up the road from where my husband works.  I've been in there once before, and the man in the store was incredibly helpful. Thinking about it, I'm not sure why I haven't been back.  The lure of lower prices I guess.  There is a local nursery a bit our of my way, but it's not like I need to go there every week.

You're right Bunnings.  Lowest prices ARE just the beginning: the beginning of filling my home with needless clutter.

Maintaining Our Lifestyle

There is something that has been bothering me for a while, something I haven't been able to put my finger on.   Minimalist Mum touched on it last weekend, which got my cogs turning, because it was just as I finished a fantastic book, Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes From, by Fred Pearce.  Then I just saw an online ad for income protection insurance and it crystallised the problem:

You can't always maintain your current lifestyle.


Life and income insurance are marvellous products - we have both - but something sat wrong with me while we were getting quotes and more information.  I had always assumed that if something happened to my husband, I would pay out the mortgage with the existing insurance on my husband's superannuation, sell and move somewhere smaller, work a few days a week, and get by with support from my family and church.  If I lost my husband my whole world would be turned upside down: I know, because it happened to our family when I was a child.   But life insurance is sold as a way to safeguard your current way of life.  It is recommended to have enough insurance to replace the other person's income for equivalent years as if they had remained alive.   We have enough insurance to cover the remainder of the house, and a year or two of income until we found our new normal.   You can't always maintain your current lifestyle, no matter how an insurance package is sold.

Fred Pearce's book was a very thought provoking book.  My husband commented that it must have been good, because I took so long to read it.  Pearce travelled the globe in search of information about the sources of his food, clothing, and general goods, as well as the working conditions of the people producing them.  I was inspired to use less stuff, as my innocent purchases had big impacts on the lives of other people, often less fortunate than myself.  But his conclusions were that we just need more sustainable solutions.  Much of the 'green economy' is about that - you don't have to give up anything to live an ethical or environmentally considerate life, just choose 'natural', 'eco-friendly' products.  A lot of these products are fantastic, and green is better than not green, but I'm not convinced that is on its own is the path to environmental sustainability.  You can't always maintain your current lifestyle, no matter how much you are 'greenwashed' into thinking that you can.

I am not in paid employment.  I spend my days at home with my kids.  I haven't gone back to work because we see huge value in kids having a parent home full time, and we are able to make do on one income.  There are many, many families who can't manage on a single income.  But there are families like my brother-in-law and his wife: he earns more than my husband, but she has put her young children into childcare to work part-time because money is always so tight.  Not because their needs are great, but because their wants are great.  Going back to work isn't a bad thing in and of itself - sometimes it is a necessity, but it isn't always.  You can't always maintain your current lifestyle, no matter what the Joneses and their kids have.

Before our last Federal election there was much talk about ideal population size for a 'sustainable Australia'.  Both sides of politics sprouted policies that would mean growing our population without sacrificing the Australian lifestyle.  How?  Won't we run out of space if we keep expanding our cities outwards? Developers put in lots of green space and walkways, but all miles away from amenities so we are still car dependent.  You can't always maintain your current lifestyle, no matter how shiny the bureaucrats can make it look.

Lifestyle, I've realised, is codeword for stuff.  Lifestyle is having the spacious house, the second car, eating at nice places, holidays, upgraded TVs and Nintendo DSs.  Lifestyle is not giving up what is comfortable.  Lifestyle is keeping up appearances.

Change happens.  Sometimes by choice, sometimes not.  Sometimes it is good, sometimes not.  Sometimes we have to be willing to change our lifestyle to go along with our voluntary, or involuntary, life changes.  

A simple lifestyle seems to me to be far more conducive to change and flexibility.  Whether it's a positive change, like a growing family or looking after our planet, or a negative change, like losing a family member or a job, a lifestyle of needing less stuff means a lifestyle more adaptable to having less stuff out of necessity.   

I know what lifestyle I want to maintain.