Frugality week 1

A few of Franklin's virtues come fairly naturally to me.  I am still driving the same 1990 Accord that I've owned for 15 years; likewise, my cellphone is so primitive as to make me the butt of domestic mockery.  I resist all forms of refurbishment and shopping (except for groceries and books).  I bring my lunch to work and it is habitually cheap and temperate (fruit and yogurt with an occasional pb & j on an English muffin). 

In short, I expected frugality to be pretty much a breeze.  I did have to turn down a wine-tasting class (a bit of a frugality cheat, since I'll sign up for a sequel later in the season).  For fun, T. and I went on a hike and watched movies at home. 

Unfortunately, in catching up with friends and colleagues, this became a restaurant-heavy week (4 meals), and two meals were my personal favorite, sushi, which I felt I had to mark as a definitionally un-Franklinesque expense.  You can see the blots on Wednesday and Saturday:

Sushi represents a category of virtue project question mark that I have.  How would Franklin have adapted his system in today's world?  I have friends who put my frugality to shame: one of them will eat sushi, his wife tells me, but he insists on the various frugal combos, which I avoid because I prefer different (read: more expensive) fishes.  So maybe sushi isn't such a grey area.

But take Saturday's trip to the farmer's market: it often annoys my frugal self that I can't find much produce there that isn't organic; in Eugene, the beautiful, local, seasonal offerings are always enticing, but they can add up (I got out this week with just spinach and Chinese broccoli and enough of it for the entire week – reasonably frugal at $6.50).  So: would Franklin buy organic?  Or would he be delighted by the ingeniousness of modern agribusiness, which makes produce generally inferior but remarkably affordable.  Remember, this is a man who never remembered even what he ate.

But Franklin was also a man who lived in a time before reliable information about nutrition and environmental degradation was available.  He cared passionately about the people on the bottom and about the public good.  He invested substantial capital in enterprises he thought would pay off in the long run and was tempted by fad diets with weighty philosophical underpinnings, as his adoption of vegetarianism after randomly coming across a book that endorsed it attests.  From this perspective, I can imagine him enthusiastically adopting the local and organic food movements that are our Franklinesque secular religion in Oregon.

The point is, sometimes it is hard to assess how a modern-day Franklin would calculate.  I like his system because it is reasonable, flexible, and relies on its adopters' common sense.  But this can easily lead to the kinds of rationalizations that drove Franklin away from a general will to be virtuous and towards a less flexible system in the first place.