The New Cuisine: Eating Without Going Broke

Diane Hackett, a La Grange, Ill., housewife, recently bought a live lamb for $10 and last weekend was headed for a farm where she intended to purchase a cheap goat. Mrs. Hackett is not after pets for her eight children; she plans to barbecue the goat. Lydia Galton of New York City recently performed the bloody job of slicing 100 Ibs. of liver; it was her turn to serve as distributor for the food co-op she and her neighbors have organized. In Dallas Mr. and Mrs. Jack Hollon have taken to growing wheat in their front yard and vegetables out back.

These are just a few of the measures being taken by people who want to continue to eat well without going broke during the nation's worst food-price inflation in 26 years. Across the U.S. this summer, the budget-conscious have been learning gardening, fishing for dinner, hoarding bargains when they can be found, seeking recipes that make cheap or unusual food palatable, and changing their style of entertaining.

The challenges of scarcity and rocketing prices are bringing out old-fashioned ingenuity along with the complaints, evoking a pioneer atmosphere in which acquiring victuals is once again an important matter even for the affluent. Kirsten Lumpkin, the wife of a Seattle construction man, bought a side of beef in company with some neighbors and has been canning her own fruit. "It's unsettling," she said last week while preparing to make sauerkraut for the first time in her life. "All of a sudden, eating has become sort of a focal point, and I think that's too bad."

In Berkeley, Anita Davidsen, a graduate student's wife, looks at it differently. "Now," she said, after learning to grow and can vegetables, "I can imagine how satisfying it was for great-grandmother--over a hot stove all day but socking away 30 quarts of whatever. I'm canning things to give away as Christmas gifts."

Freezer Run. The bargain hunters seem to fall into two camps: those determined to eat as much meat as ever and others willing to use high-protein alternatives to some extent. Mrs. Hackett, the lamb-and-goat lady from La Grange, speaks for the carnivores: "I know there are a lot of women who are going to ride it out with eggs and cheese, but I want meat."

She and her husband Jim, a computer-data trainee, have made a science of obtaining meat. Diane scouts out farmers willing to sell an animal cheap. After the farmer takes care of the slaughtering, her husband butchers the carcass. Next month the Hacketts plan to visit Mississippi, where a relative will sell them two pigs for $10 each.

The Hacketts are among the thousands of Americans who have recently bought a home freezer (theirs has a capacity of 1,700 Ibs.). That run on freezers has made them as hard to get as the beef they are intended to hold; some appliance stores are sold out completely, and others report sales increases of between 50% and 200% over last year.

With beef cattle currently the scarcest commodity of all, some people--a tiny minority, to be sure--are willing to turn to the horse. Carlson's, a butcher shop in Westbrook, Conn., that recently converted to horsemeat exclusively, now sells about 6,000 Ibs. of the stuff a day. The cuts have the same names and shapes as beef but cost half as much. The savings will grow when beef prices shoot up again next month.

Horsemeat has relatively little fat and therefore requires marinating or basting. It also must be salted down to remove its excessive sweetness. People put off by the idea of horsemeat may be consoled by its low cholesterol content. Carlson's does not intend to rest on its present success. It is bringing out a line of horsemeat cold cuts and plans to produce a horsemeat cookbook soon. Supermarkets in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania are introducing rabbits, whole or precut, at prices ranging from $1.19 to $1.48 per Ib. A Portland chain has begun to sell buffalo meat.

Dawn Purchases. Bulk buying by groups of families was an established way of saving money long before the current price problem, and now the co-op approach is more popular than ever. Manhattan's New School for Social Research is even offering a course on how to run a coop. No matter how much book learning co-op members acquire, success still depends on hard work. A buyer typically must visit wholesale markets at dawn, inspect large quantities of merchandise and be wary of bad buys. Members must also store, divide and distribute the food. Says Judy Bendewald, a member of Manhattan's twelve-family West Village Coop: "You get a saving, but when the food comes to you it is filthy and right from the farm. Lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard --they've got to be scrubbed." But the savings seem worth it. Last week at a New York City supermarket, for example, shoppers paid $1.09 per Ib. for roasting chicken, while coopers in the same city paid only 92-c-. Eggs selling for 95-c- a dozen in the supermarket went for 65-c- at the coop.

For those with less zeal for challenges, the search is on for meatless alternatives. Many housewives who previously served one tuna or pasta dinner a week now make three or four such meals. The soybean has come into its own either as a blend with chopped beef or as a substitute. Diana Young, an author and a gardening authority in Burlington, Vt., serves what she calls "the fooler": a mixture of dried soybeans, onions, cooked rice, bread crumbs, eggs and seasoning that she cooks in oil. Lou Napoli of Atlanta may get the year's optimist prize with her offering of "peanut-butter chops." She mixes peanut butter, bread crumbs, onions, eggs and rice for baking in a casserole. Peanut butter, of course, is most pliable, and the dish's resemblance to chops depends on the cook's sculpting ability. In any event, it is very rich in protein. Peanut-butter soup is another nutritious possibility. The cookbooks that are most in demand these days are paperbacks specializing in low-cost items. A booklet called The Penny-Pinching Wisdom of General Owl, for instance, recommends "doggy bag casserole," made, of course, with old bones.

Zucchini Preserves. The fastest-spreading countermeasure to inflation seems to be gardening. In cities, suburbs and the countryside, people are seeking out vacant plots and turning lawns into cabbage patches. There has been nothing like it since the World War II victory-garden movement. The Jack Hollons of Dallas are among the most prescient and ambitious of the amateur farmers. Anticipating a wheat shortage last fall, they planted a tenth of an acre -- their front yard -- last fall. They even tried to mill the wheat themselves but had problems. So they took their 100-lb. crop to a commercial miller, and Mrs. Hollon is still baking sourdough bread and making whole-wheat pancakes with the flour. Jack Hollon, a math teacher, estimates that the wheat crop and their vegetable garden have saved the family only about $50 so far. But the Hollons and their two young children are having fun with small-time farming.

Some amateurs are surprised by the yield and variety that can be coaxed from a small plot. Mrs. Penny Lynn, a Berkeley schoolteacher with two children, has been raising such exotic items as snow peas, Japanese eggplant and coriander in her front yard, as well as carrots, beets, tomatoes and parsley. "We had so much lettuce," she said, "that we had to give it away." The College of Agricultural Sciences at Berkeley has for years offered the families of graduate students the use of small plots of land for farming. This season there is a waiting list. The school's soil is so rich and free of insects that first-time farmers are bringing in bonanza crops. The wife of an astronomy student produced such a surplus of zucchini that she is now making zucchini marmalade.

Enterprising as many of the economy measures are, they lack the simplicity of the Fain family's approach. Said Ed Fain, an Atlanta supermarket executive: "My wife is giving me one egg instead of two, one sausage patty in stead of two and adding mushroom sauce to make me think that I'm getting a lot." That way, one can save calories as well as cash.

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