Henry David Thoreau - WALDEN AND ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though I

lived there more than two years,—not counting potatoes, a little green

corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the value of

what was on hand at the last date, was

Rice,................... $ 1.73½

Molasses,................ 1.73 Cheapest form of the

saccharine.

Rye meal,................ 1.04¾

Indian meal,............. 0.99¾ Cheaper than rye.

Pork,.................... 0.22

All experiments which failed:

Flour,................... 0.88 Costs more than Indian meal,

both money and trouble.

Sugar,................... 0.80

Lard,.................... 0.65

Apples,.................. 0.25

Dried apple,............. 0.22

Sweet potatoes,.......... 0.10

One pumpkin,............. 0.06

One watermelon,.......... 0.02

Salt,.................... 0.03

Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly

publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were

equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better

in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my

dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which

ravaged my bean-field,—effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would

say,—and devour him, partly for experiment’s sake; but though it

afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I

saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice, however

it might seem to have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village

butcher.

Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though

little can be inferred from this item, amounted to

$8.40¾

Oil and some household utensils,....... 2.00

So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending,

which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills

have not yet been received,—and these are all and more than all the

ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part of the

world,—were

House,................................ $ 28.12½

Farm one year,.......................... 14.72½

Food eight months,...................... 8.74

Clothing, etc., eight months,........... 8.40¾

Oil, &c., eight months,................. 2.00

——————

In all,........................... $ 61.99¾

I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get.

And to meet this I have for farm produce sold

$23.44

Earned by day-labor,................... 13.34

——————

In all,............................ $36.78,

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of

$25.21¾ on the one side,—this being very nearly the means with which I

started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred,—and on the other,

beside the leisure and independence and health thus secured, a

comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy it.

These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive they

may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value

also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some account.

It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money

about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years after

this, rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little

salt pork, molasses, and salt, and my drink water. It was fit that I

should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India.

To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well

state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I

trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the

detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as I

have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a

comparative statement like this.

I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly

little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude;

that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain

health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on

several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (_Portulaca oleracea_)

which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin

on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more

can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than

a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the

addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding

to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to

such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries,

but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her

son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.

The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an

economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put

my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes,

which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a

stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get

smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have at last

found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable.

In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves

of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an

Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I

ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble

fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths.

I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making,

consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive

days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness

of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this

diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through that

accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the

leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter,

till I came to “good, sweet, wholesome bread,” the staff of life.

Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the _spiritus_ which fills

its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal

fire,—some precious bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the

Mayflower, did the business for America, and its influence is still

rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows over the land,—this

seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at

length one morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which

accident I discovered that even this was not indispensable,—for my

discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process,—and I have

gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly assured me

that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly

people prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not

to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am

still in the land of the living; and I am glad to escape the

trivialness of carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which would

sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is