When I was a wee little girl of 9 or 10, I had a penchant for making up words. One that sticks in my mind is “geniously.”
Oh, that’s such a geniously plan.
Or
Wow, that is a geniously idea.
Or
You are such a geniously friend.
One day on the way home from school, my best friend Stephanie (are you reading this, Steph), told me to my deep devastation geniously is not a word.
Well, let me say, that really smarted because I had been using the word A LOT. Like all the time. I was a bit embarrassed to know that the geniously word I’d been using was not so geniously afterall.
(Never mind the grammatical atrocity of using an adverb in place of an adjective, but don’t even get me started on that. I’ve come a long way, baby.)
Fast forward 25 or so years to today. . . .
I made up the word “poorganically” to talk about my new scheme of eating healthfully on a tiny budget.
Or at least, I thought I did. According to my googler, a few others have had various conceptions of the word in the past few years, but basically “poorganic” has been floating around with no one to really grab it by its etymology and teach the term, so since I consider myself a decent teacher, and a geniously word-maker-upper, I have to clarify a few tiny things that have been hang-ups for some of you with regard to Eating Poorganically. (General definition of The Poorganic Life here.)
- Poorganics don’t have to eat purely organic food.
- Poorganics don’t have to eat purely cheap food.
- Poorganics don’t have to eat purely “real” food.
- Poorganics don’t have to coupon.
Basically, poorganics are not PURELY doing anything. We are recovering perfectionists who are taking the lazy man’s approach to real food, organics, gardening, and all these hot topics.We are jumping on the bandwagon, trying to find a quick, cheap, and easy way to do all this real food stuff. In some things we get tougher, but other areas we get more lax as time goes on. We are afraid of rules and lists because that makes our little inner-OCD girl come out and start twitching. Is rule-free organics even possible? We don’t know. We are trying it.
Here are the poorganic priorities with regard to food–sort of in order
- Safety (Will this food kill me? If so how quickly or slowly.)
- Cost (Is this food a good value or bad. If bad value, refer to 3 and 4, create an elaborate fraction to determine how much you care.)
- Taste (Awesome? Nasty? Styrofoamish? Like pork raised in PNG?)
- Health (Is this food good or bad for my immediate and long term health? If bad, refer to 3 and create an elaborate fraction to determine how much you care.)
- Convenience (Does my feeling of awesomeness for having spend 5 hours making a food counteract the incredible insanity of doing so? It’s subjective. One gal’s crazy is another gal’s gallon of crockpot yogurt.)
Here are things that are NOT our priorities. Don’t be mad. We have just determined that there are LOTS of other terrific bloggers focusing on these ideas, so we will let them fill that niche.
Reactionary obsession with documentary films that feature the grossness of gross farms.- Politics
- Animal rights
- Social Justice
- Morality
- Environment
- Making people feel bad for feeding their kids Hamburger Helper. (Beef stroganoff, baby. It’s so delicious.)
- Medical Solutions. We don’t have any health or medical problems so far. We are only motivated by a quirky obsession to do something that doesn’t seem like it can be done. If you have a bon-a-fide health problem that you are trying to remedy through diet, please don’t seek fer real “smart-like” answers roun’ here. I am not lying when I say that I am not a geniously person or nutritionist or doctor.
Wow. Based on that list, it seems abundantly clear how shallow and lame we are, doesn’t it? You can probably tell that we poorganics don’t take ourselves too seriously. . . at least when it come to food.
We LOVE food. We LOVE good food. We LOVE cheap good food. We LOVE easy, cheap, good food.
We HATE guilt. We HATE false guilt. We HATE false food guilt. We HATE my-real-food-is-better-than-your-false-food guilt.
Does that explain it?
Questions?
Ooo, ooo, I have one. Have I taken care of people asking me at restaurants if their choice was poorganic enough?
well i appreciate this definition. for me, i think i am still on the ‘eat real food’ thing. i mean, i would eat hamburger helper, and maybe even like it, but i won’t buy it… and i am refusing to buy standard meat in the US. which means, we might be vegetarians until we can shoot a deer. haha.
Ooo, you will be so excited Anita. I found a friend who had a very good hunting season this year and is going to give us a bunch of venison. Hooray! Now I just have to hope that we like it and that it is yummy. 🙂 We have kind of become “flexitarians” because of how much our meat consumption has decreased. I grab meat when the organic is a good deal or I’ve checked out the company. One of these days, I will get around to writing the Flexitarian post, the Eating Meat Poorganically Post, the “Concessions we’ve Made” post, etc. So many ideas and so little time. I don’t actually buy HHelper anymore because I’ve figured out how to make a from scratch equivalent, but it’s MUCH easier for me because I stay home. Demonizing HH or telling a friend that works full time that she needs to eat only “real food” is setting her up for major guilt and discouragement, so I’m focusing on encouraging people toward whatever steps they can make toward a healthier life. Right now I’m having fun demonizing canola oil and telling everyone to use butter. 🙂
Love this definition! Sounds very sane.
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Thanks! We try to give ourselves a lot of grace. 🙂