Conflicting narratives to scare you. Living simply.

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The panic du jour in the mainstream press is a looming famine. Without Russia and Ukraine, the world will supposedly starve to death.

Another panic is about the state of our military. A vast proportion of the pool of potential service people are unfit to serve. The biggest reasons are obesity, dismal scores on the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery (a.k.a. IQ test), criminal records, and drug use. They just changed the rules to accept people with disfiguring tattoos.

Obesity is evident, though not to the same degree, throughout Europe. Tightening our belts would do us no harm. I cannot imagine that we will not be able to come up with the requisite 2500 cal per day to keep the citizens of the first world alive. Without even resorting to eating bugs.

A related panic is food inflation. It is being priced out of reach. Again, it depends on what you eat. The staples of the Ukrainian diet are potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbage, beets, wheat, rye, oats, buckwheat, pork and fish. The first eight remain very affordable; the last three still not too expensive. Provided, of course, that you can make do with carp instead of salmon.

I buy everything named by weight from the farmer’s market.  I note that even Ukrainians by the same things in boxes, plastic wrap, tin cans and so on for twice the price per ounce. Step number one in fighting inflation would be to get smart about how you buy food. This observation holds more true in the United States than here. We will, of course, hear lots of loud squawking. I’m not holding my breath to observe signs of parsimony.

I think I would make a pretty good 1950s home economics teacher. Here is a picture of the delicious homemade stuff in our house today.

• There are two kinds of pickles – mine in the big jar, Grandma’s in the little one. Hers are lightly salted, to be eaten in one or two days. Mine will make you pucker more and have more spices.

• There is a big jar of grape leaves I am pickling to make dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) for a barbecue party a week from Saturday. I picked them from our garden and along the street. Should have done so a month ago when they were more tender, but these will work.

• There is a liter jar of sauerkraut. Cabbage is cheap, and I like the way mine turns out.

• There is a three liter jar of corned beef. It will be ready after sitting in the refrigerator for a week. You can't buy corned beef in the store here, but this is cheaper and better tasting than Safeway’s in any case.

• Not shown is the Emil Lagasse homemade mustard that goes with the corned beef. It is sitting in the refrigerator

• Also not shown, because we don't have any at the moment, is Grandma Nadia's homemade mayonnaise. Though hers is better, we usually make do with store-bought.

I mentioned the borscht that Nadia made last Sunday when the rest of us went for a walk in the park. It sits in a 5 gallon vat in the refrigerator, at the ready to satisfy anybody's hunger at any time. The problem is that so many new things get cooked every day that the old stuff doesn't get eaten.

It took a Joseph Stalin to make Ukrainian starve. It required incredibly hard work on the part of evil men to overcome Ukraine's natural abundance. I do not think that even the Russians will be able to manage it again. Whatever the history, a table overflowing with food is a characteristic of Ukrainian hospitality. I am a constant disappointment to Grandma Nadia because my appetite is simply inadequate.

We are having a repeat of our recent successful BBQ a week from Saturday, the 16th. The only thing missing last time was music. Two of the new members of Toastmasters have a musical background. We are inviting guests to bring instruments, and sheet music if they play the piano.

We don't have to mention what else to bring. Every group of guests we invite is incredibly generous. We will prepare a large tabbouleh and a large platter of stuffed grape leaves as hors d'oeuvres, then shashlik (shish kebab, sort of), sausages and mackerel on the grill. The table will be overflowing with finger food, fruits, drinks and sweets brought by the guests.

The other contradictory panic of the moment concerns automobile, air and train travel. All three have been incredibly screwed up by Covid, inflation, and the war. The magnitude of the confusion is an indication of the incredible wealth of our society and the extent to which we have become accustomed to a level of consumption that has long appeared to be unsupportable.

Should we really be motoring around in lumbering 2 ton vehicles? How much richer are our lives for traveling to distant lands to spend a week in the sun? How much of a hardship will it be if we are forced to regress to the levels of consumption of 20 years ago? Can we forgo those Carnival cruises? Mexican beach vacations?

I could easily be accused of hypocrisy for writing this. After all, by virtue of air travel (and the American propensity to involve its military all over the world) I have lived and worked in several countries. My defense is that these military adventures weren't my idea, and when I had any choice in the matter I made a point of settling down and learning the language and culture.  I tried not to be just a tourist.

Now, in 15 years of retirement in Ukraine, I have been perfectly content to travel by bicycle instead of car, enjoying our local beaches instead of faraway resorts.  I am blessed with a wife who has never have a car and does pretty well with bicycle, bus and taxis. She does like getting to know more of the world through foreign travel, which she is happy to undertake on her own. Fine with me – most of my air travel was done in an era in which it was a bit of a luxury. The tickets were expensive, the stewardesses pleasant and often quite comely, and the food decent. I can leave the cattle calls of modern travel to her.

The inflation I have been predicting for a couple of decades appears to be upon us. We are as well prepared to meet it as anybody. Our lifestyle is already so simple that there won't be any jarring adjustments. It will not hurt our children to grow up in a more austere time. They can learn real values.

That's the opinion from Lake WeBeGone, where the good looking women are dealing with Grandpa Sasha's pulmonary edema – he is in the hospital to have something done about it – the strong man is holding the fort with the kids, and the kids are enjoying summer to the fullest.

Graham