New Math: 2 part series = feast for thought

Part 1: Substitute Subtractions

So friends, you spoke and I listened. The first person to offer a suggestion for the coming blogs was how to use substitutions in recipes; such as when to use yogurt instead of butter or applesauce instead of eggs. This seemed like a fun opportunity to prove my crappy math skills can work in a theological kitchen! Let's crunch some numbers and bake some bread! Today's recipe features substitutions, the blog suggests subtractions, and the whole thing creates wholesome bread at our table.

It might look a little like this:

substitutions - sacrifice = expansion for all!

If you have ever cooked with me you know that I'm constantly substituting ingredients and adding (next week's theme) things to every recipe. This usually means my calzones end up looking like a snake who just ate an ostrich egg, or scones that are the love child of a gummy bear and baked good. The latter was last weeks flop at substituting. We spent the weekend at Ecumenical Advocacy Days: What's Gender Got To Do With It? and I thought a quick scone on the way out the door would save us precious sleep minutes.

Good thought; poor execution :(

The recipe read as a jumping off point to add in your favorite ingredients like dried fruit and nuts. I love both, but Jordan isn't a fan; so being a good girlfriend I tried to find equal ground and substituted the dry add-ins with defrosted and drained strawberries (in my defense I drained the heck out of those puppies!). Rather than a flaky, fluffy, or delicious scone I ended up with gummy insides, dry outsides and well, the bi-product of gummy candy and baked goods. Both things I love, but should just join the ranks of drinking and hair-clippers on the list of bad combinations! It seems you need to know a little something about baking components before you start messing around ... such as too much liquid makes flour pasty ... so I should have learned that in pre-K. :(

Like a good bread, this idea of substitutions needed some time to rest so it could rise to fullness, and this weekends conference proved to be the expanding table for this edition. The conference focused on the role gender plays in creating global peace and justice. Turns out the the Federal Budget has a whole lot of gendered politics involved, and sadly we're living out more of our patriarchal past than feminist future.

When talking about the budget you can get caught up in the scary ingredients (such as the suggested House budget cuts would eliminate head start funding for 8,000 children in Virginia alone, or eliminate 180,000 students access to college scholarships through Pell Grant limitations. Most of these households affected by these cuts are headed by single mothers.). The blanket statistic use can be as befuddling and mystifying as baking terms: "fold in dry ingredients," "cut in the butter," "degas or don't degas the dough," the defense budget is "off the table," and the "our foreign assistance is out of control."

Well folding and cutting in baking terms are easily figured out by a google search, and the debunking of these false federal fiduciary statements can be uncovered by our good friends at the UCC Justice and Witness Ministries. They break down the budget cut affects on those sitting at the far end of our community table, uncover the ways the top 1% (the sole person sitting at the head of the table) continues to feast while most are left squabbling under the table for any crumbs. To put it back into baking terms, the way our budget is currently structured hoards all the wholesome tasty ingredients into one slice of bread, leaving the over processed, gummy, dry, crusty parts for the rest.

Who wants to eat that bread?

I don't

I don't think you do either

So how can the bread at OUR table feed everyone?

We're talking economics, which is cooked up from the greek work oikomene, which means care for the household. Tending to the budget is tending to our home, and what's more homey than baking bread? So right now our federal budget recipe comprises of 3 main ingredients:

1. Tax law - Long term affects and no annual review
2. Entitlements - this just means those things we're entitled to, such as social security, medicare, medicaid, etc.
3. Annual Appropriations - now this is the biggie and the one where we're spending most of our time fighting. This is where our military budget is, as well as all those assistance programs (WIC, SNAP,Child Care Assistance, Head Start). This is also where the discretionary funds are found. If you scoop out the military spending from this 1/3 of our budget, you're left with 12% ... of a 1/3 of our entire budget ... from which we're trying to balance the ENTIRE budget. This just doesn't seem like good math. And when I asked this weekend why nothing else is being subtracted or cut, no one had an answer. Their best guess was the military budget has historically never been on the budget cut table.

Basically this last step is where we're trying to find all our subtractions without touching anything else and the top 1% can continue to feast while the rest well ... it's just crumby.

The short of it all is we're trying to balance the budget by seriously subtracting the 12% left in that third step. This 12% is what's left over when we ignore the heaping dishes of military spending sitting on our table; and if you seem to think that 12% can feed the remaining 99% of us, well then federal household caretakers (ie Congressional Budget Committees) I think you're the one that's really bad at math ... not me.

I'm one who believes that we're all called to God's table. We're not only lovingly called by our name, but when we get there, there is more than enough ... if we share. And well, we can't eat a gun, or feast on a tank ... perhaps a tank of ice cream, but I digress (is that like degas ... a little baking humor ;). I suggest that we bring this idea into the federal budget conversation because it matters to all of us. There are some economists who suggest that we're all out there for ourselves, but I think this is foolish. Our own home budgets are affected when the cost of gas and milk skyrockets, so why wouldn't our federal budget affect everyone when we spend more on bomb rockets (and no I'm not talking about the delicious tri-colored popsicles) than on supporting parents getting to work and getting their children into safe affordable childcare?

When you're balancing your own home budget, or figuring out your own recipe you have a few tools to help you figure out what to cut; but more importantly, a discerning mind when asking how can I substitute so I don't have to fully sacrifice the things I want and need?

How can I keep the integrity of the whole, while making healthy substitutions?

You may choose to get ice cream as a special treat, rather than a dinner out. You may choose to cut half the butter, opting for the other half applesauce. You may choose cutting 5% of the military budget so preschoolers can have the early education we know they need and low-income high school graduates can have needed college scholarships. These are just suggestions; but they can only be made when we're looking at the whole product. You wouldn't bake delicious bread and then make it into a ham sandwich with SPAM. I don't think we want 99% of our dinner guests eating SPAM and the rest eating duck foie gras.

When making baking substitutions I suggest this website, and these questions:

1. Why do I want to substitute? Simply to know? For necessity? For health?

Today I made a delicious sunflower wheat bread. I didn't have butter milk, so I learned from the "to know link" that a little lemon juice and milk are a good substitute. The recipe didn't call for yeast; and though this bread sounded delicious, it also sounded a little dense. So I learned how to substitute quick rising yeast to make the bread a little lighter, and as this blog is running a little long I suggest you watch this to help make this budget conversation a little more airy.

So my friends, as there are a lot of things here, I ask you, what do you think we could substitute in our shared household budget, rather than asking folks to subtract much needed support?

I have a hunch we can find ways to substitute all these subtracting cuts so everyone can have a slice of bread at the table.

~peace