By Julia Silverman

After the umpteenth jar of home-made tomato sauce, Olivia Bucks’s husband cried “Uncle!”

“No more,” he pleaded, overwhelmed by the tomatoes-by-the-ton stacked every which way around their Arbor Lodge home, not to mention the late nights his wife was keeping canning, pickling and preserving.

Bucks finally gave in, but not before she’d filled the shelves in her pantry with jewel-toned salsas and sauces, pickled green tomatoes, tomato paste and more.

“I had no idea how satisfying this would be,” Bucks says of her adventures in canning, which began when she realized a grocery bill of nearly $200 a week was unsustainable. Her shelves also are bursting with everything from homemade applesauce to chicken broth, raspberry-cranberry jam to peaches floating in a light organic cane syrup. The initial outlay for canning and preserving at this level is substantial, she says, but it should more than pay for itself in the long run.

“This is a way to support local farmers and still be able to eat the way we want to without spending our entire paycheck,” Bucks says.

Bucks is part of a new wave of men and women in the area – many of them parents – who are rediscovering the crafts of home economics, practiced by great-grandparents but largely abandoned by succeeding generations. There’s even a name for this emerging culture, courtesy of a manifesto released last year by author Shannon Hayes: Radical Homemakers (Left to Write Press, 2010).

Hayes theorizes that this new generation of radicals doesn’t want to be engulfed by consumer culture, choosing instead to live simply and tread lightly on the planet by doing it themselves, whether that means woodworking or gardening, quilting or preserving.

The fact that it’s a choice is key, Bucks says. Before the feminist movement, many women were expected to labor in the kitchen and laundry room without complaint. They had no other choices. Today Bucks and others have consciously chosen a homemaking life, and many are taking it beyond the walls of their own homes and into their communities, using their homemaking skills to get a toehold in an economy that remains less than hospitable to working parents.

Emily Flippin Maruna, a southeast Portland mother of two, ages 2 and 4, started sewing two years ago after realizing that buying birthday presents for her girls’ many friends was costing hundreds of dollars. Instead, she reasoned, she could draw on her longstanding interest in fashion and make gifts at home.

Now she sells her clothing line, Sew Flippin Cool, at consignment stores and craft fairs around town, after using an initial $500 investment from her parents to pay for business cards, a license and a stockpile of fabric.

“If we as women don’t learn these skills and pass them on to our kids, a lot of these skills are going to be lost,” Flippin Maruna says. “A lot of other moms are having that epiphany. We know that we can make it in the workplace, but we need to make sure we can make it on the home front as well.”

December 31st, 2010 | Category: Money and Finance, Past Articles