Antidote. And Other Things We Wished We’d Known During Quarantine and Corona

PC: Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

More With Less is the raggedy reality dawning on most of us as we come to grips with this new way of living during the uncertainty and stress of corona. Needing reassurance here in Hungary, I found myself going back to an old friend today. She’s been my companion these many years during constant states of change in new and strange-to-me cultures, through days of wondering what comes next and in steps of navigating the unknown. As we have changed continents and made homes in 3 eastern european countries, she’s offered wisdom. She got me through Moscow in the newly post-communist years where the Russian shelves were sometimes bare of groceries. She got me through the early years in Bulgaria after the revolution. While the last decade in Hungary has been more comfortable, she has sat on the shelf for longer periods, but this week as I noticed more empty shelves in my community grocery store, I found myself pulling her down to thumb through the stained pages once again. She is More-With-Less, and she is a Mennonite cookbook given to me years ago when we left for Russia. As we find our way in this new age of corona, our stores do have food, but there’s noticeably less: less choice, less volume and there’s more: more empty spaces, more items missing…