Life Less Large

We’ve all been hearing a lot lately about how people are cutting back, economizing, living more frugally. “The Crisis! The Crisis!” my nightly NPR broadcast screams. Even people who are comfortable and haven’t been laid off or foreclosed or even had their hours cut (although they may have seen their 401K disappear) have been trying to spend less and cut out extravagances. Of course this isn’t doing anything to help the economic recovery – there are a lot of people who have the same paycheck coming in now as before – but fear and uncertainty and also a certain solidarity that “we’re all in this together and it just isn’t fashionable to indulge” have cause a lot of people to reign it in. I think it’s good in one way because the American culture of excessive consumption could use a little balancing. But on the other hand of course, people are going to have to unfreeze their wallets eventually if any promise of recovery is to be realized. They will, we can all be sure of that.

In some ways, principally psychological, Brazilians haven’t felt the full impact of the global meltdown. The middle class was just starting to stretch its wings into the buy-more-spend-more areas. They were just beginning to dip their toes into those shark infested waters alternately known as “Living Large” or “Spending beyond your means.” So now that they’ve had to scale back, it feels more like business as usual than the sky is falling. For most part, that is. Certainly there have been layoffs and people are feeling the pinch in very real ways. Retail sales are down, wallets are closed, people are complaining. But given all the economic upheaval Brazilians from the age of 25 + have had to weather in their lives, I think for many this just feels like one more spin around the economic merry-go-round that has once again been manically and recklessly pushed by the invisible hands of greed. So they heave a big sigh, put their heads down and trudge onwards.

Anyway, all this talk got me thinking about the ways that living in Brazil has caused me to live less like a pre-crisis American with swagger in my pocketbook and more like a Brazilian, cautious and frugal. And although these changes were initially made out of necessity over choice, I’ve come to appreciate how it often translates into a less impactful way of life.

Here’s a few things I noted that have changed about my lifestyle. And I think they hold true for a large swath of Brazilians down the middle as well.


1. No clothes dryers:
Clothes are hung up to air dry. Electricity is just too expensive for the great majority of people to run them. A very small market for them also makes it a very expensive appliance to buy.


2. Lights on timers:
All the public spaces in our building have light switches that you flip when you come into the area and that automatically shut off after a few minutes. This is largely a hold over from Brazil’s energy crisis in 2001. Energy saving compact florescent bulbs have also been omnipresent since that time.


3. Conscious car use:
Gasoline is expensive, although the reasons for this are confounding. Brazil is now 100% fuel independent yet gas prices remain nearly double than what people pay back home in the States. (Someone’s Petrobras pockets somewhere are nice and heavy). Current gas prices are hovering somewhere around R$2.55 a liter, which translates into USD $4.70 a gallon. Remember when gas prices hit that high in the United States? People were freaking out. For Brazilians it’s just another day at the pump. What that means for many is more carpooling, public transportation (when available) and smaller fuel-efficient cars.


4. Less packaging:
I’ll never forget buying a small bedside lamp at a behemoth home improvement super-store back in Brooklyn. It had a tiny stem base and a small square paper lampshade. The whole thing wasn’t bigger than a breadbox, but it came with more plastic, Styrofoam and cardboard than my Imac. The added cost of producing and shipping goods with useless, unnecessary packaging doesn’t make any fiscal sense in Brazil. Packaging on everything from ketchup to dry cleaning to the new printer we just bought is lighter, leaner and minimal. Thinking about this, the line from that fake Trader Joe’s commercial keeps playing in my head – the one about 4 Fuji apples in a plastic box. Is there anything more pointedly indicative of unnecessary packaging than that?


5. Fix it, re-use it, milk-it-to-death:
There are repair shops for everything imaginable in Brazil. Recently I stumbled upon a galleria in a poorer section of our downtown shopping district that has a line up of 4 stores that specialize in umbrella repair. UMBRELLA repair. Yes. You can fix that bent, broken five buck umbrella that flipped itself inside out not ten minutes after buying it on a street corner one rainy day you got caught out wet and empty handed. It seems they’ll fix anything here in Brazil. Blender on the fritz? There’s a fix-it store for that. Cheap boom box isn’t reading cd’s anymore? They can fix that too. Blew out your counterfeit Nikes imported from Paraguay? Yep, there’s a store on every block that will put a new sole on them. When things finally do grow worn and tired, they aren’t typically thrown out either. They’re passed down to the maid who proceeds to fix, re-use and milk-to-death whatever comes her way.


6. Everything smaller:
And that applies not just to the famous bikinis. Not only are things less weighted down by unnecessary packaging, but the quantity, volume, general bulk of things is more diminutive. I’m thinking principally of items on my grocery list. You’ll never find a gallon of milk on the shelves here – 1 liter (1/4 gallon) is the biggest it comes. Gigantic tubs of mayonnaise? Not at the consumer retail level. Even the regular sized jars of things like mayonnaise are sold in a smaller quantity than they are in the States. Try to stock up on Tylenol – you’ll never find a big fat economy bottle, but instead will go home with a bag of pills in 8 count sleeves.

There have been numerous studies done on our consumption habits that have proven over and over that we eat/use more when things are presented in larger quantities. Hand someone a giant bag of Smartfood and ask him to eat until he’s full and he’ll eat far more than the guy next to him who was handed a bag half the size. Talk to any Brazilian who's traveled to the US and one of the things they always marvel at is the portion size of food in restaurants – “and on top of that they give you breadsticks!” they always exclaim in disbelief. (Followed inevitably by a comment about American waistlines…)

In Brazil things haven’t typically been sold in larger quantities, largely in order to keep retail prices attainable (with grocery items there is also the concern of spoilage in a tropical climate). But what it amounts to is that people end up using less and certainly wasting less of whatever it is – mayo, olive oil, turkey flavored potato chips (yes, they exist). And the end result being, they tend to look better in those tiny bikinis.


7. Eating local
Yes, I went ahead and pulled out the buzz word of the second half of the decade. In Brazil it’s largely inevitable. A quick perusal of my kitchen, came up with less than 6 items that had been produced out of state. Now one big factor in this may be that I live at the crossroads of the agricultural and industrial part of the country. But even so, there are still far more local brands throughout the country than there are national ones. It just costs too much and the roads and railways are too undeveloped to go shipping lettuce from one end of the country to the other. (The last time I visited my father in Panama, we bought lettuce shipped in from Salinas California. Talk about a carbon heavy salad! Can tropical Panama not grow its own lettuce?)

Local eating is not limited to just fresh fruits and veggies, but goes for a lot of packaged food too. In my kitchen I find corn meal, rice, beans, hot sauce, loaf of bread, frozen lasagna, pão de queijo and so on – all relatively local, produced in the state of Minas. I realize however that this may not hold true everywhere in Brazil, especially the Northeast where agriculture has long been based around a single crop economy of sugar cane. But there instead of importing what they don’t have, people historically gone hungry. That’s changed to a certain degree now, but there are probably still far more local products on the shelves than ones brought in from other places in the country.


Those are just a few of the thing I could think of. I’m sure I and my fellow ex-pat bloggers could come up with more. But while life and consumption habits are scaled back and simpler in Brazil, that doesn’t mean that Brazilians aren’t chomping at the bit to live large. Everybody wants the bigger car, the flat screen tv, the new house – even if it means that it has to be bought in installments at unreasonable interest rates. But those desires continue to be tempered by economic forces and at least for now, living the average day-today existence in Brazil feels more sustainable and a bit greener – without having to try at all.

Up in Smoke

We didn’t burn any literal figures of Judas on Saturday night, but we did burn a lot of bureaucracy.

My friend Juliana’s father recently passed away. It was very sudden. He was only 60 and it caught everyone by surprise. She’s now dealing with a mountain of legalities trying to sort out his estate. In emptying out his house, she collected 6 huge trash bags of paperwork dating back to the 1980’s. He had worked as a civil servant for the ferroviária and a lot of the papers had his CPF (social security #) and other personal information so in the absence of a paper shredder and in presence of a cool fall night and plenty of red wine we decided to make a bonfire.

It was good for her I think. People are buried very quickly in Brazil, usually within 24 hours and while Catholics hold a mass for the deceased 7 days later that tends to be as significant or even more so than the actual burial, there really does seem to be an absence of mourning rituals that help ease the transition for the family. We were up in the village when we got news in the morning that he had died the night before and that the funeral was being held that afternoon. We didn’t have time to get back for it. I asked if there was somewhere I could send flowers and the response was a bit confused. Flowers? For what exactly? They don’t do that here. Then we went to pay a visit to his house and I asked C’s aunt if there was any particular etiquette I didn’t know about - like do people bring a dish of food for the family? No, she said, we don’t do that here. It felt kind of strange not being able to do anything except offer words of condolence. But I guess death is like that. You can’t do anything. We are all completely helpless to the essential fact that every birth is eventually followed by death.

Burning up years of bureaucratic accumulation I think was a good cathartic exercise. And I felt happy to have at least something practical I could offer her by in the way of help. We tore open bag after bag and sent the papers fluttering into fire. It took us until well after 3am to get through all the bags.

Max decided to get in on the act and pulled out a box of papers that had been accumulating in his house for decades. He owned a video store back in the late 80’s and early 90’s and most of his papers were in relation to the store. For some comic relief, C started reading through some of the receipts for the store’s purchases and it sent us howling in laughter. Check it out:



Yes, it really truly is a receipt for $18,000,000 cruzeiros. Eighteen Million. The purchase of Imperdoáveis (Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven) alone cost $5,600,000 cruzeiros. And that's over 2 million for Pinocchio! This receipt is from 1993, right before the cruzeiro was flipped into it’s 3rd incarnation, the cruzeiro real – which would be the 4th currency in 7 years. The currency changes didn’t do anything to stem the rampant inflation that was increasing at a rate of 30% a month. They just kept changing the name and knocking off zeros so that the calculators could handle it. Bus fare alone cost 16,000 cruzeiros!

In looking around for details I read that at the time the currency was considered such a joke the central bank had a hard time to find mascots to print on it. No one wanted to be associated with it – the family of author Guimaraes Rosa (considered the Brazilian James Joyce) turned the central bank down when asked for permission to reprint his image. On the 5,000 bill they ended up putting a traditional looking character of a gaucho (a cowboy from the south of Brazil) on it framed by what were supposed to be mate leaves – although botanists protested that they were so badly drawn that they looked like weeds.


I also remember seeing in a exhibit at the New Museum in New York of Brazilian artists, one (I wish I could remember his name) painted on cruzeiros because they were worth less than the paper he would have otherwise purchased.

The cruzeiro lasted until 1994 when they finally got things under control with the current currency, the real. After scrounging around for some estimate on the exchange rate at the time – which was hard to pinpoint, with the inflation rising so rapidly on a daily basis – I did the calculations on Max’s movie purchases. In US dollars, that 5 million cruzeiro movie would have been around $70 USD.

We saved that receipt from the fire. If for nothing else then just to remember that crisis or not, things are relatively pretty darn good. But the rest we burned. Some things truly are better left in the past.