But doing dishes with her today was kind of embarrassing--and illuminating. She chided me for keeping the water running instead of filling the basin full with soapy water and then rinsing when needed. When I brushed my teeth, she gave me a stern look in the mirror, and turned off the faucet. “Do you have any whites to wash?” she asked on her way out of the bathroom. “I’m doing a load, so we might as well fill the machine.” Tonight’s leftover rice will become risotto balls or fried rice tomorrow--perhaps with the odd, rindy bits of cheese that no one really wants to eat, or the green beans that’ll mush up if we don’t eat them soon. 

“Try not to rev the engine above 3500 RPM, gas consumption shoots up,” she said yesterday as we were driving from Belgium to the Haute-Savoie. “Oh, we just crossed the border into Luxembourg! Exit here, we’ll get gas, it’s always cheaper here.”

She runs the dishwasher at night, when Belgian power companies, still operating at full capacity, are under less stress (and offer cheaper power). She turns the computer off, not just to standby. She grows her own herbs, makes her own jam, recycles her beer bottles, and feeds scraps to Mistigri, her cat. Anal-retentive cheapskate, you say? No--European.

Of course, not everyone in the Old World lives sustainably, but for many of its inhabitants, this isn’t an acquired, academically practiced pasttime, it’s a way of life. She’s not a purist about her philosophies, because they’re hardly philosophies to her--she’s not hip to recycled paper, for instance, or organic food. Then again, her supermarket offers aisles of exclusively local food, and the farmer’s markets are frequent, cheap, high-quality, and socially revivifying.

It’s harder for many of us who have grown up in a highly industrialized, efficiency- and  consumption-driven culture to acquire these often innate or at least deeply seeded traits. Indeed, they’re often couched closer to one-upmanship than common sense, which, in the worst cases,  colors the whole movement with snottiness. I liked Jane Black’s Washington Post article on the American adoption of the French “terroir” (previously discussed on this blog here);  that’s one attitudinal import that seems to have caught on. What’s next?