I am reading through the works of Louis L’Amour. Now, I am not going to talk about drinking liquor because we know how expensive that is and I am a tee total-er!

It amazed me how many times a cowboy would be stranded in the desert, or a blizzard, or was laid up with a bullet wound and had to survive.

They always kept coffee in their saddlebag. They drank water and black coffee. They didn’t drink soda, sports drinks, Koolaid, Sparkling water or chocolate milk. They drank lots of water and had coffee with their meals. They never went anywhere without a full canteen…even in the winter.

They kept beef jerky in their pockets. They had food on them in case they were shot off of their horse and couldn’t get to the saddlebag. Now, I don’t care for beef jerky, but eating food that takes a while to chew is more satisfying than drinking a milkshake.

That means we should eat the orange, not drink the juice. To quote Marla Cilley, co-author of a book on losing weight called “Body Clutter”, “Don’t drink your fruit!” (See flylady.net) We could also keep a snack size Baggie with nuts and raisins with us.

They ate a lot of beans and raw vegetables, even some kinds of cactus. (I’m told it tastes like green beans. Yeah, and snake tastes like chicken.)

In the old west they didn’t have access to many desserts. In one book the main character admitted he had not had a piece of pie in over a year. So if we limit our cake to our birthdays, and Martin Luther King’s birthday and George Washington’s birthday and the birthdays of our family members; we would be much healthier.

They didn’t eat a lot of bread but they did eat biscuits. They ate steak and gravy when it was available, but that was not every day or even every week. We could have one night a week with a meatless menu, i.e. macaroni and cheese.

The more ingredients in a food and the more processing the higher the cost. To save money we need to buy raw fruits, vegetables and cook them ourselves. It is also cost-effective to have a small garden…even if it is only a pot on the patio with a tomato plant in it surrounded by spinach.

They ate breakfast for supper. Breakfast meals are cheaper than a meal with chicken or hamburger.

They would eat breakfast and chew on jerky for lunch. They would eat supper, but they didn’t have a midnight snack, and they had to keep watch for part of the night. Sometimes they would go for a day without a meal. We can learn a lot from a cowboy.