I came across an article on Care2Connect today that intrigued me - during recessions, people get leaner and greener.

Apparently, we eat more home-cooked meals during a recession, rather than restaurant fare loaded with hidden calories; we get out our bikes and stop using the car; and that decreased use of the car means we emit fewer greenhouse gases and have fewer accidents. 

It's not all good news, though. Our physical health may get better but our mental health gets far worse as we worry about jobs, the economy and whether we'll be able to keep up our mortgage payments. Here are a few of the details.

Upsides to the recession

1 - you'll eat at home more - and home cooking is better for you. “Home cooking has fewer calories and more nutritional value than foods purchased outside the home,” says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at NYU.

2 - you'll probably cut down on red meat. You may do that because it's more expensive but it's good for the environment and good for you. 

3 - you'll probably buy more locally produced food. Again, that's a money-saving thing: locally grown food is usually cheaper, but again it's good for the environment and good for you.

4 - you'll probably exercise more. There are several reasons for this. One is that you lose access to other forms of entertainment when you're on a budget, and another is that people take up walking or riding a bike in order to reduce fuel costs. As most of us do far too little exercise generally, having a bit more can only be a good thing. 

5 - you'll probably drink fewer fizzy drinks because they're expensive - and that's good for your teeth, your digestive system and your sugar levels. 

Downsides to the recession

1 - you'll probably eat more chocolate. C'mon girls, we all know that one's true - feeling depressed, fed up or overwhelmed? Chocolate's the cure...

2 - you may eat more Spam. What, never, you say? Apparently sales in the US are burgeoning, which is bad news for your arteries, given that it's a fatty meat that's packed with bisphenol-A.

3 - you'll probably have less sex. Being depressed about the state of the economy isn't conducive to a good love-life. On the other hand, if you're not depressed about the economy and you don't have the money to go out, you might end up having more sex. 

4 - if you get pregnant, it's more likely to be a girl. OK, this might not be a downside at all, but it's something that intrigues researchers. It appears that when times are hard, female births go up partly because undersized male foetuses abort spontaneously. “Given the current economy, we should see reductions in male to female sex rations by January or February of next year,” says Ralph Catalano, professor of public health at UC Berkeley.

As one final bit of information, cosmetics sales are booming in the economic downturn - up 40 per cent at the last count, according to Care2Connect, as women treat themselves to a little bit of a pick-me-up in the face of all the gloom and doom. Nice to know that even if we're queuing up at the dole office, we still like a bit of lippy. 

The BBC is running a story today entitled 'The end of cheap clothes is near'.

It was obvious this was going to happen. With a worldwide rise in food prices, not only will everyone from east to west have to curb their clothes-buying to stretch the family budget, land that is currently producing cotton will turn back to food production as the prices for food crops increase.

Every which way, clothing is going to cost more to produce. Even third and second-world workers have seen wage rises over the past few years (gee - I thought they were going to eat straw forever), fertiliser costs are rising, and as transport costs increase because of the oil crisis, clothing will cost more to ship from production site to retail outlet. That means the price increase will be loaded onto individual garments at retail level, so we will be able to buy fewer of them.

Getting on my puritan high horse here, I can't help thinking that a bit of this could be a very good thing. Spending has gotten totally out of control in the UK and - let's face it - most women in the west have a problem of surplus clothing rather than not enough. 'Not having a thing to wear' isn't due to there being nothing in the wardrobe, just to our crappy impulse-buying habits that fill our closets with unmatched crap that dates badly, wears out or doesn't go with anything else.

Many women I know in London buy something new to wear every week. Some buy something almost every day. They pick up a new item at lunchtime like a sandwich, they have a bag for every outfit, they have 40 pairs of shoes. We have become individual Imelda Marcos's.

In contrast, when I was growing up in the far-off days of the 1970s (in a working-class family), you expected to get a new coat maybe once a year. If you could, you stretched it further - my school uniform required a navy wool coat, which I wore every school day for the whole five years I was there, letting down the sleeves as I grew (marginally) taller. If you had older brothers and sisters, you got their hand-me downs as they grew out of them, and if you didn't, friends and neighbours could be relied upon to pass around their kids' barely-worn clothing so that some good would come of it. Most of all, you learned to be handy with a needle if you wanted to look more individual.

Nobody wants to go back to the days of - for instance - wartime rationing, but at times, a little necessity can be the mother of invention. If we all have to be a bit more careful about what we buy and how often, maybe women will relearn those good old habits of looking for quality of design and construction, a good fit and high-end materials. Maybe they'll learn to ring the changes with accessories instead of whole outfits. Maybe they'll learn to mix and match their clothing to wear the same thing in a different way, and end up with a small wardrobe of fully-co-ordinated clothing, every item of which they actually wear.

Well, I for one hope so...

I did the second shop of the week yesterday, and frankly it was painful. Since we downshifted to France, money's always been tight - not allowing much leeway for clothes, or books or holidays etc, but at least we've always been able to eat well. Now, with work fast disappearing into the ether and the strong Euro making our UK earnings sink to a pittance, we're also being hit by the third whammy of food pricing.

A couple months ago, I could do the weekly shop pretty easily for 100 euros, doing the main shop at Lidl and the top-up at SuperU. I struggled to get it down to 75 if we were in a cashflow rut. But now, it's a struggle to get it below 120 euros and if I turn my back for a second, it's up to 130 or 140.

What the hell is happening to prices? Surely there's not less food in the world than there was in January. And there can't be THAT many more people than two months ago. I know the oil price is savage, but I can't help thinking that in this case, the supermarkets are also loading the price and taking advantage. And I buy mostly locally produced goods such as meat and vegetables - it's not as if they're having to come very far. We don't buy rice or anything exotic.

OK, I count my blessings here, because at least we live in the West, and there's a welfare state and with the worst will in the world, we're not about to starve to death like people in Haiti very well might. But I will admit that it is getting very tedious, constantly shopping for the cheapest cider, the cheapest orange juice, the cheapest cuts of meat, and trying to string together something reasonable out of it.

A caisse de porc, which is a big pack of mixed pork cuts, cost 2.30 euros a kilo three weeks ago, but yesterday it was 4.00. Instead I bought a pack of even cheaper cuts for 2.80 a kilo, which turned out to be massives lumps of pork shoulder. They looked like one of Christopher Moltisanti's victims, laid out in the kitchen, but thankfully Elizabeth David came to the rescue with cooking methods and we ate porc a la style provencale, with white wine and thyme (it was delicious, btw).

The thing is, how much pork can one family reasonably be expected to eat in a week? This is a meat I used to avoid altogether, but with most other meats coming in above 8 euros per kilo, and fish even worse, pork is suddenly looking a lot more attractive. And the DH is most definitely a meat-eater - middle-class vegetarianism is not an option.

Oh well, since there is nothing we can do about it, we must just get on with it. But I am alone in being pissed at John Paulson? And at George Soros - these people who push money around the world and actually contribute fuck all? We pay about 50 per cent tax on our earnings, while they pay about 15 per cent, and they earned nearly $2 billion between them last year. Wonder how much pork I could buy with that?