Susan Ager, a former columnist for the Detroit Free Press, has a freelance piece for today’s Freep called Being frugal becomes fashionable.

A snippet:

I was cheap before cheap was chic, and frugal before frugal was cool.

But now I have company, and everybody’s talking about thrift as if it were as sexy as sex.

The other day I overheard a check-out clerk telling a grocery store customer that she will waste food no more. “I had some leftover carrots and I just threw them in with a can of baked beans and ate them,” she brags.

For a long time, I didn’t call myself frugal:

• I wasn’t the mom who baked homemade bread. (I’ve tried, but I have yet to perfect the technique in my electric oven.)
• I wasn’t the one who washed and re-used plastic ware. (Gee, whiz, throw it out already! Buy a cheap set of metal flatware if you want re-useable spoons.)
• I’ve never mixed leftover cans of paint colors in order to use up every last bit. (I’m using the leftover paint colors for small craft projects. If I’m painting a bedroom, I spend the money to get enough paint in a color I really like.)

But the more I looked into what people who called themselves frugal do, the more I realized I belonged in those ranks.