If you’re feeling overwhelmed and seeking a bit of recession escapism, you might find it in a chicken, a jar of pickles or this season’s harvest. The bubble and bust has kindled a longing for a low-tech, less volatile and simpler era, a search for a time that feels less commercial and more real.

“It’s the draw of authenticity, whether it’s an aesthetic, a recipe or a technique,” Sean Crowley, a neckwear designer for Ralph Lauren, told The Times. His interest in “old things from different periods” has led him to collect and restore English and French umbrellas from the 1930s and 40s.

Mr. Crowley, 28, is representative of an antiquarian movement underfoot to exhume the accoutrements of the turn-of-the-19th-century leisure class, Penelope Green wrote in The Times. New stores in New York like Against Nature are selling Victorian mementos, taxidermy collections, fencing masks and ancestral portraits to collectors and decorators.

A new product, a liquor called Root, is actually old, and it caters to these “new vintage style” folks. It stems from Root Tea, a recipe that Native Americans taught to colonial settlers in the 1700s. Steven Grasse, owner of the store Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, told Ms. Greene, “Root fits very well with the Art in the Age brand because that brand is all about restoring the ‘aura’ that has been lost with the mass commodification of our lives. Our job is to restore the aura that has been lost by strip malls and cheap junk from China.”

While some may find that aura of authenticity in retro items, others are finding it in fluffy ones: backyard chickens. Hatcheries that supply baby chicks can barely keep up with demand, William Neuman wrote in The Times.

Marie Reed, a sales representative for a hatchery in Texas, told Mr. Neuman that managers of rural feed stores that sell her company’s birds told her they had seen a spike this year in demand for baby chicks, garden seeds and ammunition. “That tells me people are wanting to depend on themselves more,” she said.

How much more low-tech can you get than with a root cellar? Bruce Butterfield, research director for the National Gardening Association, a trade group, told The Times that home food preservation increases in a poor economy. Many families have made the seemingly anachronistic choice to turn their basements into root cellars, which have been the province of 19th-century households, survivalists and now, backyard gardeners, wrote The Times’s Michael Tortorello.

If creating a sod-floor basement and loading it with potatoes seems a little too rustic, canning, preserving and pickling might be easier. Lately, many seem to think so. Sales of equipment are up almost 50 percent over the last year, according to the Jarden company, which makes canning supplies, Julia Moskin wrote in The Times. Preserving offers primal satisfactions and practical results, she wrote.

“People want to take back their food and their skills from the industrial giants,” June Taylor, a pioneer of using local, seasonal produce, told Ms. Moskin.

It’s authenticity, found in a jar of preserves, in a chicken coop or in an antiquated lifestyle. As Mr. Grasse put it: “The approach is particularly appropriate right now because everything has collapsed. The old notions of luxury have crumbled. People are looking for what is real.”


LEAH NASH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES / Americans are looking backward, to a simpler era. Preserved pears in the cellar of an Oregon home.