Day One

At $1.19 per pound, millet has been the cheapest grain in the bulk aisle since I started comparing bulk grain prices. (It was $.89 per pound when I looked the first time, then three days later when I looked again it was $1.19. I decided to stop looking.)

My plan was to get millet, cornmeal, chickpeas, sunflower seeds, and salt, and have one meal of porridge (a.k.a. cornmeal mush) and one meal of millet and chickpeas, and either toast the sunflower seeds and mix them with the millet dish or eat them as snacks.

So today I get to the store and find the millet bin empty.

Doh!

So instead of millet I get wheat berries, which are also $1.19 per pound, but take longer to cook. But they are very filling, and might have actually been a better option for Day One. Also I substituted split peas for chickpeas, since for some reason chickpeas and wheat berries didn’t seem like a good combination, and split peas are half the price of chickpeas.

What I Bought on Day One

Day One Receipt

I don’t think anything I ate today is likely to make it onto my next party menu, but it wasn’t bad. And I came in well under my Day One limit of $2.

Join the Club

In my temporary obsession following my inital reading of the NY Times article, I found links to a few other people who did the same project as the Calfornia folks.

A guy in Michigan named Evan Steiner did it in 2006 and wrote about it at Hungry for a Month.

Two women who are also in Michigan (apparently people in Michigan are looking for things to do) did it last month. They’re doing series of projects to raise awareness of poverty and to raise money for a Habitat for Humanity trip one of them is taking to Zambia later this year. They’ve moved on from the dollar-a-day project in January to Freegan February. They’re doing a great job, and sound like they’re having a a lot of fun with it. I like them. Check them out at Hope Heals.

All three of those blogs are also linked under Related Projects in the sidebar.

Let me know if you come across anyone else doing it, I’d like to link them up.

Project Rules

1. I start on Day One with no food.
2. On Day One, I can spend up to $2. Each day thereafter, I can spend up to $1.15, but I can’t spend more than a total of $30 in 30 days. (I was going to do a straight dollar a day, like the Price is Right, as close as you can without going over, but I’m concerned about the vagaries of scales and such and don’t want to have to disqualify myself for being over by a few cents. Decided a little breathing room would be okay. And since I’m making up this project, I get to set up the rules however I want. So there.)
3. I will eat only food purchased during the duration of the project—no food from my freezer or pantry (including spices and oils), no foraged food, no food given to me by friends (or strangers for that matter). AND I WILL NOT STEAL CONDIMENTS FROM FAST FOOD RESTAURANTS. Because stealing is wrong. And even if it weren’t, that would be cheating.
4. I will not eat lentils, because I loathe them.
5. I will attempt to continue my normal life of exercise and work. Typically I eat two meals a day, so I will probably stick with that, unless some other approach seems like it will work better.
6. I will not concern myself at all with the actual unit cost of anything, how many meals I eat, or how “balanced” or “unbalanced” the meals are. I will not concern myself at all with the Food Pyramid or USDA dietary guidelines, because I have philosopical problems with those and think it would be silly to make myself adhere to things for the sake of this project that I ignore in my regularly scheduled life.
7. The project applies only to food. I am not attempting to live on a dollar a day, just eat for a dollar day. I don’t have to stop heating my house, or washing my clothes, or taking meds.
8. I will go for the full 30 days unless I am not able to get enough calories or if I feel physically ill or if I become so much more cranky and ill-tempered than usual that I am unbearable. (Not sure who gets to be the judge of that, presumably someone will send out a memo.)

My initial thought was that I should have to eat 1,200 calories a day, but I’m not positive I can do that. Also I’m hoping to drop some weight, so I think that should be fine either way.

My goal is to eat as well as I can under the circumstances. My ultimate goal is to eat well. If I have 30 days of bad food—even if I have enough to eat while staying under the spending limit—I will consider it a failure. (That being said, I’m definitely expecting a few rough days in the beginning. But hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel soon.)

Who Am I? Why Am I Here?

Okay, so here’s the deal.

I am a food-oriented person. I come from a food-oriented family. Everyone in my family loves food. I grew up eating really good food, and I have continued to eat really good food throughout my adult life.

For the past 10+ years, I’ve spent between $80 and $90 a month on food. (This makes me not a foodie. Foodies are way too picky to eat for $90 a month.)

[And to clarify, that total does not include restaurant meals, just food from grocery stores/farmers’ markets/gas stations with really good local tomatoes. Eating out is a separate budget item, but I don’t eat out much—a few times a month. I’m telling you that not because I think anyone really needs to know how much I eat out, or that anyone cares, but just so you don’t think I spend so little on groceries because I eat out all the time.]

In November 2008 I read a New York Times article about how “bad” food (i.e., highly processed junk food like chips and candy and soft drinks) is cheaper than “good” food (i.e., fruits and vegetables) and how the economic downturn is likely to exacerbate Americans’ health problems by forcing them into diets that are even worse than their current diets (if that’s even possible, I’m not sure).

The New York Times article referred to a study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association [Volume 107, Issue 12, Pages 2071-2076 (December 2007)] that tracked 300+ food items in Seattle-area supermarkets. The authors of the study determined that high-calorie, low-nutrient foods are cheaper on a per calorie basis than nutrient-dense, low-calorie foods. Which totally makes sense, a 16-ounch bag of potato chips has 2400+ calories and costs less than $5.

But I’m not sure if that study is really meaningful, because people don’t shop for calories, they shop for meals. In my experience, healthy whole foods like rice and oats and carrots are much less expensive on a per serving (or per meal) basis than nutritionally bereft, highly processed foods like cookies and potato chips. If you ate two cups of rice and a pound of carrots, you’d be stuffed, but you can eat half a bag of chips without hardly even noticing. (Well, except you might feel sick for the rest of the day.)

I know I’m defintely in the minority on that opinion, and the belief reflected in the NY Times article is so widespread that I’m not even going to argue about it. I just wanted to start with that so everyone knows where I’m coming from.

In addition to info on the study, the article talked about a couple in California who were trying to raise awareness of poverty by eating for 30 days for exactly one dollar a day and blogging about it.

I clicked through to their blog and started to read and quickly started pulling my hair out and making Dilbert-esque GAAAHHHUGGHHH noises for the next half hour.

I totally respect their project, and after getting linked to the NY Times, their hits went through the roof and they were all over the mainstream media and they managed to raise both a lot of awareness and a good chunk of change. Good for them.

But as I read their description of what they ate, and how they felt, and what they thought it all meant, I really felt like they weren’t all that creative with their food and ate a limited selection of not particularly filling combinations. Like for instance they went for three weeks before making soup, and had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day.

They said they appreciated some things about the project (shockingly, they discovered that meals cooked at home from whole ingredients are cheaper and better for you than prepackaged and frozen items—who knew???), but by the end were extremely anxious for it to be over and proceeded to each spend $20 on food their first day off the project.

It seemed to me that many of their problems were caused not by having only a dollar, but by not knowing how to cook good food for not very much money. (Also they’re vegans, which as far as I’m concerned makes things tough even if you’ve got all the money in the world.)

I thought they were probably people who had never really tried to economize on food, or to see what they could do for less. (This was confirmed on Day 20 when they said that before the project, they spent around $150 a week on groceries.)

It was like they read about people running a marathon and said, “Wow, that sounds really hard. I’m going to try that.” And then they ran a marathon, without doing any training, and when they were done they said, “Wow, that was really hard. And my feet hurt.”

Well duh.

In the NYT article, one of them was quoted as saying “I challenge anyone in America to eat fresh food for a dollar a day.”

I knew I should have finished pulling out the rest of my hair and moved on, but that line just reached right out of my computer and grabbed me. And it wouldn’t let go.

I didn’t know if I could manage to eat fresh food for a dollar a day (and I think that might depend on how you define “fresh food,” he didn’t give details), but I was pretty sure I could do a better job than they did.

But spending $30 and buying food for 30 days was not particularly appealing to me because it would be tedious and you would have to eat the same foods over and over, and also, to do it the way they did it—eating exactly one dollar worth of food each day—involves a fair amount of math to figure out exactly how much it costs for a teaspoon of this and a tablespoon of that. Which is not at all interesting to me, plus the whole thing starts to feel really artificial, because your unit cost totally depends on how much you buy, and poor people don’t weigh and measure their food to make sure they’re eating exactly the paltry amount statistics say they eat.

I tried to stop thinking about it but I couldn’t, and eventually came back to an early idea I had of starting with nothing and getting one dollar each day with which to buy food—an idea that when I first thought of it was immediately dismissed as being completely impossible by the (small) part of my brain that tries to stay grounded in the real world. But then the rest of my brain, which doesn’t worry at all about the real world, wouldn’t let it go, and I realized the reason I found it appealing was for that very reason: because I didn’t know if I could do it.

I’ve been thinking about the project since November, but between the holidays, prior food-related commitments, and work travel, this was the earliest I could start.

So here we go. Tuesday, February 10, it’s on.