Ongoing Challenge #5 Moey -- Get Back On the Horse

Oh, I did have a week last week! It was just a sucky week, won't go into too many of the details, but the long and short of it is that I flunked on ALL the goals last week. So my new ongoing challenge to add today is, Get Back On the Horse.

Something is better than nothing, right? Keep on keeping on, and don't give up.

A brief update is that the garden is producing nicely for us at the moment in spite of borers and raccoons. My potato plants have made an appearance, so I need to learn to care for them so they will produce potatoes, and hope that it doesn't get too hot for them. It is definitely a much warmer summer than it was last summer, which is good in a way, because the heat is reducing the fungal problems we had last year (which killed the tomatoes and would affect my little potato plants too.)

I have borrowed more interesting books from the library, some of which I would like to share in a future post. Seems like the library is getting in JUST the books I am wanting to read lately, so I am sure to check the "New Books" section every time I go. I can not keep up with all the reading I am wanting to do.

As far as the Dollar-a-Day challenge, due to a few extenuating circumstances (needing some extra TLC in the form of ginger ale and sprite and easy-to-digest foods,) plus a general meltdown of the system, I have spent about twice what I had budgeted for on groceries over this past week. It is still a good total, but I can do better if I refocus.

I plan to go through the stock and pull together as many recipes as I can, using what we have on hand and utilizing what is currently ready for harvest. I really don't want to waste anything, because it does make a huge difference in a small budget. When I wasn't watching the budget so closely, it didn't really matter that much.

Ongoing Challenge #1 Moey -- Eat Cheaper (but not poorer)

In the great stash of library books, is a little paperback called On a dollar a day : one couple's unlikely adventures in eating in America by Christopher Greenslate.

The premise of the first part of the book (the part I was interested in, and have read, LOL,) was that a billion people on the earth are overweight (hello, me) and 800,000,000 don't have enough to eat. The rest of the people on earth fall somewhere in between that, with many having "food insecurity," meaning, they have only enough to get by, day by day, hand-to-mouth.

And a vast majority of the world lives on around $1 a day.

I liked this book, a lot. It was interesting reading. Dramatic, a bit over-the-top, I thought at the time. I mean, really, how hard is it to eat on a dollar a day, in the USA? Everyone knows that if you cook from scratch and buy the best deals and use coupons, you can practically eat for free.

For the authors (Christopher and his girlfriend Kerry Leonard,) it wasn't that simple -- they are vegan, which adds interest, but also complication. They wouldn't use anything that wasn't available to anyone, and they wouldn't accept gifts. So, teachers' lunches and relatives "helping" wasn't going to work.

They agreed to try it for a month -- the book has the details -- but the long and short of it is that they pretty near starved, and about went crazy with the feeling of deprivation. A lot of the feelings Kerri describes resonated with me, as a chronic dieter: how, knowing you can't have something, makes it all the more desirable and a constant in your thoughts, and how mentally grueling it is to deal with (voluntary) deprivation.

Here are her words:

Since the meager dollar-a-day portions didn't satiate my hunger, food became the focus of my existence. When we weren't preparing food, we were eating. When we weren't eating, we were thinking about eating. It became increasingly impossible to ignore the abundance of food around me, and the fact that I couldn't have it. (p.31)

This book really fueled my imagination. I have thought about this many times: how cheaply can we eat (and eat well, mind you, I have little mouths to feed and not about to sacrifice health for ideology!) But I didn't have a goal number in my mind, nor a concrete reason to do it: so I would try to get frugal, use every little bit of everything, (read everything on the subject, goes without saying,) do it for a while, burn out, and order pizza.

Well, now I have a number, and a reason. The reason isn't a very good one; it basically boils down to: if a couple of vegan yuppies who don't know how to cook beyond beans and rice can do it, so can I, with my prior years of knowledge and experience. Plus, there are seven of us who eat, and only 4 of us eat full portions -- the others are still young children -- and $49/week is a lot easier to deal with than $14. Bulk buys and all that. Plus, I also have a very well-stocked pantry filled with food bought on discount (and I generally don't buy junk, or if I do, it gets eaten up right away so doesn't languish in the pantry anyhow.)

To my financial detriment, I also have a quarter share of grass-fed, organic beef in the freezer, which cost me $450 and gets doled out extremely frugally, as the cost-per-pound was astronomical. If I have $50/week to spend on food, and $450 went to beef, well, I better make it last!

So I went through the pantry, fridges and freezers, and came up with an estimated total of $1455 worth of groceries on hand. I have many pounds of beans and rice and pasta, etc., bought on discount (for example, my most recent stock-up purchase was 20lbs of botan rice -- sushi rice --for $6.99.) So I can probably at least try to stretch my pantry supplies out for the year, and that is what I based the "grocery shop" figure on. I'm giving myself $50/week instead of $49, because it's easier for figuring. So, that's $2600/year, minus $1455 in stock-on-hand, which leaves $1145, or $22/week, for grocery shopping.

I usually spend 7 - 10 times that much, especially if I am feeling tired and/or lazy.

Oh, and there is the problem of the chickens, which cost $12.50/month in feed. That used to seem cheap, for the wonderful eggs they give us; but all of a sudden, $3 a week is big money.

The immediate problem that I can see is having enough money to cover fruit and vegetables, and milk. For the recommended dairy allowance, at 3 servings a day, times 7 people, times 7 days a week, we are looking at 147 servings -- or, over 9 gallons of milk (the cheapest way to get dairy) per week. That is $20 right there, and then--how? do I get enough fruit and veg to feed 7 of us with only $2/week?

There are solutions: start using the great stash of powdered milk in the pantry (which has already been accounted for in the budget,) plant a garden (more on that later,) find cheaper alternatives to dairy (pick a vegan's brain, Hi Deb! *waves*)....

If I really only had a dollar a day to spend on food, I'd have to get my gardening money out of that, too. Which leads to interesting thoughts on: where can I get free seeds? Free supplies? How can I get something for next-to-nothing?

The bottom line is, I don't have to do this, but now I sure want to. Good exercise for the brain, the butt, and the wallet. At the end of it, I sure hope to have learned something, to be able to teach someone who needs the info and may not have the resources to experiment, and to be able to have saved enough to give a big chunk away to a worthy cause.

The thought strikes me that I've been awfully selfish and ignorant not to have given this much prolonged effort before. People have suffered because I have been lazy and selfish. That is the truth. And one of the people suffering, is myself -- suffering under the weight of, well, weight.

My husband said to me the other day, as I was doing all this figuring, "got another challenge going on?" And I said, "Of course! You know I would die, bored to death, without a challenge...and this is a good one."

Well, we'll see. And don't worry: for my purposes, the children come first, and I'll accept any freebies I can get, just like anyone who is really having to live on $1/day. LOL.

ADDED: here is the blog from Christopher and Kerri's experiment.