the hunger challenge

[dyskodyke]

Last week, a bunch of SF bloggers participated in a challenge to raise awareness and funds for the SF food bank.

The challenge was to eat on $1 per person per meal (3 meals a day) -- or, put another way, $3 per person per day, $21 per person a week for groceries.

Cooking with Amy was my starting point in reading about this challenge. She talks

Comments

[thesaturdaygirl]

this is basically the whole point of ramadan, too. :P

[dyskodyke]

To eat cheaply? Or to fast in order to acknowledge those who don't have food and appreciate the food you do have? (I'm sorry, I'm woefully uneducated on this subject.)

[thesaturdaygirl]

to fast in order to acknowledge those who don't have food and appreciate the food you do have. :)

also

[dyskodyke]

Do you find fasting challenging? It certainly sounds like a noble goal, but to be honest, I think I would be so cranky and miserable the entire time.

[seeinglife]

I am constantly grateful that Matt and I both cook, because we eat so amazingly well off $50/wk. Well being delicious and fairly nutritious. Organic? No. It's really such a luxury to eat organic. And if we had kids? Oh man. We so wouldn't have time to cook like we do now.

[dyskodyke]

Wow, $50/week is impressive! We eat off about $100, which I know is luxurious. And even then, we can sometimes be tight at the end of the month if we've eaten out too much (less of a problem here in SA) or run out of expensive stuff like olive oil and laundry detergent in the same week. Still, this budget also allows for a decent amount of my "oh, goat cheese! fancy ice cream! $3 loaf of artisan bread!" splurges. We do some organic but not everything, b/c like you say, it is such a luxury.

Being able to cook really does help a ton.

[seeinglife]

Well, we never go out to eat, ever. Most of the things we make are based in either chicken breasts or ground beef, and the frozen chicken breasts are perpetually on sale. We don't eat any fancy cheese or ice cream and the only artisan bread we've had I made myself. (It wasn't bad for a first try, but not perfect :P). We fill stuff out with liberal amounts of vegetables and rice and lately, yogurt.
Typical week? We'll have something like a curry of some sort, chicken marsala, black bean quesadillas, bacon and pancakes, pasta with some sort of cream based sauce or veg fried rice, leftovers from the above a bunch, and usually some sort of homemade cookies around.
We're experimenting now with something akin to diy hot pockets.

[pedx]

I have been hyperaware of how hard it is to be full and healthy on a shoestring budget. There's no way we could spend two hours at the grocery store every couple of weeks meticulously planning and not be. I ate for for about $40 a week in college, with one meal out on Sundays, but the food was cheap and loaded with sugar, salt and all sorts of chemicals, which pretty easily contributed to my new best friend the 'Beetus. I think the problem is compounded even more by the fact that it's incredibly difficult to balance moderate carbs with moderate fat and not swing too far in either direction. The cheap choices are either super-high in one and both and not being able to afford produce and/or not having a farmer's market or the time or ability to get to one means you have to go for that five dollar box of 24 corn dogs.

[dyskodyke]

Yeah, many Americans do have issues eating healthfully, but I feel like lots of ppl who make this claim seem to forget about the roles things like money, time, and knowledge (but esp money) play in this.

[annieeats]

This is great read, if you haven't seen it:
http://hungryforamonth.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_hungryforamonth_archive.html

As for fasting, I used to fast pretty regularly. It's quite an experience that teaches you a lot about your body and hunger.

[dyskodyke]

That was a good read, thanks! Like some of the ppl commenting, I also wonder how long he could have kept such a diet up if he lost 18 pounds that month. I felt depressed just reading about his meals. And I admit it, I got misty eyed when I saw that he donated all the saved money to a food bank.

[sharkysmachine]

I think is this is such a great idea particularly for those who have never had to survive on a 20 bucks a week (oh I remember that from living in LA and being estranged from my family.) It was humbling and exhausting trying to find things that were cheap, didn't involve a lot of extras and were mildly tasty. I haven't had Ramen, Kraft MacNCheese or 3/.99 tacos/burritos/hamburgers from ANYWHERE in over a decade

[dyskodyke]

It IS scary.

One of the women doing the hunger challenge talked about feeling sickly and run-down all week. And she was a healthy woman just making a temporary change. I hadn't even thought about ppl who are seriously ill and whose bodies are even less equipped to handle reduced calories/nutrition.

And yeah, I feel really blessed not to be food insecure. Like you, I've got some tight budget moments, but I know I can fall back on my family, or (more often) my credit cards. That's a luxury not everyone has.

[sharkysmachine]

Yeah, it always pisses me off when I see the crap people put into food bank donation boxes. It's all processed and it's all low in nutrients and stuff most people wouldn't want for their precious families to eat. I prefer donating money towards bettering nutrition programs offered by Meals on Wheels, which in my area anyway, works extremely hard to create low cost, high nutrition value meals that are also tasty. I also try to at least once a month donate food, time and cook a meal at the local hospice. Actually Mr. Angelina's been doing this for nearly five years and so I took over his slot when he moved to Seattle earlier this year. Though now that his Seattle deal fell apart he's done it twice

[cabarethaze]

I'm glad someone else thinks this - I was raised by a (poor) mother who made sure every year we bought $100 of food to give away. Good stuff, easy to make, pretty healthy. Peanut butter, good cereal, cans of decent soup, canned veg, pasta and sauce, etc. Stuff we'd eat. We'd wait until there was a super sale and grab a bunch to donate.

Then you get to the donation bin and there's a pile of sardines, expired instant mac and cheese, some weird flavour of something, a broken bottle of soy sauce. Ugh. It's just insulting.

I really wish it was possible to set up a mini soup kitchen on my front stoop - make some burritos or a stew with rice and serve it up to anyone who is hungry. Thanks for reminding me I should really make an effort to find somewhere to volunteer now that I've moved :)