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I have $10.50 in my wallet, which means I've spent $7.50 so far this month. Throw in groceries, and I've lived on $67.50 since May 1. All but 50 cents of that has been on food. In addition to the parking meters I spoke of earlier, I've missed packing my lunch a few days this week, and resorted to a slice of pizza at Pizza My Heart for lunch (with a cup of water) on two different occasions. Total cost: $7. Now, that's a bargain, but it's also 3.5 days of budget to me, so I'm kicking myself, especially since my refrigerator is still practically full, and I have another $62 of grocery budget kicking in this weekend. Am I just not eating? That's what everyone asks, and on further reflection, the answer might be yes. My biggest concern going in was that I'd slip up and overspend. Now I'm worried that I'll coast through the rest of the month with ease, but hurt myself by undereating. That wasn't the point at all.
It's not that I don't like food. I enjoy a great meal as much as anyone. And it's not that I don't like to cook. In fact, I have a blast when I cook, and I've become much better at it in the previous year. What's happening is I apparently have a mental block against the routine of preparing food, because (for reasons that don't require detailed explanation here) I haven't needed to cook for myself on a nightly basis ever in my entire life. This has led to an underdeveloped sense of food, such that when I open my cupboard, I wind up just staring at all the ingredients with a blank look, hoping for some meal to magically leap off the shelves at me. Hand me a recipe, and I'll gladly hit the grocery store to buy its ingredients and whip it up. But ask me to stock shelves with staples and assemble them later into something recognizable and (ideally) edible, and I'm stumped like a Price Is Right contestant bidding on a bushel of corn. My girlfriend and I have batted around ideas for how to solve this, but considering how surprisingly far my grocery budget is stretching, I might revert to my well-established habit of just selecting a recipe for dinner at the end of the day, stopping by the grocery store on the way home to buy its ingredients, and cooking it, keeping an eye on the grocery spending as I go. But the voice of my mother (who, no joke, was so concerned that I'd fall victim to just this syndrome that she took me on instructional grocery trips in the months before I went to college, explaining to me what each aisle was for and how to prepare a weekly grocery list) insists that I meet this challenge head on, instead of sideways. In other words, I'm going to have to schedule my meals. Perversely, my first thought upon making this decision was that I should head over to Paper Vision and find a meal planner diary. (Again, this is why I must put a padlock on my wallet: I get $10 to spend and I can't get rid of it soon enough.) I think scrap paper will work well enough, though. *** According to the Eat Local Challenge site, I should be spending $68 a week on food if I want to be average. Also, I should be eating local. (I couldn't agree more, though today I scavenged an organic apple from the GT kitchen, and the bag which so proudly proclaimed the scrawny apple's organicness also mentioned it came from Chile, so I probably just consumed my weight in carbon emissions.) Is it possible to be a locavore and thrifty at the same time? Just because I don't have enough on my plate (double entendre intended) I'll attempt to only purchase California food this week. I think I have enough condiments and spices on hand to get away with this. While I think the locavore philosophy has its limits (much easier to pull off here than, say, Las Vegas, for starters), it's worth a try. Then again, with food prices rising anyway (and kudos to the Washington Post for actually providing useful and investigative news in the way that only a newspaper can ... I dare anyone to find such a thorough examination of comestible economics generated by a television news organization), maybe I should limit the number of restrictions I'm placing on myself.
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