Monday, September 12, 2011

Today's our first day doing the hunger challenge

As we were enjoying amazing sushi, cocktails, and wine with friends on Friday evening, the tone of the conversation turned serious as we talked about Hunger Action Month. Craig and I are taking the hunger challenge because we need to understand what it’s like to walk in the shoes of the hungry and to raise awareness how widespread food insecurity is in our own community.

I am confident we’ll have enough to eat, and our meals will be healthy. But we’re fortunate because I know how to cook. I am well-versed in meal planning and cooking nutritiously and inexpensively – rice, beans, lentils – with planned leftovers for lunches. We also have access to many resources that most Food Outreach clients do not have. We can drive to a farmers’ market to get seasonal (and cheaper) produce. I have hundreds of cookbooks and can easily go online and retrieve millions of recipes. Our kitchen (in our nice home in a safe neighborhood) is well-stocked with appliances and enough pots, pans, baking dishes, bowls, blah, blah, blah to easily prepare dinner for 25. And we’re really, really healthy! We’re not undergoing chemo or taking antiretroviral drugs that leave us too exhausted or nauseated to cook, and we’re not battling hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol. Hunger is only one of the many hardships experienced by those living with a terminal illness – and – living in poverty.

It took us an hour and a half on Saturday to plan our meals for the four days we are doing the challenge. It never takes me that long to plan meals for an entire week. I usually ask Craig what he’s hungry for and go from there. Not this week. Even buying frozen, (cheaper) tilapia from Whole Foods, the only place we buy fish, is not feasible ($2.99 for six ounces). Typically if we have lentil, sweet potato, and spinach soup, I’d pick up a whole-grain baguette from Trader Joe’s. Not this week. Since I’m making brown rice for a vegetarian broccoli casserole, we’ll have the soup over rice. Nutritious and filling. We usually have at least three or four things for dinner (salad/soup, protein, starch, vegetable). Nope. A small, simple salad – OR – homemade applesauce will be the only other thing we can afford with our soup, chili, pizza, and casserole. Choices on a food budget are extremely limited. And if I didn’t cook, our eating would be likely be peanut butter sandwiches, cereal, and canned and boxed foods (soup, stew, chili, tuna helper), all of which are so much more expensive and nutritionally inferior to home-cooking. And how do you fill half your plate with fruits and veggies as the USDA recommends?

We shopped yesterday, which was very different than normal. We had to eliminate some things from our list to stay within our budget and no organics and no spices. Our fresh produce is limited and basic, and we opted for generic brands, frozen broccoli and canned tomatoes instead of fresh. I don't think we've ever compared unit prices as closely as we did yesterday. When another shopper looked at us like we were freaks as she heard us arguing which peanut butter we could “afford” (I think that was the word that got her attention), we told her about the hunger challenge. She thought it was pretty cool, but she did walk away shaking her head and wished us luck. That’s the thing. Come the weekend, we will go back to our typical eating, unlike Food Outreach’s clients who have no choice but to eat like this, day in and day out.

What we purchased is what we’ll be forced to eat. We have no flexibility to change our minds if we’re in the mood for something else. Since we’re eating dinner leftovers for lunches, I was planning to make both lentil sweet potato soup and black bean chili yesterday so we'd have lunch for today, and we wouldn’t need to eat the same thing for dinner and then lunch the next day. However, I forgot to soak the black beans, so I just made the lentil sweet potato soup for today’s lunch. The issue is that I had made this last week too, and we finished the leftovers on Saturday; so, we’ll have eaten the same thing four times over a five day period. And I just realized I also forgot to make rice, which cooks for 30 to 40 minutes, so all we’ll have for lunch is soup. It hits you what little variety – and – how much planning you have to do to eat on $4 a day.

Denise and Craig Evans

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