Wind in my Sails

Day 2 of the self-challenge, and it's going swimmingly so far. I've uploaded a spreadsheet if you're so inclined to cycle through the worksheets to check my figures and follow my consumption, and I also won't have to list it on the blog.

I've had two delicious dinners so far. I made a pot of brown rice. For the time cost of cooking one pot I'll get four servings to be eaten sometime over the next dozen days. (Disclosure: I used some curry powder I had on hand to add to the rice - maybe 3 cents' worth for the batch and you can buy small amounts for next to nothing at Bulk Barn.) I blanched my spinach Tuesday night so it won't spoil on me and I'll get three servings out of the bunch. Hopefully the rest of my veggies last.




Now for a bloggers update. The star of the show, Rachel, reviewed her week and found that she spent $50.43. Slightly under budget and accomplished with the charity of others. Days when she was over budget were days she ate out or bought a bottle of acetaminophen. Now that drugs are apparently under the food budget umbrella we can add uppers, a university student staple, to next week's menu.

I don't understand Nick. I had begun to think that he might actually be doing the challenge by assuming a semi-humourous role of an "average" student, or intentionally just throwing the challenge. That thought is now drifting slowly away, but I'm holding on to it to save me from my incredulity. On the weekend, he played a hockey game and started "feeling it", and they told him "the food I have been eating today/lately simply does not allow me to perform at anywhere near peak performance". He posted a video where he says he's been "living like this for a long time" and it was an "unconscious thing where he was living like this". You'd think that all this might have been some sort of wake-up call, but he's still deeply unconscious. His idea of eating healthy is finding a healthy place to eat. Fast asleep, he appears to be about 6 hours away from the dawn of discovery that he could make his own healthy food.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm picking on Nick. I am, however, picking on what he represents, which is an entire population of today's students who lack day-to-day money and/or time management skills and/or household skills, and top it off with a sense of entitlement. If they become undernourished, it's because they're being under-educated. Hiking the budget for them to eat out as a daily occurence won't help them eat better or pay off their debts afterward (but would give the pennywise student much more cash to play with). Would an increase in food budget for students be a prudent investment of tax dollars, or is it encouraging them not to learn key life skills? Should there be a Grade 12 course on managing these logistics of post-secondary school, or is the hard way the best way to learn these lessons?

Many of the people I have talked to about this whole topic do feel strongly that for some reason students aren't learning these things during their university days. For you, my friends, I give you Nick's closing quote:

"All the time you have to put into planning for food and what you can or cannot afford takes away from the time you should be focusing on your studies. Great life lessons during your undergrad are important but undue stress is not the balance we should be seeking to attain."