The End is Here!

Day 28 marks the point on a line which happens to be the endpoint. At this point, I could say "I told you so" to students everywhere, but I barely see the point anymore. It was so ridiculously possible to begin with, that the whole challenge became not so much kicking a dead horse as kicking a dead horse non-stop for comic effect.

Looking back, it's now been about five weeks or 10% of my year trying to live healthily on $7.50 or less and in fact doing so. To look at the interesting results, the 'Daily Totals' worksheet in my spreadsheet shows a four-week daily average consumption of $5.89, and total consumption of just under $165, or $41.25 per week. Clearly this is manageable. But I'm a self-styled professional grocery spender. I have strategies. Instead of totally closing the blog now that my challenge is over, I'm gonna offer a few short and sweet tips in coming posts to pass along what works for me.

But back to my diet the last five weeks. The question is, is/was it healthy? If I do say so myself, I eat fairly healthily. An interesting thing is that my diet didn't change much for the challenge. In the last two years or so, I changed my diet to be more nutritious. I jacked up my intake of plant material so that I now get around 7-8 servings of fruits & veggies a day. I wouldn't be surprised if most people don't reach half of that. I replaced white flour with more whole grain stuff, and eat a variety of meats with only modest amounts of beef and much fewer processed foods. I don't eat much junk food either. But is my diet Canada Food Guide healthy? Well, I think it's close. Probably closer than most people's. You know the commercials where the cereal is "part of this complete" breakfast? Well mine has an extra piece of fruit.

One area I'm not sure I am close to reaching is caloric intake. According to the CFG, I should be eating 2900 calories a day. My guess is that in reality I'm lucky if I reach 2000. But my weight has been stable for years, my health seems to be fine, and I don't get hungry all the time. With the quantity of food I eat already, I'm not sure what more I could eat without venturing into the sugars. Maybe I could eat a crap load of trail mix and wash it down with a huge white Russian.

Non-existent segue...

The premise of the OUSA campaign was that the OSAP formula is broken. It expects students to live off of a quantity of money that would be considered below the "poverty line". My problem from get-go wasn't their idea that the OSAP formula is broken, but with the OUSA's move to mess with the part of the formula that's not. My guess is that they picked this part of the formula to mess with because it's the easiest to demonstrate. My reaction was and remains one of scorn. As I've shown, $7.50 is most certainly a reasonable budget. Still, none of the students really made it work. This doesn't mean that they've proven that it wasn't enough to live on, but they have proven it wasn't enough to make bad choices on. And their bad choices can surely be chalked up to naivete. (I wanted to say 'ignorance' instead of 'naivete' but I felt it was a bit too harsh.) Perhaps they simply didn't have enough knowledge or experience to make the wise choices. That said, if I were the government, I wouldn't be likely to revisit a funding formula to give a bigger loan to someone who lacks the wisdom to spend shrewdly and doesn't realize that eating out is the devil. Walking in to post-secondary school with better cooking and grocery shopping skills is something I could have used and it's something we might all consider developing in our own kids as they grow older. However, I did manage to learn these myself in college (with lots of phone calls home for advice) and I hope these students aren't so adverse to the idea as they seem.

Well, thanks for following my challenge. People were pretty supportive and I got food offers even from friends of friends just so they could watch me stick it to some big-spending students. Stay tuned for thriftiness tips.

Long weekends mess with a food challenge

An interesting week. It would have been run-of-the-mill if it weren't for a giant holiday at the end of it. So my dilemma was how to continue the challenge when for two days I was living on the charity of others. In fact I was living on the hospitality of my parents, as we all live on the hospitality of others from time to time and offer the same in return. So what to do with two days of zero food expenditure/consumption as it relates to my challenge, to avoid two days of basically $0 destroying the realism of the daily average? The best solution I came up with was to more or less delete those two days (1/2 day Friday, Saturday, and a 1/2 day Sunday) from my challenge. I make up those lost days by:
1) extending my week by one day so it will end on Tuesday rather than Monday now, and
2) replacing the remaining missing day with a mosaic day, so "Day" 18 is in fact Good Friday breakfast and Sunday lunch and dinner, with a snack thrown in.

There were a couple of interesting occurences. First, Days 15 and 16 were an expensive run largely, it seems, because I did tacos for dinner. I wonder if the further you go from making things from scratch, the more expensive it becomes. I may have to test this further before I'm done. Second, Days 17+ show the introduction of Tim Hortons coffee to the mix, and we'll have to see yet how that plays out. Third, I made banana bread to salvage a couple of over-ripe bananas. This required using shortening, sugar, and pecans which I had on hand from before the challenge. The quantities total less than $2 and I have a more detailed breakdown of the recipe's cost (and also that of the muffins) if anyone cares to challenge. Fourth, on Day 18 I went out for burgers with a friend and paid the larger part to simplify things. (On a side note, it should be illegal for a restaurant to call it a 'poutine' if they use grated cheese instead of curds.) All in all, it added up to under $17 cost to me. Two days later, we chanced to meet up for pho and dinner was on her - score evened. Still, a 20-dollar day will do a number on my average, but we'll see tomorrow (end of Week 1 of the extended challenge) if my savings the rest of the day will even 'er out. Check out the spreadsheet for details.

It's over, but is it really?

So, the blogging students are done blogging and are back to being just plain stupents. In conclusion, can one live healthily on $7.50 per day?

Students: No.

Me: For the love of Pete, yes!

That we've come to radically different conclusions will come to no surprise to anyone who's been reading along. I've ranted on this a whole bunch in my previous postings, so to make the end of their challenge as anti-climactic as possible, I'm going to completely ignore it until perhaps my next posting. Let's focus on something more interesting instead: me.

This is the last day of my two-week challenge. To revisit the idea, I took the budget for two weeks of groceries, $105 dollars, and bought groceries with it (see what $105 in groceries looks like here.)

Two weeks later, my consumption of those $105 equals about 2/3 of that total, that is, only $69.18. I want to draw particular attention to my consumption today. I ate out for lunch. A modestly priced Korean meal cost me $8 even, including tip. With the rest of my day's consumption relatively similar to previous days, I neared $12 for the day compared to my average of under $5. Clearly, if I were to keep to budget, eating out is something to be restricted. If my consumption ($5/day) and spending were to hold, I could be able to afford bulgogi about once every four days.

If I do say so myself, I made the challenge harder and more interesting than it would have been for those students. When I started my two-week challenge, I also made it a "start-up" challenge. I pretended I had nothing, like it was school the day after Labour Day. (Although a real student would have put three cases of beer in the fridge with $105, instead of groceries.) Now is just the point where it should become interesting, and where it is more comparable to where those bloggers and I actually were on March 8 when it all began - at a point where we had already accumulated a certain supply of foodstuffs to work with. So here I am. Sure, I could call this my last posting and shut 'er down. But wouldn't it be interesting to see what happens if I keep living on the budget, but without the crazy start-up expense? I mean, I was consuming only $5 of the $7.50 budget! I still have A LOT of food left from those first two weeks, which means that if I were to go on, I would continue to consume the food from those two weeks without consuming the money from those two weeks. This would hypothetically mean I can take further weekly budgets and spend them on things like booze, cigarettes, porno mags, and things that add variety and character to my diet. Enough hypothetics. I'm doing it.

Same conditions as before but, in the spirit of budgets, I'm forcing this past week's spending overage of about $15 to shrink next week's budget just to see what happens. As always, follow along here.

The Student Campaign is Over but...

...I've got oh-so-much gloating yet to do. MY challenge (Click here) lasts through Monday. Stay tuned for an exciting development coming soon!!!

First, forgive the period of silence. It's been a rough week for a guy who relies on his stomach for a food-related challenge. Wednesday morning, feeling the promise of a day with food poisoning well behind me, I woke and ate a breakfast of cereal and fruit. Mid day, chills start settling in, headache and the rest associated with that thing I though I had just beaten. Long story short, I came down with a second bout of food poisoning and have since thrown out the two likeliest of culprits: asparagus and the rest of the bag of milk. I've had a really small appetite the last few days and in general have been eating because it's reasonable to do so, rather than because I wanted to. Now on Saturday, I feel more or less back to normal.

My spreadsheet shows a couple new items on the sheet: another loaf of bread and the bowl of soup I bought on Thursday to soothe my poor stomach. It now shows that I'm 87 cents over my two-week budget but in a couple of days I'll explain why it won't matter. I'm not completely sure what to do about the two meals I missed. I'm not pretending this experiment is scientific or being subjected to statistical analysis but fudging data seems like a mistake, so the likely plan is to take note and just carry on in a regular schedule. Anyway, enough data points and the outliers shouldn't affect the trend (or something like that).

Some Scorn

The student campaign is now over. (I have to reiterate that my own challenge ends on Monday evening and you MUST see what happens then.) I'm waiting to see their synopses and final posts, but at least one of them, Nick, certainly didn't manage to "live on" $7.50. He's posted a couple of video blogs (Blog 1, Blog 2) of an interview with a fellow student. Apparently, you have to choose between being involved and eating healthily because when you're on campus late, you don't have time to go home and make a healthy meal. Maybe it's something about students at Wilfrid Laurier, but Andrew at Western seems to understand that meals are portable. I've had classes that lasted until 8, 9 or even 10 when I was in school and had to travel over an hour in transit to get home. That's how I, and hundreds of other students, made the connection that we live in a world of ice packs and Tupperware, not in one where we chase lions away from antelope carcasses or eat at Pizza Pizza to get sustenance.

Whoa! I stopped eating briefly.

So Monday I came down with that noblest of illnesses -- the 24-hour stomach flu. Luckily, 12 of those hours were spent asleep. But this also means I missed an entire dinner, though by utter necessity. When I awoke this morning I took it easy and had only two waffles (I would normally eat three) spread with yogurt instead of syrup and an eighth of a cantaloupe. During breakfast I questioned the wisdom of dumping the bacteria from the yogurt into my digestive system which was probably on an immuno-rampage, but everything turned out OK. I also couldn't fit in a grapefruit half. I found it interesting how much my stomach's capacity seemed to have shrunk in 12 hours and how gaunt my abdomen seemed to have become after it all. If I had a scale, I would have been on it for curiosity's sake.

Here I am now on Tuesday evening. Formerly hungry. The great chicken hunger was upon me. I have eaten two thighs tonight, a bunch of potatoes, and some asparagus.



Week One Done

A breakdown of the week's totals can be found on my spreadsheet. I've spent a third of my budget so far, which means in another week, there could be $30 or so left unspent of my big grocery shop. That's all I'll say about that for now. More or less it speaks for itself.

Today by complete happenstance I came across an article that was a welcome affirmation of my (anti-)cause. When you're looking for satire on the ludicrous, look to The Onion: Click me

Hey, I'm still eating!

Challenge-wise it's been an interesting few days. I broke the breakfast mold and had Shreddies one day and waffles another. Cool, eh? I had dinner at my brother's again on Thursday, which made one day really cheap, but cooked dinner for myself and a friend on Sunday, which made that day more expensive and also served to even out the spending. There was also a delicious homemade apple-berry crumble which she generously brought for dessert. Friday's dinner was a lamb chop with roasted potatoes. Neither was seasoned, though I wished I had put some of my garlic on the chop. Carrying that lesson forward to Saturday, I wrapped a couple of margarined cloves of garlic in foil and threw them in the oven with a pork chop, giving me delicious roasted garlic to spread on my pork.

Weekend lunches are generally small or non-existent for me. I have breakfast later than usual in the morning and often begin running errands in the late morning or early afternoon, which means I will often skip lunch on those days or suffice by carrying something small in my pocket (like trail mix) to munch on while on the go to make it through 'til dinnertime. Anyhow, check out my spreadsheet (Click Here).

Now check out Sunday's meals:

Two over-easy eggs, a heap of hashbrowns with onions, banana, grapefruit half, and a half-cup or so of low-fat strawberry yogurt. $1.32


Spaghetti squash with pasta sauce (includes ground beef, onions, mushrooms, red pepper) and asparagus. About $3.42 per plate. Were I making it for myself, one plate would have brought my daily total to only $5.66.


$7.50 - Enough for Whom?

Blogger Andrew considers the difference between himself, a lean-built guy of average height and relatively low activity level, and a linebacker. Where Andrew might be fine on $7.50 considering who he is, would everyone be able to make it on that budget? Probably not. Maybe the government should be covering its bases and funding everyone for the 12,000-calorie Michael Phelps diet... If I were to hazard a guess, a formula might use numbers from a normalized distribution (often graphically represented as a bell curve) of diet costs where, let's say, 70% or so of the students would fall within the range of diet requirements that I am working to prove can be met for $7.50 or less. Delivering all OSAP students food funding for a caloric intake of the minority of highly active athletes is crazy and would push OSAP students' food budgets WAY over their fellow non-OSAP students' ability to meet the same dietary level. OSAP students, flush with cash, would likely eat out (and unhealthily) much more or would find many other non-food related things to do with the money. I have to stop arguing this particular matter now. It's just too silly.


"Mommy, I want it!"

Blogger Nick's thoughts on spending money eating out: "The student should not be dining out at restaurants several times per week unless they can afford it, but they should have the ability to treat themselves once in a while." My response: If you go ahead and treat yourself when you can't afford it, YOU are responsible for that. OSAP isn't responsible for your treats any more than OHIP is responsible for pec implants, no matter how badly I might need them. YOU are on the hook for it if you walk out of Baskin Robbins with a double scoop, instead of the No Frills with four litres of milk. (That said, if all goes well my budget will soon have enough left over to allow me to treat myself...imagine that!)

The story of how I learned at school to spend my money on food is also the story of how I lost my sweet tooth. It was about making choices and trying to make them good ones.

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."