EARLIER IN THE week, one of my English classes had somehow started discussing oatmeal. I lamented that I had been eating the gloppy substance plain for two weeks, and at this point the conversation turned to oatmeal cookies. A few students were appalled that I didn’t care for them. The next day a student brought me a cookie that he had made. I took it, but I didn’t eat it. At that point I still felt strong. Later in the week it was a different story.
Friday was the first debate tournament of the year, and my school was the host. By the end of the last period, I was frantically running around. I needed to make sure the classroom doors were unlocked, judges were in place, visiting teams knew where to go, and the first round was matched and ready to post. Then, two of my first-year debaters showed up with two plates full of vegan chocolate chip cookies—one to sell at concessions, and one for the coaches. So began the Great Cookie War.
As I worked through the evening, I tried to ignore the plate. Friday nights used to be a time to see friends, go to the movies, or relax after a hard workweek, but upon becoming a debate team coach, I worked Friday night and all day Saturday. On that evening, I paid attention to my tasks and tried not to notice as other coaches walked by and grabbed a cookie without even thinking about it. But those cookies were all I could think about.
During the second round of events, I sneaked outside to call Christopher. I let the darkness envelop me as I punched in the number. The conversation started out playfully. I presented my plan: I would eat one cookie, or maybe just a half, but I would buy it from concessions and calculate the fifty-cent cost into my food total for the day. I thought my logic was sound, my case clear, and my motives pure. Christopher replied that to eat this cookie was breaking a rule. I tried a new tactic: I argued that we said we could eat food that was free to anyone. I pointed out that judges and coaches eat for free at tournaments, and we welcomed anyone to come and judge. In fact, we often begged people to come. He said that it was unlikely that a person unaffiliated with the school or the event would come onto campus to get free food. I countered that their purpose for coming to campus didn’t matter, but rather that they could. He said that this wasn’t a reasonable assumption. Nearing exasperation, I upped the stakes. I reminded him that just a few days before, he ate a “free” sucker from a jar in a tattoo parlor. I felt that it was much more likely for someone to see an event happening at a school and wander by to graze some food than it was for someone to walk into a tattoo parlor to get a lollipop. He failed to see my logic.
That was it: I had to fight dirty. I told him that he had bent the rules and justified it for his own benefit, but was now going out of his way to make me feel guilty for wanting to eat a cookie that I was willing to pay for. I told him that he had cheated, yet he was denying me a cookie because he wasn’t there to have one. He claimed that I would have to find out all of the ingredients and calculate the cost per cookie in order for it to work. But that was ridiculous; we didn’t charge ourselves for the individual ingredients in the ramen noodles or spaghetti that we had purchased. I felt that prepared foods were different; he insisted that this would violate our rules.
By this point, I was furious, far more so than anyone should ever get over a cookie. While most couples were at home watching a movie, or out with friends, I was standing in the dark, still at work, surrounded by hundreds of students, many of whom were debating the topic of whether or not the federal government should increase subsidies for alternative energy—while I, the crazy woman running this thing, was debating my partner over a cookie. As the second rounds came to an end, I had to make a decision: continue the argument, or get back to work. I hung up, trying not to cry. Like any other couple, Christopher and I have disagreements, but usually they don’t last long. I don’t think I have ever been as angry with him as I was at that moment. Images of going home and packing up my belongings flashed through my mind. How could I stay with someone who would give me such grief over a cookie?
The answer came later that night. I spent the evening fuming; it took a great effort to keep the tournament going while I waited for Christopher to bring me dinner as we had planned. He showed up late, and that added to my frustration. He arrived at around eight thirty, and I hadn’t eaten since noon. He came over to where I sat in a student desk surrounded by schedules and results. The other coaches huddled around the plate of cookies, chatting, unaware of the misery caused by those tiny morsels. Christopher approached.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Instantly my anger dissipated and I wrapped my arms around him, noticing that he felt thinner. I apologized as well, and he set my dinner down. He brought me beans, rice, and tortillas, with the added treat of fried potatoes. Then he reminded me why I fell in love with him: He handed me two homemade peanut butter cookies. He was late bringing me dinner not because he was angry, but because he had spent time finding a cookie recipe that we could afford.
4
Vegetable Liberation
Christopher
Pulling into the crowded parking lot, I wondered if people who struggled financially shopped at places like this. Mostly white families pushed SUV-sized carts through the Costco entrance as an employee checked for their membership cards. I pulled mine from my wallet to signal that I had paid my dues; I belonged. Kerri and I weren’t sure if we would actually buy anything that day, but two weeks without fresh produce had made us desperate. Pushing the cart toward the back of the store, I thought about the large bags of carrots, cartons of blueberries, and other industrial-sized servings of plant life that could become part of our meals. I longed for the crunch of vegetables between my teeth, the bitter taste of a bell pepper, the vapid flavor of romaine lettuce. I needed my veggies, and I needed them now.
Deftly I maneuvered around whining children and their parents. I hung a left at the DVDs and barreled down the aisle of leftover beach towels. Kerri and my sister, Heather, who’d come along to observe how we shopped on our dollar experiment, did their best to keep up. The possibility of eating free samples could not derail me from the large walk-in cold section that waited behind thick slats of clear plastic. Then I stopped.
“What is it?” Kerri asked.
I was having second thoughts. Did being in this wholesale big-box store make sense? Was shopping here true to the spirit of our project? If we bought food here, would we have to factor in the cost of the membership? How would we do that? By cost per day, or by dividing our annual membership dues by the number of visits? I realized that we could decide later.
“Let’s just see what they have,” I said.
Kerri got her phone and, using the calculator, figured out what we could afford. Before long there was a ten-pound bag of carrots in the cart. Then a five-pound bag of broccoli. Then we found the lettuce: six hearts of romaine for $2.39. It was too good to be true. It seemed impossible to buy produce at the traditional grocery store, given our extreme budget, and at the dollar store we were limited to onions and garlic. Today was different—we could actually afford to buy produce here. The idea of a salad resonated in my imagination as the questions over membership fees echoed in my psyche, but the power of fresh produce was too strong. Kerri placed the lettuce in the cart. Feeling inspired, we moved out of the cold section and on to the bags of apples and oranges, but they were still too expensive.
Having drunk nothing but water over the last two weeks, I wondered if we could manage a powdered drink mix. Heading up and down the aisles, we looked at all the food we couldn’t afford, until finally we found it: Tang. The canister had images of orange slices emblazoned across the front, accented by an info-graphic proclaiming that this newly improved beverage contained “fruitrition.” We tossed the item into our sparsely inhabited cart and made for the checkout stand. I was ecstatic. We would have salad with dinner that night, and orange drink with our oatmeal in the morning. Feeling enthused on the drive home, I made a spontaneous stop at a large fruit stand on the side of the road. The enormous sign out front advertised fresh local strawberries
. Kerri gave me a funny look.
“We won’t be able to afford anything here.”
Smiling, I grabbed my wallet. “I’m just going to take a look.”
The pyramids of locally grown fruits and vegetables were over-whelming, and the prices were surprisingly manageable even for modest budgets. However, as I looked around, I found little that we could afford. I made a mental note to remember this place for when the project was over. Then I saw them: oranges, a five-pound bag for five dollars. I counted the number in the bag; they were eighteen cents each. I realized that we could each have half an orange in our lunches. Our daily totals had been well below a dollar for the last few days, and I figured that we could manage this. Worries of getting sick would be a thing of the past. The baseball-sized blasts of citrus would save us. I pulled out a five-spot and handed it to the guy behind the makeshift counter. Walking back to the car, I held up the bag in victory. Kerri was shaking her head in disbelief. Once in the car, I explained the cost per orange, and she seemed just as pleased. I had no idea that today’s thrifty victories would lead to a nickel-sized blunder the next day.
By our third week of eating on a dollar a day, it was clear that we had underestimated the power of food as a driving force in our lives. We knew we were hungry, but in addition our experiment had left us emotionally brittle, physically drained, and decidedly desperate for a more diverse diet. The next day it happened: I spent too much. It wasn’t just the addition of Tang to our morning routine that put my daily total over a dollar. We also made polenta for dinner, and for the first time, we had a small salad with dressing as well. The dressing alone was eighteen cents a tablespoon, not a wise decision. Too many new things at once sent me over the top. Kerri’s self-denial of a spot of peanut butter that morning was what enabled her to narrowly escape the extra five cents. I felt bad at first, but I learned my lesson. It wouldn’t happen again.
It got me thinking, though: How was it that one tablespoon of salad dressing was the same price as an orange? And why was I willing to spend nearly 20 percent of my daily food budget on a salad topping, while questioning the possibility of eating a whole orange with my lunch? In a food system where large companies look to maximize profits at every turn, it makes sense that processed foods have a higher markup than fresh fruits and vegetables. And once one stops to think about where most of the money in the food system is made, it becomes clear why processed foods are the primary focus. This is where nearly all advertising dollars are spent, and where most food research and development takes place. There isn’t very much “processing” to an orange. Someone planted it, grew it, picked it, and shipped it, in some cases adding it to a bag of other oranges for a bulk purchase. But with the salad dressing, several ingredients are required, meaning that there are more people and machines involved in the process. But what really matters is that no longer am I simply buying oil mixed with herbs and spices; there has been “value added” to these raw ingredients.
The fact that companies can “add value” to raw materials is what enables them to mark up these foods and sell them for the prices that they do. The food company is offering you a service. When you buy bread, you are not just buying flour, water, salt, and sugar (which is what most breads are made of)—you are buying something altogether different, and the differences lie in what value has been added. So instead of just selling one kind of bread, you are given a variety of choices: white, wheat, whole wheat, honey wheat, whole grain, heart-healthy, vitamin-enriched, made with prune juice for help with “digestion,” etc. Anyone who has spent time in the bread aisle of a modern grocery store knows that the number of possible bread products and their advertised differences are nothing short of a dizzying array that would confound any sensible person. Yet consumers today have become more than just immune to this—we expect it.
In most cases, the ingredients list is far longer than most shoppers have time to read, and the ingredients that have been added are written in a scientific jargon that one needs a degree, or access to the Internet, to understand. All added ingredients have a purpose and add some type of “value” to the product. Sometimes a substitute is used to make the end product cheaper, to maintain its freshness, to reduce fat content, to provide more nutrients, to reduce calories, and so on.
It’s harder to do the same thing with produce, as there isn’t much value that can be added to something like lettuce. No matter what, it is just lettuce. A store can offer different varieties of leafy greens, but the options pale in comparison to the cereal aisle, or any other aisle, for that matter. Of course, some of the value added to our foods have hidden costs that we don’t realize: low wages for workers, pollution from the creation and production of the product, animal cruelty, and of course the possible negative health impacts from eating too many of these types of foods.
In addition to the variety of products made possible by adding value, there are other ways for companies to add value as well, but the most common is the convenience factor. We have grown accustomed to purchasing foods that take little time or skill to prepare and require very little cleanup. Frozen dinners, which struggled to catch on until people could afford to have freezers in their homes, can be stored indefinitely, popped in the microwave, eaten in front of the television, and easily disposed of afterward. Canned soup is another example. Processed foods like these have the added value of saving people time. These types of foods found their footing in the fifties, when women were still doing most of the cooking, and several companies, and even the president of Campbell’s Soup, claimed that these products were popular because they were saving women time, saving them from the drudgery of “slaving in the kitchen.” Even in 1969, after married women had started to become a regular part of the workforce, the chairman of the board of the Corn Products Company said he believed that processed foods, made for the sake of convenience, were the cause of a “social revolution.” He believed that the food industry had given women the “gift of time” and that this could allow them to “reinvest in bridge, canasta, garden club, and other perhaps soul-satisfying pursuits.” Looking back, it is funny to think that of all things to cite as contributors to the struggle for women’s equality, some men in the food industry believed that products like canned ravioli played a vital role.
But even if the food companies overestimated their role in the women’s liberation movement, their innovations did revolutionize the amount of time people spent at home preparing food. We were learning this firsthand. Having been accustomed to picking up a loaf of bread at the store, or dropping a couple cans of refried beans into the cart, we were experiencing this loss of convenience on a daily basis. In the 1930s, it took people about two and a half hours in the kitchen each day to prepare food; in 2010, we spend on average roughly eight minutes.
On our first night, I had rolled out tortillas by hand—tortillas which would have cost me just a couple dollars at the grocery store. On the weekends, I watched Kerri prepare several different types of meals to eat during the week. While we could have spent that time at the beach instead, that would have meant that we would spend most of our evenings working in the kitchen after getting home from working all day. Plus, certain foods had to be planned for in advance. Dried beans, for instance, had to be soaked overnight.
Beyond saving money, the most noticeable benefit was that, for the first time in our entire lives, we knew exactly what we were eating. It was not the best food we had ever eaten, but it wasn’t bad, and we felt a certain level of pride in knowing what we were putting into our bodies. We also learned that there is little reason to buy things like bread, tortillas, boxed Spanish rice, and refried beans. We now knew how to make these things, and they were far cheaper when made at home. What was even better was that they didn’t take all that much know-how or energy to prepare.
For most of that third week, things stayed pretty routine. The added benefit of a small salad with dinner each night was wonderful. While the chopped-up hearts of romaine lettuce didn’t add much to our daily calori
e count, they did act as a sort of psychological lubricant to keep us feeling confident as the days passed by. I had already lost nine pounds by this point, and although I was still a few pounds above my ideal body weight, I could feel other signs of physical distress. My body ached to get more active. I thought about going to the gym, but the fact that I felt light-headed if I stood up too quickly reminded me that I simply did not have the calories to burn. I needed every ounce of energy just to make it through the day. Kerri felt similarly. She had stopped riding her bike to school, and her e-mails to me throughout the day were like mirror signals in a maximum-security prison. She, too, was thinking about food nonstop. It didn’t help that my students wanted an update each morning on how things were going, and eventually I just started referring them to the blog so that I could try to think about something besides eating.
By the third Friday, we needed a change. For three weeks we had been going nonstop. Long workdays, and weekends spent preparing foods and cleaning the house, left little time for us to relax together. We decided to go to the movies. In general, Kerri and I don’t spend very much money entertaining ourselves. For the most part, we spend our free time reading, watching a movie at home, or taking the dogs to the park. Kerri likes to crochet, and I like to think up new things to do, like trying to eat on a dollar a day. But that night we would eat our small bowl of broccoli-potato soup with a side salad and then head out for a night on the town.
While waiting in line under the lights outside the theater, we noticed that the price of admission seemed different tonight. The price was always nine dollars per person, and while we usually groan at the cost of tickets, this time it seemed like downright robbery. Nine dollars was nine days’ worth of food for each of us. The cost for two hours of entertainment for us both (eighteen dollars) was nearly equivalent to how much we each had spent on food individually for the last three weeks (twenty-one dollars apiece—seven dollars per week, per person).
On a Dollar a Day: One Couple's Unlikely Adventures in Eating in America Page 5