Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if I could survive on twenty-eight dollars worth of food in February, 2009.

A google search reveals that I’m not the first person to have this idea. Reading over those projects, mine is different in a couple of ways.

1. I plan on taking lots of photos of myself, what I eat, and anything else that strikes my fancy.
2. I’m going to be weighing myself each day.
3. I’m not doing this for any political reason, or to prove a socio-economic point about poverty and hunger. I just think it will be interesting!

So, the rules:

• I have only 28 dollars to spend on food this month. I’ll point out that this does not mean that I’m spending exactly a dollar each day – I plan on buying rice in bulk, to last me the month, and some days I’m sure I’ll spend less than $1, some days I’ll spend more.
• There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Someone asked if I was allowed to accept food for free- the answer is no. Obviously not. My housemate Cannibal Kate would just feed me for the month for free if that was allowed, and that defeats the point of the whole experiment. What’s more, no free samples, no free packets of sugar, no free cups of tea…nothing. Everything that I eat will come from the $28.
• Water doesn’t count. I read somewhere that you can survive for up to three weeks on just water – I’m sure it’s not very good for you, but if you can survive on just water for 3 weeks, surely I can survive on water and also a little bit of food for 4 weeks. I’ll mostly be drinking tap-water, but if I’m out and about, and I run out of water, I can buy a bottle without it coming from my $28.
• Cooking comes for free. I will be cooking rice, which is technically using electricity, which technically costs money, but I’m only counting money spent on the food itself.
• Drinks count (except for water, obviously.) I debated this for quite a while, but then discovered “juice-fasting”, which is living on nothing but vegetable juice and fruit juice. As such, any non-water liquid I consume has to come from my twenty-eight dollars.
• I can’t grow any food, or buy a chicken and eat its eggs, etc. Someone suggested buying a heap of bean seeds and growing some beans, but that just seems to go against the spirit of the project to me, so only food that I have bought myself counts.
• Toiletries aren’t food. It’s a lesson I learned at a very young age, and it’s still with me today. I don’t use toothpaste, but if I did, it wouldn’t count. (unless I found myself eating it by the tube.) Similarly, Shampoo, Soap, Deodorant, Razors, Conditioner etc don’t come out of my budget.
• Entry fees for food-related places count. A number of people have suggested going to a market that costs money to get in – that, for the benefit of the project, comes from the $28.
• If it looks like I’m going to die, I’ll probably stop. As interesting as my death would be, I don’t think I’m going to go that far for the experiment. Having said that, anything short of imminent death, and I’ll most likely keep going. Sure, dysentry would be unpleasant for me and everyone around me, but I’d also find it interesting.Also, I’d get to introduce myself as “that guy who got dysentry for the internet”, which has secretly been my dream for many years*. *not true. 

My sister (MeatGirl) and my housemate (Cannibal Kate) have been hard at work, researching vitamins and nutrients, basically trying to make sure I don’t die. This is the shopping list they’ve come up with:

• Rice. Cheap, full of carbohydrates, goes well with everything.
• Kidney beans. Also cheap, and contains all of those vital healths. Can’t live without some healths!
• Oranges/orange juice. Vitamin C, apparently, is good for you! Who knew?
• Caviar and champagne. Cheap and nutritious!

Questions that people have asked about the project:

Do cigarettes count as a consumeable?

Well, I don’t smoke, so it’s a bit irrelevant. If I did smoke, I’d probably count them, because they work as an appetite suppressant. I normally drink 3 or 4 cups of tea in a day, which have a similar effect, and I’m off tea for the month, so yes. Cigarettes count.

Would you like the loan of a rice cooker for that month?

Thank-you, but no. I have my own rice cooker. It is a bit shit, but it’ll do me.

Do you plan on eating a lot?

I suspect I won’t be able to. If it turns out that food is incredibly cheap, then sure, I’ll eat as much as I can. But food tends to be pricey. Thus the challenge!

Other comments:

I recommend rice and soy sauce. A single 50lb bag of rice and gallon of soy sauce was most of my meals for one long and destitute summer, supplemented with instant ramen on occasion. (actually, if it is just for one month, the ramen might be the better route, being eight for a dollar here if you shop around)

One of our legislators out here blogged about trying a week living off of what people on food stamps could afford. She recommended going to a fast food place, ordering something small, then dumping tons of packets of condiments into your bag on the way out the door for seasoning your other food. That’s probably a good idea too. Cheap canned soup from discount grocery stores was mentioned too.

I’m not sure exactly what “ramen” is, but I assume it’s the same as our 2-minute noodles (or, as they call them in England, “Pot Noodle”.) Soy sauce sounds like a good idea, and I’ll definitely be picking up  some cheap noodles. Perhaps I’ll do a variant of this experiment some day where I’m allowed to nick condiments from fast food chains, but I suspect that once the month is over, I’ll never want to be without food again.

If anyone else has any questions, ask away, and I’ll attempt to answer them in the next few days!

I posted on a Brisbane Livejournal community called “Brisneyland” a few weeks ago, asking for suggestions for places to shop for cheap food. Tomorrow, myself and my friend Em, will scour those locations for cheap rice, kidney beans, oranges, and caviar!

Tomorrow: Midnight Postings.

Today’s Daily Dinosaur Comic is particularly good. If you haven’t read the strip before, today’s is a good place to start.

Daily Dinosaur Comics was (fairly obviously) the strip that inspired my own fixed-art comic, Samwise and Friends. You should check that out as well!

I considered making a list of my favourite Daily Dinosaur Comics comics, but he’s up to 1400 strips, and I like most of them. I can make a list of my favourite Samwise strips, however! My favourites are numbers 1 through 15.

I’ll be doing the wrap-up of StinkyPete over the next few days, and getting ready for my February project…28 Days, 28 Dollars. It shall be an exciting roller-coaster of words! Stay tuned!

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and I put some meat in a cage, then after maggots had eaten most of the meat, transferred it to a pot. I then poured a bottle of coke into that pot, and in the next few days, will be draining the pot to see if there was any difference made to the meat. In the mean-time: photos!

It rained Saturday morning. This would normally be great news, except that I was trying to film at the time.

“RIUM+” got back to me about drinking the coke:

Yesterday I would’ve considered it if I could’ve passed it through a filter, boiled it, distilled it and drunk the resulting liquid. Looking at it today, I’ve changed my mind and wouldn’t drink it even if you passed it through the same filters they pass sewerage through on a space ship.

It looks like the boke will remain un-consumed. This is probably for the best – I had a lot of people telling me that encouraging anyone to drink it would be an incredibly bad idea.

In the next few days, I plan to drain the coke and see what the meat looks like underneath. I’m insanely busy at the moment, with deadlines all over the place, so I probably won’t update until then – not a lot is happening to the pot, as you can see in these photos from yesterday and today.

I decided to lift a sausage up, to see what effects the coke had on it. It's looking brown and half-eaten.

The rain hasn't seemed to have made much difference to the pot.

It did partially fill the gravy jug though.

Up next: Draining the pot!

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and yesterday I poured a bottle of Boke over a pot of meat that is sitting in my back yard. Before going into the Pot of Rot, the meat had been sitting on two plates in a cage for a bit over a week.

The Pot as of this morning. It looks a lot like a pizza.

In response to my offer to pay someone to drink from the Pot of Rot Boca Bola, “RIUM+” asked:

How much money are you offering, can I do anything to it beforehand or do I have to drink it straight as-is, and will you pay for all my assorted medical bills afterwards? ;p

Well, I’ll give you $50 from my own pocket, but it’s at your own risk – you have to deal with your own medical bills, and I’d probably want you to sign something saying you won’t sue me. In my mind, you’d just dip a cup in and drink from that, but we can negotiate on the “doing something to it beforehand” issue.

If anyone else wants to contribute some money to see someone drink from the pot, leave a comment – I can set up a PayPal account. It should be interesting, and it’ll be heavily documented; photos and video, and I’ll check back regularly, to see if they’re dead.

RIUM+ is also the commenter whose mother has dibs on the original StinkyPlate. She’s going to wash it, and hang it up on the wall “next to some Spode plates”. Apparently Spode is a “very fancy, very expensive brand of china”. We have a picture of where the StinkyPlate’s final resting place shall be:

Some more pictures of the pot:

Like an island, floating in a really gross sea.

What is that stuff floating on top of the boke, anyway? Fat? Fizz?

I was wondering if anything had happened to the meat, so I used a fork and dredged the pork steak up.

At this point, the plan is to leave the Boca Bola in the Pot of Rot for another day or two, and then (unless we get a volunteer to drink it) drain the pot, and see what difference it has made to the meat.

Up next: Days 5-6

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and today I poured a bottle of fizzy drink into a pot of meat and assorted meat-related products that is sitting in my back yard.

The chosen liquid. To avoid using brand-names, it is going to be referred to as "Boca Bola".

I got some great suggestions from the comments yesterday, for what liquid I should add to the pot:

“McKeeKee” suggested:

Ketchup and mustard!

“Katydid” (my co-writer from yesterday’s Ted Vs Ed post) agrees:

I like McKeeKee’s suggestions – Traditional toppings for meat! Barbecue sauce! Ketchup! Sweet Chili sauce! … you already have gravy.

“Communications Officer Bernhard” (as seen in StinkyPete 1.0) has a unique take:

Red wine and a drop of your own

I was actually really tempted to go with this. Then “Chrissie” changed my mind:

Add something that you think might actually alter the meat’s condition – I don’t think sauces would have that much of an effect; they’d probably just get a skin and go crusty and gross. I like vinegar, cordial, or Coke for a topping, but leaning more towards Coke.

“Jenzilla” agrees:

go the coke. it’s acidic. maybe only acidic on metal… not sure. but it’s DESTRUCTIVE so do it.

A persuasive argument indeed! So this morning I woke up, discovered that we have about four bottles of coke in the fridge, left over from a party a while back, and…well, you can watch the video:

In the video, I also detail some StinkyPete-related dreams I have had recently.

Note: if the coke turns out to be a non-event, and nothing interesting happens, I’m happy to drain the pot and try again with a different liquid. Stay tuned!

Also, as promised, here are some photos of the Pot of Rot, post-stirring:

A lot of the fat from the Pork Steak survived. (although it can be hard to tell what's steak-fat, and what's tissue.)

StinkyPete: providing your daily "gross meat photos" updates.

This looks quite similar to the previous photo, but it's actually the other side of the pot. At first I thought that was a puddle of congealed fat, then I worked out it was probably tartar sauce.

I was trying to take a photo of the other side of the pot, and I missed.

I will put down money to see someone drink a cup of the Pot of Rot brand Boca Bola. Any volunteers?

Tomorrow: Daily check-in!