Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I am spending less than (or equal to) twenty-eight dollars on food. I hope I do not die!

See that face? That is the face of a man experiencing pure joy.

Today, I ate half a banana.

It was a glorious experience.

Following a spate of suggestions yesterday, I decided to stop off at the shops on the way home from my hard day of work:

Hard at work.

I was after a number of things, but because I’d forgotten to bring a list, all I remembered was that I wanted some form of canned fish (for my brain) and that I still hadn’t bought anything that had Vitamin B2, which prevents “Rice Balls”.

The first thing I noticed in the fruit and vegie section was cheap limes:

I don't think that you're meant to take photographs in supermarkets, but no one seemed to notice or care.

I remembered that limes were what the English used to take with them on long sea voyages to prevent scurvy (one of the possible origins of the nickname “limey bastard” for Brits) but I also remembered that we’d decided that scurvy wasn’t a huge risk, so I moved on.

You may have noticed (if you know your Australian supermarket giants) that I'm at Coles, instead of my preferred store, Woolworths. The reason is simple - Woolworths was an additional five minutes walk away, and I was trying to preserve energy, after all that hard working I'd been doing.

Bananas, I distinctly remembered, were right after “asparagus” (it must have been alphabetical) on the list of foods containing riboglavin (also known as Vitamin B2.) Now, a single banana wouldn’t weigh more than about 150 grams (40 pounds, for any Americans reading), so I could probably afford one or two without spending more than a dollar. I wouldn’t eat more than half a banana a day, so that would be less than 25 cents/day. Well within my budget!

I grabbed two, then decided to be super-frugal, and put one of them back.

My next stop was the canned fish aisle:

Sardines: Roughly twice as expensive as rice, if you measure by grams/$.

Tuna was far too pricey, but sardines were nicely affordable. I was faced with a dilemma – vegetable oil or tomato sauce? Which would be better for me? Which had more vital healths that I was needing?

I’m a male, and thus utterly incapable of making decisions, so I rang my clever friend Em, of Day one’s Shopping. (she was also the one who suggested I get fish in the first place.) She recommended tomato sauce, because it had more Vitamin C (is Vitamin C the most important vitamin? It seems to be the only one that anyone ever talks about it. If that is the case, why isn’t it Vitamin A?) which was fortunate, because I was leaning towards that one myself – as I mentioned yesterday, I hate tomatoes, but I love most tomato-based products.

Today's purchases. The check-out chicks at Coles are far too jaded and disintereted to do things like assume I'd be eating the two foods together, but wouldn't it be more fun if they weren't?

Amazingly, the banana ended up costing exactly 45 cents (less than a US penny, American readers) and so together, the banana and the sardines cost exactly $1.

I spent exactly $1 on food today.

I ate half the banana today – it was divine. I’ll give it 9/10, because it really wasn’t at all filling, but it was pretty darned delicious. There’s a scene in the pilot episode of the TV series Firefly where a character trades a box of strawberries in exchange for passage on a ship. One of the ship’s crew eats a strawberry, and has a look of complete ecstacy on her face.

I now know how that feels.

The other half of the banana has been glad-wrapped, and is in the fridge, ready to be eaten tomorrow. I haven’t opened the sardines yet; it felt like overkill to have banana AND toast AND rice AND sardines all in one day. I don’t want to get spoilt!

This brings the total spent up to $17.66  - just over $10 to last me the next 23 days. (but I do have enough butter and rice and hopefully soy sauce to last me the rest of the month, so I’m not panicking yet.)

I would estimate that I’ve had the same amount of water today as I have the last few days. I had a smaller portion of rice today, to avoid the situation of yesterday. I ate it right down with no problems; it was actually quite enjoyable!

Hopefully I won’t have any more rice disasters like yesterday. That’s right, I’ve decided that not finishing my plate officially counts as a “disaster”. (I had to throw almost half of it out! Catastrophic!)

From the comments:

“Oz”:

I would suggest getting some stock poweder for your rice, I used to do that when I was running out of money and it didnt taste that bad.

If I go off my rice again, I’ll definitely check that out! I suspect it’ll be pricey, when you consider how small my budget is, and the fact that it only has to last me 25 days (and I probably won’t want to use it every day. I still have my delicious soy sauce!)

“Amy B-T” asks:

Why don’t you use toothpaste, Peter?

The short answer? It’s unnecessary.

Toothpaste exists to make money for the people who sell toothpaste. Sure, it makes a slight difference to dental hygeine, but the most important part of brushing your teeth is not putting toothpaste on the brush, it’s simply brushing your teeth.

The reason that toothpaste froths up when you use it is because they put something in it to make it froth up, so that it looks like it’s actually doing something. The only useful component of toothpaste is fluoride, which comes in the water in NSW, and is about to be introduced in Queensland (where I currently live.)

I heard about this a few years ago, but I hadn’t really paid it much heed until I asked my dentist which type of toothpaste would be best, and she said not to bother with it. It’s useless and expensive – the most useful thing that toothpaste does is, I repeat, make money for the people who make toothpaste.

When I heard about how useless toothpaste was, I mentioned it to my cousin (he lives with me.)

He didn’t believe me.

I told him that I had heard this from my dentist, but he was still dubious. He’d been raised believing that toothpaste was necessary, and not even the word of a trained dental professional could change his mind.

We always have a book in the toilet at our house, and at the time, it was one of the infamous Bathroom Readers – books full of dozens of interesting stories, many true, some not. My cousin came out of the bathroom a few weeks after that conversation, and said

“Hey Peter, turns out you were right about toothpaste. It doesn’t actually do anything.”

He had learned this from one of Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers. The word of a dentist wasn’t enough to change his mind, but the second he read it in a book designed to be read on the toilet, all doubt disappeared.

My cousin still uses toothpaste.

The other reason I don’t use it is that if I have to get up and brush my teeth in front of the sink, I won’t do it. It’s a combination of laziness and forgetfulness – the only time I brush my teeth is when I come across a toothbrush in my day-to-day life, and very little of my day-to-day life is spent standing in front of the sink.

To ensure that my teeth get brushed on a regular basis, I have bought lots of toothbrushes, and spread them around the house. There’s one in front of both my computers, there’s one next to my bed, and I tend to hide them in jacket pockets – I’ll be sitting on the bus, and reach into my pocket, find a toothbrush, and remember to brush my teeth. (it’s given me a few strange looks, but much nicer teeth.)

If I used toothpaste, I wouldn’t be able to brush my teeth on the bus (nowhere to spit it) and I’d have to carry a tube with me everywhere I went.

So to answer your question, Amy, I don’t use toothpaste because my dentist told me not to unless you desperately feel the need to support the average toothpaste salesman, there’s really no need to. (also: convenience.)

In other news, RIUM+ seems to know everything:

You’ll notice a lack of vitamin C if the skin on your hands starts peeling/flaking off a little. If that happens, you’ll need to probably double the amount of vitamin C you’re having for a few days, then go down to a level that’s around 1.5x as much as you were having before.

Actually, I’ve had skin on my hands peeling for months now. Since I started drinking that cup of orange juice per day, it seems to have stopped…

The orange juice is really quite nice. Even after this experiment, I might keep having a glass a day. It’s cheap, and apparently good for me!

Also, you will want to start brushing your teeth more (but not too long and not too hard to not scrub away the enamel). With toothpaste. Almost religiously after every main meal. And use a fluoridated mouthwash as well if you can every night. Because you’ve got no calcium in your diet at all from what I can see and that will probably weaken your teeth first (don’t want the effects of this experiment to cause you longterm damage since once a tooth gets a cavity it’s too late to do anything about it).

Oh my. I will get on that right away! (though probably not with toothpaste)

I’ve had a few people telling me that whenever they buy food lately, instead of thinking of it in dollars and cents, they’ve been thinking of it in “days”, which amuses me. I went through the same thing for the first few weeks after I thought of this project.

Tomorrow: Daily weigh-in!

(total money spent so far – $17.66)

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and last night, for the first time since I started this project, my dream today wasn’t food-related.

72.4...hang on, that's UP from yesterday!

Yesterday I weighed exactly 72 kilograms (any Americans reading – that’s also, coincidentally, exactly 72 pounds) – today, I’m at 72.4. I’m up by almost half a kilogram.

This is probably due to either random weight fluctuations, or the fact that it’s a dodgy cheap scale. Perhaps my metabolism has started to adjust a bit, but I don’t think that would cause me to actually put on weight.

Would it? I’ve never really understood metabolism. Any metabolism-experts out there?

One of my hobbies is to deconstruct words, and try to work out their meaning from that. “Meta”, the first part of “metabolism”, is an interesting prefix. (it’s probably my favourite prefix, to be honest.) By itself, it doesn’t really mean anything, it is reliant on the word it’s attached to.

(and before you claim that that statement could apply to any prefix, no, it can’t. In the word “prefix” for instance, the prefix is “pre”, which always means “before”. “Meta” by itself doesn’t, strictly speaking, have a meaning, though it has become a slang term, meaning “self-aware” or “self-referential”. You know how “random” has become the all-purpose slang word of late? (“That’s so random!”) Well my money is on “meta” being the next one. “Oh my god…he is so meta.”

Meta means “___ about ____”, where the blank is filled by the word that meta is attached to. Meta-writing, for instance, is writing about writing, like I’m doing right now. Metafiction is “fiction about fiction” – a story in which someone is writing a story. (like my first attempt at Nano, Writing a Novel.) A metajoke is a joke about joking.

So “metabolism” sounds like it would be “the bolism of bolism”.

I’ve run into a problem here, because I have no idea what “bolism” is, but let’s look at that half of the word. “bol” also starts the word “bolognaise”, and can be found in the words “symbolism”, “diabolical” and “abolishment”, and, with a slight tweak, “bulemia.” At least two of those words are food-related!

Okay, so it didn’t work that time. But it quite often does!

Wikipedia tells me that

The term metabolism is derived from the Greek ‘Metabolismos’ for ‘change’, or ‘overthrow’.

and that it refers to

the set of chemical reactions that occur in living organisms in order to maintain life

…a definiton so broad that it’s pretty much useless.

I’d go into more details, but I’ve just received a phone call from my cousin, asking if I can come in and give him a hand at work, so the rest will have to wait until tonight! Stay tuned, linguaphiles!

My housemate Cannibal Kate didn’t believe that I had gained weight, so I hopped back on the scales to show her. To my surprised, they came up at 71.9kg (25 pounds) – I was surprised, but it made more sense to me than having randomly gained half a kilo. I quickly grabbed my camera, but when I went to take a photo…it was back up to 72.4kg.

It took me a while to work out that my camera has its own weight. I wouldn’t have pegged it at half a kilo, but I admit that I’d never really thought about it before.

So if the difference really bothers you, go back over all my weights so far, and take off half a kilo. As Kate pointed out, I’ll have to keep on taking photos while holding the camera for consistency. Of course, batteries get lighter as they run out of charge, but that difference should be negligible.

I believe I was halfway through saying something when that second photo was being taken.

It’s amazing how quickly you grow accustomed to taking photos of yourself in your underwear and putting them online. Of course, it helps that I have a smoking hot bod, and nothing to be ashamed of.

Tonight: Daily Food Post!

(total money spent so far – $16.66)