Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I am only eating food that I purchase (from stores) with no more than twenty-eight dollars of Australian money, as I think it will be a personal challenge/interesting experience. That sentence there should answer about 99% of the questions I get asked. If it does not answer your question, pleaseleave it in the comments, but seriously, read that sentence a few times first. I hope I do not die!

My dinner, sitting on top of everyone else's dinner.

My cousin and I go and play Dungeons and Dragons every three weeks. We rotate who brings food, and this week, it was our turn.

This small pile of food cost $34 - more than I'm going to be spending all month. It was eaten in less than an hour.

Ever since I started this experiment, I can’t get over how much certain foods cost. A pizza is about $5, and (if you’re a big eater like me) will take about half an hour to eat, and keep you fed for up to about 5 or 6 hours. For that money, you could buy a loaf of bread, some butter, and maybe something to put on the bread – that could last you for three or four days!

As soon I stop this project, I know I’m going to go straight back to buying pizzas when I feel like a pizza. It just seems strange to me, the way foods are priced. A decent steak at a restaurant can cost anywhere between $20 and $50…$50! For one meal! It’s insane.

I hypothesise that one could easily survive on about $50-60/month…and that’s eating well, too! All you really have to do is cut out fast food, junk food and meat.

I’m not going to, because I happen to love fast food, junk food, and meat, but I definitely think it’s possible. Anyone out there looking to economise, start with food.

After I weighed myself this morning, but before I did the daily food post, I finished off my spaghetti from last night. Spaghetti is one of my favourite foods…not only is it delicious and easy to cook, but it reheats really nicely as well. I’ve always thought someone should do a study on what foods reheat well…spaghetti retains its deliciousness on reheating, whereas hot chips are absolutely disgusting. Pizza falls somewhere in the middle.

The spaghetti kept me full for several hours, and on the way to Dungeons and Dragons, I had my three slices of bread for the day (I had my fourth last night, in toast form.) When I got home, I was suddenly hungry – honestly, hunger isn’t a familiar feeling these days. I tend to put off eating until about 4 or 5pm, and then I’m full until my last meal of the day.

I only ate half of my rice yesterday, and for reasons of laziness, I tried to finish it off tonight, but it smelled terrible and tasted only slightly better, so I threw it out, and cooked up a new lot. I also made a bowl of rice for my cousin, because I don’t think I’m at much risk of running out of rice by the end of the month.

If I do run out, I’ll borrow a bowl full of rice, and not count it in the totals.

I didn’t get a chance to wash/mash potatoes today, but that’s definitely a priority for tomorrow – I don’t want to risk them deteriorating; I would lose a dollar worth of food, and that’s not something I can afford to do at this point.

I’m actually quite tired, with a slight headache – this might be because of the diet, it might be because I got too much sleep, or it might just be because I spent about 4 hours at my friend’s house playing Dungeons and Dragons and watching everyone else eat pizza. Either way, rather than edit through the night as originally planned, I’m going to get some sleep now, and wake up early tomorrow, for a full day of editing and washing/mashing potatoes.

None of my Dungeons and Dragons friends follow my website, so I got the standard round of questions from them. The first thing that most people ask about (after offering me leftovers) is whether it would be okay to grow my own food.

I specifically mentioned in the rules that growing my own food wasn’t allowed. Partially because I think it’s against the principle of the project – hunting for bargains is part of the point for me (although I haven’t had time to do as much bargain-hunting as I’d hoped to) and I think that it would be hard to measure. Do I count the money for seeds? If a friend of mine grows food, can they give it to me for free? How long before the project am I allowed to start growing food?

I’m more of a consumer than a farmer, so I decided to make it simple, and not allow myself the option.

Someone pointed out that if I had a chicken that laid eggs, they probably wouldn’t count. I don’t have a chicken, so it was irrelevant. If I did, I’d probably have to count the chicken’s feed, or maybe how much I paid for the chicken in the first place. I don’t have a chicken, so I’m not going to spend too much time thinking about it.

My friends also insisted that it was okay to take free samples, even after I informed them that the rules specifically say that I’m not allowed free samples. I thought that would have won me the argument for sure, but they persisted, informing me that “They cost $0, and you can take that out of the $28.”

I’ve also been surprised to find how many people try to help me cheat. At the pub the other night, they offered to force me to eat something, so that I wouldn’t feel guilty about it. One of my Dungeons and Dragons friends is as passionate about tea as I am – we could sit and talk about tea all night. Tonight, he got up to make a cup, and was absolutely shocked to discover I wasn’t having any.

“But…I can’t have tea without you. It would feel weird!”

He offered to make me a cup of boiling water, so that I’d have something to sip, and then “accidentally” drop a teabag, milk, and three sugars in.

When I declined, he too offered to tie me down and force me to drink it, because then it “wouldn’t be my fault”.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m not doing this to win, I’m not interested in cheating, and I’m not interested in changing or bending the rules. I wrote the rules! I’m not even specifically doing this for the blog; it’s a project that I’m interested in.

It’s quite easy to cheat when you’re the one both writing the rules and making sure you’re following them, but I’m not interested in cheating. All I want is to see what will happen next. I might lose another kilogram, or pass out and fall down some stairs, or discover that a touch of malnutrition is exactly what I needed to write the Great Australian Novel, or get scurvy…whatever happens next, I’m sure it will be interesting.

Tomorrow is the first day in a veek that I don’t have any obligations. I’m going to stay home and edit all day, wash my potatoes, and if I’m lucky enough to find the time, watch the second half of Weird Science. It shall be an exciting, uneventful day.

Tomorrow: Daily Weigh-in!

(total money spent so far – $21.41)

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, everything that I eat has to be paid for from twenty-eight dollars. No, you can’t offer me left-overs. Please people, stop offering me left-overs. I can’t eat them. It’s against the rules.

I hope I do not die!

70.1kg - 0.7kg down from yesterday.

I’ve had the same weight (70.8kg) for two days now, so this loss is not surprising. It’s the second-biggest one-day loss so far; between days 3 and 4, I lost 0.8kg, but then I gained back 0.4 the next day.

These are probably my favourite boxers.

If you go back and directly compare to the Initial Weigh-in, you can see a distinct difference – my knees don’t face each other any more, I’ve got slightly more stubble, and I have considerably less stomach. I’ve lost about three kilograms in 11 days, which I don’t think is drastically unhealthy, but I still wouldn’t recommend this diet to anyone. (unless, of course, you want to blog about it.)

I got to bed at about 2am last night, and slept for 11 hours, which is why you’re getting this post mid-afternoon. I was waiting for a tape to copy, and watching Weird Science - the John Hughes movie from 1985.

I’ve owned Weird Science for a bit over a year now; I bought it in a three-pack with Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club (how the hell did John Hughes create this film and The Breakfast Club in the same year? I can’t imagine two more wildly different teen films.) but I’d never watched it because I assumed it was just another teen romantic comedy, nerd falls for a cheerleader, there’s conflict, they eventually get together, etc etc.

Yesterday, I randomly came across a snippet of a conversation – “What’s that John Hughes film where two geeks create the perfect girl?”

If someone had mentioned that the plot of Weird Science involved nerds creating a girl on a computer, I would have been all over it years ago! I love dodgy teen science-fiction movies from the 80s – films where a guy accidentally gets his mind transferred into a dog’s body, or creates a machine in his back yard that makes him twenty years older, so that he can make his teacher fall in love with him…

You know the sort of film I’m talking about.

I only got about halfway through Weird Science before I had to go to bed, but I wasn’t disappointed! My favourite part was when they scanned in a photo of Albert Einstein, and the computer managed to extract an image of his brain from that, and duplicate his intelligence. That, ladies and gentlemen, is science!

Dreams.

I had about 5 dreams about improvised theatre last night – there were two entire long-form shows, of an hour each, which I could tell you the entire plot of (I won’t) and then I was filming some impro, and was invited to the afterparty.

At the afterparty, I was offered some cake by someone with a huge grin on their face. I had no idea why they were grinning, so I suspiciously took some cake and tasted it – it was delicious. They (and my cousin, who was with me at the time) looked at me with absolute shock. It took me a few minutes to work out why…the project! 28 Days, 28 Dollars - I’d accidentally screwed up, just for a sample of some cake!

I felt like an absolute idiot.

Now that I’m awake, I’ve realised that in my dream, other people remembered the project but I didn’t. What the hell, subconscious? Why were other people smarter than me in my own dream? Ridiculous.

Today (well, tonight) I’m going around to a friend’s house for Dungeons and Dragons – we do this every three weeks, and provide dinner on a rotating schedule. This week, it’s my turn, so I’m going to be paying more than $28 on food just today, but I won’t be eating any of it.

When I get home, I’m going to be up all night, catching up on work. The “Daily Food Post” will probably be written/posted around 4am.

Tonight: (or tomorrow morning) Daily Food Post!

(total money spent so far – $21.41)

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and during the month of February, I plan to eat my own weight in gold. I hope I do not die!

Mmm, crunchy.

Last night, after the Daily Post went up, I started to make myself some spaghetti. My housemate Cannibal Kate was in the kitchen, making toast. It smelled quite delicious, so I decided to use one of my daily pieces of bread, and have a bit of toast as well.

Apparently our toaster is on the fritz. The slice pictured above was only in for half as long as it’s meant to be, on the lowest setting.

Only one side was burned; the other side was still quite bready, so I buttered that side, and it turned out to be quite a delicious piece of toast.

From the comments:

Commenter “lurkitty” has some advice:

Iron, protein, calcium, magnesium and B vitamin deficiencies all would account for your symptoms. As a vegetarian. I can tell you it is a very delicate balance. But all of those things take time to manifest. Yams or sweet potatoes are far more nutritious than white potatoes, and have a lower glycemic index. This is something you should look at. Were I to design this experiment, I would head to the doc first and get bloodwork done – iron levels, B12 level, fasting blood glucose, haemoglobin A1c, then follow up with tests.

I was talking to Em, and she thinks that what I put down to low iron was simple malnutrition. If I have any spare money, I’ll definitely look at sweet potatoes and yams. I had a lot of people recommend that I see a doctor before starting, but I’m reasonably sure that they would have just told me that it was a bad idea. And fair enough, from a medical point of view, it’s not the smartest thing to do.

Had I known that there were two dozen interesting tests I could have done, I definitely would have found a doctor and asked them to do all of them. (depending, of course, on cost.) If I decide to do this again some time I shall definitely have all of those tests run, and proudly broadcast the results.

“Polly” doesn’t think that rice should be bland:

I don’t know if anybody’s told you, but if you cook rice in something brothy instead of plain ol’ water, it’ll turn out delicious instead of bland. I normally dissolve like half a chicken-flavoured (but it’s not real chicken) bouillon cube into the appropriate measurement of boiled water, then let it cool down a bit and cook the rice with that using the exact same instructions as if it were just water. The flavour gets absorbed into the rice along with the water, and it is very nice.

On your budget, you’d probably want to use some kind of cheap brothy powder that you’d buy in bulk or something, rather than fancy bouillon cubes (which I think are something like $3.50-ish for a box of 10 in Canada, which would be $4.25-ish in Australia money). You could even, if you’re eating those dry noodley things, save the flavouring powder and use it to cook your rice!

That sounds interesting (and a bit delicious) but honestly, I kind of enjoy the rice as it is. It’s become my comfort food; consistently bland, and with just a dash of soy sauce, deliciously different. I do have a number of those little spicy packets from the noodles left, but I don’t really want my rice to be spicy. I don’t really enjoy spicy food.

Also, $4.25 is well over half my remaining money.

She also knows more about oats/oatmeal than I do:

The recipe for oatmeal is just one part oats to three parts water, bring it to a boil and let it boil/simmer for a few minutes until it’s thickened up a bit. I never ever use milk in it, because you really don’t need to. Although, I do sprinkle it with cinnamon and brown sugar for flavour… but you could always try soy sauce!

Oatmeal with soy sauce sounds disgustingly intriguing. I have had oatmeal, and (I know I’m being far too fussy for someone living on an average of a dollar a day) it’s just too uninteresting for me. With milk, it’s tolerable; with milk and also brown sugar, it can sometimes make its way to “delicious”. Just water, no brown sugar? Not at all tempting.

Comment from “i am”:

it also sounds like you could be pregnant……have you done a test?

Oh, crap, I haven’t checked in ages…and I can’t even remember the last time I had a period! Next time I go past a chemist, I’ll grab a home pregnancy test.

If it turns out that I’m pregnant, I’m definitely drop this experiment. I don’t want to starve my unborn child.

“Logan” is a potato expert. (potatospert?)

Potatoes are a pretty awesome food. You can survive on little more than potatoes, by all accounts. Wikipedia’s note about all the nutrients not being in the skin, contrary to popular belief, is probably true, but you need to take a closer look at that article. The nutrients are all just under the skin; for practical purposes, you should be eating the skin too, since it’s difficult to be sure just where those pesky nutrients are. Plus, skins are tasty.

Use a scrubbing brush or even a scouring pad to clean the potatoes, just like if you were cleaning a particularly troublesome frying pan. Hand washing doesn’t cut it with some of the really caked-on dirt.

I had a few people point out that I should be eating the skin. Next time I get a chance, I’ll sit down and scrub all the potatoes clean.

I’ll probably mash them, too, based on a suggestion from Dan Beeston:

OH! Watch those potatoes. It they were selling them cheap then there’s not much life left in them. They’ll go squishy and bad. I bought a big bag of potatoes and in a week they were oozing across the floor. Maybe do a big batch of mashed potato and put them in the fridge.

You need a better potato peeler. Get one of these babies: http://flickr.com/photos/overthemoon/2399083294/. You can get them for, like $9.

I won’t be peeling the potatoes, I’ll just thoroughly scrub them, and mash them up, skin and all. Do you have to boil potatoes first to mash them? I have mashed potatoes before, but I don’t really remember the exact steps. I’m pretty sure boiling was involved somewhere.

“Amy” has shown remarkable self-restraint until now:

Right, Peter C. Hayward, I have lurked long enough. I cannot believe that you have a cheap greengrocer down the road and it wasn’t your first stop! You also, if memory serves me correctly, have an Aldi quite nearby. You, sir, are going about this Entirely The Wrong Way.

Here, according to me, is what you should have done for nutrition and general goodness. Perhaps not thrilling, but would keep you healthy:

1. Purchase dried lentils and beans, brown rice, a few bags of home brand mystery frozen vegetables, maybe some tinned tomatoes and some eggs on special. Some cheap minced garlic in a jar would help, as would a few onions (or even some cheap onion powder). Maybe some UHT milk – you have a freezer, you could freeze it in portions. There’d be money left over for a few multi-packs of two minute noodles (they’re like a dollar fifty for 5 for homebrand ones at Woolworth’s) and some bits and pieces at the fruit shop.
2. Consume. Do not die. EAT LOTS OF LENTILS.

Well, Amy, maybe you should do your own 28 Dollars, 28 Days experiment, show me how it’s done. I’d quite happily host it. You would have to share your weight with the world, and (if you wanted to do the thing properly) take daily photos of yourself in your underwear.

“Em”, my shopping assistant from Day 1, joins in with the chorus of concerned females who think I’m an idiot:

Am very very glad to see you have finally integrated POTATOES, also. VEGETABLES! THANK FUCK.

My maternal instincts are saying it is time to quit this fucker of an expt and do a month’s worth of proper research (including all these different recipes you mention, and doctor & dietician visits) before starting again? 

I don’t know that I’d be able to start up again. The second this experiment is over, I’m jumping straight back into eating again. While I’m on a roll, it’s quite easy to keep going, but I don’t know that I’d be able to give up variety again so quickly, knowing now what it’s like to live without it.

If I do try again, it won’t be until next February. Partially to give myself a year of being able to eat whatever the hell I like, and partially because I really like the name “28 Days, 28 Dollars”.

The first three days, I remember almost constantly thinking “I might as well have something to eat, and do this some other month.” It was a close call on about 6 separate occasions.

BTW, as i remember from dr rosemary stanton’s vege cookbook, to process/access the iron in veges & grains, you need to eat them with something containing vitamin c with them.

Yes, I’ve had a number of people mention this to me. I’ll save my orange drink (which has really become the highlight of each day) until I’m eating my potatoes (or bread and butter, which seems to have iron in there somewhere.)

“Jasmine” has been a vegetarian for considerably longer than I have:

Hmm, in 8 years of being a vegetarian, I think potato is possibly the only food I didn’t know had iron in it. (Basically everytime I see a doctor they spend half an hour telling me the same thing over and over about getting enough iron. It gets repetitive) Yay I learnt something today!

By the by, if you are indeed worried about iron intake, avoiding the milk was a good thing. I’ve always been told that calcium hinders iron absorption and vitamin C helps it.

Isn’t the human body interesting? I love the idea that we evolved (or were created, I guess) so that we could eat most of the plants and animals around us, but eating them in different combinations yields wildly different results.

I also find allergies weird and fascinating. My cousin, for instance, is allergic to shellfish. Think about that. There is some chemical that appears only in a specific type of underwater creature, that only affects a small portion of the population, makes them react in a very specific and consistent way.

Does anyone else find that really strange, or is it just me?

Dan Beeston weighs in:

And here’s another thing you didn’t consider. If you’re fasting you can get sick or damage yourself by binge eating at the end.

I won’t literally be gorging myself on the 28th. Right now, the plan is to have a steak and some apple crepes at the “I did it!” celebration (assuming, of course, that I get that far.) The next day, I’m going to have a chocolate bar or two, and a big bowl of spaghetti bolognaise, and then start on my next project, eating a different meal three times a day for an entire month (for a total of 93 completely different meals in a month.)

Unless I decide to hold off on my next project for a few months, just so that I can use the suggestion of commenter “Hejira”, and call it “Gour-May”.

If I were doing this project I would have allowed myself to forage and hunt on top of the $28.

Well, Mr Beeston, I thoroughly recommend having a go! My offer stands – I will happily host (and, if you want, copy-edit) a blog by anyone who is interested in doing their own 28 Days, 28 Dollars project. You can change the rules up a bit, but as long as you take plenty of photos, write plenty of words, and weigh yourself daily, your efforts can find a home here.

“Ashley” is a big believer in “I told you so”:

I told you this was pure foolishness. Theoretically I’m with Amy and Em on this one – more research required – but even such enlightened dieticians would find $28 for 28 days difficult… Call me terminally superstitious, I just think there’s more to food than a list of vital minerals.

Well, help me convince Amy to conduct her own “28 Days, 28 Dollars” experiment, and we’ll see who’s right.

“Rin” expresses interest in my urine:

Dehydration causes dark/orange pee. Mainly because with more water/liquid in your system it makes it easier for your kidneys to filter waste, and dilutes it, where as if there’s less water/liquid, it makes it harder to filter, and what is filtered is far more concentrated. At least that’s what House leads me to believe. I’d only be worried if my pee was brown, because that generally means some filtering organ or another is failing

Someone pointed out that I needed to drink even more water than I would normally, because we get a lot of water from food. Even bread, which is pretty dry, is made up of 9% water or some crazy percentage like that. I drank about a litre yesterday, and still had dark pee.

While we’re on the subject…I’ll try not to go into TMI Territory, but last night I had a rather unpleasant encounter with the toilet, which resulted in a of a poo of unusual colour. It’s the first time since I worked in a nursing home that I’ve seen excrement of a light yellow colour, and it was a bit alarming. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I assume that potatoes are somehow to blame.

I shall keep track of future excrement, hoping all the while it comes out a  more natural colour. Unless there are other abnormalities, I promise that this will be the last time I mention my feces on this blog.

“Rick” has a suggestion:

You say the other experiments were done in America where food is cheaper… how about levelling the playing field by making it 28 Days, USD$28? With the exchange rate as crap as it is at the moment, you’d have almost AUD$43 to play with. That’d be fair I reckon.

One could quite conceivably do this, but I don’t want to change the rules halfway through the project. If I’d had $43 to play with at the start of the exercise, I would have done a number of things differently (I would have paid the extra few dollars and bought brown rice instead of sticky white rice, for instance) – if I wanted to change the rules, I’d stop the project and start again, and as I mentioned, I don’t know if I’d be able to do that.

The experiment is to see if I can survive on twenty-eight Australian dollars worth of food, and nothing else, in a month. If I discover I can’t, then hey, that answers the question! I don’t want to start adding money halfway through, or switching the rules around to make sure I can win. It’s not about “winning”, it’s simply about seeing what happens.

If I do end up having to quit, in a year’s time, I’ll probably try again with a slightly different ruleset. But I quite clearly lay down the rules at the beginning of the month, and it’s those rules that I will follow until the end, whatever that end may be.

“Bek” has no confidence in me:

Peter you will DIE on $8 for the rest of the month, if not cause yourself some serious health problems, both physical and psychological….

I am willing to put money down that I do not die. I could probably survive for the rest of the month on just rice – millions of people do, all over the world. It’s a pretty shitty existence, but they do it.

Of course, I will have more than rice to live on, and if things get really bad, then yeah, I’ll quit. I don’t want any serious health problems.

People tend to have one of two reactions to this project:

1. “Oh my god, you’ll DIE!”
2. “Yeah…and?”

I think it depends on how financially secure they’ve been in the past – I have friends of varying levels of success who have been forced to live on very little money in their lives. Just last night, I was talking to someone at the pub who once had nothing but a potato and an onion to eat for the next week. He’d heard that eating vegetables raw caused you to get the most energy out of them, and so he sat down to consume the vegetables as they were.

The potato he got through fine, but the onion caused a little more trouble. It was still fresh, so he ate through to the core, his nose running, his eyes streaming…he reached the middle of the onion, bit down, and there was an audible crack, and his tear-duct started gushing blood. It had taken all that it could handle, and been forced to give in.

His first reaction, he told me, after “Shit, I’m bleeding!”, was one of dismay – he’d been eating the onion raw, to get all the energy he could out of it, and now here he was, spilling precious blood all over the floor. What a waste!

Lastly, “Katydid” explores my psyche:

I wouldn’t have thought that you deliberately sabotaged your performance, but if you had performed badly last night, I would probably have chalked it up to your subconscious sabotaging you for a chance at sweet, sweet food.

So…what does it mean that I didn’t fail? I must be (subconsciously) either a glutton for punishment, or a stubborn little bastard.

I’ll be updating again in a few minutes with the daily weigh-in. Stay tuned!

Up next: Daily Weigh-in!

(total money spent so far – $21.41)