Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I am only eating food that is bought (from a store) out of a budget of twenty-eight dollars. It is an interesting personal challenge! I hope I do not die!

I washed the potatoes today! It took forever, but by the end, they were all sparkly and clean, as you can see.

I didn’t notice until I took the photo, but a few of them are a bit green. According to this CSIRO Food Science page, that essentially means that they’re poison.

Green potatoes may cause food poisoning and since some of the symptoms are similar to gastroenteritis it is possible that some undiagnosed cases of gastroenteritis have been caused by eating green potatoes.

Human and livestock deaths have been recorded as a result of the consumption of greened or damaged potatoes with very high glycoalkaloid levels.

Well, shit.

I haven’t mashed any of them yet, but tomorrow, I’ll go through, remove the green ones, and mash the rest. On Day 7, I went halves with Cannibal Kate on a number of ingredients, which she assured me that she could turn into delicious biscuits. On Day 8, she actually made the biscuits, and they were disgusting. (this is extremely rare – Cannibal Kate’s baking is usually delicious, and actually the reason for her nickname.)

Since I hadn’t yet eaten anything made with the ingredients, I decided that it was okay to simply take my money back. Similarly, I’ll try to weigh the potatoes that have gone green, and either take the money back, or replace them with potatoes of an equivalent rate. It’s not cheating, and it ensures that I actually get to eat some potatoes. (and, hopefully, live!)

Daily Cheesecake:

I’ve had a few people call my lack of shaving a “beard”. I don’t think it’s a beard. A beard is more than a bit of extra-thick stubble.

In an attempt to have a closer look at my “beard”, I accidentally took what may be my new favourite photo of myself:

I look like I should be living in a secluded hut on the mountains, killing bears, and waiting for lonely hikers that I can skin. (but not eat; a hiker counts as “free food”, which is expressly banned in the rules.)

Daily Weight:

69.9kg (8 pounds, 3 shillings) is up 0.1kg (tuppence) from yesterday, as this handy graph demonstrates:

I started the day off with a lovely bowl of rice. Eating rice earlier in the day prevents me from getting tired or hungry all day, because of the way that carbohydrates are released into the body. I recommend you try a bowl of rice for breakfast some day, see if it makes a difference!

I also recommend getting your very own container of cheap orange juice – it only cost me a dollar, and it’s full of vitamin C, as well as being a highlight of each day. (I haven’t had any for a few days now, because I’m saving it for when I have some potato.)

Tonight, I went out to a party, and due to a pants-related problem, I didn’t remember to have my daily bread before I left. I could feel my energy sapping even as we were travelling to the party, and after about half an hour, my blood sugar was low, the room was…not spinning, but definitely throbbing in an uncomfortable way, and I tried not to join in the conversation, because if I did, I knew I’d just end up picking a fight with someone.

After about an hour of feeling like I could devour the couch I was sitting on, I abruptly felt fine again. I don’t fully understand how that works – I didn’t have anything to eat, despite the selection of delicious foods being offered (a particularly tempting bowl of fruit passed me about 6 times) but I was able to rejoin the party, and enjoyed myself for the rest of the night.

Perhaps my body consumed one of my less useful organs. If I never have to get my appendix removed, I’ll know why!

All night at the party, my eyes were drawn to a bowl of Cheerios, as I wondered why no one was eating them. They looked absolutely delicious from where I was sitting. (but then everything has looked delicious to me lately.)

I later discovered that they weren’t Cheerios, they were tomatoes. I sat there at the party, torturing myself over a food I don’t even like.

Dream:

I had another vivid dream last night- I remember rolling over and turning my alarm off so that I could sleep a bit more and finish it. It wasn’t food-related, but it seems to me that ever since I’ve started this project, I’ve been having vivid dreams every night. Are vivid dreams and hunger/malnutrition commonly linked?

From the comments:

Friend of the Blog “Em” comments:

I’d like to see the experiment as run by a really good gourmet cook who knows the markets, and by someone who only buys their food from Crazy Clark’s at Macarthur Central. (There are an astonishing number of pasta sauces, tinned tomatoes etc there — but only sometimes!)

If anyone knows any gourmet cooks who are interested in blogging, send them to the site, see if they’re up for it. I don’t know about only buying food from Crazy Clarks (a cheap store that sells items rejected by all the other stores) – I mean, that cuts out cheap rice and bread in one fell swoop, not to mention my orange juice, and possibly soy sauce and spaghetti as well.

Only eating food bought from Crazy Clarks would be an interesting experiment, but I think combining it with the “28 Dollars, 28 Days” format is a recipe for disaster.

Still Em:

I’ve found a few more links for you.

The short and long term effects of semi-starvation [as I think, given the minimal fats and low carbs, you're probably going this way as well]:
http://snipurl.com/bv464

Here is the important bit:

“[People who are semi-starved] continue to live relatively normal and economically productive lives; the terms normal and productive must be viewed in the proper perspective of this condition, as they do not refer to the optimal. There is good evidence to show that persons with [long-term semi-starvation] are less productive, and that the [long term semi-starved] state is associated with higher morbidity and mortality and these issues will be discussed later in this review.”

I have definitely been less productive – I’m starting to catch up on work now, but I’ve hardly been doing any other writing. I sit down to write a script, and even after an hour’s tweaking, I can’t get the lines to sit together properly.

Basically, I’ve decided to put all writing off until next month, when I’ll have the brain-power to string words together more coherently.

I don’t think the quality of the writing here on Pictures and Words has decreased (feel free to leave a comment if you disagree) – writing a blog post about events that have actually occurred to me is much easier than trying to write a humourous conversation between two people who only exist in my brain.

“David Peachey” emailed me with a suggestion about making my rice more interesting:

Just thinking… are you just making up the rice, or have you tried congee? If you haven’t stumbled on it yet, I’ll give the quick rundown:

Basically it’s boiling the hell out of rice until it goes porridgey and glutinous. This is a popular brekky around SouthEast Asia, basically cause you can chuck anything on top of it, and in small amounts. Or have it as-is. Some places boil it up with poultry bones to add some flavour. there’s a spot in Kuala Lumpur Chinatown I *always* go to for brekky because they do congee and nothing else.

The basic recipe is: 1 cup rice + 10 cups water. Bring to boil, then simmer for bout 1 to 1.5 hours. This makes me enough generous breakfasts to last me a week. Really. Plus it fills me up.

To improve the flavour add a little bit of meat (a tiny can of tuna will last over 3 meals if not four), maybe some salt & pepper. I go all out and add spices, dash of flavoured oil, pinch of chopped herbs, dash of vinegar etc but thats being luxurious. And still keeps the brekky cost well under $1.

Here’s the wiki link! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congee

Good luck… I hope you do not die also!

I’ve had a few suggestions on how to make the rice more interesting, but I haven’t done anything different so far, mainly because I’m extraordinarily easy to please. I’ve only grown sick of rice once or twice now, most days I really enjoy it.

Today I didn’t even have any soy-sauce! That is how much I enjoy rice. Too much, one could say.

Congee, however, sounds interesting – I’ll definitely give it a go. If it doesn’t work, then I’ve only lost one cup of rice, but if it does work, it might last me a couple of days. I’ll see if my budget allows sardines (considerably cheaper than tuna- the cheapest tuna I could find was about $1, compared to $0.55 for sardines) but if it doesn’t, I’ll have it plain.

I’ll report back and let you know how it goes!

My mental state:

I’m not sure what happened yesterday; I may have just been in a bad mood. Today, the project hardly affected me at all – I spent all day editing, which means that I have to force myself to remember to eat anyway. I enjoyed my meals, and the only negative consequence was going out to a party with delicious food, and not being allowed to have any, and getting a bit head-spinny for a while.

It just finished being February the 14th, which means that I’m exactly half-way through the experiment. This time in two weeks, I’ll be sitting at the Pancake Manor, having my first real meal in a month! I look forward to seeing what happens between now and then! (but not as much as I’m looking forward to the meal.)

Tomorrow: Daily Post!

$21.41 spent so far!

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