Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I am only eating twenty-eight dollars worth of food. I have only three days until I can eat whatever I like, whenever I like. I really, really hope I do not die before then. 

It's been a while since we had one of these!

Cannibal Kate and I were both awake at the same time this morning, so for the first time since I got my camera back, I remembered to get the Daily Cheesecake Shot.

For comparison, here’s a photo from Day 5 (the first day that I’m not slouching in the photo.) I can’t spot much difference, but I’ve had a number of people tell me that I look skinnier:

At the time, I genuinely thought that was as much as my facial hair was going to grow.

Honestly, I think that the biggest revelation I’ve had this month is that I can grow a freaking beard. Sure, it’s a beard that only covers the bottom quarter of my face, but it’s much more facial hair than I actually thought I could grow. I was playing around on the The Hero Factory, and I discovered that they had (almost) my exact beard:

Although at first glance it might seem like I've just posted the Daily Cheesecake first, look closely. It's hard to tell, but this isn't actually a photo of me.

At the end of the month, I still plan on shaving it off.

Daily Weight!

That's down 0.1kg from yesterday, but still 0.2kg above the all-time low of Day 18.

Weight-graph:

"One of these weights is not like the others, one of these weights is not quite the same."

From the comments:

“Joel” comments:

Not absolutely convinced, though, as to whether you should’ve got your money back for your potatoes. After all, you got them cheap (I presume?) because you bought them in bulk. If you couldn’t eat them all before your time ran out, then you might’ve had to pay more for fewer (if that makes sense: more per potato, though still less money overall!)

Actually, the potatoes were sold by the weight. I could have bought 1 at 69 cents/kilo, I could have bought 100…there was no deal for buying them in bulk.

The onions came in bags already, but they too were sold by the weight, and there were bags of varying sizes. For the sake of the food-buying theory, I’m not actually “getting a refund”, I’m pretending that I bought half as many potatoes, and a smaller bag of onions.

It’s all above-board. I wouldn’t cheat on science!

Shopping:

With $4.24 remaining to spend however I please, and only 4 days of the experiment to go (including today), I thought that I would splash out a bit, treat myself a little. It’s all going to be over, so very very soon, and it seems a waste of money to buy boring foods like lentils and sweet potatoes.

If I found a chocolate bar for less than fifty cents, I was having it.

First thing I bought was the staple of my diet these days, delicious cheap white $1.09 Woolworths bread. 

$3.55 left,  I went looking for something to put on it:

Clearly I was wrong; Woolworths has two in-store brands as well. "Home Brand", and "Wow Select".

The peanut-butter tempted me. I could buy a jar of peanut-butter, and smother every slice of bread for the next four days in it. Ultimately though, I thought $2.50 was too much to spend, and peanut-butter can be quite dry. I was after something a little more moist.

Earlier this month, my housemate Cannibal Kate lost a bet, and had to spend only $5 on food for 5 days. I bet her another twenty-eight dollars that she wouldn’t be able to do it, and halfway through the second day, she dropped out, meaning that I haven’t had to pay any mony for food this month.

During her single day of cheap living, she bought some salami from the deli at Coles; two or three slices for only sixty cents.

I had a look at the meats cabinet, and the cheapest sliced meat was devon, at $4.99/kilo. I decided to spend a dollar or two on devon (apparently this is an Australian name – you may know it as “bologna sausage”) when I spotted this:

I don't know who Gern is, but for $2.95/kilo, I'm not going to ask.

They had one ham bone left, so on impulse, I asked how much it was. A few minutes later, I was the proud owner of a $1.34 ham bone, and $0.59 worth of Devon:

Meat, glorious meat. I bought one slice of devon for each day remaining.

The hambone was purchased, like a number of foods I’ve eaten this month, because it reminds me of childhood. When I was young, every few weeks, we’d have a big roasted leg of lamb for dinner. My sister and I used to fight over who got the bone; the bone would always have plenty of meat, fat, gristle, and marrow on it. As a child, I could make the bone last a week, until it was white and glistening because I’d eaten every last bit of meat off it.

As I got older, I still enjoyed eating the meat off the bone, but I would only really get a single night’s enjoyment out of it. Also, my sister became a vegetarian, so there wasn’t any competition for it. It stopped being a trophy, and started just becoming food.

The devon was purchased primarily because it was the cheapest meat there, but it too has memories from childhood – on the days that I wasn’t sent to school with noodles for lunch, I had devon sandwiches. Fried devon was one of my favourite dishes as a child too – I might fry up one of these slices in the next few days.

After my meat purchases, I had $1.22 to spend as I pleased. I immediately headed for the chocolate biscuit aisle. Most everything there was, as you’d expect, completely out of my price range, but there was one particular type of biscuit that was deliciously affordable:

Cheap Home Brand biscuits, the world would be a darker place without you.

At $0.65/packet, I could only afford one, but one was all that I needed. I decided on chocolate; I actually prefer the strawberry ones, but I’ve been craving any kind of chocolate for 25 days now.

I’ve mentioned my purchase to a few people already, and the reaction has been the same from all of them:

“Chocolate biscuits!? You’re slowly dying of malnutrition and you waste your money on chocolate biscuits!?!”

Yes. Yes I am. They are divine.

There are twenty in the packet, so I can have five/day.

I considered looking around to see what I could buy with my remaining money, but my maths skills have slowly deteriorated throughout the month, and I couldn’t work out if I was 8 cents under or 12 cents over or neither or both. (both was pretty unlikely, I admit.)

So I rang through my purchases, went home, took photos of all my purchases, and before I started eating anything, worked out the finances to make sure that I was allowed to eat everything.

It would have been terrible to have failed the project four days before the end, because of a simple maths error.

Fortunately, I have 57 cents remaining, and thus was able to chow down with glee! I can have 5 slices of bread, 1 slice of devon, 5 chocolate biscuits, and as much rice as I want every day for the rest of the month.

I haven’t had any rice today, but I’ve had everything else I’m allowed to eat, as well as about 90% of the meat from the ham-bone. I was originally planning on spacing it out – I had roughly a quarter of the ham-bone’s ham, but then my computer started being completely unreasonable, and I felt like kicking something. Instead, I got the ham-bone out of the fridge, and rewarded myself by eating most of the meat.

Someone suggested that I turn it into a stew. I don’t know that just boiling the ham-bone in water is going to produce much of a meal; generally a stew has some additional ingredients, such as vegetables. I enjoyed just eating the meat off it more, I suspect, than I would have enjoyed “hot ham water”.

Any suggestions for what I should spend my 57 cents on?

Tomorrow: Daily update!

(total money spent so far – $27.43. Remainder – $0.57)