Monday, May 3, 2010

Sometimes eating is hard to remember

*Now with an UPDATE*

Breakfast - cereal with milk and bananas and blueberries
Snack - oatmeal raisin cookie somebody brought to class (they brought a batch of them, not just one that I stole from them)
Lunch - whoops I forgot - good thing there was that cookie
Second Snack - orange
Third (!) Snack - cherry tomatoes, cheese, crackers
Dinner - orzo with grilled shrimp and vegetables

I want to cook better dinners. It feels like we cook all the same things. So starting this week I am going to try to cook something from another culture at least once a week. It's got to be something we haven't made before, and a non-American cuisine. Hope I don't cheat by cooking Italian food.
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Lately there have been a lot of blog posts talking about (rich) people "trying out" what it's like to be on food stamps for a week / month, or getting food from a food pantry. I had to stop reading, because these people go on and on about how hard it is, and they don't even realize how much they're "cheating" and how totally off they are about the whole thing.

Examples:

- people kept posting pictures of their cabinets with food bought with food stamps. why on earth are these people buying apple juice? nobody needs apple juice. drink water. milk. we consider orange juice an extra, although we'd rather not. they bought things that are not needed, like pepper flakes or garlic. they kept trying to make foodie meals with food not meant for foodies.

- people kept talking about taking food that was growing in their gardens. I realize there are poor people in very rural areas and maybe they can grow gardens there, but not so much in the South Bronx or other urban areas. a lot of apartments don't even have fire escapes or get direct sunlight.

- people kept talking about feeling sluggish or getting dizzy and falling down or having trouble concentrating. um that goes away if this is how you live ALL THE TIME. of course going from one way of eating to a drastic different way will affect your body! give it half a year, then get back to me. your body adjusts. didn't these people read the end of the Diary of Anne Frank where they talk about people dying after they got out of the concentration camps because they gorged on food? going in the opposite direction has a similar affect.

- people kept talking about how depressing it was to not be able to eat lots of variety, how hard it is to be a foodie and try to eat that way. again, do it for six months - you'll forget pretty quickly.

About half the blogs I read involved "we cheated" or "I gave up three days early" and these people just walked away. They did this in April. Try doing it in June, when everyone is supposed to bring a bag of cookies to school for the end of year party. Or in December for holiday parties, when you also have to give presents. Or September when you're going back to school, or July when you've just left school. For some reason changing the day's routine is really, really hard.
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Since living with Josh, my sisters and I eat more. I only skip meals when I forget to eat, not when I'm trying to save money. The three of us definitely have gained weight. Josh said he can't see my ribs outlined as clearly anymore. I hadn't heard of the freshman fifteen until other people told me about it. Josh said in the summer he figured he'd gain at least 30 pounds this year. He sometimes eats five meals in a day. But Josh has lost weight since we moved in together.

I am so tired of blogging about food now.

*UPDATE*
I told my sisters about how we should eat more variety and the new goal is to find things from other cultures to try. Alex said we should eat meatless meals a few times a week. So we're adding that now too. Except I think it's going to be hard so I told her she's in charge of coming up with one or two a week.

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