Meet the challenger!

So Madeline knows me well enough to realize that the best way to ensure my participation in anything is to make it a contest.  Hence our past experience with the "Mileage Challenge" - who could put the fewest miles on their car in a given time period a few years ago.  See below for why I'm an excellent candidate for this particular contest.  My motivation may be a little less about not buying food-in-a-box and more about eating the non-perishables I have on hand!  On the plus side, if there's an earthquake it'll take quite a while for me to starve.

As you can see, there are many items in boxes/bags.  I hope that I'll eat more fruits & vegetables if I stop buying carbohydrate-based snacks-in-a-box - something I should be doing anyway.

I've been a vegetarian for more than ten years and my Achilles' heel has always been blank carbohydrates.  I find that unless I make a concerted effort to eat something of substance like beans, tofu, or yogurt I am nearly always hungry and I want to eat bread.  Forget chocolate - give me bread products.  So giving up crunchy bread snacks is going to sting a little. 

An added challenge for me is that I will start my first job as an RN beginning in early February.  Packing food for a 12-hour shift, during which you have limited time to eat (at best), is challenging enough when I *do* resort to food that comes in a wrapper.  I am used to spending time on food prep but I will definitely have to be more creative about snacks on the job.

As we make the rules, we have to think about our intentions and also where we want to draw lines - is peanut butter in a jar OK?  Beer?  Our goal seems to be the intersection of frugality and health - i.e. is is possible to eat mostly produce and whole/fresh foods on a budget?  Living in an area of the city near many grocery stores and farmer's markets makes it much easier.  Even in Seattle there are areas where it is difficult to get good produce without transportation, so I know that I'm lucky to have the means and the access to eat as well as I do already.

Next week we'll hammer out some rules and figure out a way to compare our expenditures to our own baseline monthly food budgets and to the budget level of the Washington Basic Food Program or the Nevada equivalent.  It feels a little elitist to do this as an experiment or a lark - I've never had to worry about whether I'll have enough money to buy food.  Hopefully we'll learn more about the realities of trying to eat healthfully on a tight budget while eating more produce and perhaps saving some money.