Fourteen To Go

The first meal is under our belts.

Well, not quite under.  That won’t actually happen for another twelve hours or so.  Maybe that’s more than you wanted to know.  I suppose that was a bad choice for an opening metaphor.  Let me try again….

We had our first meal of our $2-a-day experiment.  We started today, Sunday, and we will be done after lunch on Friday.  So far, so good.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  Jenny has never made anything that tasted bad, unless you count that one time, early in our marriage, when she accidentally used sweetened condensed milk instead of regular evaporated milk to make Alfredo sauce, leaving us with ravioli covered in what really amounted to a dessert topping.

But like I said, that was early in our marriage.  Jenny makes amazing meals, all from scratch.  Meatloaf, twice-baked potatoes, flank steak tornadoes, Thai chicken salad, homemade spaghetti sauce, chili, patty melts with mushrooms sautéed in stout, oven-fried chicken marinated in buttermilk, fish tacos with a mango salsa…I could go on and on and on, but I’m starting to get hungry again.

She’s taken the $2 challenge very seriously.  She even had me weigh out the amount of coffee needed to brew a pot so she could calculate the cost (about forty cents).  She left for Winco Saturday morning with her jaw set, clutching her reusable grocery bags—a woman on a mission.  She returned a couple hours later, her eyes glowing with triumph.  She was under budget by a little more than a dollar.

“They must have thought I was a nutcase,” she said.  I understood that to mean that she was talking to herself in the grocery aisles, but she is always talking to herself in the grocery aisles.  What she actually meant was that she had gone armed with a set of measuring spoons, carefully measuring out and weighing things from the bulk bins, like a teaspoon of yeast.  What she actually meant was that she had purchased one bay leaf.  One.  The cashier couldn’t even get it to register on the scale at the checkout, so she just charged Jenny four cents.

“She ripped you off,” I said.

The first thing she made was a loaf of no-knead bread, which we plan to use for peanut-butter sandwiches for our lunches.  She found the recipe online.  Total hands-on time to make is less than half-an-hour, but it has to rise over a period of eighteen hours, so don’t think you can just throw it together right before dinner.  The first attempt was a little flat, but we have high hopes for the recipe with modifications Jenny has already implemented for Batch #2.  The interior was soft and the crust was crispy.  Total cost, thirty-three cents.

For Sunday dinner she made a lentil stew, with carrots, celery, tomato, and onion, all served over rice.  I thought it was delicious.  Meredith said she wouldn’t ask for it again, but she ate it all, mainly because we said we would let her taste the homemade bread if she cleaned her plate.  Meredith’s objections aside, it was filling, nutritious and tasty.  Not only that, we have two containers leftover for lunch on Monday (for me and Jenny.  Meredith wanted peanut butter and jelly).  Total cost, just shy of two dollars.

I’m not sure if Jenny has used the bay leaf yet.

Two Dollars a Day

Lately I’ve been worried about what I am going to eat.

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re saying to yourself, “But Kevin, isn’t that in direct violation to Jesus’ command in Matthew 6:25, specifically the part wherein he says, as translated by the New International Version, ‘do not worry about your life, what you will eat?’” ¹   

To which I respond, “Yes, you are absolutely correct.” ²

Jenny and I had been talking about poverty a couple weeks ago, and she mentioned that some of the poorest people in the world survive on two dollars worth of food per person per day.  I believe it was my suggestion that we should try that for a workweek, so I have nobody to blame but myself.  Jenny readily agreed to the idea.  Anneka, our older daughter, thought it was brilliant, but it should also be pointed out that she is away at college, so during those five days she can eat as many made-to-order sandwiches that she can fit on a cafeteria tray.  Meredith, our younger daughter who lives at home, had no say in the matter.

I’m hoping that this little exercise will help us understand the plight of the poor and that we will be able to empathize a bit more with them.  Too often, we hear about the stereotype of the lazy person on welfare, watching daytime television and stuffing their faces with bonbons.  Although the food stamp program in our country provides people with $4 a day, I doubt it’s enough to afford bonbons. 

Two dollars a day.  Sixty-seven cents a meal.   What can we eat for that?  Think about what you spend on food and drink.  A latte at Starbucks would wipe out two day’s worth of your budget.  A Monster Energy Drink would need to get you through almost a day-and-a-half.  The McDonald’s “Value Menu” would get you two items.  Can you imagine making a cheeseburger and fries get you through a twenty-four hour period?

No, of course fast-food restaurants and expensive energy drinks are out of the question, as would be much of the little treats many of us enjoy.  A half-cup of ice cream would be about twenty-five cents, but who can stop at half a cup?  Even a can of Coke, purchased on sale, would be out of my price range, especially when you consider it has less nutritional value than a Snicker’s Bar.  I’m especially concerned that my morning cup of coffee might be out of reach.  A glass of wine with dinner?  Don’t make me laugh.

For that matter, things we consider staples, like meat, and fresh fruits and vegetables might be too expensive for our new week-long budget.  I imagine we will be eating a lot of rice, potatoes and beans.³ Eggs, if purchased on sale, might be on the menu, but at nearly $4 a gallon, we’ll have to seriously consider whether we can afford milk.

To make the challenge more realistic, we are not allowing ourselves to use things that are already in our pantry.  For example, I was looking up a recipe for baked beans that called for, among other things, a half-cup of ketchup.  To have this as a meal, we would need to determine how much that ketchup would cost us, even though we already have a bottle in our fridge.  I’ve figured it out to be about thirty-two cents for that half-cup.  That’s quite a chunk of change when you’re trying to make a two-dollar meal for three people.

So, I’m worried about what I’m going to eat, but not in the way Jesus was thinking about.  I worry about whether or not the food will be delicious.  See, I know that once the workweek is over I can go back to a more relaxed budget. 

Unlike most of the world’s poor, I’m not concerned about whether I will have enough food to keep me healthy, or just alive.

I imagine it will be an interesting week.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

ENDNOTES 

¹ Right?

² But don’t be such a smartypants about your biblical knowledge.

³ I apologize in advance to those who will be forced to spend time with me in close quarters.

A Cool Billion

I recently fell into a billion dollars.

Of course I haven’t gotten it yet.  There are still a couple of hoops to jump through.  I expect I will need to do some paperwork and there will probably be a small ceremony.  That and I need to correctly pick the outcome of sixty-three basketball games, but that part should be pretty easy.

I was on a car trip from Phoenix back to the Bay Area yesterday, so I had a lot of time to think about what I was going to do with the money.  A billion dollars has the potential of changing a person, and I don’t really want that.  I don’t want to be the kind of guy who feels like he needs a bigger house, or lots of fancy cars, or a boat, or a jetpack just because I’ve gotten a few extra bucks.  I imagine it has the potential to affect your relationships as well…people expecting me to pick up the tab when we go to In-N-Out…that sort of thing.  Then of course I expect to be bombarded by requests from total strangers seeking help, or the mafia making "propositions."  It’s all too much.

So, I know you will think I’m crazy, but I’ve decided to give it all away.

OK, most of it.  I'll probably set up a trust fund for the girls.   Of course, it would be irresponsible of me to ignore any future children of theirs, so I’d better set one up for potential grandkids as well.  Maybe I’ll set some aside for our retirement.  I should buy my dad something nice.  He could probably use a decent car.  Still, even if I save just one percent of it for me and my family, I’ll have a lot left over to play with.

I know that Jenny will want to tithe on it…that is, give ten percent to the church.  I wonder how Pastor Craig will feel when he gets the check for one-hundred million dollars in the offering plate. The church's parking lot should be redone, but beyond that I think the bulk of it should go to helping the homeless, supporting the local schools, things like that.  Pastor Craig is the kind of guy you can trust to do the right thing with a hundred million.  I just hope they don’t decide they need a new building.  I certainly don’t want them to name anything after me.  Maybe I’d better give it anonymously, in small bills. 

While I’m throwing around a hundred million, I might as well give the same amount to some of my favorite charities. World Vision does good work with the poor around the globe.  One dollar feeds one child for one day, so I could feed a hundred million children for a day, or a million children for a hundred days, or one child for a hundred million days.

Eden Reforestation plants trees at a cost of only ten cents per tree.  The guys who founded it had a goal to plant a million trees in their lifetime, but ten years after Eden’s inception they have reached sixty-million and counting. Their organization fights poverty, slavery, and global warming all at once.  One hundred million dollars will plant a billion trees.  I hope there will be room left on the planet for people.

By the way, just because I’m laying out a hundred mil on these charities doesn’t mean you can now stop supporting them.  Even poor folk like you can still have a great impact.  Remember the widow’s mite.

I still have a lot of money left.  Maybe I’ll buy the Youth Theatre Company a new theater.  State of the art.  Green technology.  I imagine ten million would be plenty.  I don’t want them to name it after me or anything.  Perhaps a small plaque, but that's all.

Maybe I’ll buy a youth camp…fix it up real nice.  What would a camp cost?  Fifteen million?  Twenty?  Chump change.  I could hire my friends Steve and Karen to run it.  I wouldn’t name it after me or anything, but I could have them set aside a cabin for me and my family.  We’d pay to use it of course.  It’s not like cash would be a problem. 

But now I’m starting to worry.  Is ten million for my family too much?  I don’t want this money to change us.

As we motored up I-5 through California’s Central Valley, I laid out my plans to Jenny.  She was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, “Tell me again why we don’t need a bigger house.”

See what I mean?