Collards and $ense

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for reading my posts, which means a great deal to me. I am going to be tabling this blog until Dima and I settle in to our new life in Paris.

Right now I am on a marathon of trying to wrap up two major work projects and it’s just too much to blog at the same time. I wish I had unlimited time and energy, but just like money, those things are finite and must be carefully budgeted [insert chagrined facial expression]. I hope you won’t mind the break and will decide to read again in the new year–although at that point, this may be more of a living-abroad blog.

Love,
Tania

Just don’t do it the way the owners of “cookie diet” companies encourage you to.

NY Times writer Abby Ellin and I must have been on the same wavelength Wednesday night. After I posted my last entry, on working ‘temptation’ foods into your diet, the Times ran an article questioning the efficacy and safety of so-called “cookie diets.” Based on my own approach to nourishment and weight maintenance, I located the following problems in the ethos of “cookie diets”:

1. Lack of balance! Cookie diets supposedly integrate a “forbidden” food into one’s everyday diet–which is what I recommended re: chocolate-chip pancakes for breakfast. Severely restricting your consumption of other foods, though? Where’s the nourishment (which I am foolish enough to think is the purpose of food)?

2. The cookies on these diets do not seem to qualify as food. Made of distinctly non-cookie-like ingredients, and engineered to absorb water in the stomach and create a sense of fullness, they are what Michael Pollan refers to as “food-like substances.” (The United States threw out a law many years ago that would have forced companies to label foods with lots of additives as “imitation”; too bad for us, since now most supermarket “bread” contains 30+ “ingredients.”)

3. Starving yourself all day and then indulging in cookies, even if they are real cookies, is not a sustainable lifestyle. Attaining and maintaining a healthy weight is very important to overall health, but adopting habits you can’t sustain yields temporary results. It may also make you miserable.

I speak from experience: not too long ago I was relying on processed ‘diet foods’ to get me through the day. I gave them up slowly and reluctantly, helped along by the observation of a caring and brave roommate that my irritability had increased proportionally with the frozen meals in my diet.

It was only after a recent trip to Bulgaria that I realized food culture in the U.S. is particularly focused on “food” that isn’t really food. The moment you get sick of the cookie-and-starve cycle (I’m guessing quickly), you’ll be back where you started: in need of a strategy that works long-term.

I am glad that the Times put a spotlight on the importance of moderation and the dangers of going to extremes where diet is concerned. The question: is America listening?

Tomorrow, Dima and I will be reaping the fruits of our $60 challenge: that is, $20 for each of us to spend out with our friends. How did we do at budgeting in this city of luxury?

GRAND TOTAL (accounting for groceries that will last longer than a week): $66.42

We went over. Mea culpa. I didn’t leave enough room in the budget for fresh produce and we got hungry for it: extra produce was procured. We also both ended up borrowing a few dollars from next week’s budget, finding ourselves stranded at work (me) or school (Dima) without enough snacks.That’s okay, because this was our first try at such a constricting weekly budget. We’ll know more and be able to plan better next time we want to eat out.

Reviewing receipts isn’t just about individual weeks. It allows me to make sense out of broader, formerly vague spending patterns. I now know approximately how long my bag of coffee lasts me (13 days), how long a quart of milk lasts me (7-9 days), and how often I need to replace my sugar (2 months) and flour (1 month). These expenses vary, just like our gas and electricity bill, but tracking allows me to set aside enough money for them. If push came to shove, I’d rather go without coffee than electricity–but I’d really kind of like to always to have both.

I knew 39 cents a pound for chicken leg quarters sounded like a ridiculously low price, but I was focused on staying within our budget while still having enough to eat. I asked Dima to spend up to $8.00 on the chicken. Smooth move: he spent under $6.00 and came home with two huge packages, containing 4-5 legs each. One package went straight into the freezer.

Ordinarily, I would celebrate such a bargain. When I started skinning the legs, though, reality set in.

There were: grainy stray parts of organs; frozen blood snaking out of a few veins; an unusual amount of fat (I’m guessing from the birds’ being crowded into miniscule cages); even a few feather tips still stuck in the skin. Seeing how carelessly the chickens seemed to have been butchered, I could only assume they were treated with equal negligence in life.

This I knew about ‘conventional’ chicken before I made my grocery list. I have bought the $1.99-a-pound variety countless times before–but I didn’t really understand the impact of my choice until the 39-cent stuff made it, in scores, into my kitchen sink.

I did manage to turn the bony, pink, fatty chicken legs into neat tupperwares of tasty, cooked, relatively lean chicken pieces. They are feeding us well in terms of protein, but I can’t help factoring a dose of antibiotics – and guilt – into the nutritional value of each portion.

It’s free-range chicken for me next time, or I risk serious injury to my green psyche.