A Different Dollar Menu

In the One Dollar Diet Project, two high school teachers ate on a dollar a day (each) for a month. (Insert your own joke about teachers’ salaries here.)

Christopher and Kerri spent the month of September scrimping to stretch their food dollar (read their rules here) with this goal:

We are interested in many of the strands related to this experiment; food choices, consumerism, waste, poverty, social psychology, etc., and this experience may provide insights that could help us better understand and teach about a variety of concerns (we both teach Social Justice in a public high school).

In addition to experiencing hunger (like many in the world today), the couple considered food waste. On Day 11, Kerri wrote:

It makes me realize how wasteful [I] have been in the past. I have some weird issues with food. I worked in a grocery store for 6 years and I know that food lasts after its sell by date.

Even with that knowledge is in my head, I am usually very suspicious of anything that I believe may have lingered in the depths of the fridge beyond its date. Christopher on the other hand eats anything and is constantly telling me, “it’s still good.”

I don’t bring this blog up to suggest that we all cut our food budgets to $30 per person per month. Rather, I can’t help but think that if we valued food more, we’d waste less of it.

Perhaps rising food prices are already accomplishing that in your home. If not, though, maybe a one-day experiment would be beneficial. Eating on $1 or $2 per day might bring some insight into how lucky most of us reading this are.