30 September 2010, Thursday

Living on $20 a week for food—to rewrite a relatively new proverb—isn’t for sissies. You just might be able to squeak by on $20 a week if you’re strong of mind (planning my food purchases took hours and hours this week) and strong of body (shopping took me five only occasionally painful hours on foot this week), if you’ve got an extended social support network, if there are no surprises (sickness, an accident), and if you never need anything else.

This week, I’ve literally walked (and walked and walked) in the shoes of someone on social assistance. No. That’s not quite true. I’ve walked in the shoes of someone on social assistance in only one aspect of that person’s life—his or her relation to $20 a week for food. But that’s not quite true either. I’ve merely followed in the footsteps of someone on social assistance as he or she shops for $20 worth of food. Even in this exercise this week, I’ve been advantaged in my own well-constructed walking shoes.

For me, this week’s exercise in excessive walking and limited eating has also been an exercise in the art of seeing. Hunger is largely invisible in our community. But I’ve learned to see clues all around me. The tipped grocery carts abandoned on street corners. The women with bundle-buggies, men without helmets on bicycles. The mothers on sidewalks pushing infants in strollers, trailing toddlers. People waiting for busses. People shopping the food aisles of dollar and discount stores. People laden with shopping bags on the streets. Are they all hungry? Probably not. But too many of them are.

In Nightlife, published as an insert in today’s Record, the restaurant reviewer concludes: Dinner for two a very reasonable $150.

If one evening’s dinner for two people at $150 is considered very reasonable by a large percentage of us living in Waterloo Region, surely $20 a week for food for a person living on social assistance is very unreasonable.

It’s also unacceptable.

Those living on social assistance in our community are among the most creative and adaptable and resilient among us when it comes to eating. We’ve given them handles without hammer heads and told them to pound in nails. They’re also among the bravest. Week after week, they try and try to pound.

Can you imagine what such creative, adaptable, resilient, brave people would be able to do to improve their own lives and our lives in community together with $25 extra dollars for food a week, $100 extra dollars a month?

Please join us in asking the Ontario Government to implement a Healthy Food Supplement of $100 a month for every adult receiving social assistance in Ontario—a mere two-thirds of that very reasonable dinner for two.

29 September 2010, Wednesday

I say I’m not hungry. But I’m thick. Had to be called to a 1.30 p.m. meeting yesterday, even though it was staring at me from my open daytimer. And I’m slow. Everything is taking longer. I want to sleep, in spite of seven hours of mostly uninterrupted, dreamless sleep last night. And I’m tea-logged.

A colleague walked past with a Tim’s. The fragrance of forbidden coffee!

This evening, my husband and I will pool resources for macaroni and cheese. I’ll bring my macaroni and cheese, celery and onions (always celery and onions) for the pot; he’ll bring his macaroni and cheese and something else, to be determined. I’ll cook. I’ll also make a cabbage and apple salad (we’ve been given more apples by a friend who works in an orchard) with no name salad dressing (omnipresent in my food this week). My treat. I have cabbage and salad dressing to spare this week, and the apples were a gift.

28 September 2010, Tuesday

Two cooks, two different dinners, one small kitchen, amiable chaos.

An idea—I’ll make scrambled eggs and veggies for both of us if you’ll contribute your own, equivalent ingredients.

I brought oil (my treat), two eggs, celery, onion, and cayenne to the frying pan; my husband brought two eggs, cherry tomatoes (he didn’t have celery, thank heavens!), onion, and mixed Italian spices. We each brought a piece of bread for toast.

Cherry tomatoes! Mixed Italian spices! My first tastes of difference in a week.

Breakfast

Toast

Tuna salad

Lunch

Bread

Peanut butter

Macaroni salad

Apple

Dinner (see above)

27 September 2010, Monday

Odd. For the past three days, I’ve found myself eating less and less. All of the joy has gone out of it. This food is functional, but it’s not beautiful. In a world in which people are hungry, what a luxury (what a sin?) it is to want food that’s beautiful! But I also find myself divorced this week from the social aspects of food, aspects that are far more important than aesthetics—food as emblem of family, community, nation, food as nurture, intimacy, friendship, celebration.

My husband and I are still managing to eat our morning and evening meals together, in spite of having to do a perpetual dance around each other in our tiggy-winkle kitchen as we each make our own breakfasts, our own suppers.

Breakfast

Toast

Peanut butter

Green tea

Colleagues at work asked how things were going.

If I brought in a bottle of homemade wine, would you be able to drink it?

Tempting.

May I share my lunch with you?

Very, very kind of everyone, but technically, this week, I don’t have colleagues.

Lunch

Tuna salad

Macaroni salad

Apple

Green tea

My husband picked me up after work. What could we do that didn’t involve food and drink?

We walked the St. Jacobs antique stores.

Dinner

Spaghetti

Spaghetti sauce

Cayenne pepper

Oregano

Cheese

Green tea

A certain sameness. And I’m getting a headache from too much green tea.

26 September 2010, Sunday

Up at 5.10 a.m. I was just about to put the kettle on, when the fire alarm rang. Drat, drat, and double drat! My husband and I put on shoes (always put on shoes when a fire alarm rings—you never know when you’re going to have to climb down a ladder), threw coats over T-shirts and track pants, grabbed keys and glasses, and headed 11 flights downstairs. We stood outside in the chilly air. I wondered, What if the clothes I had on my back—these clothes—were all I had after a real fire? What if a fire were to leave us homeless?

Heard later that a Toronto high-rise apartment fire on Friday has left thousands homeless.

Twenty-five minutes passed. No fire trucks. The closest station is three blocks from our building. Clearly, the alarm hadn’t sounded at the station. Cell phone calls from other bed-headed, bathrobed, morning-breathed residents to 911 and our building’s emergency number.

A car pulled up. A man who delivers newspapers to our building every morning in the dark. One of the invisible men in our lives suddenly visible. He put the papers in the lobby. I wondered, What is his story? Where does he live? Does he have enough to eat?

Someone told him that we’d been waiting for the fire fighters for 25 minutes.

Minutes later, there were fire trucks, our newspaper delivery man’s car hard behind them. He’d driven to the fire station himself to sound our alarm. But he’d inadvertently left his client list with the newspapers in the lobby. Invisible again, as fire fighters secured the building. He couldn’t get inside. But I need my list. I need my list.

Breakfast

Toast

Peanut butter (four teaspoons rather than three—much better)

Green tea

Took teabags to church so that I could have tea afterwards. But I didn’t have lunch at coffee hour because I didn’t walk to church. Today’s Gospel reading—the story of the rich man and Lazarus, a man who was hungry.

Lunch

Toast

Onion

Cheese (grilled)

Cayenne pepper

Cabbage

Salad dressing

Cayenne pepper

Green tea

Decided not to walk half an hour each way for a third $.67 can of tuna. I’ll try to make do with what I have.

Dinner

Oil

Eggs (2)

Celery

Onion

Cayenne pepper

Oregano

Toast 

Green Tea

For lunch tomorrow, tuna salad, bread, and an apple—until I counted my remaining slices of bread. Not enough to last the week if I have bread with lunch. For my lunch tomorrow, tuna salad, macaroni salad, and an apple.

Tuna salad

Tuna (1 can)

Celery

Onion

Salad dressing

Pickle relish

Cayenne pepper

Oregano

Macaroni salad

Macaroni (1 cup)

Salad dressing

Cayenne pepper

Oregano

25 September 2010, Saturday

Challenge Day One.

Rearranged the refrigerator when I got up—food that I wouldn't be allowed to see on one side, food that I'd be allowed to see on the other. Inadvertently licked the spoon of one of the invisible foods when I transferred it to a smaller bowl. Drat. Technical violation before I'd even started.

Breakfast
Toast
Peanut butter
Water (Drat. Forgot to buy tea yesterday.)

The toast dry. Tomorrow, I'll try a little more peanut butter.

Shopping Day Two. Fall weather—11 degrees Celsius when I went out after rain.

It took 1.5 hours to spend $7.06.

Dollar store
1.00    Green tea
1.00

Zellers
0.67    Tuna ($.02 less than budgeted)
0.67    Tuna ($.02 less than budgeted)
1.34

Sobeys

1.69           Cabbage ($.70 more than budgeted)

0.99    Celery hearts (a substitution—cauliflower was no longer priced at $.99

          a head)

2.68

I was almost angry at the cauliflower for ceasing to exist at $.99, not only because its non-existence required me to scramble, to rethink my Grand Plan, but also because the cauliflower—the very same heads of cauliflower—that had sold for $.99 had simply been moved to another bin and assigned a higher price.

A case of knowing that grocery specials change every week but thinking naively that $.99 heads of cauliflower would cost $.99 until the last one sold.

Sour grapes department. I don’t really like cauliflower without broccoli, and celery hearts will be more useful.

Shoppers

2.04    Eggs ($.05 more than budgeted; I bought a plastic bag as carton

          insurance, backpack protection)

2.04

I was also almost angry at bread at Shoppers. There they were—Friday’s $.99 loaves of bread, in the same place, priced $.80 higher on Saturday.

It took five hours yesterday and today to spend a grand total of $19.20. I have $.80 to spend at my discretion.

Fortunately, it didn’t rain.

Lunch

Toast

Onion

Cheese (grilled)

Cayenne pepper

Cabbage

Salad dressing

Cayenne pepper

Green tea

Dinner

Oil

Onion

Celery

Spaghetti sauce

Cayenne pepper

Oregano

Spaghetti

Cheese (grated)

Green tea

Dinner wasn’t a happy experience. Don’t think I could bear another sauce like that one. The fault of the celery and the thin, thin sauce. Couldn’t finish it. Might have to invest an hour walking and my remaining $.80 in another $.67 can of tuna tomorrow (its last day at that price). I’d wanted to spend it on fruit.

24 September 2010, Friday, Supplementary

A man, wearing a crushed brown hat, wrinkled black shirt, red suspenders, and psychedelic sunglasses, hair and beard salt and peppered (I've changed aspects of his physical description for this post), was shopping the food aisles of the dollar store. He passed me on his bicycle on my walk back to the bus stop. I see him differently now. Wondered about his story. Before this week, I would have seen only his sunglasses (Were they really going round and round in fast, orange swirls?).

Waiting for me when I got home--a fall catalogue from H. Halpern Esq.: Are you stylishly casual by day, and elegantly dressed by night? Or are you sartorially splendid at business, and casually attired when the sun goes down? Whether beneath the moon or under the sun, no matter what your personal style of dress, we have the shirts, ties and accessories to suit.

Overwrought shirts from $198 to $278, ties from $98 to $128, and socks from $14 to $38.