Day 4 Living Below The Line

Julie's gluten and dairy free birthday desserts - which I didn't even taste!

Julie and Carlos came over for dinner tonight to celebrate Julie's 27th birthday! I had my beans, lentils, and rice, fried up with my broccoli. Lots of salt. Many glasses of water. Bob made (rice) pasta arrabiata for the three of them. I bought gluten and dairy free desserts for Julie and Carlos (and in my normal life I'm also gluten and dairy free) - they looked, and reportedly were, delicious. Oddly, maybe because I rarely eat dessert even though I love it, it just wasn't a problem for me at all to skip dessert. As hungry as I am, I know if I were dieting it would have been nearly impossible to resist.

BUT - the visceral experience of this challenge (even with the many advantages I have over a truly poor person in terms of ease of cooking, use of a car, refrigerator, etc.) has been worth the deprivation. Each day I get a bit hungrier and a bit more tired. And each day I think of another way that hunger affects me, and how much more it would affect an extremely poor person. My health is still good, my teeth don't hurt (so many poor people have bad teeth, certainly due at least in part to poor nutrition, and the Kenyans I know just have the bad tooth pulled, until they are often missing many teeth), I can rest or even nap if I need to. . .

I had breakfast with a friend this morning, after reassuring her that I wouldn't be at all bothered by watching her eat in the restaurant. And I wasn't. But it occurred to me that I could sit in a restaurant at a mealtime and not order a meal. This was a pretty casual place, and I'm sure that people often come in and just have a cup of coffee, but I suspect that I might have been pretty unwanted if I looked extremely poor or homeless and wasn't ordering food.

My kiwi tasted a bit odd this afternoon. Getting overripe, with a nearly fermented edge to it. I put my last one in the fridge, but I'm nervous that tomorrow's might be inedible. And my broccoli is starting to yellow a bit. I'm not really nervous about it, but I did start to feel anxious for a minute. And I wonder what it would be like to buy food on a truly tiny budget and then have it go bad, and have that mean that I don't eat.

My lips are dry and burn a bit, despite the copious quantities of water I'm drinking, since I drink half a glass or so every time I feel hungry, plus a glass or two at every meal. I think it's that I have too little fat or oil in my diet, in spite of the fact that although I budgeted for two tablespoons of olive oil a day I'm not really measuring and am probably using at least three. That isn't huge from a budgetary standpoint - about 10 cents worth - but calorically it is relatively huge. A serving of beans is 70 calories, and a tablespoon of oil is 120. So I'm giving myself more calories, and more fat, than I'm paying for, and I'm still not getting enough. And - I'm using lots of chapstick, which didn't have to come out of my $1.50.

What's it like to be a hungry, growing kid?