Musings on logistics of the food challenge

From livejournal, written n September 24, 2008

Still pondering the logistics of this food experiment. I'm trying to make decisions about the following:

I generally spend $40 a week at the farmers market just on produce. It's fresh, it's gorgeous, and we use all of it. For the experiment week, I would obviously have to scale way back on that amount (I don't think I ever officially set a dollar amount, but in my head it's always been $50). So that would clearly be the first obstacle. Doable, though, but depressing.

I just ordered I don't even know yet how much stuff from the food buying club, which I'll be picking up today. It probably is somewhere around $200 worth of stuff, mostly bulk grains and nuts and frozen vegetables and condiments and that sort of thing. It's supposed to last us...well, a long time. This, in addition to the ton of food I already have in my kitchen, and the idea of pretending it's all not there is a little confusing. It's not a big deal for most things, but there are things we use in small quantities on daily basis that I'm trying to factor in--olive oil, salt, pepper, herbs (from the garden), maple syrup, coffee, that sort of stuff, that to buy initially does cost more than would fit into this one week time frame. Still deciding about how to handle that.

I guess those are the big things. I'm not sure about the dollar amount I should set, either. I've been thinking $50, but I don't know where that came from or if it's totally arbitrary and set low for the sole purpose of complicating things unnecessarily. In our household, there are two adults, a picky almost-three-year-old who tends to binge on fruit of the most expensive variety, and a six-month-old nursling who isn't a huge factor. Jake is a big eater and that's going to be tricky, because while we can agree just fine on "rules" for this thing, if he's not satisfied with what I feed him, he's not going to just leave it at that. Being anything less than FULL (I might even say TOO full) is not something he's okay with, but I've been hounding him lately to eat less anyway. So that will make things interesting.