So I cheated. On the first day of my self-imposed grocery-spending diet. And pretty much every day thereafter. But let me explain. Oh, never mind. I'm too hungry.
Suffice it to say that just a matter of hours after beginning the four-week experiment, I answered the question we posed: Could someone live well on the $25.60 a week some experts suggested a single woman my age should be spending on groceries?
How would you like this boring bowl of spaghetti and tomato sauce shoved up your nose?
In other words, not just no. Heck no. And pass me that hamburger.
Ah, hamburgers. Those were the days. A bun stuffed with lettuce, cheese, onion, mayo and yes, even meat. Do you have any idea how much a good hamburger costs to make?
Start from scratch: burger, $3.68; buns, $2.79; cheese, $2.99; lettuce, $1.79; tomato, $1; onion, $2.09; pickles, $2.59; mayonnaise, $2.29. A total of $19.22.
That leaves me $6 for the rest of the week. Sure, I could get maybe five more burgers from my initial purchase, but once the meat is gone, then what? Buns with mayo and lettuce and tomato? Then just mayo? Then mayo over easy with salt and pepper?
The idea for the challenge came from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service, which publishes a quarterly bulletin called Cost of Food at Home for a Week in Alaska. The costs of 104 food items in communities across the state were surveyed and matched with a daily menu plan.
A family of four with children ages 6 to 11, for example, could pay as little as $104.71 a week for groceries in Anchorage and up to a high of $184.01 in Bethel, according to June's survey. A similar menu in Portland, Ore., would cost $90.90.
When I made budgets for myself in the past, I always figured on spending about $100 a week for food and sundries. Turns out I was way off, according to the survey.
As a single woman between 20 and 50 years old, I was apparently in the heavy eating phase of my life. Younger than 20 and I'd only be allotted $24.41 per week. Older than 50 and I was reduced to $25.37. For the moment, I could spend 23 cents more than that on my weekly groceries.
I vowed not to go hog wild.
WANTON SHOPPERS
At 2 p.m. that first Sunday, I gathered my list, calculator and as much verve as I could muster and entered my favorite supermarket.
As I wandered the aisles, fondling food items now far beyond my price range, I watched wanton shoppers around me fling bags of chips, thinly sliced lunch meat and specialty cheeses into their carts with an abandon I'd never noticed before. Could that have been me just yesterday?
I scowled and tried to avoid their dangerously overladen carts as I bought a container of yogurt so cheap it didn't even have a name.
Twenty-five sweaty minutes later I was standing in a checkout line with what appeared to be about seven items. I'd fretted the most over a big jar of salsa. It cost $2.99 but would easily last me four weeks. I considered it an investment.
In a way, this appealed to me. I like writing down every penny I spend. I like balancing my checkbook. And now I stood to save something like $75 a week. How could that be? If this worked, I'd wind up about $300 richer at the end of the month. As fate would have it, that was just about my credit card balance.
So I felt good as I went to pay for my food, confident, almost cocky. Until the checker tried to ring up my three 69-cent-a-pound apples as spendy Anjou pears. I corrected her with a tone of panic she must have found confusing, so I tried to explain what I was doing: $25 for a week's worth of food, I said. It's an experiment.
She rang the total and looked at me. "So how are you doing?"
Ack, $26.34? I'd already gone over.
I slunk out to the car with my three teensy bags and wondered where I'd gone wrong. Studying the receipt in a manner I usually reserve for pizza menus, I found the mistake: $3.99 for cheese. Who in their right mind would pay that much for cheese? Surely not the new me. I waded back into the Sunday mob and demanded a price check: $2.99 was the verdict.
Now I was down to $25.34. When I got home I discovered even better news: I'd forgotten that my guideline was $25.60. I was cents under! Add 45 cents for the half-dozen eggs already at home and I was only 19 cents over. A clear victory.
I'd somehow neglected to buy milk to go with my oatmeal, but I will cross that bridge (i.e. cheat at my very first breakfast) later. Now the trick was to live off this stuff for seven days.
METAPHORICAL APRON
Even those who love me best aren't crazy about my cooking. My friends and relatives will tell you I cook less for art than for sustainability. Less for the sublime moment of flavors exploding on the tongue than the pragmatic, carb-loading long haul.
No one will starve on my watch; neither will anyone ever film a "Chocolat'' in tribute of my culinary wiles.
When I divorced, I basically quit cooking. It was as though in taking off my wedding ring, I removed a metaphorical apron. I went from making my own mayonnaise to wanting nothing more than a microwaved Lean Cuisine. Five minutes became too long to wait for regular oatmeal; breakfasts consisted of the instant variety.
After 20 years of being the only cook for a family of four, food and its preparation bored -- even repulsed -- me. I claimed it was post-traumatic stress, but the urge never returned and it's been more than six years.
My teenage son, living at home then, didn't mind. His diet consisted largely, as it had much of his life, of massive quantities of pizza, Cheerios, cottage cheese and broccoli. I can only credit organic and protein-rich everything when he was a baby for his strapping 6-foot-3 physique.
Back when he and his sister were little, what I lacked in talent I made up for in fervor. And beans, which, fortunately, they loved. I'll bet their molecular structure is 85 percent navy bean soup (mmm, cooked with bacon and onions till it's practically a solid, with lots of crusty homemade bread and melted butter and maybe a chocolate brownie for dessert).
In those days, I ground my own flour, sprouted my own wheat berries, curdled my own yogurt, milked my own goats, harvested warm, brown eggs from my beloved Rhode Island Reds.
Today it's a different story. My boyfriend eats at my house, but that's only because he's always hungry and not fussy. Plus I keep several of his staples on hand: Ben and Jerry's, plain yogurt and chocolate. It's hard to mess that up. But the day I cooked us scrambled eggs that somehow wound up smelling like fish nearly spelled the end of our romance. The cooking news he most likes hearing from me is that my mom had a dinner party and sent me her leftovers.
So I saw the assignment to try to live well on $25 a week in groceries as less a financial conundrum than a Zen-like challenge. Could I eat more consciously by spending less and therefore live my life that way as well?
LITTLE PLEASURES
What do other people spend on groceries, anyway? I found that most would sooner talk about sex than their grocery bill.
They'd give me a number, then sidle up a day or two later to whisper a considerably higher update. One person claimed to spend about $130 a week on her grocery needs and later raised it to more than $200. Another estimated $150 a week for her family of three, then realized it was closer to $10,000 a year, or more than $190 a week.
Even the thriftiest seemed to exceed the survey's estimate. One colleague makes a practice of eating cheap, boasting about the cup of Thai soup she found for only 50 cents. But she balked at the thought of staying under $25, estimating her weekly total at about $35.
"Ketchup and garlic are your spices,'' she said while describing the secrets to eating cheaply. "And salsa? You have no idea how important salsa is.''
As the weeks went on, I discovered my biggest challenge was figuring out something to eat that I hadn't also had the past three days. To my surprise, I found variety to be an overrated menu attribute.
My editor, for example, tried to keep my spirits up with e-mails about his own frugality.
"I couldn't eat it all today, so now it will stretch into at least six meals," he announced about a pot of chili he made the day before. "Maybe seven.''
Ditto a security guard for our building who prided himself for cooking a giant batch of spaghetti early in the week and eating it for every meal thereafter. His weekly expenditure was well under $25, he insisted.
WHAT I LEARNED
Being on a budget made me hungry. Like the proverbial dieter who hankers to cheat on day one, I craved a trip to the store. Limited food made me itchy; the specter of austerity made me want to gorge.
For those four weeks, my life became all about rationalization. A tomato didn't count because it was a snack; same with my quart of milk and that $5 bag of organic carrots at Saturday Market.
What was more important, I asked myself: following these silly rules or avoiding vitamin A deficiency?
And what about where the money came from? Did the cents I used to buy a fast-food burrito count since I had found the change on the floor of my car?
By the fourth week, I'd given up on feeding myself and began hustling dinner invitations. Marinated filet mignon with her famous mushroom sauce at my mom's house? Natch, as Nancy Drew used to say. Pork loin and garlic mashed potatoes at my friend Darleen's? Duh. And weren't those brownies by the coffee machine at work? Stockpile!
Just when I'd start to grumble uncontrollably, irked at the constraints of weeks of burritos or pasta, I'd get a wake-up call: A young mom ahead of me in the grocery line with two babies in the cart and another clinging to her ankle, worriedly comparing her purchases to coupons from the Women, Infants and Children program. A gray-haired man with a lined face, can of peas and a handful of change.
This was an experiment to me. For others, watching every penny, budgeting to the last dime while trying to feed children was a way of life. That realization knocked the whine right out of me.
Amazingly, at the end of four weeks, I -- well, my credit card company -- wound up $300 richer.
Odder still, I seem to have rediscovered cooking. Deprived of expensive frozen meals, I'm now much more aware of what's in my refrigerator. Lettuce gets eaten before it wilts; potatoes aren't allowed to mold; even scraps of cheese find their way into something.
My first morning off the challenge, I thought of going to the store to lavishly restock my larder. But just to be sure, I checked the fridge. I still had potatoes and onions left from making soup the week before, plus cheese and eggs. It was comforting to slice the potatoes and onions and let them sizzle while I drank a cup of tea.
If it took longer to cook this breakfast than it would instant oatmeal, they were minutes filled with sound, smells and anticipation. Somehow, by shopping and spending less, I'd wound up with more. How very Zen of me. Best of all, there was still plenty of salsa to go on top.
Daily News arts editor Susan Morgan can be reached at 257-4587 or smorgan@adn.com.
