Still Eating Cheap....

The Eat Cheap Challenge has been over for more than a week, and all the math I had to do to figure out how much soup I actually ate seems like a distant memory.

In Thursday's Commercial Appeal (go to commercialappeal.com/wendi), I summarize what the challenge taught me - but there's so much more that I learned that there's no room in the paper for.

Like, when you have little money to spend on food, all you think about is how you're going to get the cheapest food you can. Seriously - I wonder how much productivity nationally is lost because of hungry employees and stressed-out working parents worried about what they can possibly put on the table for dinner. My friends and family were soooo tired of me talking about how much I could spend and how much I'd spent and what deal I'd found, etc.

When you don't have money to spend on food, you eat like a pig when someone else is paying. Never again will I be an elitist snob when a homeless person or person at a soup kitchen asks for extra food. Of course they want extra food - if you don't know where your next meal is coming from, you gorge when you can.

My brother and I had a luxury that truly poor people do not: We could comparison shop in our nice cars all over town, with no thought to the gas we were spending. Poor people shop at their neighborhood grocery stores, and if even most of them are like the few I visited before and during the challenge - they suck. The produce selection and quality is absymal and you can find bologna but no low-fat sliced turkey for sandwiches. And we wonder why poor people are disproportionally overweight and in poor health. You would be too if your grocery store sold pickled pig's feet but no fresh brocoli.

If I can eat for $5 a week, and could eat really well, actually, for probably $15 a week, then there is no reason why anyone in this land should go hungry. Jesus said that when you do this for the least of these, you've done it unto me. And by this - he meant feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, caring for the poor, etc. I take my faith seriously, and it is immoral that anyone in America go hungry. Absolutely immoral and unconscionable.

I think as the economy continues to decline, more people will embark on their own Eat Cheap Challenge - maybe they won't call it that, but they'll be watching every dime they spend.

And now, I'm off to eat some lentil soup that I still have left, with some cornbread I made this week, with some turkey polish sausage added - meat I couldn't afford during the challenge, but an addition that makes it a really tasty meal.

And for dinner, I've got some chicken I couldn't afford to cook during the challenge - marinated in jerk marinade (hey, I'm half-Jamaican - the jerk must be done) and half a baked potato.

Not sure how much that will cost, but it'll be good. And my conscience will be clear, knowing that at least today, I'm being a wise steward of all the blessings I enjoy.