Food experiment + 50 days.

If you don't remember, I tested out my wits late last year by not going to the grocery store or any other store for 92 days. Gasoline and a couple of business items were the only things purchased during that time. Just lived off of what I had in the house or what I could grow. It's been 50 days since and I have a few more items to report on the experiment.

I went to the local farmers market today and that was only the 4th trip for groceries since December 13th. I purchased my 4th gallon of milk today and normally it would have been about triple that amount in that time.

My garden continues to produce abundantly and here's the pictures to prove it.

Butterhead lettuce

Onions

Peas

Fresh salad every 3rd day or so is great. It's been two months of fresh food for a few dollars of seeds! My garden is against a south wall and so there are about 4 feet of dirt that don't get any sunshine in the winter but the line of sunlight is moving about 2 inches per week and I have room for another row of stuff now and I'm going to harvest the last of my cilantro this week and the peas will probably be done in two weeks so I'll start planting some Spring vegetables shortly. I bought some strawberries at the market today because I have lots of arugula to harvest this week and it's a bit of a pungent leaf so you serve it up with peaches or strawberries to balance it out and some balsamic vinaigrette and toasted pecans. It's a fabulous salad!

An observation of note is the change in attitude towards shopping and eating. No more do I stand in front of the fridge or the pantry and say that there is nothing to eat. There IS something to eat but it's not the highly processed and loaded with sugar and salt and fat and convenience- I will have made some cookies in advance or there are peanuts or pistachios to shell or crackers with some Strawberry/Jalapeno jam or something. Impulsive eating doesn't happen any more. Meals are more deliberate. I think in advance about soaking some beans or grinding some wheat and what I may want to plant so I can have some food next month. Shopping trips are massively diminished- about every 10 to 14 days instead of every 3rd day.

If you noted some of the items that came up lacking during the experiment, they have been replaced with a redundancy stored in a different location in the house.

I did find that some pinto beans stored for about 9 years in #10 cans were a bit crunchy- not enough to break any teeth or anything, they were chewy and edible but they just didn't soak up the water and then soften up when cooked in the crock pot all day. People still store food for "someday" and if they don't rotate it and make home storage and gardening a part of their regular lifestyle, they will find that their bodies can't abide that kind of big diet change and that they have spent lots of money and effort and storage space for food that has spoiled or worse that they don't know how to prepare it for consumption in any case.

I may try the experiment again late in 2010 and refine the lessons learned.