The Great Recession-Proof Food/Cooking Experiment! - Day Twenty Seven

Ha, you thought I had forgotten about it/abandoned the project, didn't you?

Well, sort of. My sister mentioned that it's difficult documenting every single meal you've eaten, and she's right. I stayed strong for about two weeks before falling woefully behind. However, it is a new month, and so...numbers!

This month, we spend a whopping $231.02 on restaurants, $44.12 more than we did before. However, most of our spending in other areas has decreased, causing our budgets to just about equal out (gas is a big one; a drop in gas prices as well as car usage really helped us out this month).

I scratched my head over this puzzle. What factors combined to create an increase in restaurant eat-age when we were actively trying not to eat out? I finally came up with two general reasons.

The first one would be our schedules. Like every other American couple, we have become laden in activities, Dantzel especially. Leaving home around 6:45 am and sometimes never coming home until 9:00 pm, by the time she comes home, dinner time is somewhat late. Usually around that time, we're both tired, and cooking looks unappealing. So we cheat and go somewhere to grab some dinner.

Second is the fact that food is important to Dantzel and I, it's often a form of interacting socially. We rarely ever go to the movies as well as parties. Actually, if we ever go out of our apartment, it's for school, work, running errands or, you guessed it, eating out with friends or together on a date. When food is important to you emotionally, socially and even spiritually, you tend to spend more on it in your budgets.

Of course, combined with the changing seasons, Dantzel and I have been feeling under the weather as well, which makes it difficult to motivate oneself to do anything, let alone cook a meal. We are victims to our own business and poor health.

Exercise, eating healthy and health in general tends to go hand in hand; if you don't exercise, you don't have as much energy, causing you not to cook as much, which leads to poorer health, thus continuing the vicious circle. It's difficult to concentrate on one area of your life without having it ripple through to other areas, and when you neglect one area, it will hurt other areas as well.

Cooking and eating healthy is vitally important to not feeling like crap every day, and so in order to stave off sickness, we will need to double our efforts in cooking right and eating right throughout the day. And so, I'll be trying to document once more on what we're eating, focusing more on just what we eat, as well as how much it costs.

Less about saving money, this whole project has become somewhat a social experiment in how eating and cooking affects the rest of our lives.

"When it comes to food, America has been sold a bill of goods. We've been flimflammed, bamboozled, hoodwinked. We've been tricked into thinking that cooking is a chore, like washing windows, to be avoided if at all possible, and then done only grudgingly and when absolutely necessary. On the contrary, cooking is a vital, spiritual act that should be performed with a certain reverence. After all, we are providing sustenance to the ones we love -- can anything be more important?"
- Kurt Michael Friese