Might try the dollar a day thing again

I have found two more blogs on the subject, plus there were a couple of idiot guys on YouTube who might have ended their friendship over a few items from Taco Bell.

I would say that it started with the One Dollar Diet Project, but I suppose that they weren't really the first to try the experiment, and even the idiot guys on YouTube were about a year earlier. But for me and a lot of other people, the couple in California were the first that I heard about. Just see if you could buy food and only eat the small amount that would add up to a dollar a day. They bought a lot of stuff in bulk, used packages of condiments from fast food restaurants, and figured out that they could eat on a dollar a day, but not very well and they had to give up most of the vegetables and fruits that they liked. They're vegans, so they were already giving up meat, eggs, and diary. During the experiment they ate a lot of beans and rice and peanut butter sandwiches.

Two non-vegans from Michigan also did the 1 dollar a day thing at their blog Hope Heals. Their blog started out very similar to the first one, only they also ate eggs and cheap hotdogs. They then moved on to trying to be Freegans for a month, and are now doing this sort of random kindness thing. I was going to say that I didn't like the changes in their blog, but I've decided it isn't so bad. I was disappointed with their lack of posting in February, but it's their blog and they can write (or skip) whatever they want to. And I was at first disappointed with their March project, but I've looked at it again and they never really said that they were going to go out and help the needy. They just said that they would be doing little things for people when they thought they could help. They might accidentally help out someone who really doesn't need it or doesn't deserve it, but finding the most needy people to help for a month and then going away was not the point of the project. Just doing little things to make a person smile was the point, and maybe the point was to have fun doing it, which seems to be working.

Now I've found someone else in Michigan who decided to try this dollar a day thing in November of 2006. And he did it, though for the first few days he only had one meal a day. He figured that he saved just over two hundred dollars, which he donated to a local food bank. He called his experiment Hungry for a Month.

I found that blog from another blog called Less is Enough, which I found after checking back with the One Dollar Diet Project. The lady writing Less is Enough decided that she could also eat on a dollar a day, without being a vegan, and without stealing condiments from restaurants, and with more fresh veggies and fruit. And, for the most part, she did. The really interesting thing about this blog is that instead of trying to figure out how much the individual meals cost so that it added up to a dollar a day, she just went out everyday and spent about a dollar. If she had money leftover, she spent it the next day. If she wasn't going out on a certain day, she spent the dollar either the day before or the day after. She started with no food (not even salt) and thirty dollars, and at the end of the month she still hadn't spent her last $1.40, and she had just a little bit of beans, salt, and cornmeal leftover. So while she can't say for sure what her daily totals were, they averaged out to less than a dollar per day. For her next project, she's going to see how much it really costs to eat everything you are supposed to (three meals a day, fresh veggies and fruit, and all the food groups in healthy portions) if you are trying to stay on a budget. So I look forward to that.

Anyway, I'm thinking of doing it again maybe next week. It is easier to do when I'm by myself, and when I don't have any social obligations. I never know too much a head of time when I'll be by myself, but I don't think that I have any social commitments between this coming Sunday and the middle of next month. So that would be a good time to do something if I wanted to.