With every bite came a new level of satisfaction, but I paid closer attention to my body than usual. Having learned my lesson earlier that day, and having relayed it to Kerri, we ate about half of our dinners and boxed up the remainders for lunch the next day. As much as we enjoyed our food, our bodies still struggled to adjust. I have over-eaten before and felt the oversaturation of too much food throughout my body, but this was different. This was not a typical food coma. My level of energy that night dipped below zero as my body poured most of its resources into helping me cope with the abundance of food working its way through my system. I couldn’t help but toss and turn as I lay in bed and tried to fall asleep.
Over the course of the next few days, our bodies adjusted to eating reasonably sized portions, but our way of looking at everything related to food was forever changed. We continued to plan our weekly meal schedule, shop around for the best deals, and eat mostly unprocessed foods that could be bought in bulk as raw materials. The most significant change in our shopping trips was that we were able to reintroduce fresh fruits and vegetables, which healed our nutrient-deficient bodies and helped us regain confidence in our level of health. We started exercising again, and no longer did I feel light-headed at work.
Our students noticed a difference, too. By the time the project was over, some of Kerri’s students finally knew about it, and upon discussion in class, one student remarked, “So that’s why you were so cranky last month.” Kerri was quite surprised. Since they had known about it all along, my students had different observations. Although they tried to hide it, I could hear the chatter in the background, and one student had the courage to look me in the eye and say, “You look too skinny, Mr. Greenslate.” While I had been quite pleased about shedding some excess weight, she had a point. In just thirty days I had lost fourteen pounds, or close to half a pound every day, and without any exercise. I couldn’t tighten my belt any further, and my pants hung loose around my waist. Kerri had only lost five pounds, and while I couldn’t tell that she had lost any weight, she often put her arms around me and exclaimed that I was disappearing right in front of her.
In fact, this was one of the things that readers of our blog were most worried about. Readers often posted questions asking about our weight loss, and others gave us medical explanations about what was going on with our health as a result of the experiment. In addition to readers’ questions about how we were holding up, and comments meant to inspire us, people kept donating their money to the Community Resource fund, as well. I had asked our readers at one point to help us break the thousand-dollar mark, which I thought was pretty ambitious, considering that we were complete strangers to most of them. While my father and a few other family members made donations, we were seeing people from all over the world giving amounts from as little as a buck to one reader who handed over two hundred dollars after returning home from an evening out with friends to find our blog. The reader was matching what she had spent on dinner that night.
For the rest of October, we were focused on teaching and on getting our lives back to normal. Yet the donations sitting in our online account, and the large buckets of raw ingredients taking up space in our kitchen, stood as reminders that our project had changed our lives forever. We soon started to understand that there was something more powerful here than we had originally anticipated when we planned our survivalist experiment. This project started as a way to learn, an “experiment in truth,” as Gandhi would say. We knew that at the very least we would no longer see food or grocery shopping the same way, but we had not really considered how other people would perceive the project. We soon found out.
As November approached, we had received e-mails from literary agents in New York, and then a call from Tara Parker-Pope, a health writer at The New York Times. In speaking with Tara, we discussed the details of our experiment and other issues related to food and global poverty. The journalism teacher in me was doing my best both to learn from speaking with her and to keep my guard up. But then she said something that surprised me. With a casual tone she said, “I am going to make you famous.” I grew silent and smiled at the audacity of her comment. I myself have been known to say a thing or two that makes people do a double take. I laughed at the idea. Soon enough, we were back to talking about our monthlong dollar diet, and she requested a follow-up interview with Kerri at some point in the near future.
About a week later, on the day that our country elected its first African American president, the article came out. It was titled “Money Is Tight, and Junk Food Beckons.” In addition to talking about our project, she also cited a study done by the director of the Center for Public Health and Nutrition at the University of Washington published in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association about how the cost of healthful food had risen by 19.5 percent over the course of the two-year study, whereas the cost of junk foods had actually decreased. The article also included a link to our blog.
As soon as the article was out, our readership went from respectable to astronomical. All of a sudden there were tens of thousands of people from around the country talking about our project. The next day the article was reprinted in The International Herald-Tribune, the international version of the Times. Our readership continued to grow, this time to a global audience. Before long we were getting e-mail and comments from people in Egypt, the Czech Republic, Brazil, and a whole host of other countries. Their comments on our project were fascinating. We watched as people argued over some of the claims in the article about the cost of healthful food. We witnessed people unload their political and economic philosophies on one another. And of course, lots of people shared their stories from college—mostly about being “poor” and eating ramen noodles.
What was most fascinating, though, was the fact that thousands of people had read the same story, read our blog, and come to entirely different conclusions. All of a sudden we had simultaneously proven both that one could eat well on a dollar a day, and that one could not. Each reader had drawn a different conclusion from our project, and often they were in direct contradiction to one another. Of course, having actually been the ones who did the project, we knew that it was more complex than this. It was clear, though, from our experience that it was very difficult to find affordable fresh food. At the same time, we couldn’t have afforded a lot of junk foods either. What made the most sense was to eat mostly beans and rice and homemade soups, and to eat small portions. When we were lucky enough to eat carrots and lettuce, it felt like just that: lucky.
After the initial frenzy over the piece, which had more reader comments than any other article in the New York Times health section for the next few weeks, we started getting messages from other media organizations. All of a sudden we were being contacted by The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, and Inside Edition. It was both bizarre and exciting, and it was just the beginning. While on a trip with my students to the Fall National High School Journalism Convention in St. Louis that next week, we did a live television appearance on the News Hour, aired across Canada, and a week later we had a small crew from Inside Edition following us around the Smart and Final store where we had bought most of our bulk items. As we don’t subscribe to cable television, we had never seen the show Inside Edition before, and in retrospect were incredibly naive to think that any part of the forty-five-minute interview we did about poverty would end up in the segment as part of the show. When it finally aired, we had to go over to our friend Krista’s house to watch it, and as it came on, we laughed to see our experience sandwiched between the birthday bash for Britney Spears and a walrus that could play the saxophone. The best part of the whole experience was that after the show, we got to spend time with one of our good friends and eat a delicious meal with fresh salad greens picked from her backyard garden.
We thought for sure that our ninety-second stint on a celebrity news show was the extent of our newfound “fame,” but we were wrong. The next day we received an e-mail from a producer at the nationally a
ired morning television news show Fox & Friends. As much as I don’t care for their organization, I wasn’t about to pass up on the opportunity to talk to such a large audience about the cost of eating well. Plus, the audience for Fox & Friends would be relatively different from that of The New York Times. For all my feelings about the quality of reporting at Fox News, I must give them credit for not only picking up on a relevant concern for Americans, but also for treating us well. Since the show broadcasts live from New York, the time difference between coasts meant that we would have to be up at three a.m. in order to be in a satellite studio for our time slot. By three thirty, there was a car and driver in front of our house, waiting to take us downtown for the interview. By the time we got back home, we had thousands more visitors who had seen the blog, and just as before, the responses varied widely in perspective. Feeling good about the whole experience, we went back to sleep in order to feel a little more rested for a daylong work meeting.
We had a surprising amount of energy at the meeting. About halfway through the day, one of our colleagues approached us and said, “Hey, I saw you guys on Yahoo.com just a little while ago.” Stunned, we went to the nearest computer and logged in. Sure enough, we were on the front page, with a video clip of the interview. The clip stayed online for the next few days, and through the weekend, and as a result, traffic to our blog jumped once again, at times reaching over 200,000 hits a day. It was official: Our little blog about our silly little project had reached an exponential number of people. It was funny to think that at the beginning, Kerri would chastise me for mentioning the idea of our project to the checker at our natural foods store, and now there were millions of people who had heard about it, and several hundred thousand who were visiting our site directly.
It was at this point that we started to realize the scope of the conversation we had entered. Reader comments on our blog were coming from everyone from cash-strapped moms in Tennessee and Arizona who were trying to feed their children on a limited income to personal finance specialists on Wall Street who were trying to give their clients tips on how to stretch their dollar even further during the recession. There were health care professionals in Riverside, California, and nutritionists in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Peace Corps workers in South America and gardenistas from Chicago; food bank workers from Kentucky and people struggling with celiac disease—all making their way to our blog to learn about what we did. Instantly our site had turned into a place where all kinds of people were discussing everything from how to get the best deals in the grocery store to how to start a windowsill garden. From helping the hungry in our country to those starving in the third world. From nutrition tips to cancer treatment, and from government food policy to the practices of large agribusiness. Everyone from foodies to Wal-Mart exclusives were stopping by, and every avenue of the food discussion was in play.
From here, we had the opportunity to watch it all unfold and to learn from all the people who took the time to add their voices to the conversation. When I looked to see where readers were coming from to visit our site, I learned that they were hearing about our project all over the blogosphere as well. From the Whole Foods website to the Kenneth Cole site, and from all kinds of blogger moms to Earthfirst!, people were tuning in and responding. Very soon the level of donations doubled, and we felt it was necessary to meet up with the Community Resource Center and hand over the funds that had been collecting from generous readers worldwide.
Upon calling the Community Resource Center, I mentioned who the donations were coming from, and having heard about the project in our local paper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were very pleased to hear from us. As it grew clear that the nation was headed for recession, donations to nonprofits had been falling quickly, and for organizations like the Community Resource Center that provide all kinds of services for families, including food assistance, demand was growing. While I was on the phone with the woman from the center, she asked if we would like to attend their invitation-only reception the night before their annual holiday basket program began. We agreed, figuring that we would do a check presentation and meet some of the people who helped run the program.
When the evening arrived, my mother accompanied us to the event, which was being held at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. We entered the facility where things were being prepared for the following day and stood there in awe at the sight of the volunteers who were putting together “food baskets,” grocery bags filled with donated food items. A dozen tables were lined up end to end with nearly thirty volunteers, ranging in age from eight to eighty, packing and filling boxes with food for the following day’s opening of the Holiday Basket Program.
During that weekend, over 1,200 families were given the chance to have a dignified “shopping experience” as they would make their way through the huge hallway and pick up items that would help them make it through the holidays. With the economic downturn, programs like this—run entirely by donations and thousands of volunteer hours—are a testament to the power of community. Participating in this moment was both instructive and inspiring. We left the reception amazed by what happens when people work together to get things done for others. Yet for every smiling face that would benefit from such efforts, there were many not receiving help. There are over thirty-six million people living in the United States who suffer from food insecurity, and while good things are happening across the nation, there is much work to be done in order to help our fellow Americans.
Our own holiday season would be one filled with warmth and joy as we gathered with our families to share stories, food, and gifts. However, this season had a different ring to it. Our lives had been changed by the dollar-a-day experiment, and as we indulged in larger than necessary holiday portions, we could not forget the extreme hunger we had experienced, nor could we forget those who would be leaning on the community for help.
After celebrating the solstice with my family, for Christmas we drove to Kerri’s parents’ modest home in Redding, about three hours north of Sacramento. We passed through California’s central valley, taking in the fields of fresh produce that make our state the largest farming state in the nation. This four-hundred-mile stretch of flat land is not what people think of when visiting California. Lacking the glamour of Hollywood, sun-soaked beaches, or sites like Disneyland and the Golden Gate Bridge, this quiet part of the state is able to provide 25 percent of our country’s food supply. Watching fields of lettuce and strawberries, citrus orchards, and the seemingly endless California aqueduct pass by, I wondered at the amount of food available, and that so many still had to go without.
The ten-hour drive had all but vanished as we pulled into the cul-de-sac around dinnertime. The hearty welcome from Kerri’s family reminded me of the value of traditions and the importance of sharing time with loved ones. Throughout the next couple of days, we spent time sitting in the living room and catching up with one another. Staying in our pajamas and not leaving the house, we talked about our lives, read stories to the kids, and waited anxiously for the holiday meal to be ready. People kept arriving, but within no time, all the guests were there and Christmas dinner was served. There was a prayer for Kerri’s grandfather, who had been hospitalized for months. Looking around the room, I could see the toll that his decline in health had taken on the family. Christmas wasn’t the same without him seated at the head of the table.
As we sat down to eat, I couldn’t believe the amount of food laid out before me. There wasn’t more than usual for the holidays, but after scraping by on small portions of beans, rice, and peanut butter, this spread resembled a royal banquet. I was overwhelmed by smells of creamy mashed potatoes and spiced stuffing, the clinking of spoons in serving dishes, and the endless stream of bowls that flowed from person to person. In a daze, I nodded as Kerri asked me if I would like some green beans, some potatoes, some bread, some salad. My mind was in a distant land, as if someone had pressed pause on my consciousness. By the time I glanced down, my plate was overflowing with just a little bit of
everything. Kerri stared at me and repeated the question she had been asking for the past minute.
“What do you want to drink?”
I snapped out of my trance.
“Water. Water will be fine.”
I picked up my fork. I looked down at the helpings in front of me, barely comprehending how all of this food had ended up on my plate. I dipped my fork into the pile of mashed potatoes and looked around to see everyone smiling and enjoying the meal without reservation. Suddenly my mind took me back to September, when a meal like this would have been little more than fantasy. My stomach churned with hunger pangs just thinking about it. I considered the families that would have far fewer options on their tables today. Tasting the lemon-spritzed green beans, I experienced a surge of emotions. The dollar diet taught me about those stabs of hunger that twist a person’s insides, and now I sat in the lap of abundance, stunned by the contrast. I did my best to finish the food served to me, but I could not shake those feelings.
We stopped by the Community Resource Center a week later in order to drop off kitchen tools and extra clothes. When we arrived, we saw a line, predominantly made up of women and children who were looking to receive donated food. These were not “freeloaders” who were “too lazy” to get a job and feed themselves; these were the mothers and the children of our community who had fallen on hard times, and who needed just enough help to make it through. Many of the adults had jobs, but still found it hard to feed their families. As we got in the car to head back to the security of our warm house, we remained silent. We knew that there was much more that could be done, and that the dollar-a-day blog was just the beginning of understanding the scope of food issues and hunger in our country. Although the year was coming to an end, we knew that the challenges of unemployment and low incomes would persist beyond the holidays. As people with stable incomes and food security, we had a responsibility to do more.
On a Dollar a Day: One Couple's Unlikely Adventures in Eating in America Page 8
