The Great American Food Challenge!

I've been thinking about sustainability lately. We live in a consumer-driven society, we're the most wasteful society in the world and these twin foundations of our everyday lives seem to have been providing the driving force behind American capitalism- but, looking around, it's hard not to wonder if those driving forces haven't gone down the toilet along with the rest of the economy. The sad fact of the matter is that, to me, we waste an awful lot of stuff- especially food.

So instead of bemoaning the fact that between bills, rent, bills, Christmas presents for a newly expanded family and facing up to the fact that between the two of us I don't make nearly enough money (a fact I'm working to remedy rapidly), I've decided to take this financial anorexia and turn it into an interesting experiment.

Hence, The Great American Food Challenge!

I'm sure the Food Network already has that copyrighted somewhere- but here's the deal:

The Missus and I are more than a little broke right now- and we can't afford to get groceries until sometime next week- so we're stuck with what we've got in the cupboards. The GAFC is to basically see three things: how much can we use, can we survive another week and how exactly do we use what we've got?





In our society to do, we spend too much, we buy too much and we waste too much- and this includes food. I've had too many roommates and seen too many people that buy a whole bunch of food that they think is going to be rockin' and then they end up throwing it away. I've been in situations where roomies and I would go through tons of Diet Coke- cases at a time, because someone would open one, get distracted, forget about it and open another one and so on and so forth.





So, we're going to give this a try:

DAY ONE: We had a supper of Velveeta Shells N'Cheese, followed by cooking up a squash we had laying around and we made a pasta salad with some leftover veg, macaroni and some Mrs. Dash Marinade we don't have meat for.