February Challenges

Brian and I recently took on a couple of challenges. The first challenge came out of a conversation in our Sunday school class that ended with several of the couples in the class committing to observe "Meatless Mondays." Brian has been really fussy about it. He gets the point. But he doesn't like it.

Now, I am not a vegetarian and I don't even want to become one. I respect the vegetarian lifestyle a lot but I believe meat, in moderation, is a healthy and important part of a diet. (Also, I'm afraid that if we all stopped eating meat at once there would be a bunch of feral pigs and cows and I would walk into my back yard and find stray pigs rooting around there.) However, we Americans have taken something healthy and natural and turned it into an all-you-can-eat extravaganza. One person in our class had heard a report that many rural Chinese are only able to eat meat on holidays. Many have moved to the cities where they can earn more and consequently can now eat meat once or twice a week. Once or twice a week!!! Americans can easily eat meat three times a day! Bacon at breakfast, cold-meat sandwich at lunch, and meatloaf at supper. No problem.

Another person in our class had heard a report that if each person in the middle class in China would increase their pork intake by 10 pounds per year (roughly one pork chop a month) they would starve the rest of the world. This is due primarily to the grain that it would take to feed the pigs and the farmland lost for growing the grain and hosting the pigs. Now, I don't know if this report is totally accurate but still, we thought, in the converse, what could happen if Americans ate 10 pounds less of meat each year? Would we help? So some of us have decided to give it a try with Meatless Mondays. This is mainly to raise our own awareness, to keep us thinking about the rest of the world and to fight the American seduction of over-consumption. And it should be a health benefit to cut a little meat from our diets. So far, I have not eaten meat on a Monday in 2009.

The second challenge came through me taking a hard look at our finances and nearly suffering a coronary when I saw how much we spend dining out. I was trying to figure out where we could save some money. "If we get a different phone plan maybe we can save $20 a month or if we up our deductible on the car insurance we can save $15 a month...OR IF WE NEVER WENT OUT TO EAT WE COULD BUY A NEW CAR EVERY MONTH!" Okay, it might not be that extreme but it was ugly. So I have deemed this challenge "The Great February Dine-In." (You may be realizing that I do much better with lifestyle changes if I view them as a challenge and give them a catchy name.) It is an attempt to see if we feel any major difference in our finances if we don't eat out at all. I'm hoping by the end of the month I'll have excess cash to throw on the bed and roll around in. We tend to spend a lot because of being busy. "We have a meeting at the church tonight...let's run through the drive-through on the way." Or if I get home late from teaching piano lessons and am too tired to cook, we order pizza. We fritter away a lot this way. So, I'm attempting to plan ahead a little better and adjust my food desires.

We really do love to go out to eat. We love to try new restaurants and visit favorites and we really try to support locally owned restaurants around here. But so much of the food we were eating, we didn't even really enjoy. It was junk that tasted bad that we ate because we're busy. The good news is that we really love to cook. And we cook at home a lot, it was just shocking to see how much we don't cook at home.

So far so good. Until Brian came home last week with an email he had printed out from work. Da-Lite's sister company in the Netherlands was sending over some employees to tour the plant and build rapport with the Warsaw employees. To build rapport, they scheduled two meals for Brian to attend with them at the two nicest restaurants in Warsaw! So during The Great February-Dine In, Brian was able to go to two of my favorite restaurants, Cerulean and Noa Noa, for free. (We go to Noa Noa on our anniversary or very special occasions, it is our favorite restaurant in the world probably.) Needless to say, my bitterness was great. So last night was Meatless Monday (which Brian totally didn't observe) and I didn't really feel like doing a bunch of cooking for myself. So I made some deviled eggs for my main dish. Turns out, deviled eggs don't really make a great main dish. And they turned on me during the night and, long story short, it ended with me curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor at 2 in the morning. Not good. Tonight my supper was equally sad: Vienna sausage I found tucked in the corner of my pantry that someone had given us two Christmases ago, some stale crackers, and a few olives. It's 11:00 p.m. and I'm feeling okay. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

So I don't know where these challenges will take me. I'm sure we'll be back to dining out, we just enjoy it too much. But maybe we'll make dining out really count rather than being a second rate convenience meal. And maybe we'll learn a few lessons about our over-consumption habits along the way.