A shocking spring-clean of wasted food in a fridge sparks a personal hashtag campaign and a pledge to eat healthily at home. The benefits are plain to see, in a cutback on the credit card bill, and a pair of too-tight jeans that finally fit.
Three packets of bacon: eighty-seven ZAR. One delightfully pungent brie: thirty bucks. Roughly two hundred ronts’ worth of free range lamb loin chops and the same amount again of prosciutto. Throw in a hundred rands’ veg and an unopened two litre milk.
This is not some bizarre recipe for a heart-attack inducing meal for the most indelicate of palates. It is the expired food I tossed out when I was forced to spring clean my fridge because it was too full and starting to smell less than welcoming.
My pattern is this: after a long day at the office, I stop at the grocery store on the way home. I pick up the ingredients for a sumptuous dinner, but as I am so exhausted by this stage of the day, the thought of slaving over a hot stove is torture, and so I also stop at the drive-through and pick up takeaways, telling myself “Self, tomorrow you don’t need to shop because you have enough food!”
Except that the next day I do shop, and I go through the same routine. And I always pick up a takeaway dinner. Added to that the takeaway lunches I buy at work, and I am spending around R150 – R200 every day of the week on takeaways and I pack all that unused grocery shopping in my fridge and leaving it to rot. Shameful. I know. And a ridiculous waste of money.
So I have put myself and my credit card on a diet. I’ve even hashtagged it, because that seems the popular and responsible thing to do these days, to show you’re serious about something. For the month ahead, I am #NotEatingOut. No takeaways. No light and fluffy melt-in-your-mouth cronuts at the office from the patisserie over the road (this is the difficult part of the challenge.)
There is so much good food at home, that all I’ve needed to do was to occasionally pick up a couple of tomatoes and onions or a fresh loaf of free-range, organic, banting-paleo bread. (Just kidding! Standard government-issue white loaf for me, thanks.)
I have planned my menus and cooked at night, even when I was tired and really, really didn’t want to. In fact, especially then. And each time I cooked I made a little extra to fill my lunch box for work the next day. Soon I had to pack in a little extra on top of that because my work mates really took to my cooking and I am by nature a gregarious, sharing kind of guy.
Ultimately, once the sixty days of #NotEatingOut are done, I want that regime to become my monthly habit. It just makes financial and wellbeing sense.
I’ve learned a few valuable lessons along the way. Curry cannot be hurried along in an electric frying pan. Fresh garlic is better than that tasteless rubbish in a jar. Frying bacon in a bit of olive oil is perfectly acceptable, and of course, you can never have too much bacon. But I knew that last point already.
So what’s changed? Well, there has been an unexpected health benefit. I have lost the horrible bloated feeling that a diet of mostly processed foods gives me, and the size 42 Levi’s I bought in November 2015 that I could never fit into now actually close.
Also, I’m not throwing out hundreds of rands of spoiled luxury foods, so that’s a win.
But mostly, the change that I am most impressed with is that I saved between R3000 and R4000 just in October. And that means my credit card will hate me less with each passing month. And that means that when friends suggest a sushi dinner at that quaint place in Sea Point, I can legitimately enjoy a night out without any guilt or credit limit anxiety, and I get to actually enjoy the food as a treat and a change from my daily routine.
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