Healthy Eating on a Tight Budget

I am not a doctor.

Or a nurse.

Or a dietician.

Or a cook.

Or an accountant.

All of which may help to explain why I'm 20lbs overweight with bad cholesterol, and living from paycheck to paycheck. But that has motivated me to do better with my shopping and eating habits, and I've picked up and figured out some tips for eating well on little money.

It's actually not too difficult to eat healthy. Or to eat on a budget. The trick is doing both at the same time. You can eat fairly low-fat with very little effort by buying frozen dinners from "Lean Cuisine", "Healthy Choice" and "Weight Watchers", or ordering the "heart-smart" entré(s) at restaurants. But that costs a fortune. You can save money by sticking to the cheapest generic items on your grocery store's shelves. But they tend to be nutrition-lacking, sugar-filled, artery-clogging, blood-pressure-escalating crap that'll kill you.

It's a balancing act. But I'm discovering it can be done. Here's what I've learned so far:

First, ya gotta cook. I don't enjoy it, and Mom never really taught me that much (figuring I'd one day have a wife to do it), so I'm no iron chef. But the basics aren't that hard to pick up. For the seriously new-to-the-stove, a book such as Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen! or something of its ilk might help. But reading the instructions on boxes of macaroni & cheese, Rice A Roni, and Hamburger Helper are where I learned a lot of what I know about food preparation.

Mac & cheese is also where I learned that those instructions are not etched on stone tablets. My senior year in college, I lived in a house off-campus but was still on the cafeteria meal plan, so I didn't exactly keep a well-stocked kitchen. 25-cent boxes of M&C were a cheap and easy option for when I accidentally slept through lunch on the weekend, but I didn't fix it often, so the milk I bought for it kept going sour before I used it up. Plus, the ecosystem thriving in the house fridge was no place to put opened containers; only factory-sealed items such as beer remained safe for human consumption. So I figured out that mac & cheese could also be prepared without milk. It wasn't as good, but it was OK. And for that matter, if there was no margarine (which I kept in the house freezer for better sterility), the stuff was still edible. With that lesson learned, boxed macaroni & cheese became a perennial "emergency" item in my cupboard.

Hamburger Helper and Rice A Roni are also some of my best friends. I've read guides to budget shopping that scream at you to avoid stuff like Hamburger Helper, because it's just an overpriced box of cheap pasta or rice with some pre-measured powdered sauce. And once you add in the cost of the meat and other ingredients you have to add yourself, it's not that great a bargain. And definitely not low-fat.

That's why you have to ignore parts of the instructions. Like the bit about browning some ground beef in the pan before you add the contents of the box. I'm no vegetotalitarian, but I know that beef is A) expensive, B) bad for your cholesterol, and C) not actually needed in a pasta or rice dish. And even though they're not as bad for you, the chicken in Chicken Helper, and the tuna in Tuna Helper aren't necessary either. (I actually hate tuna, but some of the Tuna Helper dishes are good, without it.)

Instead of meat, buy some plain old packages of store-brand pasta, in the same shapes that come in your Hamburger Helper boxes. You can get enough pasta for several meals for less than a single box of Helper. Then when you prepare dinner, add in the same amount of pasta that came in the box, and you've filled out your meatless dish into a super-sized portion again. Better yet, save half of it for tomorrow, and you've just stretched that little packet of overpriced powdered sauce to make two meals, not one.

The good news is that these meals contain plenty of grains and usually some dairy, but the bad news is they have only traces of veggies. You can make up for that (and make them go a little further) by adding some frozen veggies to them when you start to boil the pasta. Large bags of store-brand corn, peas, beans, broccoli, etc. aren't too expensive, and this is a really easy way to cook and eat them. In fact, one of the great things about boiling veggies is that if you do it long enough, even the most dried-up freezer-burned ones recover pretty well, especially when smothered lightly in sauce and pasta. For example, corn and/or kidney beans go well in Mexican-style dishes, chopped carrots are good in mac and cheese, broccoli is nice in alfredo sauce.

One good thing about these foods is that (freezer burn notwithstanding) they keep well. So if you see them on sale, you can stock up and store them. I check the Sunday paper for coupons as well, and then double-team them when they go on sale. So I might get $1.50 off the purchase of 4 boxes of Helper from the coupon, in addition to them being on sale for 75 cents off each, for a total of $4.50 saved.

By this point I'm saving quite a bit over those frozen low-fat dinners I can't afford anymore. The bad news is that I miss being able to toss one of them in the microwave and then pull it out and eat it a few minutes later. To help with that, I've been taking an hour or so over the weekend, and fixing a whole week's worth of dinners ahead of time. Get a few pots going at the same time, plus maybe a dish or two of boxed potatoes-and-sauce in the oven, and it doesn't take too long. Put them in sealable plastic containers, and shove 'em in the fridge. Then when I get home from work during the week, I can just pull one out, heat it (or not), grab a spoon or fork, and munch away.

A little cooking - very little - solves the high cost and dubious nutrition of breakfast as well. Breakfast cereals are ridiculously expensive, even with coupons, and usually loaded with empty calories. Oatmeal - especially store brand, which isn't distinguishable in any way I can see from Quaker brand - is much cheaper, and better for you. Not the little pre-flavored "instant" packets, just plain old... oatmeal. I can't eat the stuff plain, but a little honey makes it just fine. Oh, and here's where to ignore the preparation instructions completely. Don't boil water, etc. Just pour it in a bowl, add enough water to cover all the oatmeal, add some honey, stir, and nuke it for maybe a minute.

A little more work, but also cheap and healthy is pancakes. A box of pancake mix is really inexpensive, and all you have to do is spray a frying pan with canola oil, add water to the powder, stir, and pour. Instead of smothering the pancakes with syrup, you can add a little honey or jam to the mix before you start pouring, and they come out quite tasty.

I used to bring the smaller frozen entrés to work with me for lunch, but lately I've kicked that habit. Since, come noon, I'm pretty much stuck with whatever I have the will to pack for myself in the morning, I go health-fascist here: chop up a couple carrots and toss in an apple (the cheap bagged ones, not the pick-them-out-and-weigh-them-at-the-checkout ones). And I'm actually kinda liking it: easy to munch on at my desk (I don't get a paid lunch break), and no afternoon drowsiness from eating (or drinking) more heavily.

Beverages are a good place to save money. The first, most obvious step I took when I became unemployed the first time was to switch from good beer to the cheap stuff. I don't know for sure, but maybe the fact that I don't enjoy the taste of it so much has helped keep my drinking in check. Or maybe the lower price has made it easier for me to drink too much. Hard to say. In any case, beer - of whatever price - is just empty calories, so for a while I made myself "earn" it, usually by going for a run first (one minute per ounce). Currently I'm just giving myself a budget of $X/week to spend on beer, and when I blow it on the occasional bottle of good beer, that's just less beer that I drink.

Pop (that's what soft drinks are called in this part of the U.S.; deal with it, outsiders) is typically terrible for both body and budget... but it doesn't have to be. I switched to diet pop years ago, and aside from the smaller selection of flavors, I don't mind it a bit. In fact, sugared pop tastes sickly and sticky sweet to me now. As for the cost, have you ever noticed that a single half-liter bottle costs almost as much as a 2-liter bottle? So buy the 2-liters, and use those to refill half-liter bottles to take with you for lunch or whatever. If you drink pop a lot, that'll save you a lot. And get over the silly Pepsi-vs.-Coke brand loyalties; I buy whatever's on sale that week. (Except for the store brand diet cola, which I just don't like. No point in being miserable to save a couple dimes.)

Diet pop may not be empty calories, but it's still... empty. Juice is better for you. But it can be expensive as well. The trick there is to water it down. Seriously. Most people don't get enough water in their diet, and let's face it: drinking plain glasses of water just isn't that appealing. I usually cut my juice (frozen or bottled) in half or thirds. If it helps, don't think of it as watered-down juice; think of it as fruit-flavored water. (I've recently seen some overpriced bottled drinks of that sort; this is a much cheaper version of that.)

A good cheap snack is popcorn. Movie theaters may charge you dollars per ounce, but you can buy bags of just plain popcorn for very little money. Forget the microwave-ready bags, and invest in a hot-air popper. And skip smothering the popcorn with butter and salt; it's actually pretty good plain.

So that's some of the stuff I do to keep my belly full - but not too full - while keeping my wallet from becoming empty. I welcome additional suggestions.

Separating the Soft-Headed from their Money

Generally speaking, I'm a pretty open-minded person. I've got my own hobbies and interests, and other people are free to have theirs, even if I find them weird. Jim Morrison said it best: "People are strange." So when I see advertisements (such as those found in the coupon sections of the newspaper) for plates commemorating the death of a Nascar driver, or porcelain statues of a bald eagle clutching arrows and an American flag in attack mode with the inscription "Peace on Earth - 9/11/2001", I usually just shrug, maybe roll my eyes sadly, and resume looking for discounts on Hamburger Helper. But one I saw the other day just left my jaw on the floor. And the more of it I read, the more dismayed I became.

It's an advert for "May God Bless You, Little Grace", a collectible doll crafted to look like a prematurely-delivered infant. The first in a new series of lifelike "So Truly Real™ Early Arrivals" vinyl dolls. Collecting dolls? A perfectly sane hobby, I suppose. Baby dolls? Little yellow flags go up if the collector is over the age of 12, but it's probably a harmless manifestation of the parental instinct. But preemies?

Preemie babies are hardly a subject suitable for cloying sentimentality. There's a reason they stay in hospitals long after their full-term birthday-mates go home. They're patients. They suffer from high mortality rates, high incidence of physical and neurological deficits, and generaly suffer through the early part of their lives. "May God bless you" indeed; you need it. To have an "aww, how adorable" reflex to a preemie is to lack any understanding of what they go through. And to want a doll (or several; this is a series) that looks just like one, is... creepy.

The company selling these stresses the realism over and over. She's life size, of course. A "noted doll professional" - whose name gets zero hits from Google, so that probably means she's just some marketing flack - gushes, "This 'Early Arrivals' doll is absolutely incredible! What an accomplishment! I'm sure you'll be as amazed as I was at how lifelike she is." The advert copy describes her "soon-to-be-patented RealTouch™ vinyl skin", and promises, "Once you see her, touch her, hold her, and love her, you'll be convinced she is So Truly Real."

Maybe. But if she's that realistic, and just lies there (not even breathing), I'd call that a deathlike preemie.

The advert isn't only disturbing; it's deceptive. It starts by stating, "In 1959, an extraordinary first took place: a famous fashion doll premiered in stores for $3. Today, that same original doll can sell for thousands of dollars." They're talking about the first Barbie® of course. But the reason those dolls sell for so much today is because A) Barbie went on to become a cultural phenomenon, with literally hundreds of millions of fans who have played with them and dearly loved them as children, and B) the owners played with them, damaging or wearing out nearly all of them, so only a small number of the early Barbies are still in condition suitable for doll collectors.

"Now you have the chance to own another extraordinary first at a first-issue price," it continues. But "Little Grace" here is never going to have millions of fans, and the people who buy them are going to take very good care of them (assuming they don't have serious neurological deficits themselves). "A one-of-a-kind doll by Tinneke [the artist who designed the doll] can sell for thousands," they add. So fucking what? These aren't one-of-a-kind originals made by the master's hand; they're manufactured products. It's like the difference between owning the Mona Lisa, and owning a Mona Lisa print. These dolls aren't at all likely to go up in value, and even if by some fluke they become one of the handful of manufactured collectibles that do go up, it certainly won't be into the "thousands" range they keep teasing the buyer with. They're a horrible investment.

Especially considering how damn much they cost to begin with: "Premiering at 5 payments of $25.99*". Somehow this adds up to "$129.99*". The footnote explains that, along with the $12.98 shipping and service charges, the total cost will be $142.97. In my opinion, anyone who needs to spread the cost over 5 payments (it doesn't say, but I assume they're monthly), can't really afford to spend that kind of money on a fake dead preemie.

So what we have here is a product being marketed to psychologically disturbed, gullible people with limited disposable income. Disgusting.

Health Insurance Should Not Be A Benefit

Nearby Kalamazoo Valley Community College has instituted a policy that they won't hire people for full-time positions if they smoke cigarettes. Predictably, it's all over the headlines.

The main reaction I've seen is from smokers and civil libertarians who argue that this is unfair.

They're right.

What you do in your own time is none of your employer's business unless it impacts how you do your job. It shouldn't matter if you smoke, drink, shoot heroin, collect assault weapons, attend anime conventions dressed in Sailor Moon costumes, worship Satan, sleep with your sister, or even vote Republican. All your employer should care about is whether you do your job as expected.

The KVCC administrators are coming at from an entirely different angle. They don't seem to actually care about the morals or ethics of smoking. It isn't that they don't want you to smoke; it's that they don't want to have to pay the increased cost of your healthcare because of it. That's why the rule only applies to full-timers: KVCC gives those people health insurance as part of their standard benefits package.

They're right as well.

The only reason this is an issue is because we have this bizarre notion that employers should provide healthcare to their employees. If they didn't have to, employers like KVCC wouldn't have any reason for this policy.

Employers didn't use to pay for people's healthcare. They started offering it as an enticement to potential employees back when the government had instituted wage controls, and they were already paying the maximum wage allowed. So they conceived of "benefits", a form of compensation that wasn't wages.

Wage controls are gone now, but the workforce has become so dependent on these standard benefit packages that employers can't drop them without losing all their best employees. Even if they adjusted their wages way up to compensate, the employees would be screwed, because it's nearly impossible for individuals to get good, affordable insurance on their own. If you ask any business executive, he'll tell you that the cost of providing health insurance is one of the key things driving layoffs, off-shore outsourcing, and generally poor profitability.

The obvious solution is to free businesses of this horrible burden. Not by eliminating health insurance (which is what seems to be happening to the lower working class), but by putting that burden where it belongs: on the government. The whole insurance system is based on "pooled risk", spreading the costs of caring for really sick people among healthy people whose healthcare costs are trivial. The larger and more varied the pool, the better it works. A "pool" of over a quarter billion U.S. citizens of all ages and races and genders and lifestyles seems like a pretty good one to me.

This is the point were small-government ideologues start wailing about "socialised medicine" and how horrible that is for patients. But the current system, in which patients are increasingly going without insurance altogether, is even worse.

My boss had a difficult time getting approval to create my job. The higher-ups said it was too much money for the amount of work she'd be getting out of it, so she had to scale back the request for a 32-hour/week position instead of full-time. That made it much harder for her to fill the job; she got lucky, with me being a bit desperate, and the extra cost of paying for my own insurance is making it difficult for me to stick with the job. But just think of how many jobs could be created if employers didn't have to include insurance in the cost, because their applicants already got it elsewhere!

Of course the money to pay for health care is going to have to come from somewhere else. To some extent, employers would raise wages, since they could afford to. Then employees could buy their own, and with the whole workforce doing that the cost per person would be lower than it is now. But it would be more effective and far more fair to go back to the "pooled risk" idea and just spread the cost across the whole population. Yeah, with taxes.

This suggestion always sends the anti-tax zealots into a frenzy, but it you look at it rationally, it's not like it's going to be a huge burden on Joe Citizen. He'll almost certainly be making more money, as his employer will be able to afford paying him more. On average, he'll probably come out even.

So if it comes out even, what's the point? The point is that it frees employers from having the administer people's medical expenses. It permits employers to create jobs more freely and flexibly, in particular to do so right when they need someone, not months too late when the business is already suffering from being understaffed. It spreads the cost burden more widely and more fairly among those paying for it. It gives employees more freedom to change jobs without having to change insurance companies and change doctors. It gives a parent more freedom to drop out of the workforce to have and care for children. It frees doctors and hospitals from hiring (or becoming) collection agencies, trying to squeeze payment for services rendered out of impoverished patients and/or reluctant insurer/employers.

These would all be good things for society, for individuals, for businesses, for the medical industry... Of course the insurance industry finds the whole idea of the government filling their role unacceptable. There's just so damn much inertia in the current system. And the anti-government ideologues keep shrieking "socialized medicine". Which is why it may never happen.

The Secret of Dieting

This is no great revelation, but I think I've just confirmed the underlying principle that makes dieting (sometimes) (sort of) (for a limited time) work.

I saw some "low carb" boxed dinners (pasta and sauce mix, basically an up-scale mac and cheese) a couple weeks ago, clearance-priced at 75 cents each. I thought smugly, "So the Atkins fad has peaked, and now you've got too much inventory for it, eh?" A quick scan of the nutritional info indicated they wouldn't be bad for me, so I bought a few, and pocketed the savings over a full-priced box of Hamburger Helper® or Pasta Roni®. Money's tight, so I was happy.

This noon I pulled one of them out to prepare for lunch. Inside was the usual nondescript packet of powdered cheez product, and... a bunch of strange dark brown twisted noodles trying hard to look like rotini. And failing. The color didn't put me off (I eat whole-grain breads, not that glossy white stuff) but why wasn't it shaped like regular spiral pasta? A glance at the ingredients explained both: it was made of soy, with only a little wheat gluten to try to hold it together. I went ahead and prepared it according to the instructions on the box (substituting skim milk for the heavy whipping cream), but the not-rotini mostly fell apart into little strips of soy pasta. The texture of it wasn't exactly unpleasant, but still... unappetizing.

And that is the key to diets' success. Whatever the gimmick, the real trick is to make people not enjoy eating. Whether it's the hassle of counting calories, the ennui of eating the same thing all the time, or even going so far as to make the food disgusting, that - more than any metabolic models or nutritional principles - is why people (sometimes) (sort of) (for a limited time) lose weight when they go on these special diets.

I admit that at 200lbs+ I'm clearly no fitness guru. I'd really love to drop 40lbs and I really need to drop 20 to stay healthy. But I'm doing that the old-fashioned way: getting more exercise and eating less junk. I ride my bike to work in good weather, I take the stairs instead of elevators, I do some light weight-lifting when I can motivate myself to. I eat oatmeal (with honey) for breakfast, I take carrots and apples to work for lunch, I build my dinners around pasta or rice (not meat), and I've recently dropped the 2-3 beers from my nightly routine. It'll probably take me years (rather than months) to get my weight down to where it needs to be, but at least I'll be able to enjoy getting there.

Birth

my rating:

Birth was a disappointment. It could have been a really great film, but ended up leaving me mostly un-engaged. It's about a widow who - 10 years after the death of her husband, and following the announcement of her new engagement - is approached by a 10-year-old boy who claims to be her late husband. OK, stranger things have happened in movies, but this one just isn't believable... not in the sense that "it couldn't happen", but "it wouldn't happen like this". The characters' reactions are all dictated by the plot, rather than making sense from them as characters.

There was a tempest in a teapot over the fact that Nicole Kidman (the widow) and Cameron Bright (the boy) have a scene in which they share a bathtub. "Child pornography!" some shrieked. "Disgusting!" some spat. "Child abuse!" some wailed. It was none of that. At the risk of spoiling it, here's what happens: Kidman is taking a bath (no nipples or other naughty bits shown or hinted at). Bright walks in, gets undressed (the last full-body shot reveals his undies), and sits at the other end of the tub. Kidman demands an explanation of what he's doing. He replies (rather blandly), "Looking at my wife." End scene. And for the record, both actors wore bathing suits for filming. There's also a scene in which the two kiss on the street. A little more intimate than any kiss I've ever shared with, say, my mom, but it was no more intense than when one of my sisters' friends showed me how to kiss, at about the same age. Furthermore, it was acting; the kid certainly wouldn't traumatized by it.

The kid's lack of passion is symptomatic about why the film didn't really work. I'm not blaming the actor; he was following the script and direction. The widow is appropriately skeptical of the boy's claim to be her husband, but she seems willing to entertain the notion despite the fact that he doesn't behave like the husband would have acted. No, "I'm so happy to see you again, punkin!" and nibbling on her ear, just "Don't marry whatshisname," sitting in the tub with her. And the tests of his authenticity all focus on his knowledge of private facts only the late Sean would know, not the obvious sniff test of "Does he seem like Sean?"

It seems like the movie was intended to leave the audience wondering along with the widow whether the boy is who he claims to be, or what. But in the course of providing the necessary foreshadowing of the answer, it provides the answer rather obviously. It doesn't take too much brain power to connect the dots from A to B to C... to D. There was a little bit of surprise about one aspect of the final proof, but the basis question of "is he or isn't he?" was answered even before he said "I am."

The Spirit of Will Eisner

Will Eisner died yesterday. If you're a serious fan of the medium of comics, you know who he was. He was the Grand Master of Sequential Art.

He's famous for a bunch of things, not the least of which is having the foremost awards of the comics medium named after him. While he was still very much alive, no less. Heck, he hadn't even retired yet. (In fact, he never did. His next book comes out later this year.) The thing is, it was only slightly awkward when Eisner himself won an "Eisner".

In 1940 he created the landmark Sunday newspaper insert "The Spirit", which (to please his editor) had the trappings of a "masked adventurer" (like those trendy new "super heroes"), but was so much more than that. The character, the setting, and the strip itself had depth. And the art... the sequential storytelling... was groundbreaking, doing previously-unseen things with the page as a structure for conveying the narrative. It was Eisner who transformed the comic strip (panel, panel, panel...) into the comic book (page, page, page...).

As if that weren't enough, in the 1970s and 1980s he pushed to gain new respectability for the medium as more than just a vehicle for pictures of men in spandex hitting each other. And more importantly, he showed the way... first with A Contract With God a "graphic novel" which demonstrated the subtlety and seriousness and length that comics could aspire to, and later with Comics & Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narratives, how-to books that explained so much about the craft and vocabulary of the medium.

And as if that weren't enough, he never stopped, even in his late 80's. He averaged a graphic novel per year. His output after "retirement age" was greater than many cartoonists accomplish in their whole lives. And the number of comics conventions, seminars, classes, etc. he participated in was amazing.

And he did it all with such warmth and class. He treated everyone with respect, and received it in return. In the comics industry, where feuds and rivalries abound, I have never heard a single person say anything negative about him. Even artists who couldn't be coerced into agreeing with each other about anything ("The sky is blue!" "No, it's cyan!") will agree about what a great artist and what a great person Will Eisner was. You could fill a book with all the fond memories, the inspiring anecdotes, the encouraging bits of advice that followed in Eisner's wake.

I'm saddened to say that I don't have an "Eisner story" to share. I never met him. Which means I also never got any direct encouragement from him regarding my own work (as oh so many others did). But he left behind a great body of work, including some excellent teaching tools.

As a writer and an artist, I'll never be anywhere close to Eisner. But considering how much he did, even when much older than I am... that helps motivate me to keep working on it. And considering that even Eisner's work has now come to an end... that helps motivate me not to put it off.