Spending $1 a day on food

Rebecca Currie loves to eat, and generally spends (this may amaze you) $80 or $90 a month on food, not including a couple restaurant meals.
She's launched a 30-day project, detailed at her blog Less Is Enough, to spend a dollar a day for food -- not calorie-laden, processed food, but food that is good for you. That's her whole point: You can eat well for much less than you think.

It seems to be working.

Two things motivated Rebecca (whose project was featured in the New York Daily News):

• A New York Times article about a study that showed how high-calorie, processed food is cheaper per calorie than healthy alternatives, and related concerns that a bad economy will drive people to worse eating habits than they already have.
• The One Dollar Diet Project blog, about two teachers who each ate a dollar's worth of food a day for a month. She didn't really relish their approach. She said they transitioned quickly from a $150-a-week diet to lots of peanut butter and other boring staples. To Rebecca, that project was like running a marathon without any training. Of course it hurt.

At the end, one of them said, "I challenge anyone in America to eat fresh food for a dollar a day."
Count Rebecca in. Here's what she did:

• She started with no food in the pantry.
• She allotted a dollar, more or less, for food spending each day. She initially consumed less than a dollar's worth of food as she built up modest supplies in her pantry (no bulk buying and no coupons). Her method also eliminated the tedium of figuring out the unit cost of items for every meal.
• She cooks simple, nutritious and often organic meals, eating lots of whole grains, legumes and fresh veggies. (She found extra carbs in a 49-cent box of Jiffy biscuit mix.) As her stash of food has grown, the meals have improved. You can read her daily food record here. There's no sense of deprivation, unlike the strange tale of the blogger who ate only Chef Boyardee for a month. (We're not making that up.)
• She eats only two meals a day, which has been her routine for years.She writes, "In addition to wanting to see if I could meet the challenge, I also wanted to demonstrate an approach to cooking and eating that I've used for the past 10-plus years that allows me to eat well for much less than most people think possible."
  

Has she been hungry? During the first five or so days, she had "an undercurrent" of hunger. After that, she was all right. (Although when she writes about her first "meat" purchase, a huge chicken leg she cooked on Day 12, she's practically drooling.)
This project -- a fundraiser for The Scrap Exchange, a nonprofit "creative reuse" center in Durham, N.C. -- is not just about food, but about an approach to life. One of her posts describes lessons from a favorite book, M.F.K. Fisher's World War II-era "How to Cook a Wolf," which is once again popular. Rebecca adds, "I hate it when things I like get trendy."

Her project is about knowledge and how you use it. She writes:
Knowledge and creativity are the most important resources in the world -- far more important than money. If you know what you're doing, you can use basic items in place of things you would otherwise have to pay much more for. You can work with building blocks instead of buildings.
And if you're creative, everything is a building block, and you can combine them in a million different ways.