$6.88

ruled out walmart, went to kroger and relied on their 10 for 10 specials, and luckily this week they had 20 for 10 oranges and grapefruits! so i'm okay on vitamin C, which i recently discovered that pine straw has more vitamin C than oranges...strange? yes. still pondering accepting donations though. thoughts?

here are some pictures of the store:


you must be thinking "baby ruths?" i know i know. well i was checking out and had an extra dollar and they were buy one get one free and they were the closest thing...so that is how i ended up with awful-for-you baby ruths. but, they do have lots of protein!

so my total for the week was $6.88. i thought that was pretty good. its so ironic though to think about eating off a dollar a day, as i drive to the store, use my cell phone to add up what i'm spending, pay with my debit card, document this with my digital camera and laptop...

anyhoo, it turns out that i have a creative assignment about the Millenium Development Goals due for my International Agriculture Development class. so i get to kill two birds with one stone here, although i don't like killing birds...unless they are chic-fil-a birds.

so not only is it a dollar a day, but it is also a goal a day. the first MDG is to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty by 2015. over 1 billion people-1 in 6-live in extreme poverty (defined as less than $1 a day). the number itself is really effective, but it is important to remember that these numbers represent real people around the world. people that go hungry every day, children that are forced to forego education in order to work, people that have weak immune systems and are unable to work.

there is plenty of food being produced at the moment, but accessibility is the problem. (un)fortunately i live in a country where i can have whatever i want when i want, so going to the store today wasn't hard. however, i couldn't buy anything fresh. everything was packaged. nothing was local (although i did manage all usa products). granted it is winter so that is a challenge. but what about places that just can't access food, partly because it isn't affordable?

lets pretend for a second that i lived in a differently developed country...one that doesn't have gigantic grocery stores or one that doesn't have refrigerators or the technology to process and package foods? i would have to depend on growing things myself. well, i tried that here in athens but was a bad mother and killed my container garden. but most individuals or families in the us don't have adequate land or knowledge to do that.

some final food for though...i recently read that a 1% increase in agriculture yields decreases the percentage of the population living on less than $1 a day from .61% to .91%, with a slightly higher reduction in Africa. that is amazing! but i guess, like with improving your gpa or losing weight, the farther down you are the easier it is to improve.