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Amaranth
12-7-12, 9:20pm
Food Challenges and Experiments for 2013

Let’s choose a couple of food experiments for 2013.

Some possibilities:

1) Living below the Line Challenge
$7.50 for food for 5 days
Good challenge for anytime of the year
Challenge is currently done internationally

2) $2 a day challenge for 7 days
Challenge is currently done internationally
Participants are encourage to collaborate
Oil/Garlic/Herb/Spice/Salt challenge kit is usually provided to groups of participants

3) What I Eat—Sadhu challenge
2 days on pilgrimage ingredients
3 days on home base ingredients
Good challenge for winter

4) What I Eat---One of the healthier whole foods menus
Which ones would most interest you?
5 days
Good late spring, summer or fall when our gardens would match up well with produce
My top choice would be the first one listed and it has the bonus of being frugal.
China-Lan Guihua—The Citrus Grower 1900 (Late June or July for most of those foods to be fresh from the garden)
Taiwan—Lin Hui-wen The Street Food Vendor 2700. Spring or Fall for garden vegetable match
Yemen—Saada Haidar—The Homemaker 2700. Summer(July or August) for vegetables and fruits to match
Latvia—Aivars Radzinx—The Beekeeper 3100. Any time as most foods are year round. Tomato and cucumber could be purchased if out of season.
Ecuador—Maria Ermelinda Ayme Sichigalo—The Mountain Farmer 3800. Anytime but the foods would be most appealing in cold weather.
USA¬¬—Joel Salatin—The Sustainable Farmer—3900. This one is mostly a mix of summer and fall ingredients, so either season could work.
Italy—Riccardo Casagrande—The Friar—4000. Most of the vegetables are summer vegetables.

5) Food stamp allotment
$21-35 for a week, depending on level of the challenge
Usually done as an empty pantry challenge
Participants sometimes split pantry items
Any time

6) Food stamp allotment plus garden
$21-35 for a week, depending on level of the challenge
Minus the value of the seed for items eaten that week
Usually done as an empty pantry challenge
Participants sometimes split pantry items
Late spring, summer or fall when the garden is producing well

7) Hungry Planet Challenge
Sudanese Refugees in Chad p57
7 day challenge
Good winter challenge as items are mostly pantry items
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5005952
See photo 3 http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_1373680,00.html

8) Hungry Planet Challenge
One of the more whole foods oriented diets where most of the foods can be easily grown/gotten by people on the forum
7 day challenge
The ones below are mostly whole foods and fairly frugal or could be grown in the garden.
China-Cui family in village p82 —Produce probably tastiest in July or August
Bhutan p 37 Summer Vegetables
Mali p207—Anytime a frugal menu
Chad-2nd family p68—Anytime as most items are dried
Ecuador-p 107—Probably best in winter.
Egypt p119—Summer Vegetables
India p167—Summer Vegetables

9) Choose a limited amount of basic pantry items and then otherwise eat from the garden.
7 day challenge
Good chance to turn garden items into a diversity of foods
Could be done in any season with fresh or stored food.

10) Grow a small Vitamin Garden per person. Use the appropriate quota of food from it each day. For example usually every 16 square feet can provide 1 serving of vegetables per day. So a Salad Table or a 4x4 garden would provide 1 vegetable per day. A 4x25 foot garden would do about 6 servings per day. With good planning a 4x25 foot garden can be intensively gardened in 1-2 hours per week.

11) $1 or $2 or $10 or 12 packet garden experiement
Get that much in seeds. See how much food we can grow.

Which challenges would be the most appealing or enlightening for you? What other challenges would you like to try?

Tiam
12-8-12, 1:49am
My garden is done in. I did not successfully plant a winter or root crop, so I wouldn't be able to start living on any garden produce for months.

Tiam
12-8-12, 1:51am
My garden is done in. I did not successfully plant a winter or root crop, so I wouldn't be able to start living on any garden produce for months. I think this shows my lack of planning effectively.

Amaranth
12-8-12, 11:53am
Well some of these are grocery store challenges, and some the garden part is optional, so you could participate in most of them. And we could also plan way ahead so people had stored crops for winter of 2014. :-)

Mer05
12-8-12, 1:03pm
I've been playing around with the idea of using a limited number of recipes/ingredients, and rotating them by season. (Like the 333 clothes project, which I did this year and have enjoyed.) There are lots of different goals around food, and they aren't easy to all fit in! Eat healthy/local/organic/seasonal/cheap, grow/cook your own, reduce food waste, etc.

What I have so far is: 21-item grocery list, plus one farmers-market freebie per week. Garden produce, spices, and tea are exempt. Eating out with company is fine, but no 'convenience' food.

I made the shopping list based on recipes I already make regularly; the farmers market clause allows a little extra variety (also bacon and donuts, which did not make the list somehow). I haven't decided what to do with pantry items that didn't make the list - I may pack them away at first, or else just use them up without replacing them.

Gregg
12-10-12, 10:16am
This is possibly DD2's last semester at home as she graduates HS in May. I've been using a modified food stamp challenge to help her learn about nutritional budgeting. I'm not sure which one of us has learned more! Our garden is a HUGE part of our planning for 2013. Right now the planning is geared to augment the holes left by shopping on a tight budget. There is a disclaimer in that this ends up being more an experiment on paper because we have a big pantry and a big spice cabinet to work out of and because I tend to go back to the store to just get what we are in the mood for, but I still think it's worth doing all the tracking we do for DD's sake.

peggy
12-11-12, 10:21am
Does it have to be a deprivation challenge? Can it be a fun challenge like trying something completely new? Or maybe each week we can pick some ingredient and see what creative ways each comes up to use that ingredient. I suppose we could take turns picking the ingredient. It would have to be something available, obviously, and not outrageously expensive.

Kestra
12-11-12, 10:42am
Does it have to be a deprivation challenge? Can it be a fun challenge like trying something completely new? Or maybe each week we can pick some ingredient and see what creative ways each comes up to use that ingredient. I suppose we could take turns picking the ingredient. It would have to be something available, obviously, and not outrageously expensive.

I agree. So not into the deprivation challenges.

Or try out a local product or small grocery store you've never been in?

Amaranth
12-11-12, 11:15am
Separate threads are started for the three challenges people are interested in so far.

Mer05, did people do the 333 clothing challenge here? If so would you make me a link to it? The Forum won't search on 333 as it classifies it as too common a word.

For a long term pantry challenge, I think using up the ones outside the pantry list and not replacing them makes the most sense.

AmeliaJane
12-11-12, 11:49am
How about a "Take a Cookbook off the Shelf" challenge? Now that I get a lot of my recipes from the Internet, I have a collection of great cookbooks that hardly ever get touched. You could pick one cookbook and cook your way through it (I have done that a couple times, and both times found recipes that later became favorites) or just challenge yourself to try a new recipe every week or two and then share the results. If nothing else, it might help identify cookbooks that don't reflect your current way of cooking and are ready to be sent to a new home.

Rosemary
12-11-12, 1:40pm
How about a challenge to maximize the servings of fruits and vegetables in a day? For ease of discussion, rather than estimating actual serving size, we could just report the produce items that were used in quantities larger than seasoning (e.g. not the 1/2 c of carrots that goes into a soup, but roasted carrots as a side).

Mer05
12-15-12, 9:44am
Amaranth, I don't think there's been a group 333 challenge done here - I found it on a different blog. There's also a 6-item challenge out there, yikes!

Amaranth
12-15-12, 12:51pm
Thanks Mer05. Would you post or send me a link to the blog with the 333 challenge? The 6 items or less challenge has been talked about on the board here. That one is very challenging.

Mer05
12-15-12, 1:38pm
The blog is here: http://theproject333.com/. The six-item one sounds like neverending laundry - 333 has been pretty doable, although this round I ended up short of shirts, somehow.