Thanks a latte!

 

Thursday 10:00 pm

Today I passed by the supermarket across from where I work.  Sometimes for Iunch I get a hoagie, chips and a drink.  It’s a “meal deal” and costs me five bucks.  It got me thinking about the cost of a single meal.  Doing the math and dividing $28.00 by 21 meals in a week, results in a figure of $1.33 per meal, almost one fourth of what I pay for my “deal.”    I also considered this from the other end, by that I mean estimating what I would typically spend on meals.   I figure $2.00 per breakfast is probably fair (although we have established that I am not a big breakfast eater, I do often grab a mid-morning something at WaWa.)   Let’s set lunch at $5.00 per day, and dinner four nights a week, if I cook at home, at $6.00 each and dinner out three nights per week, say 20.00 per outing (although it is sometimes more).   Grand total, if I did the arithmetic right, is $133.00 per week, which is $105.00 more than my SNAPfast week budget.  Bear in mind that this includes no snacks, no splurges, no diet cokes on the road, and no treating friends.  If I did the SNAPfast all year long I would save almost $5500.00.  Yikes!   

Since I am kicking around numbers, here are some other calculations I did:  My $28.00, if used differently, would buy me 8.6 grande lattes at Starbucks.    It would buy about 5 Happy Meals at McDonalds.   $28.00 is about the most I’ll pay for one pair of jeans.  $28.00 would fill my gas tank, but only ¾ full.   Maybe my car gets to eat better than I do.  What's up with that?

Trotting out statistics to dramatize one’s point sometimes seems sanctimonious to me, and that’s not my intent here.  Nor am I trying to inspire guilt.  I am just sharing what I discovered when I did math that I wouldn’t have done if it hadn’t been for SNAPfast.   It’s all about perspective, and when I am in the routine of my daily life, week in and week out, I think I lose sight of the fact that the way I live my life is not the ONLY way to live a life.   Ok…. I’m getting off the soapbox…for now.

When this week is over I’ll probably still eat at McDonalds some….and probably get a latte from time to time.  But I suspect the memory of this week is going to nag me a little bit.   And maybe that’s not a bad thing.