If you go to this web page and leave a comment, Tyson Foods will donate 100 pounds of chicken and other protein-rich food to a Bay Area food bank – up to 200,000 pounds total. It all happened because of the Hunger Challenge. As of this post, there were more than 1,500 comments - that's 150,000 pounds of food!

I saw the light at the end of the tunnel – and was shining on some dark chocolate, a wedge of triple-crème cheese and a good bottle of red wine. I’m on my final day of the Hunger Challenge, the final day of spending just $3 for all my food.

And to kick it up a notch today (yeah, try saying “Bam!” to a bowl of plain oatmeal for seven days, Emeril!), my husband and I were headed for Costco and Trader Joe’s, to do our shopping. But first I fortified myself with the usual breakfast: the bam-less oatmeal, a fake latte (milk+instant espresso) and my last pear. The pear was looking as battle-scarred as I felt. In fact, Paul tried to throw it out yesterday when he was rummaging through the fridge looking for good things that had gone bad during my week of ignoring the stuff I couldn’t eat.

That pear was still beautiful to me; as the only fruit I had all week, I’d cherished every single one of those aging $0.49/pound Bartletts. Hunger Challenger Lisa Barnes commented on this, too. She found herself eating things she normally would have tossed without a thought. Today I found a spot of mold on my little stump of oatmeal quick bread. No problem! I excised it and gobbled one of my last two slices. That bargain stew meat that was past its expiration date? Sure, it had been a little grey around the edges, but it made my best dish of the week.

Amazing how un-picky we become when we don’t have any choice. And on the plus side, there was very little waste this week. My compost bucket was nearly empty. Yes, that’s partially because there wasn’t much produce that I had to prep – and when I did, you can bet I took just a thin sliver off the bottom of my broccoli stalks, instead of lopping off the entire stem, per usual. I didn’t toss out the fat, woody end of the carrot, either; I chomped away at it and was glad to have every last bit to fill my belly.

Truth be told, we toss out stuff that has gone bad every week. The neglected bag of salad greens that turned to mush because at the grocery store, we didn’t stop to consider how few meals we'd be eating at home that week – we just reflex shopped. The apples that got shoved to the back of the produce drawer. The shallot that’s turned into a science project. We are stocked up on items that are standing by, ready to serve our food whims, as they are patiently rotting away.

It makes me feel good to know that San Francisco Food Bank takes in a lot of food that would otherwise go to waste – the surplus plums that have blemishes but taste just fine, the cottage cheese that’s got a few days of grace remaining after its expiration date. The food bank’s fresh rescue team visits some of the toniest grocery stores in town, coming back with cases of heirloom tomatoes that are looking a tad tired or organic basil that’s a bit peaked. It’s the kind of stuff I’d push aside as I pawed through a produce bin, but boy, would I have loved to have it this week.

I felt a real satisfaction in knowing I was actually eating everything I’d bought. In that spirit, I used the last of the spaghetti, my final two eggs and the lone remaining carrot for a spaghetti frittata (aka Hakuna Frittata) for lunch (I threw in two non-Challenge eggs and split the result with Paul). $0.59.

Then it was off to shop. I find the big-box store Costco overwhelming even when I haven’t been living on $3 a day, but today it was nightmarish. Demo people were hawking all sorts of foods, which seemed frightening and complex compared to what I’d been eating. Ravioli? I looked at it like a cave man contemplating fire for the first time. What being eats this strange and exotic food?

I picked up the smallest package of wild salmon in the refrigerator case. $14.45. That one item, which took 30 seconds to put in my cart, cost more than the six items I eventually picked out on my nail-biting 45-minute Safeway shopping trip last week.

The capper had to be after checking out, when we were waiting to push our cart onto the elevator. The beefy man in front of us had a pallet of 24 cupcakes slathered with frosting in his cart, which he maneuvered with one hand while he shoved a hotdog into his face with the other.

But at Trader Joe’s I reclaimed some serenity. I realized how comforting it is to pick up all the things that you’re used to. Organic arugula, organic bran muffins, Niman pork chops, organic milk, crusty pugliese bread. They were like old friends and I was happy to see them again. Oh, Plugra butter, I missed you so! Did you miss me?

It brought home again how arduous it is to bend your meals around buying only what’s on sale. There’s no groove, no pattern – only that desperation to get the most for the least.

Now comes confession time. I stuck religiously to the Challenge the entire week – until my last meal. We had promised to attend a potluck dinner, and I decided it would just be too uncool to take a plastic tub with my last piece of chicken and final florets of broccoli. Or to show up with nine servings of oatmeal as my contribution.

I made the appetizer I’d offered to provide – halved green figs from the farmers market, spread with a dab of soft blue cheese and wrapped with a band of prosciutto. I felt like the kitchen staff preparing for a society shindig.

And, after a week with no chocolate, I decided to whip up a batch of super-rich brownies to take along, too. I was even willing to share them!

My total for the day, counting my remaining dinner ingredients: $2.91. My grand total for the week: $17.81. With the ingredients I’d purchased for my $21, I was also able to feed my husband three dinner entrees and 1½ lunches, plus I had surplus oatmeal. I won’t be eating it any time soon.

As I sipped my first glass of wine in seven days, I felt like a guilty Cinderella who got to go to the ball but didn't deserve it. I told my friends about the Hunger Challenge and described my scintillating menu for the week. And then I dug into grilled lamb chops, mâche salad with goat cheese, CSA-box green beans with fresh lemon zest, corn pudding and homemade peach-ginger-cardamom ice cream.

At the end of the meal, I didn’t even have room for that brownie I’d been craving. I didn’t really miss it, either. I realized I could have a brownie the next day, the day after, or the day after that. I could probably have a brownie whenever I wanted for the rest of my life.

But I don’t think I’ll ever forget about the people who can’t. Because looking at the world with hungry eyes for one short week, I’ve seen what a struggle it must be for those who live this challenge for real. That bitter taste of inequity will season everything I eat for a long time to come.

GET INVOLVED!
♥ Learn about the San Francisco Food Bank.
♥ Read the blogs of people taking the Hunger Challenge. There's a blogroll here.
♥ Donate and receive a special thank you gift!
1. Click on donate to go to the donation page.
2. Fill out the necessary info and make a donation of $50 or more.
3. About 2/3 of the way down the form, look for a header that says, “Food Drive/Event Information (not required)”
4. Use the drop-down box to select “Bloggers Hunger Challenge,” so we’ll know you are participating.
5. Be one of the first 12 people to donate $50 or more and you’ll receive a brand new free cookbook as a thank-you.

Wow! If you go to this web page and leave a comment, Tyson Foods will donate 100 pounds of chicken and other protein-rich food to a Bay Area food bank – up to 200,000 pounds total. It all happened because of the Hunger Challenge!

Today I went to a buffet. I used to think of it as the Alemany Farmers Market, but today I realized it was a gigantic smorgasbord of free samples. Since a low-income person could easily come here to graze, I didn’t feel like I was breaking the Hunger Challenge rules, which limit me to just $3 a day for all my food.

In the past, while browsing the farmers market, I only sampled items I was interested in buying; today, I snacked at will, without guilt or shame – peach slice, strawberry, dried French plum, tomato slice. Amazing how five days of going hungry can also starve your inhibitions.

My husband, Paul, and I were doing our produce shopping for the upcoming week. But it was totally surreal knowing I wouldn’t be able to actually eat the food I was purchasing for another two days – until after the Challenge was over. As I squeezed Cherokee tomatoes, I realized I’d been missing the sensuousness of fresh produce, confined as I’ve been to a pear a day and a serving of broccoli.

Back home, I analyzed my remaining stash of cooked whole-grain spaghetti and decided I had enough extra to make a version of this spaghetti frittata recipe that Hunger Challenger Vanessa Barrington created. I was missing a few ingredients, but decided to give it a go. I sautéed two diced carrots and a clove of garlic in some bacon grease (my secret flavor weapon), then threw in some spaghetti and added 4 beaten eggs. I had enough food volume to split the result with Paul (who would probably eat a shoe if you sautéed it in bacon grease). He decided it should be called Hakuna Fritata, because the spaghetti resembled a lion’s mane. “Chow mane,” I added. Food deprivation has made me slightly giddy, too. My lunch, $.59.

I sliced up and macerated a mountain of strawberries for my post-Challenge week, not popping a single one in my mouth. I was feeling sooo virtuous. But again, I started thinking about the ill-paid kitchen staff at restaurants all over town. They must handle ingredients every day, week in, week out, that they could never afford to eat at home.

For dinner, I had enough ragù and spaghetti to feed both of us - but by my calculation there should have been three portions left and there were actually only two. I don’t know what happened, because I measured the entire batch the night I made it, and there were almost exactly 8 cups. Somehow it turned into 7 cups. If I’d been counting on that last cup, I would have gotten a rude surprise. Just another reminder that, in the world of the poor, there is no room for mistakes or miscalculations.

“You know, you could have some heirloom tomatoes with your dinner,” I said to Paul.

“I wouldn’t eat those without you!” he replied, melting my heart. “But I might have some wine,” he added, freezing it right back up again.

Total for the day: $2.77. If I were doing another week of the Hunger Challenge, this would have been the day I’d go grocery shopping. My arduous shopping experience of a week ago makes me really glad I’m going to be done tomorrow. It’s the hardest part of eating for just $21. You seal your fate for a week, living for better or worse on the choices you make.

It’s hard to imagine going through another cycle of scanning the ads, shopping, calculating, re-calculating, putting things back and finally hoping the collection of groceries I ended up with will turn into decent meals. It might eventually get easier, but not much. How can people do it month after month? How long before I would just give up and go to McDonald’s for a $1 meal? Or snap and buy something expensive that I craved, even if it meant I wouldn’t eat for two days? Or simply break into tears in the middle of a grocery aisle?

GET INVOLVED!
♥ Learn about the San Francisco Food Bank.
♥ Read the blogs of people taking the Hunger Challenge. There's a blogroll here.
♥ Donate and receive a special thank you gift!
1. Click on donate to go to the donation page.
2. Fill out the necessary info and make a donation of $50 or more.
3. About 2/3 of the way down the form, look for a header that says, “Food Drive/Event Information (not required)”
4. Use the drop-down box to select “Bloggers Hunger Challenge,” so we’ll know you are participating.
5. Be one of the first 12 people to donate $50 or more and you’ll receive a brand new free cookbook as a thank-you.

Wow! If you go to this web page and leave a comment, Tyson Foods will donate 100 pounds of chicken and other protein-rich food to a Bay Area food bank – up to 200,000 pounds total. It all happened because of the Hunger Challenge!

I didn’t intend to save money by skipping a meal during the Hunger Challenge (which limits me to just $3 a day for all my food). Events conspired against me. I was trying to get some work finished and ended up racing out the door for a mid-day meeting – grabbing a slice of the dwindling oatmeal quick bread as I went.

I hadn’t planned to eat lunch on the go today; there is nothing sandwich-like in my Challenge repertoire. So I was stuck. My client, Dominique, offered me a juice cooler or a coffee drink, but I had to decline. She is French, and a wonderful cook, so you can imagine the look of horror on her face when I said I was eating on $3 a day – and she insisted on making me a care package of goodies for when this is all over.

At 4 pm – still no lunch! – I met my husband for our planned rendezvous at the de Young Museum to see the Dale Chihuly exhibit.

“I’m sooo hungry,” I told him.

“I can buy you something!” he offered.

“No, it’s not in my budget! I replied.

“It’s in my budget!” he countered.

“No! No! No! I can’t do it!” Hunger is definitely making me cranky.

But when I was inside the exhibit, I forgot how hungry I was. What a treat – after strategizing, stressing, planning and measuring all week – to go to a museum and feed my soul.

How often does a low-income person get to visit a museum? What else are they hungry for, besides food?

I’d planned on stopping by the food bank’s largest pantry today, which happens to be in my neighborhood, hosted by St. Gregory’s church. The volunteers at St. Gregory’s do a great job, and maybe that’s why as many as 700 people travel from all across the city, waiting an hour or two to get inside. I wanted to peek at what they were distributing at the grocery pantry and imagine how it would have made a difference to get an infusion of carrots or a watermelon; mushrooms, jalapenos, a loaf of bread or a pineapple (all items I’ve seen before at St. Gregory’s). But the hard fact is, I didn’t have time. I couldn’t spend an hour in line.

How can somebody with kids and a job manage to do that, too? And the lines are getting even longer, as food prices skyrocket and the economy goes south. Every San Francisco pantry is seeing more clients.

Fortunately, when we finally got home, all I had to do was re-heat some ragù and spaghetti. I stuffed another piece of oatmeal bread in my mouth to stop my stomach from growling while I dished up our dinner. There were still five ragù portions left, so I invited Paul to partake. This dish is a definite hit. “Yummy!” Paul said, “Let’s have it again.”

His wish will come true tomorrow night.

My total for the day: $2.18. I’m starting to feel like I’m in food jail, eating the same things, parceling out my remaining ingredients. I’m coming to realize how much comfort and satisfaction good food provides, beyond sustenance. I can’t wait until this is over.

I flashed on the boxes of donated Joseph Schmidt chocolates I’ve seen in the San Francisco Food Bank warehouse. When they’re available, the food bank sends them out to neighborhood grocery pantries, and each client who comes in gets a chocolate truffle. Can you imagine what a treat that must be for people who’ve been standing in line wishing they could be someplace else, wishing they didn’t need a handout just to feed their family? It’s a morsel of food for the soul.

GET INVOLVED!
♥ Learn about the San Francisco Food Bank.
♥ Read the blogs of people taking the Hunger Challenge. There's a blogroll here.
♥ Donate and receive a special thank you gift!
1. Click on donate to go to the donation page.
2. Fill out the necessary info and make a donation of $50 or more.
3. About 2/3 of the way down the form, look for a header that says, “Food Drive/Event Information (not required)”
4. Use the drop-down box to select “Bloggers Hunger Challenge,” so we’ll know you are participating.
5. Be one of the first 12 people to donate $50 or more and you’ll receive a brand new free cookbook as a thank-you.

Wow! If you go to this web page and leave a comment, Tyson Foods will donate 100 pounds of chicken and other protein-rich food to a Bay Area food bank – up to 200,000 pounds total. It all happened because of the Hunger Challenge!

I realized pretty fast today that my husband, Paul, was not stepping up for the Hunger Challenge – spending just $1 a meal for food. He’d been out-of-town all week on business, until last night. This morning he took off for an early breakfast meeting, no-doubt devouring piles of pancakes and mountains of bacon. Then, this afternoon, he wandered into my home office holding a plate piled with three slices of Jurassic-era pizza he’d dredged up from the back of the fridge.

“Go away!” I yelled at him. He got a bad-dog look on his face and high-tailed it down the hall.

Later on, I found an empty hummus tub in the sink and I heard him crunching away on one of the homemade pickles I’d been ignoring all week because their fresh dill, garlic, sea salt and pickling spices – plus the price of a large Ball jar – made them way too expensive to qualify for the challenge.

Although, after kissing Paul, I learned that the pickles are coming along quite nicely. I kissed him again, hungrily. And I do mean hungrily. He was briny, garlicky and delicious.

Would it be possible to feed a 6’2” guy on $1 a meal? I’m doubtful. I suspect I’d have to whittle myself down to $0.75 a meal, or less, to keep him from wasting away. For a moment, I imagined it would actually be a relief to have a young kid with a small appetite to even things out. Except kids eventually become ravenous teenagers. And you have to keep them in clothes, shoes – and if you can somehow find a way, college.

I’ve actually met more than one food bank client who first started coming to get groceries at a neighborhood pantry when their child started college. They put everything they had into paying for the kid’s education, including their food money. That’s how strong a parent’s dream can be for a child.

I have a very small dream: getting to the end of the week. Today I ate the usual oatmeal, pear and fake latte breakfast. $0.71. I ate the usual scrambled eggs and carrot stick lunch. $0.41.

Then I started wondering what I’d make for dinner. Since I’d had the same thing three evenings in a row, I decided it was time to break out the chicken. My remaining available ingredients included tomato sauce, half an onion, garlic and 1/3 can of tomato paste. Just to see what would happen, I put “chicken breasts” and “tomato sauce” into the search box at Epicurious. A bunch of recipes popped up, including the most likely candidate, “Chicken with Spicy Tomato Sauce.”

The recipe called for putting diced Mexican-style canned tomatoes in a blender, along with garlic and spices. I substituted my remaining tomato products, threw in garlic, oregano (from the garden), chili powder, cumin – and, in a good Challenge scenario – had to fake it with some extra cumin and cayenne, because I was short on chili powder. But then again, how many seasonings would a low-income person have to work with?

The recipe also called for orange and lime juices, which I could have added, but didn’t, because they weren’t in the budget. I browned the Pamela Anderson-sized chicken breasts and put them in a baking dish, then poured the sauce over them and scattered onion slices on the top. I was going to chop and brown the onions, but didn’t have the initiative. I told myself it would make me feel better to have recognizable pieces of another vegetable besides broccoli on my plate. I covered the whole thing with foil (which I suppose I should have counted in my budget, but didn’t) and put it in the oven for an hour. The recipe called for simmering it on the stove, but baking sounded easier and I think it makes chicken moister.

I did some calculating while the chicken cooked, and felt pretty confident I could feed Paul dinner with my remaining resources. I contemplated selling him dinner for, oh, maybe $15, but decided that wouldn’t be very nice. As a backup I still have the other half of the 4.3-pound chicken package I bought and didn't budget to use for myself.

The chicken turned out pretty good, despite the sauce missing its citrus element. I told Paul he couldn’t have any of my broccoli, so he consoled himself with salad and leftover grilled asparagus, neither of which I was allowed to eat.
My dinner total: $1.43, the most expensive meal yet. And at a grand total of $2.73 (including 3 slices of oatmeal quick bread), I’m still under $3 for the day, thanks to my frugal breakfast and lunch. Although it was nice to cut into some meat, I realized my money went a lot farther with the beef ragù I’d made before, stretched by the carrots, mushrooms, canned tomatoes and the pasta I served it with.

Soups, stews, casseroles. They’re all great ways to maximize your food dollar. But it sure was nice to get a big piece of meat. That’s why I’m so excited about the offer Tyson Foods has made as a direct result of the Hunger Challenge. Somebody at Tyson read one of Amy Sherman’s Hunger Challenge tweets and now their company is offering up to 200,000 pounds of high-protein foods to Bay Area food banks. That's six tractor-trailerloads of the most hard-to-come-by foods desperately needed by food banks!

Please click here now to leave a comment and Tyson will add 100 pounds of protein-rich food to a truck headed for the Bay Area food banks. It’s the easiest donation you’ll ever make!

In a wicked stroke of fate, the story of my search for the best clotted cream in Cornwall ran as the cover of the Washington Post travel section this past Sunday. Ever since, complete strangers have been sending me emails rapturously describing their love for rich, unctuous clotted cream, warm scones slathered with blackberry jam and…ack!

I’m only reminded that somebody living at the edge of poverty is never, ever going to taste clotted cream or scones. More like Welch’s grape jelly on toast.

So my very different search continues – how will I eat for $3 a day?

Today I looked in my dishwasher (to be realistic, I should be washing all my dishes by hand, I suppose) and saw only small, salad-sized plates and bowls. I’ve been using that dieter’s trick of eating off smaller plates, so my food looks bigger. Only my stomach isn’t fooled. I was wondering how I’d survive my mid-day exercise class.

I had my usual oatmeal, pear and fake-latte breakfast, but saved three pear slices to parcel out later in the day when I wanted something sweet. Let’s just total it up as the same old $0.71, since I don’t want to figure out how much three pear slices would cost and subtract them. The entire week (ha – I just typed “weak” by mistake, a very Freudian typo!) has seemed like one huge, exhausting story problem.

It takes a lot more effort to cook with purchases all dictated by the fact that they were on sale, too. Usually I work with a repertoire I choose. It makes shopping easy. I have an idea of what I’m making, and if I need a special ingredient or run out of something, I just go buy it.

I wonder if somebody on food stamps would have the energy to adapt to the whims of the food ads every week. And would her family put up with the odd parade of items Foods Co - or some other discount grocer - had selected to promote?

Well, I made it through my class – and was particularly good at “scooping in my abs,” per the teacher’s instructions. An empty stomach helps. But I had to rush home and devour two eggs and a carrot for lunch, with a slice of the mediocre oatmeal quick bread on the side. $0.47.

“Dessert” was reading an excruciatingly fabulous list of San Francisco’s best sweets in the Tablehopper newsletter, submitted by sugar-crazed readers. I was buoyed by the fact that the ‘Hopper herself included a shout-out to all of us doing the Hunger Challenge. Thanks, Marcia!

But what really made my day was news that a major food company is going to make a huge donation to six Bay Area food banks – directly as a result of this Hunger Challenge. Boggling. More about that in the next post.

It’s a good thing that I don’t mind eating leftovers, because this was the third day in a row I had ragù with spaghetti (here’s a close-up) and broccoli for dinner. Fortunately, it’s one of those dishes that gets better the longer it sits in the fridge. Maybe I was hallucinating, but it started to remind me of some delectable rigatoni Bolognese I ate at Fraiche, in Culver City, CA. $1.29 (that's for my dinner, not the one at Fraiche!).

Total for the day, $2.59, including two additional slices of oatmeal bread I snacked on.

Later in the evening, I picked my husband up at the airport. No sooner did he walk in the house than he popped open a bottle of San Pellegrino water, one of my rare guilty eco-evil pleasures. I’d missed him over the last three days, but I was beginning to see that this Hunger Challenge could get harder with another person in the household. Would he join in, or would I have to watch him chowing down on all the things I couldn’t eat for the rest of the week? And would he stay the heck away from my food??

How do people living in poverty divvy up scarce food among family members? Or what would happen if your teenage son came home from school while you were at work and hoovered up the entire main dish you were planning to serve for dinner?

GET INVOLVED!
♥ Learn about the San Francisco Food Bank
♥ Join the Hunger Challenge
♥ Donate and receive a special thank you gift!
1. Click on donate to go to the donation page.
2. Fill out the necessary info and make a donation of $50 or more.
3. About 2/3 of the way down the form, look for a header that says, “Food Drive/Event Information (not required)”
4. Use the drop-down box to select “Bloggers Hunger Challenge,” so we’ll know you are participating.
5. Be one of the first 12 people to donate $50 or more and you’ll receive a brand new free cookbook as a thank-you.

There’s a wickedly good half-eaten brownie from Baked. in my freezer – right next to the ice cream. In the fridge lurks a wedge of triple-crème French cheese, butter, some apples, salad greens and a bunch of beets. I have a hoard of assorted chocolate that I’d put up against anybody’s collection in the Bay Area. And I can’t eat any of it.

On my second day of spending just $3 for all my food, I felt surrounded by things I couldn’t have. It’s like all the food items I really want to eat are behind velvet ropes until the end of the week.

A low-income person certainly wouldn’t have this enticing food staring her in the face at home – but imagine what it must be like to walk the aisles of a grocery store and know that so many things are out of your reach. Behind the velvet rope. To someone living in poverty, a grocery store – and maybe the entire world – must seem like a food museum.

What about walking past restaurants – or even working in one – that you could never afford to eat in? How would it feel to be a cleaning person, emptying the trash in an office and seeing spoiled, half-eaten food that was tossed out after a meeting? What if somebody invited you to have a cup of coffee and you had to make excuses for why you couldn’t order anything, like my Hunger Challenge cohort, Genie, did?

My second day on the Challenge was nearly a repeat of my first. I had the same oatmeal and pear breakfast, and I put my fake latte in a smaller mug so I wouldn’t feel so deprived. $0.71.

For lunch, I scrambled a couple of eggs ($0.36), with a carrot ($0.5) on the side. I put some basil from my garden into the eggs, based on the Challenge rules stating that seasonings are “free.” (This may be bending the intent, but I happen to know there’s actually a low-income housing community in the Tenderloin that grows potted herbs on the roof of their building.)

For dinner, I reaped the benefits of my hard work from last night, and ate leftover ragù with whole grain pasta. I carefully laid out all my broccoli crowns on the kitchen counter to make sure I only took 1/6 of what was left, then steamed it. Definitely a satisfying dinner, but I’m used to having big portions of 2-3 vegetables instead of the single modest serving I was allowed. $1.29.

I didn’t buy any bread for the week, but wanted to try an oatmeal quick bread recipe sent to me by the folks at Leah’s Pantry. I put a cup of oatmeal into my blender to grind it up, per instructions, and began to wonder how many people living near the poverty line could afford a blender or microwave. Another example of how it would be tough to make much headway if you couldn’t invest in cooking gear.

I carefully followed the instructions, combining the oatmeal ($0.20), baking powder ($0.06), honey ($0.15), milk ($0.27), flour ($0.19), salt (free) and oil ($0.10). I went renegade by using some staple ingredients I’d had on hand, but the milk and oatmeal came out of my Challenge purchases.

The only problem? I was supposed to make the dough into a ball and cook it on a cookie sheet (more gear). But the dough was the consistency of a thick pancake batter. No way it would make a ball. I was freaked out that I could have wasted some of my coveted ingredients – particularly milk – on a potential failure. I threw in some more flour and brought the batter to the consistency I’d expect in a quick bread, then poured it into an oiled bread pan (still more gear) and baked it.

I got a flattish, dense loaf that tastes OK – and better toasted – but of course that’s with no butter, jam or triple-crème French cheese...mmm...cheese... Total cost, $0.97, not such a good deal, compared to buying a big store loaf of whole wheat bread, which I saw on sale for $1.50.

My husband, Paul, gets home tomorrow night. I’m going to try to lure him into the Challenge by wafting the ragù aroma around our house. He needs to join in, or no ragù, mister!

So for the day, breakfast ($0.71), lunch ($0.41), dinner ($1.29) and 2 slices of oatmeal quick bread ($.12) add up to $2.53.

Today I learned that, in addition to not having enough cash to save money by buying in bulk, someone in poverty would need to invest even more non-existent capital in equipment and ingredient staples, all to be able to save money by cooking from scratch.

It’s a double-whammy. Makes me wonder if the Food Bank, or somebody, could start a program – let’s call it “Project Grub Stake” – which gets people over the hump by supplying staples you just need small amounts of over time, along with basic cooking equipment.

GET INVOLVED!
♥ Learn about the San Francisco Food Bank
♥ Join the Hunger Challenge
♥ Donate and receive a special thank you gift!
1. Click on donate to go to the donation page.
2. Fill out the necessary info and make a donation of $50 or more.
3. About 2/3 of the way down the form, look for a header that says, “Food Drive/Event Information (not required)”
4. Use the drop-down box to select “Bloggers Hunger Challenge,” so we’ll know you are participating.
5. Be one of the first 12 people to donate $50 or more and you’ll receive a brand new free cookbook as a thank-you.

Unlike some of the other bloggers taking the San Francisco Food Bank’s Hunger Challenge, I’ve never faced dire economic straits. I grew up in the Midwest, solidly middle class, and was raised on – yes – middling food. Sure, when I was making a pittance at my first job, I scarfed a lot of “dinners” at free happy hour buffets while nursing a single glass of bad white wine – but all in all, I’ve never had to wonder where my next meal was coming from.

Maybe that’s why I find it so rewarding to help out at the San Francisco Food Bank: I believe everybody should have the right to a decent meal. If you feel that way, too, please consider giving to the Food Bank, where every $1 donated is turned into $9 worth of food. As a special thank-you, the first 12 people who give $50 or more during the Hunger Challenge will get a free cookbook, courtesy of Amy Sherman (NOTE: you MUST choose “Blogger Hunger Challenge” on the donation page drop-down menu when you give; it’s about 2/3 of the way down the page, under the header “Food Drive/Event Information”).

Here’s a slide show that gives you a glimpse of what SF Food Bank does to help feed people in need:



My First Day on the Hunger Challenge

I’ve always liked oatmeal, so it wasn’t too tough substituting it for the half a bran muffin I usually eat. I don’t like anything sweet on my oatmeal, so didn’t have to factor in toppings. A little butter would have been nice, though.

A Bartlett pear filled in for the big bowl of berries I normally eat. Again, not too bad. I measured out a cup of milk, which only half-filled the cup I usually use for my morning latte, and shook some instant espresso into it. (I blew up my beloved espresso machine a while back and have been using this instant stuff ever since.) A pretty satisfying breakfast, which clocked in at $0.71.

I don’t always eat lunch, because most lunch-ish foods bore me (peanut butter sandwiches, no thanks!). Despite the fact that I briefly considered buying a $1.99 bar of Trader Joe’s organic dark chocolate and using it as two lunches, I am going without chocolate for a week. So I took some of the extra oatmeal I’d made with me in case pangs set in, but ended up not eating it until I got home at around 5 o’clock. $0.10.

And the reason I was eating oatmeal at almost-dinnertime? I wanted to make a braised dish with the stew meat, and knew it would have to spend several hours in the oven before I’d get to dig in. The fact is, cooking cheap takes more time. You have to use tougher cuts of meat and make things from scratch. It’s like having a second job (and a lot of low-income people already work two jobs).

My stew meat, now two days past its sell-by date (the reason I got that 30% discount), was a little grey around the edges, so I needed to use it - fast. Best case, I would have made this dish ahead of time over the weekend, but my schedule didn’t cooperate.

I vaguely followed my favorite recipe for Brasato al Barolo – hold the Barolo. I browned the 1.43 pounds of meat in some bacon drippings, instead of the usual olive oil. I assessed myself $.20 for that 2 tablespoons of leftover bacon grease I had on hand. It made up for the pancetta in the regular recipe and added a lot of flavor – but was it cheating? I decided not, since it seems in line with the resources a low-income person might have. Then I sautéed half a chopped onion and a half-pound of sliced carrots, adding garlic and my precious mushrooms (large dice). I threw in my can of diced tomatoes with basil and garlic and about half a can of tomato paste. The meat went back in, with a couple of cups of water. I brought it all to a simmer and then popped it (covered) into the oven for two and a half hours at 325 degrees.

Subconsciously, I think I was constructing an "umami bomb," as Jean-Georges Vongerichten is fond of calling it (I'd like to see him cook for $1 a meal!). Mushrooms, tomatoes, browned meat (and the Brasato recipe didn’t even call for mushrooms). Maybe I was trying to make something so savory, my hunger fears would be quelled.

I’m a far cry from the expert recipe developers who are also taking this Challenge, but I have to say, I was happy with my concoction. After it came out of the oven, I broke up the falling-apart meat, then carefully measured every drop to see how many portions I’d created. There was almost exactly eight cups.

That made me happy, because it meant I was ahead of the curve; at the least, I could have a good dinner every night – and I still had chicken breasts in the fridge. Having something tasty to look forward to can make a big difference, even if it’s just one meal out of the day.

I cooked my whole-grain pasta and steamed some broccoli. It was a pretty good meal – though I was wishing I’d somehow managed to pick up a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck red. Yeah, right. With tax, that would have meant giving up all my oatmeal – or my morning caffeine. Not worth it.

The total cost of the stew braise was $6.78, and eating 1/8 of it, plus the other items, made my dinner come in at $1.29. For the whole day, I spent $2.10, mostly thanks to my bad lunch habits.

But, if I’d had to feed my husband – or god forbid, an imaginary teenager – I likely would have gone over. Making a personal sacrifice is one thing, but having to feed other people whom you want to be happy and nourished is something very different. We hear stories all the time at the Food Bank about parents who don’t eat so their kids can have food – or medicine, or shoes.

GET INVOLVED!
♥ Learn about the San Francisco Food Bank
♥ Join the Hunger Challenge
♥ Donate and receive a special thank you gift!
1. Click on donate to go to the donation page.
2. Fill out the necessary info and make a donation of $50 or more.
3. About 2/3 of the way down the form, look for a header that says, “Food Drive/Event Information (not required)”
4. Use the drop-down box to select “Bloggers Hunger Challenge,” so we’ll know you are participating.
5. Be one of the first 12 people to donate $50 or more and you’ll receive a brand new free cookbook as a thank-you.

So, I cooked up this idea, and it suddenly dawned on me that I’d be a total weasel if I didn’t do it, too. I’m talking about the San Francisco Food Bank Hunger Challenge, wherein I convinced some of the Bay Area’s best food bloggers to eat for just $1 a meal.

Why? To shine a light on the thousands of people who are forced to live on that meager sum - day in, day out. The $1 figure is significant, because that’s the average amount a family receiving food stamps gets per person, per meal.

Think about it: only $21 a week for all your food. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I started fretting last Wednesday, when I pounced on the two grocery store inserts that came in our newspaper. I studied them like I was prepping for a final exam, instead of just glancing to see if perhaps there was a killer deal on wild salmon. I even dug through the recycling to rescue those same two ad sections after my husband gave them a toss. As I lectured him about keeping his mitts off my food ads, I realized it was going to be a stressful few days.

Poor me. There are people who can’t even afford the price of a newspaper to scope out food deals.

Normally, I shop for produce at a farmers market and hit Trader Joe's for the rest – but this weekend my schedule didn’t allow me to go to any of the three farmers markets held in San Francisco. So on Saturday evening, after making a sketchy shopping list, I set out to buy my week’s rations, clutching my precious advertising sections.

I started at Safeway, the area’s major grocery chain. A greeter welcomed me and right off I saw the Bartlett pears for $.49 a pound, which I’d already noted in the store’s ad. I weighed out seven for about $1.50. “A pear every day! This isn’t going to be so bad,” I thought.

Surfing my bargain-pear high, I grabbed a bunch of asparagus, on sale for $1.79, and headed for the mushroom section. If I spent $10, I could use a coupon to get a pack of fresh mushrooms for just $.69. But, oh, no! The shelf where the $.69 mushrooms were supposed to be was empty.

That agitated me. I was counting on those bonus cheapie mushrooms! I found a produce guy and demanded my fungus. He scuttled off, while I stared at the oodles of $2 mushroom packages and pondered whether there were any more “coupon” mushrooms left in the back room. Fortunately there were – but the guy was surprised when I only took one of the “limit two” cartons he held out to me. I probably should have taken them both, but I was being conservative.

Onward to meat. The 7-bone chuck pot roasts were advertised at $1.89 a pound. When I finally found them in the case, they were huge – and ribboned with thick fat, in addition to being studded with bones – not to mention being stickered with price tags in the $10 range.

I desperately scanned the section, looking only at the price per pound on the packages, not even paying much attention to what was inside. Then I spied some well-trimmed beef stew meat that was close to its sell-by date, tagged with a 30% off sticker. At the sale price of about $2.80 a pound, I decided it was the best I would do.

Oatmeal. I like the stuff, it’s a whole grain - and it was on special as “buy one, get one free.” I would rather have had just one for half price, but I put two cartons in my basket. Yes, you can save a lot by buying large “family” packages or stocking up on multiples – unless, of course, you don’t have the investment capital.

Should I have corralled one of the other food bloggers to be my shopping buddy? Could we have agreed on what to purchase and share? Too late for my mini-buying club idea, and logistically probably not so easy, either.

Pasta. A pack of whole grain spaghetti was on sale for $1.49. Sweet! I’d make some quick pasta sauce, using the $.25 per can tomato sauce I was going to buy at my next stop.

Then I got nervous about the asparagus. Was it too extravagant? I wanted milk and eggs, too, but those items seemed so pricey (I could buy one 18-count carton of eggs for $5.99 and get a second for free – a decent price per dozen, but no way did I want to be out six bucks and stuck with 36 eggs!).

I put the asparagus back, and poked through my basket, adding up the price of everything. I was $.26 short of the $10 total I needed to use the mushroom coupon. What to do? I wanted those mushrooms. They had become some odd, obsessive symbol of luxury and I was GOING TO HAVE THEM. I grabbed a can of diced tomatoes with basil, on sale for a dollar.

Checkout. I watched every item ring up, and then mentally validated each discount as it deducted. Wait. There was something wrong. The mushrooms rang up as $2.99 and $1.30 was subtracted. They were overcharging me a dollar for the damn mushrooms! I pointed out the error to the checker, who did the math and then handed me a dollar bill from the cash register.

Wahoo! A dollar! I felt like I’d won the lottery. Then I wondered if somebody with a couple of kids might have been distracted and not even noticed the error until it was too late. Or how about people who lack the language confidence to challenge a checker?

I had spent $11.29 - and according to Safeway's calculations, I'd just saved $13.43 off the regular prices by buying only sale items. Without the discounts, I'd have already blown my $21 budget.

Onward to Foods Co, a place I’d never shopped before. On the way, as I drove past clutches of stores in the Mission District with produce displays on the street, I scanned the prices. Yes, if I had time to wander up and down, perhaps I’d get some produce deals – but not with my schedule this week.

Foods Co was grim. Cracked concrete floors, bare-bones displays. A marked contrast to the bright, shiny Safeway experience. This is the sort of place where people who are really on food stamps might shop.

I was here for the $.97 a pound chicken breasts, and grabbed one of the last two Foster Farms packs in the case. It was $4.20, and I took it, wondering if I would be cheating to use only half and apply just $2.10 towards my $21 maximum. I postponed my moral dilemma by telling myself I could convince my husband to join in the Hunger Challenge when he returned from his business trip later in the week. That would give me a cash infusion of – gosh – a whole $9 over three days! And a big, hungry guy to feed.

Carrots, $.69/pound. Broccoli crowns, $.98/pound. Milk, $2.08/quart. Eggs, $2.18/dozen. Four cans of tomato sauce. Tomaot paste, $.78. I paused to consider the packs of ramen, 10 for $1. Nope. I’ve forsaken organic for the week. These eggs are no doubt from chickens that were caged and fed god-knows-what. I am not stooping to eat the list of scary artificial stuff in these puffy little ramen packs. I’d rather gobble oatmeal for lunch.

So, here I am, stocked up for the week. I’m so intimate with everything I bought and what it cost that I have each item memorized, along with what I paid. I didn’t have to look at my register receipts once to write this.

I’m going to “sell” myself a tiny jar of instant espresso, an onion and a head of garlic that I had on hand. I’ll hope I’m not bending the rules too much by costing out small amounts of flour and oil that I plan on using.

I seemed oddly obsessed with protein when I was shopping. I don’t know if that’s because meat was the most expensive line-item, or if I was worried about going hungry. I’m light on vegetables, and those trophy mushrooms have all the nutritional value of a wad of wet paper. The funny thing is, I love vegetables. I’ve been gorging on heirloom tomatoes, strawberries, chard and stone fruits this past month.

What am I doing with this alien batch of groceries???

It starts Monday. I figure I can survive anything for a week. Too bad the real folks on food stamps don’t have that organic-heirloom-grass-fed-didn’t-notice-the-price-‘cause-I’m-worth-it light at the end of the tunnel.

GET INVOLVED!
♥ Learn about the San Francisco Food Bank
♥ Join the Hunger Challenge
♥ Donate and receive a special thank you gift!
1. Click on donate to go to the donation page.
2. Fill out the necessary info and make a donation of $50 or more.
3. About 2/3 of the way down the form, look for a header that says, “Food Drive/Event Information (not required)”
4. Use the drop-down box to select “Bloggers Hunger Challenge,” so we’ll know you are participating.
5. Be one of the first 12 people to donate $50 or more and you’ll receive a brand new free cookbook as a thank-you.

Thank goodness for the man from Hope. No, not Bill Clinton. And not Barack Obama, either. I’m talking about the guy from Hope, Minnesota.

Victor Mrotz appeared like a vision, holding a huge tray of bread slices, slathered with slabs of butter from the Hope Creamery. I was standing in a looooong line, waiting to get a plate with three little pieces of cheese at Slow Food Nation, the big event celebrating American foods that was held in San Francisco this past weekend.

Slow Food Nation made me cranky – or at least the Taste Pavilions portion of the event did. With 2,000 people swarming only 16 pavilions for samples of charcuterie, seafood, pickled items, jams, honey, cocktails, chocolate, ice cream, coffee and other goodies, there were bound to be bottlenecks.

Very nice volunteers were slamming bits of chocolate or scoops of scrumptious ice cream onto paper plates and dealing them out at a breakneck speed to attendees who were mostly obsessed with tasting everything available before their 4-hour ticket expired. Slow Food? Really?

But what upset me most of all about the situation is that I didn’t get to connect or chat with the producers – the people who grew, cooked, cured or stirred the things I was queuing up to taste. One server couldn’t even tell me what the ingredients were in a seafood dish she handed me. That’s why I was so happy when Victor showed up and actually talked to me and my line neighbors about the butter his company makes in small batches, using an old churn from the 1940s.

Contrast this with Slow Food International’s big event, Salone del Gusto, held every two years in Turin, Italy. In 2006, there were more than 500 exhibitors from around the world, and at each stand, it was possible to chat with someone who knew the item intimately. It was like encountering Victor Mrotz - times 500.

I learned about cured goat leg "violino" from an artisanal producer, quizzed a man from Sicily about his manna, learned all sorts of details about jamon Iberico (“It is a sacrilege to cut off the fat!”), watched a fish trap being made and found out the Portuguese fleur de sel I was buying came from an area where salt was harvested in Roman times – and the young people selling it were trying to prevent the tradition from dying out by learning the techniques from the few old men who still knew how to work the salt pans.

Yes, Salone del Gusto gets crowded with thousands of people, but throughout the massive convention-style exhibition, it offers an intimacy that Slow Food Nation failed to achieve. In the two times I’ve attended, I felt like I didn’t just sample the food - I got the real flavor of the people who were behind the food. And that always makes things taste so much better.

There were many commendable things about Slow Food Nation – the banning of water bottles, lively panels about food justice, and valet bike parking.

If the event is held again, I’ll cross my fingers that the organizers will take a lesson from Salone del Gusto – and the man from Hope, Minnesota.

Sometimes when you’re think you're just looking for a beautiful, ripe peach that gushes sweet juice with every bite, you get more than you bargained for. In my case, I got an entire, amazing family of peach farmers/writers/performance artists.

I’m talking about the Masumotos, who live and farm near Fresno, in California’s Central Valley. Every since Mas Masumoto stubbornly refused to rip out an orchard of commercially cursed Sun Crest peach trees, then wrote about it in Epitaph for a Peach, the Masumotos have been doing peaches different.

This past weekend was no exception. They held a birthday party for their Sun Crest peach trees, which turned 40 this year. But believe me, these trees aren’t having a mid-life crisis. Their fruit is as luscious and succulent as ever – despite the fact that they are well past the age when a farmer would normally rip out a peach tree (they usually get the heave-ho in their teens).

Back when Mas was desperately trying to find a buyer for his Sun Crest peaches, he gained a fan in Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse restaurant. Then more and more chefs signed on to take the Sun Crests, which commercial brokers rejected because they didn’t survive cold storage very well.

Fast-forward to 2008, and these peaches have a serious fan club. At their birthday celebration, chefs from Chez Panisse (past and present), Rubicon, Picante, Ici, Montclair Baking and Flea Street Café gathered to fete the Sun Crests – by cooking them. Grilled pancetta and basil wrapped peaches; pickled peaches with salumi; Beaume-de-Venise wine jelly with peaches and amaretto cream; peach tartlets; peach melba…Peach heaven.

Mas and daughter Nikiko did readings (Nikiko even accompanied Mas with a dramatic taiko drum performance as he described a devastating hail storm in the orchard). Marcy described the honoree peach trees at various stages during their lives (she has decided they are perpetually 39, like women of a certain age). And their son Korio showed the assembled crowd photos of the Sun Crest trees throughout the seasons.

Can learning a peach tree’s life story make the fruit more juicy? Can knowing the family who nurtured, pruned and plucked your peach from the tree render it sweeter?

Yes. (Slurp!) Oh, yes.

Movie stars, glamour…Culver City? This LA enclave a bit north of LAX once billed itself as the "Heart of Screenland," and rightfully so. Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane and King Kong were all filmed here. Today, it’s possible to visit the original Yellow Brick Road on a tour at Sony Pictures Studios.

And at Culver Hotel (which original owner Charlie Chaplin is rumored to have sold to John Wayne for a dollar during a poker game), you can sip a cocktail (or sleep over) in a landmark once occupied by Wayne, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Ronald Reagan and Oz’s rowdy cast of Munchkins.

But the big buzz is about Culver City’s restaurant scene. There’s Fraiche, recently named by the NY Times’ Frank Bruni as one of his top ten new restaurants. Even when I visited – at 5:30 on a Wednesday – the place was packed. I grabbed a seat at the bar and gobbled a quick plate of Rigatoni Bolognese en route to the airport. The intense, long-simmered sauce was rich with lamb and rosemary. And the classic French bistro décor is a nice change-up from LA zen-chic.

Then I dashed down the street (you can actually park your car and walk from spot to spot here) to Akasha. This new restaurant and bakery is the first from Akasha Richmond, a private chef to Barbara Streisand and other celebs, who is dedicated to all things organic and sustainable. No time to eat in, but I snapped some fast photos and picked up a slice of deep-chocolate tarte that nourished me as I waited in the nearly endless LAX security line.

Nearby are also dining spots from the sons of Harrison Ford (Ford's Filling Station) and Dennis Wilson (Wilson), as well as BottleRock, a wine bar and retailer, where they’ll pop open anything from their 800-label collection if you’ll buy two glasses from the bottle.

Half a mile east of Culver City’s new restaurant row, don’t miss Surfas Restaurant Supply. Chefs have been making pilgrimages to Surfas’ collection of kitchen gear and obscure gourmet ingredients (lavender powder or Emily Ridley’s Fuggle Mustard, anyone?) for over 70 years. More about this culinary wonderland in another post!

Yes, it sounds pretty disgusting - right up there with bacon mints or bacon toothpicks. And yet…

I attended a special “Bourbon & Bacon” dinner at the new San Francisco restaurant, Orson. The meal started with diminutive bologna sliders (“My baloney has a first name, it’s O-R-S-O-N!”), then detoured around pork terrine, lardo with crawfish, pork belly (served with an amazing smoked and deep-fried egg) and suckling pig - before landing squarely in Baconville for dessert.

What first arrived was the Pigwich: a scoop of bacon-maple ice cream, topped by a thin, crispy pizzelle-style wafer, with tiny cubes of candied sweet potatoes on the side in a zingy vinegar glaze. While the other courses had each been served with an intriguing cocktail, the Pigwich arrived with a straight-up slug of Knob Creek – evocative of the booze bribe that’s usually served beside an order of haggis.

But the Pigwich looked remarkably unthreatening, and tasted divine – sweet, smoky, salty, mapley, tart. “Are there actually customers who don’t like it?” I asked our server. “It’s about fifty-fifty,” she replied. “I tell people it’s just like having pancakes with maple syrup and bacon.” Well, sort of. The textures are far more distinctive – and no, there aren’t bacon bits in the benign-looking vanilla-colored ice cream.

The chocolate chip cookies that followed were another story. The warm, chewy disks were punctuated by savory morsels of bacon, their crunch effectively replacing the usual walnuts. But the sweet-salty combo wouldn’t be disconcerting to anyone who ever munched a handful of honey-roasted peanuts.

If all this nouveau bacon cuisine leaves you a bit unsure of whether to risk it or not, try asking yourself, “What would bacon do?” - or rather, try asking the spinner game of the same name. And while you’re at it, why not pay for the meal with some greenbacks pulled from your bacon wallet.

This special dinner was part of the second annual San Francisco Cocktail Week, a series of events celebrating the cocktail...followed by a series of hangovers.

“We have lost any sense of the sacredness of food,” Carlo Petrini said. Appropriate, since the impassioned founder of the Slow Food movement was speaking in San Francisco on a Sunday. I felt like I was attending food church.

“We create food pornography,” he said, “But we eat poorly on a day to day basis. Our relationship with food has become schizophrenic.”

Slow Food’s mantra for the past two years has been, “Good, Clean, Fair.” But Petrini was clearly thinking on a larger scale about the fate of the earth. “In just 100 years we have destroyed 80% of the earth’s biodiversity,” he claimed, “Only because we thought we could be stronger than nature.”

The solution? “We have to return to a place where we can reconstruct our relationship with nature. We must live and exist in harmony with the metabolism of the earth. Eat, digest, give back to the earth.”

Petrini meant this literally. “In Italian, the world ‘manure’ comes from the Latin word for happiness,” he explained. “S**t is happiness!”

Petrini also preached the sermon of moderation. “Psychologically, we are still afraid of famine,” he said. “We are all trained to be perfect consumers: Always take too much, always want more, always waste.”

"Our refrigerators are like family tombs,” he railed, “everything dying! And let’s not talk about all that frozen food – underneath there are some rabbits that came from Jurassic Park!”

(Guilty. Last night, as I ripped open a two-week old bag of baby lettuce and shook the contents into my compost bucket, I felt like a true food sinner.)

One place Americans could cut back, Petrini suggested, was meat. “The U.S. consumes 120 kilograms (nearly 265 pounds) of meat per capita. In Italy, we only eat 90 kilograms (about 198 pounds) per capita – but we are just as happy!”

And then, there’s the importance of slowness. Petrini told the story of a cook in Italy who ran a tiny restaurant that was only open for lunch. Her food was lauded by critics and fans, who urged her to open for dinner, too. “I don’t want to be the richest corpse in the cemetery,” she replied, refusing to bend.

“We are all going to the same place,” Petrini reminded us. “It’s better to go slowly, eh?
Slowness is like a homeopathic medicine. Everyday, take one dose of slowness.”

“Calma.” he said, raising his hand like a benediction. “Tranquilli.”

The crowd didn’t need a translator to understand that blessing.

Remember those tiny flotillas, endlessly circling with their petite cargos of hamachi, maguro and California rolls? Ah, sushi boats! They’re sailing off into the sunset – and maybe that’s a good thing.

Did you know that food-handling regulations permit raw items to voyage around and around for four hours before they’re deemed too old to eat?

But wait, that’s not what’s putting those cute little sushi boats into dry dock. They’re being done in by industrial chic conveyor belts. The craze started in Japan, of course, where it’s known as kaiten-zushi. Non-sushi items motor by on the continuous-loop belts there, too – soups, desserts, even packaged foods. It’s like a lazy person’s cafeteria.

Now you’ll find conveyor belt sushi restaurants in Seattle, LA, Manhattan and London. I visited a new one that has a particular claim to fame. Lucky Fish is the only U.S. conveyor belt operation with a computer chip on each plate, part of a freshness monitoring system that boots unlucky (unselected, that is) sushi off the belt after an hour.

Here’s how it works: when a new plate is placed on the belt, a reader scans it. Then, if it languishes on the belt for too long, the computerized system has a little arm that comes down and ejects it from the belt when the plate rounds home on its final, fatal lap.

Luck Fish is in Beverly Hills, which means that it is hipster chic. Crème brûlée circulates along with spicy tuna rolls. The conveyor belt even cruises by some tables, so a group of four can avoid sitting like birds on a wire.

For state-of-the-art sushi, you might want to go elsewhere. But for state-of-the-art technology, this is a mini moving walkway to the future.

John Deiner of the Washington Post has been to the Mountain. Spud Mountain, that is – a roiling mound of cholesterol. I could feel my arteries clogging, just reading about it:

The waitress seemed to struggle with the very weight of the concoction, a bubbling mass of french fries buried in cheddar cheese and chives. When I pierced the top, steam and bacon vaulted upward through the fissure. The only thing missing was lava pouring down the sides and villagers running for their lives.

Boy, do I love great writing about bad food! Deiner is the Edmund Hillary of Spud Mountain. He conquers that pinnacle and others in a story about New Jersey diners (there are 600 of them statewide, he reports). Additional towering taste treats include Mile High Meatloaf, banana cream pie and pancakes as big as your head.

Deiner nails the ambience – if you can call stainless steel and swivel stools ambience – of the diners sprawled along Route 130. Here, he’s taking a pie break at a spot called the Dolphin:

Each time a truck rumbles by on 130, the Dolphin shudders a bit. I swear I see whitecaps in my water glass.

Ah, it all takes me back to Ernie’s, one of my favorite, long-gone joints in Columbia, Missouri. A pal and I once ordered slices of pecan pie to go. The waitress barked to the kitchen, “Pecan! Pair! Walk!”