Saturday evening – 2 Fast 2 Falafel (or: The Final Chowdown)

Here we come to the final entry in the blog, ending with my last meal based on rice and beans. I think after this I might take a little holiday from those types of meals and expand out into the wide-open horizons of “almost literally anything else”.

Still, this meal didn’t have too much riding on it. Breakfast was a disappointment, and lunch was (still in my opinion) the greatest meal of all time, so dinner was inevitably going to fall somewhere in between regardless of how well it went.

For the final food, I thought I should revisit the food I had so slanderously called falafel earlier in the week (when in fact it was just chickpeas and oats). Hopefully this time I could make a better version of that – which, again, is like setting the bar for the high jump by laying it on the ground.

I decided to use this recipe (https://gourmandelle.com/chiftelute-de-naut-healthy-vegan-falafel/), mostly because it had the word “healthy” in the title, and meant that I didn’t need to deep-fry anything. It also looked relatively straightforward – blend everything in a food processor and then fry it.

Of course, to add a small complication I don’t actually have a food processor. But I do have a hand blender which eventually did the job, after lots of stops to scoop out mush from where it got stuck behind the blade. (This time the mush was comparatively tasty, though, so I didn’t mind).

Since the picture is slightly unclear, this is in a white mixing bowl, not a very large white plate. We're not going to go all The Dress here.

Once everything had been smushed up, and following a couple of substitutions (garlic granules for actual garlic, ordinary flour instead of chickpea flour [got to get some extra gluten in there somewhere] and smoked paprika for sweet paprika), everything was ready to fry away.

Come fry with me, let's fry, let's fry away...

Turns out the mixture makes about twenty falafels, and I only planned to eat four, so the rest have gone into the fridge (and most eventually into the freezer) for another day.

This meant that I got the “beans” part of the “rice and beans” in there. To get the “rice” part in, I decided to make rice. This did the job admirably. I also decided to pad it out with some broccoli, because broccoli is my favourite vegetable and I had one I accidentally bought late last week that I wanted to use before it expired in my fridge.

Pictured: rice and beans and friends. The perfect triple act.

As expected, this meal landed comfortably between the two others of the day taste-wise – but definitely enjoyable, and much of an improvement on the dinners of previous days. So that's my meals for the day.

In terms of my energy levels throughout the day, mine have still been fluctuating quite a bit. I think it’ll take a few more days to property readjust to eating properly and to having the usual number of calories. I lost around 4 pounds over the course of the week, which was rather careless, and I may have to look into trying to replace them.

And so concludes my writing about the Mean Bean challenge. I’ve mentioned a few times how grateful I am for all the very kind donations I have received – that’s mostly because I really am very grateful and very humbled at how generous you’ve all been, so one more round of thankfulness is probably called for. I’m also very thankful for everybody who’s read this blog – it’s given me something to do during the week, and it wouldn’t be nearly as fun to write if nobody was reading it. I’ve been doing this in a Word document and the word counter tells me I’m at a little under 14,000 words (excluding picture captions), so probably thanks is due to my keyboard as well for not collapsing under the additional strain of the week.

I’ve very much enjoyed writing this, and hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading this too. If anybody has any suggestions for other challenges I could take on and write about, do let me know!

 Note: The Mean Bean challenge has now finished, as have the expanding blog posts. Thanks to your exceptional generosity, Tearfund will be getting £460. If you have enjoyed this blog and feel able to donate to get that figure even higher, the link is here.

Saturday lunchtime – Come Salad Way (or: Lettuce Be)

The visit to the supermarket was very exciting. There’s something quite nice about wandering around looking at food and knowing that if I wanted it, I could just buy it and eat it. I had to stick to my list, though, otherwise I might have seriously considered going to customer services and asking how much it would be to buy everything, just so I had some choices.

Out of my list of recipes to start with, there was one that bizarrely seemed to be right at the top of my list, to the point where I had a huge craving for it yesterday as I was sleeping. Wanting a recipe isn’t that unusual; what was unusual is the fact that it was a salad bowl. Here is the recipe I was looking at. Technically it’s a buddha bowl, rather than a salad bowl. I’d never heard of this before; apparently it’s so called because the bowl should be so full of food that it expands out a bit at the top like the stomach of the buddha. Otherwise they’re just a medley of different foods, usually vegetables and other healthy-style foods which are designed to be nourishing and good for the soul – perhaps a more charitable interpretation of the “buddha” part of the name.

It met the criteria of involving rice and beans, so was definitely viable for my Saturday meal, but it contained so many other things that looked so delicious when compared to rice and beans that I think the selection of flavours was too much for my brain to cope, and it passed out whilst spamming “Yum!” to the rest of my body.

I can now divide the world into two types of people. People who think this is the most delicious thing they've ever seen, and people who are wrong.

The centrepiece of the dish is the “taco chickpeas” – essentially chickpeas cooked in some chopped tomatoes and a bunch of spices. I think this is one of the reasons I love chickpeas so much – they’re really good at absorbing flavour. By themselves, they’re not quite so interesting.

The rest of the ingredients present in the dish were:

·         Lettuce. Classic space-filling salad vegetable. Doesn’t really taste of too much, but for some reason that didn’t faze me too much. It’s almost like I have some recent experience of that.

·         Avocado. I keep forgetting that avocado exists – I quite like it but I don’t very often remember to cook with it. I bought a 3-pack today, though, so hopefully that will spur me on to greater avocado dishes.

·         Rice. I forgot that I’d put this on and burnt it slightly, but only a little bit. The rice in the dish tasted fine, but the washing up will be a bit more interesting.

·         Tomato. There’s nothing quite like a fresh tomato. Mostly because a fresh tomato is dissimilar to lots of things in a lot of ways, that’s not really a comment on whether it’s good or not. But it is good.

·         Radish. I don’t think I’ve ever had a radish before (at least not knowingly). I ate the entire bowl and still don’t really remember eating one, so either I have a small mouse hiding behind my bowl stealing radishes when I’m not paying attention, or it’s just a relatively unremarkable food.

·         Sweetcorn. Sweetcorn reminds me of Switzerland, in that both are relatively neutral to me. I’ll happily eat it, but wouldn’t usually think to buy it or add it to things.

·         Cucumber. This wasn’t in the original recipe, but I love cucumber more than the average person (I usually get through a whole cucumber every three days or so) so it seemed like a good addition to the salad bowl family.

·         Cheese. This also wasn’t in the original recipe, but if you think I’m going to go two meals in a row without having cheese when I have the option of having cheese, you’re crazy.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that I haven’t eaten a proper meal for a week, but I think this bowl might be the tastiest thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. Fortunately, I have lots of all of the ingredients so can make it again tomorrow with minimal effort. (Or this afternoon if I get peckish). In any case, this was definitely a much better meal than the porridge for breakfast.

It was also very filling. I can’t work out if that’s because there’s actually a fair amount of food in there or if it’s because my stomach is still slowly waking up from its temporary hibernation. I suspect I’ll be doing this a few more times in the future, so I’ll probably be able to work it out from that. Perhaps in the future my buddha will become more well-fed – at the moment he’s comparatively thin.

It was also really nice to have a full-flavoured meal for once. It’s already done wonders for my energy level (as may the decent quantity of sugar that’s come from finishing the bottle of Coke that had been sitting in my fridge for a week). One of the things I hope to make use of for as long as possible is the fact that food with any flavour is deeply appealing at the moment; in particular, dishes like this that are really healthy (perhaps sans the cheese, but I’m only human), so hopefully this will spark a reasonable length of time of eating stuff that’s good for me and enjoying it.

I have my rice and beans-based dinner dish already planned out, so join me this evening for the final blog post of the Mean Bean challenge.

 Note: The Mean Bean challenge has now finished, as have the expanding blog posts. Thanks to your exceptional generosity, Tearfund will be getting £430. If you have enjoyed this blog and feel able to donate to get that figure even higher, the link is here.

Saturday morning – Berry Good (or: The First Meal of the Rest of Your Life)

I survived! I made it through five days of really dull food and came out the other side. I stared into the unblinking eye of blandness and held my ground without blinking myself. (Metaphorically, of course. I actually blinked quite a lot during the week.  When somebody invents the Slink Blink challenge to not blink for a week, I will definitely accept the opportunity to sleep for five days).

It was a little touch and go, though. Last night I was again extremely hungry when I went to bed, which noticeably affected how long it took me to get to sleep. The clock definitely ticked past midnight before I drifted off, and I did consider using the “Technically it’s Saturday” loophole to order approximately all the food in the world. But somehow that didn’t feel quite right – going to sleep hungry on the Friday night seemed to me like part of the challenge, and so I managed to hold off.

But this morning, nothing would hold me back from enjoying my first meal of freedom! What should I choose? What exciting dish would break my fast?

Oh yeah, I’ve already agreed it’d be porridge. Bummer.

I really do genuinely want to like porridge (as I think I’ve mentioned before). The problem is that at the moment I really don’t (as I know I’ve mentioned before). So I was really hoping that, by making this porridge in the best possible way, I would have discovered that over the course of the past week I’ve learned to love the meal I was stuck with, like we were the two main characters in a Richard Curtis romcom.

Alas, it was not to be.

Excuse me, waiter? Somebody seems to have put colour in my food. Isn't all food supposed to be vaguely off-white?

I did pretty much everything I was supposed to. I made it with milk instead of water. I added a liberal amount of honey. I even put in some berries I had in the freezer before I microwaved it to give it additional depth.

And sadly, porridge is still just uninteresting sludge. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news for those who love it, but it just isn’t a good food. The only difference between the porridge of today and the porridge of the previous week is that today’s porridge was sweeter, slightly creamier sludge. Which admittedly was better, but only in the sense that when somebody is repeatedly sledgehammering your face, when they switch to hitting your leg instead it’s a refreshing change of pace.

Sadly, then, this may be my last porridge-based meal for a long time. On a related note if anybody would like to give a good home to a well-endured, half-consumed bag of porridge oats, you are more than welcome to begin the adoption process. (I’ve never given away porridge before, so I assume the process is like giving away children).

So my first post-Mean Bean meal wasn’t especially exciting. But that’s OK – I have meals planned for the rest of the day that should be a step up.

On Thursday evening (and this is an indication of what the challenge does to you), I found myself surreptitiously perusing a Buzzfeed article of meat-free dinners, to prepare myself for today. I ended up deciding that I really wanted to eat at least half of them immediately, and I expect that over the coming weeks I’ll make all of them at one point or other. But I have in particular picked two out to make for lunch and dinner, and my plan for this morning is to pick up the ingredients (my fridge currently resembles Winnie-the-Pooh in that it’s a little bare) and then slavishly wait for lunch to come around.

One slight challenge for today is to not overdo the eating. Having dramatically cut my food intake for the past few days, I suspect it’ll take a couple of days to get back to my usual level of consumption, and already I can tell that my body isn’t completely sure what to do with the porridge I’ve just eaten. I have a strange sensation of simultaneously feeling quite full and very hungry, which I wouldn’t have thought was possible before. So let’s see how that develops over the rest of the day.

 Note: The Mean Bean challenge has now finished, as have the expanding blog posts. Thanks to your exceptional generosity, Tearfund will be getting £430. If you have enjoyed this blog and feel able to donate to get that figure even higher, the link is here.

Friday evening – The Bean Oatimatum

And so the final meal of the Mean Bean challenge has been eaten.

I considered getting each bean a little flag to wave in celebration, but then remembered that I'm not a crazy person. And more saliently I don't have enough cocktail sticks.

What else could I finish with, but the classic combination of rice and chickpeas which has been my staple throughout the week. This evening’s meal was essentially a victory lap in honour of all the foods that have served me so well this week, and perhaps as the night draws in on the final day of the Mean Bean Challenge, I should give a few awards:

·         The Most Surprising Bean award goes to the borlotti bean. Almost pleasant by itself, I reckon it would be delicious if it was cooked in something with a taste.

·         The Trickeist To Spel Bean award goes to the cannellini bean, which has several times been very nearly identified as the cannelloni bean.

·         The Surprising Omission award goes to salt. Having discovered on Monday after my first porridge experience that salt was allowed, I decided to see if I could go the week without adding it to anything. Turns out I didn’t miss it all that much (or maybe the missing it got absorbed in the missing of all the other foods I couldn’t have).

·         Most Valiant Attempt At A Meal award goes to Tuesday’s falafel. If I’ve learned nothing else this week, it turns out if you take a recipe and remove the vast majority of the ingredients, it often doesn’t taste as good as it might otherwise taste. I am very tempted to try making my own falafel at some point soon, though.

And now we come to the most prestigious award:

·         The Best Bean of the Week award goes to… La La Land! Oh, sorry, wrong envelope. It actually goes to the black bean. The chickpea did ride it close, and I did buy a lot of them in preparation for the week in the expectation I would use them a lot, but I used up all the black beans in my cupboard due to their strong taste and bravery under fire.

I also wanted to mention a few small things that I noticed during the week, that should fit in a nice list for a round-up:

·         Honestly, toothpaste has never tasted quite so good as it has this week. It’s almost been a little bit of a treat to brush my teeth and to get something with flavour in my mouth – to the point where I’ve almost felt guilty for doing it. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to do rice- or bean-flavoured toothpaste.

·         One of the small disadvantages of cooking the same thing (more or less) for every meal is that you don’t get a chance to get behind on the washing up; if you don’t get it done immediately, you have to do it before the next meal.

·         On a related note, this week has confirmed to me that sieves are the world’s hardest thing to clean, perhaps only beaten by an angry rhinoceros finishing a mud bath in a volcano – and even then, at least with the angry rhinoceros there would be two of you. I swear that the sieve I have must have some sort of rice generator, and that the roof of my kitchen must occasionally drip starch on it when I’m not looking. I definitely won’t miss having to clean that twice a day.

·         One of the positives from this week is how easy it is to plan meals through the week, and how little food shopping I had to do. It’s also remarkably cheap – my shopping in preparation for this week cost me a little over £4, and although I also used a couple of tins of beans from the cupboard I had already, the whole week can’t have cost me more than £6. If I were planning to do Live Below The Line (where you live off a pound per day for food), this would certainly be a viable option (perhaps with some slight limitations on quantity).

·         If I ever do Live Below The Line, I am definitely not doing rice, beans and porridge every day!

We now come to the last serious box of the blog – this time on poverty tourism.

Even if you haven’t come across the term “poverty tourism” before, you can probably guess what it means. It essentially refers to people who, in some way or other, “visit” those who are struggling in one way or another for a short period of time, before returning to their ordinary lives without that struggle. It can take the form of people visiting poorer parts of the world to understand more of the realities of life in extreme poverty, sleeping on the streets for a night to sympathise with the homeless, or (in my case) slightly reducing their diet for a week to attempt to emulate the food eaten by those who have nothing else.

The term “poverty tourism” is often used derogatively, albeit usually most of their scorn is reserved for those who actively travel to poorer parts of the world simply to see what life is like there.

I should emphasise at this point that this is absolutely not a critique of people in general who work in poorer areas. I know many people whose dedication to charitable endeavours is inspiring, and I would hate for you to think that was what I am talking about here.

The issue I have is described well in this article by Kennedy Odede from the Kenyan slum of Kibera, where many visitors there are literally poverty tourists. As Odede describes: “Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from.”

Could it be argued that this is a fairly good description of what I’ve been doing this week? I have been writing for a week about the “difficulties” I’ve faced, in a manner which has hopefully been entertaining, but it is something I only have to briefly endure. I’ve sometimes been slightly sceptical of challenges such as this in the past - I’m not directly demeaning people by going and taking pictures of their lives, but does simply imitating the diet of somebody else do any good, or is it just a longer-range version of poverty tourism?

Having completed the week, I do think this has had a positive impact (something which can't really be said for poverty tourism), for the following reasons:

·         Firstly, and most obviously, it involves fundraising. This isn’t something I’m doing simply to see what it is like, but to generate money. At the time of writing Tearfund has raised over £110,000 through the Mean Bean challenge, which will do great work to helping thousands of families.

·         Even if it wasn’t sponsored, I think there is some benefit in experiencing a small taste of what life is like for those from whom this, and much worse, is a daily experience. It’s one thing to simply be aware of the fact that there are millions of people starving each day; it’s another entirely to live through the impact that even just a brief dietary restriction can have on your energy levels, mood and quality of sleep (all of which I’ve noticed in the past few days). Empathy comes through walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes, and although I’ve only walked a few paces in shoes far more comfortable than I deserve, it gives some insight.

·         Following on from that, starting with empathy towards the situations that somebody else faces makes it a lot easier to get involved in some way to help alleviate their situation. I really hope that this week won’t be something that I do and then forget, but that it will spur me on to go further and do more to help work towards an end to world hunger.

·         It’s also very beneficial to me personally. We live in a materialistic culture, and although I can only speak for myself I know that I am very lucky to have all that I have, and I know that I have far more than I need. Knowing how little I actually need to survive means that I know I have more to be generous with.

So, although I do think that poverty tourism is not particularly helpful, I wouldn’t put this experience in the same category. It’s definitely been eye-opening, and although I can’t say that I enjoyed it particularly (nor should I be able to say that, really), it’s been a very interesting journey and one which I would highly encourage anybody reading this to consider giving a go next year.

I still have one more day of the blog to go, where I will be making dishes based on the ingredients I’ve used throughout the week, but also with plenty of other things added into the mix too. But now seems like as good a time as any to thank everybody who has been reading this blog over the past week. It’s not every week that I sit down and write eleven and a half thousand words (and counting) about not eating very much (indeed it would be weird if it was), but I’ve very much enjoyed doing it. A special thanks to everybody who donated as well – I’ve raised far more than I ever expected to during this week, which is shown in the fact that I really wasn’t expecting to be writing 2,000 words a day by Friday! I hope you feel like you’ve got your money’s worth. And if not, there’s still tomorrow!

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £410, which means I’m aiming at 2,250 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.

Friday lunchtime - Black Bean-ty

For lunch today, I thought I would treat myself to a dish of rice and beans. I’m not entirely sure where I got the inspiration from.

I accidentally started this meal before taking a picture of it. So if you want the full experience, imagine what's in the picture but slightly more of it. If that's too hard, then try looking at the picture roughly one and a half times.

The lunchtime bean of choice was black beans, one of my personal favourites alongside chickpeas. I was slightly worried that I would have learned over the course of this week to hate these, but fortunately it seems to be a bit more like spending time with a friend or relative who you like but who grates on you slightly – you’ve maybe spent a bit more time with them than you usually would and might need a bit of a break, but you’ll definitely still plan to spend more time with them in the future. Unlike beans, however, most friends don’t improve if you cover them in herbs and spices.

One of the slightly unusual parts of this challenge is eating essentially the same meal for lunch and dinner. Usually I’ll have a smaller lunch and then a larger dinner, so having two meals of roughly the same size means that bizarrely I’m probably feeling fuller at this point in the day than I usually would be.

I find that my expectations when coming to a mealtime have changed a fair bit over the course of the week; it’s moved from a party to more of a business transaction, as the following plays will hopefully illustrate. (That’s right, you’ve got a song and a play this week. If that’s not multimedia I don’t know what is. No, seriously, I really don’t know what multimedia is.)

SCENE 1 – LAST WEEK

STOMACH: Hey brain, what time is it?

BRAIN: Around 12, why?

STOMACH: Awesome. That’s lunch time! Party time!

BRAIN: So it is. Let’s get the rest of the body down here and have a celebration.

MOUTH: I’ve got something coming in!

TASTEBUDS: It’s a cheese sandwich! Yay!

STOMACH and BRAIN: Yay!

MOUTH: More stuff on the way.

TASTEBUDS: It’s crisps! Yay! And fruit! Yay! And chocolate! Yay! And water! Yay!

BRAIN: Well, we don’t really say “Yay!” to water, that’s just sort of what we need. But I guess it’s good to have it.

MOUTH: Looks like we’re all done now.

BRAIN: That was a good meal. I think we all had fun there.

STOMACH: Hey brain, what time is it?

BRAIN: About 12.15, why?

STOMACH: Awesome, that’s snack time!

BRAIN: No! No snack time today.

STOMACH: Aw… :(

BRAIN: How did you pronounce that?

* * *

SCENE 2 – EARLIER THIS WEEK

STOMACH: Hey brain, what time is it?

BRAIN: Looks like it’s lunchtime again.

STOMACH: Awesome!  I feel ready for another party!

MOUTH: Incoming.

TASTEBUDS: It’s rice, yay!

STOMACH: Hm, I’m not sure rice is a yay. It’s generally nice because of the stuff that comes with it.

TASTEBUDS: It’s beans, yay!

BRAIN: Flavoured or unflavoured?

TASTEBUDS: Unflavoured! Yay!

STOMACH: Guys, that’s really not something to be all excited about. Let’s wait for the next delivery.

MOUTH: Nope, that’s it.

STOMACH: Really? That’s it? That wasn’t much of a party at all.

BRAIN: You’re telling me. That’s hardly anything.

STOMACH: Hey brain, I’m hungry.

BRAIN: Not really much I can do about that, I’m afraid.

STOMACH: I’m hungry.

BRAIN: Can’t help.

STOMACH: I’m hungry!

BRAIN: Right, I’m going on holiday.

* * *

SCENE 3 – EARLIER TODAY

STOMACH: Hello, Brain? I was just enquiring as to what the time is currently.

BRAIN: Brain is out of the office at the moment and cannot respond. Please redirect all enquiries to stomach.

STOMACH: That explains a lot. Ah well, it looks like we are getting our scheduled delivery.

MOUTH: Incoming.

STOMACH: Probably rice and beans. I’ll just put it with the others.

TASTEBUDS: What about us? Yay?

STOMACH: You can probably go on holiday too to be honest, we don’t really need you at the moment.

TASTEBUDS: :(

STOMACH: Hey, I thought I was the only one who knew how to pronounce that.

True story. And yes, before you ask, that was definitely the most concise way of explaining that.

The point of whatever hunger-driven chaos I wrote up top is that my body generally seems to be a bit more used to food simply as energy to keep me going rather than something to be enjoyed, which is actually quite a helpful transition at this point. I’m curious as to exactly what impact going the other way will have, how I’ll respond when given a whole load of flavour to deal with.

So that was my final lunch of the week. I would say it’s relatively unremarkable, but I’ve managed about 750 words worth of remarks on it, so perhaps that isn’t the fairest description of it. 

I’ll finish the post by bringing up the serious box again.

In this section, I’d like to talk a bit about my faith. My beliefs as a Christian are something that is very important to me, but for those who don’t share those beliefs, I know that they’re not always the easiest to understand. More generally, our beliefs are not something that we as a culture speak about all that much. Hopefully this can serve as something of a conversation starter if it’s something that you want to understand more - and if it starts a conversation you want to continue with me, I'd be very happy to do that.

One of the big motivators for me getting involved with the Mean Bean challenge is my faith. Those of you who are familiar with Tearfund, the organisation I've been raising money for, will know it’s a Christian organisation, which suits me quite well because I’m a Christian and like organisation. (Sorry, that sentence was not appropriate for the serious box).

One of the big differences that my faith makes in my life is that it means I have to be aware of the suffering of others. One of Jesus’ parables in Matthew 25 describes those who are blessed by God and part of God’s kingdom, and part of his description reads “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” It leaves no room for forgetting about the poor and vulnerable in society, which is something I personally find all too easy to do sometimes, particularly with my very comfortable middle-class lifestyle. This challenge seemed like a very practical way of starting to understanding the difficulties faced by those suffering in ways I have never had to, as well as a chance to raise some money to help make a difference to their lives.

Elsewhere in the Bible, it says that “God loves a cheerful giver”. This reminds me that the money and material goods that I have aren’t really my own; they are gifts from God, and I should do my best to use them wisely. My faith encourages me to be generous with my money, and although I still spend lots on things I don't need it drives me to give what I can.

Every now and again, I feel challenged to give more generously than I would ever choose to of my own volition, and I have found that, like muscles, the more you exercise giving, the easier and more natural it becomes. Whether you’re a Christian or not, I believe there is huge benefit in giving every month to charities that work in areas you are passionate about.

For some, the notion of the existence of a God is entirely incompatible with a world in which there are so many that live with famine, with disease, with warfare. I can understand why people might think that, and don’t pretend to have straightforward answers to such a difficult question. But one perspective that I find helping when dealing with such a question is in seeing something of God’s heart for this world in the passion and drive exhibited by countless charities and charity workers who seek to relieve hunger, to cure disease, to bring peace and stability to war-torn countries. Cicero wrote that "Nature herself has implanted upon the minds of all, the idea of God," and I believe that our desire to help those less fortunate than ourselves stems ultimately from the goodness of God, as is our ability to look at the world with all of its problems and keenly feel that it isn't right that things are like this.

I’m reminded of the words of Fred Rogers (no relation), a wonderful man who for many years hosted a children’s show in the USA. (If you’ve never come across the man before, he is probably one of the most Christ-like people I have ever heard about – read his Wikipedia page to get a sense of the type of person he was). His words always resonate when I see things in the world that I don’t understand, and they seem like fitting words to end this section with.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping’.”

Part of being a Christian for me is always striving to be one of the people who helps, and this is one small way in which I hope to be able to do that.

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £410, which means I’m aiming at 2,250 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.

Friday morning – Oaty McOatface

To open with, another note of thanks to those who have donated so generously throughout the week. You’ve currently given £410, which is far more than I ever hoped I would raise through this week, so thank you. As a result, my promised target of writing for today and tomorrow is 2,250 words, which is quite a lot to spread over two blog posts, so today I’ll be doing three (one per meal). In each post there will also be a more serious reflection on the week from some angle or other. To set this out from the usual moaning, I’ve invented the serious box which all such thoughts will live inside.

This is the serious box.

This morning was a very sad day – it was the last time I get to wake up and look forward to a wonderful bowl of tasteless mush to begin my day with. Never again will I get to pour sawdust into a bowl, fill said bowl with water as if I were simply cleaning it out, but instead of tipping the sorry mixture away I get to microwave and eat it. Well, of course I’ll have the option to make porridge with water if I so desire, but the key words “if I so desire” may prevent this option from ever occurring.

Le Porridge de Friday

Adding just a small amount of water to the dish can give it a nice, solid texture and make it perfect for a long walk in the country.

Ingredients: oats, water, a man with his will to survive

1.       Take a clean, innocent bowl that’s never done anything wrong in its life, and pour oats into it. So far it just thinks it’s dusty.

2.       Pour an appropriate amount of water on top of it, so now the bowl is dusty and damp.

3.       Put it in the microwave for a couple of minutes, so now the bowl is dusty, damp and warm.

4.       Google the phrase “dusty, damp and warm” and discover that the first three results are for the habitats of possums, booklice and headlice respectively. Check the mixture for all three.

5.       Remove possums and lice to taste.

6.       Be disappointed that, even having taking stuff out of the bowl, there are still some things left in there.

7.       Eat said things.

Going in to this challenge, I was fully expecting the porridge phase of the day to be the hardest, since it’s the first meal of the day and also consists of the food I dislike the most out of the (many and varied) options on the menu. The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed from the way I write about the porridge part of the day that this did in fact turn out to be the case.

It’s a shame, because I do love porridge as a concept. It’s got loads of good stuff in it, it’s low effort to make and it’s very inexpensive. This is why bizarrely I’m almost looking forward to my porridge tomorrow, made to the best of my abilities with a selection of more interesting ingredients. So far, I’m thinking of making it with milk instead of water (a relative no brainer), and adding honey and some berries to it. If anybody has any further suggestions of ways to make porridge even more exciting, do let me know – I’m happy to try many things tomorrow. (Although if you suggest having it plain with water, I may not be responsible for what happens to you).

Anyway, here comes the serious box for the first phase of reflections on the week.

I wasn’t entirely sure how this challenge would affect me physically. I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve not had to work this week, so I’ve not had to try and do anything strenuous at all on the limited energy that I have. I know that some people who do the challenge end up with quite bad headaches due to caffeine withdrawal from no tea or coffee, but as somebody who doesn’t really drink either this wasn’t going to be a problem for me either. So I was largely expecting it to be fine.

It turns out that that wasn’t really the case at all. The combination of taking in substantially fewer calories than usual (probably around a third of what I normally eat), and those calories being rather uninteresting at that, turned out to have a few side-effects. The lack of energy was something I was expecting, but I definitely noticed that. The physical sensation of feeling hungry hit a few times, but perhaps most significantly yesterday. I suspect, having accidentally omitted breakfast, that my calorie intake was even lower, but I felt quite hungry all afternoon, and going to sleep on Thursday evening was probably the lowest part of the whole experience for me. It took a long time to get off to sleep just because of how hungry I felt – which naturally in turn meant that this morning I was not particularly well-rested.

Food seemingly also has a relatively big impact on my mood, which has been swinging fairly wildly this week as well. Of course, there may well be factors other than the food which impacts that, but I can definitely attribute some of the psychological low points of the week to that. It’s not that hard to see how being stuck in poverty for an extended period of time can completely sap your motivation and your energy, in a way that perhaps I hadn’t appreciated until I took this challenge.

It’s not all been bad, though, and perhaps this blog has focused unduly on the negatives (mostly because they’re more entertaining to write about than “everything’s basically fine”). Although the food is definitely not interesting, the lack of taste stopped bothering me particularly after the first couple of days. Humans are great adaptors, and this is one thing I seem to have got used to relatively quickly (although part of that naturally will come from the fact that I only have to do this for five days, rather than indefinitely; one of the many ways in which my experiences in this challenge don’t really echo the challenge faced by those in poverty at all).

Also, despite the lack of calories, I’ve not really massively felt the urge to eat different food throughout the week. I’ve had some food-related dreams and things like that, but I’ve not been particularly tempted by anything left in the cupboard or the fridge – turns out in this case at least, my willpower is stronger than I thought it might be.

So those are how it’s affected me physically over this past week. In the next couple of posts I’ll talk about my reasons behind taking on the challenge, and what I think can be taken away from such an experience.

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £410, which means I’m aiming at 2,250 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.

Thursday evening – The Bean Supremacy

Given the bumper length of the previous update, this evening’s one will be a bit a shorter. Which to be honest is just as well, since I don’t have quite so much to write about today’s meals.

For a start, the discussion on breakfast will be rather short, because by the time I’d visited the supermarket and evaluated my cravings it was essentially lunchtime, so I ended up skipping my morning porridge. Naturally I was devastated by this turn of events as I have grown to love porridge in the same way as a man eventually learns to love being punched repeatedly in the face.

Lunch consisted of a reheated version of yesterday’s bake. I guess I can supply a recipe for that.

Reheated bake

I'm using the same picture as yesterday because it's the same meal as yesterday. It fills me with great joy that my most used picture on this blog is also the blurriest. If it makes you feel any better, pretend this was taken midway through the fence climbing scene from Taken 3. (Warning: video not recommended for people who get motion sickness or who are allergic to fences).

Ingredients: cold bake, time

1.       Take the cold bake.

2.       Heat it up

Turns out it’s not that complicated a recipe.

For dinner, I decided to go extravagantly all out, partly because it’s Thursday (and if you can’t have an extravagant celebration on a Thursday, when can you have it?), and mostly because I can. The excitement here stemmed from eating three different types of bean in a single meal! Can you handle the excitement? Because I’m struggling.

The three, in no particular order, were:

·         Chickpeas. If beans were football players, this would be the star striker. He plays a pretty central role, he gets a lot of play time and he gets results.

·         Red kidney beans. This bean would probably be on the substitutes bench, because it’s still pretty good but I only remembered it was there because all the other beans had gone.

·         Cannellini beans. This would be Giorgio Chiellini because I only vaguely remembered he existed, he is probably Italian and I don’t really usually make much use of him in day-to-day life.

This also was accompanied by rice. If beans were footballers, the rice would be Benedict Cumberbatch, because Benedict Cumberbatch is not a footballer.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of any of my meals today, so here is a picture of a plate that almost certainly contained some food at some point.

You will also notice in the background a growing collection of empty tins of beans, which are starting to form a gang in my kitchen. There’s also a much-neglected toastie maker to the right, which is probably wondering what it’s done to deserve such abandonment.

I apologise for how short this evening post is – hopefully I made up for it in the morning with an especially long one. Tomorrow is the final day, and along with the usual combination of helpful recipes and general whinging, I’ll be giving some reflections on my experience throughout the week. Depending on how much I come up with and how jarring a transition that is from the rest of the content, this may form a separate “serious” post, which hopefully will still prove to be interesting.

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £365, which means I’m aiming at 2,025 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.