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.

Thursday morning – A Very Special John Craving’s Newsround

This morning I decided to try something a little different. Last night was the first night when I was quite aware of how hungry I was as I went to bed, and this gave me an idea. They say that you should never shop when you’re hungry because you’ll buy lots of stuff you don’t need, and I adhere rigidly to this rule whenever I’m not hungry. However, there’s nothing in the rule that says that you can’t go window shopping at a supermarket to see what you can find, and do genuine science out in the field to determine how having not eaten flavoured food for three days affects how I feel about a selection of foods. For an added bonus, I decided to go before breakfast to get the full hunger experience.

Naturally, with it only having been three days, most cravings are still in a relatively early stage (you can live for three weeks without food), but that means in order to investigate this properly I’d need to keep this diet going for weeks, and that’s definitely not going to happen!

The supermarket of choice was Morrisons, due to the very scientific reasoning of it being my closest large supermarket. This is not an official endorsement of Morrisons, though, so if any supermarkets are reading who want to sponsor me, feel free to. I’m not the sort of person who can be bought for any price. However, I am the sort of person who can be bought for a certain range of prices.

And so without any further ado, let us enter the realm of…

A Very Special John Craving’s Newsround – Morrisons Edition!

For this, I will present a selection of foods, plus a rating out of 5 for both usual level of craving and current level of craving. My rankings are as follows:

·         0 – If this was all that was left on Earth, I would seriously consider moving.

·         1 – I don’t really use this very much and do not like the taste at all.

·         2 – Something I like, but don’t buy all that often.

·         3 – This would normally be in my cupboard, and I’d probably make use of it at least weekly.

·         4 – I would probably consume this every day if I could get away with it.

·         5 – If this is in my house I will consume it almost instantly, like matter and antimatter annihilating each other.

Grapes

Grapes, aka pre-wine

Usual: 2/5

Current: 3/5

Grapes are pretty cool. They basically feel like a healthy version of sweets in that they’re filled with sugar but they’re good for you. Some sugar would be nice.

Bananas

Bananas also double as a glacially-changing traffic light at an intersection where you never want traffic to stop.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 3/5

I eat bananas more frequently than grapes, but at this point probably want the same things from them. (Except for it to turn into wine, I don’t think banana wine would be especially appealing).

Mushrooms

According to the internet, approximately 20% of mushrooms are poisonous. If I got a punnet of these I'm not sure which I'd be hoping for.

Usual: 1/5

Current: 1/5

I don’t really get mushrooms. I like most vegetables, but this is just rubbery and a bit strange (not to mention the fact that if you see one in the wild, it will almost certainly kill you.) (Not even just by eating it; in some parts of the countryside there are wild gangs of mushrooms roving around with knives and shotguns picking off lone foragers). No change in my mushroom stance today.

Doughnuts

They sometimes have jam in, so they're healthy.

Usual: 2/5

Current: 5/5

For these, the price was almost as tempting as the food itself – 10p for a doughnut, I’ll take that! This was a 4/5 initially, until I got a bit closer to the bakery section and smelt some doughnuts cooking. At that point holding up the shop in exchange for a doughnut seemed like a relatively reasonable trade.

Bread

Always nice to have a food you could either eat or juggle, depending on your mood.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 5/5

For me usually, I get through a fair amount of bread but usually as a vessel for other food which I like more. Bread by itself is usually not particularly engaging, but the smell of the bakery again did funny things to the taste buds that I didn’t think were there anymore.

Cheese

This picture was taken from a slight distance for the safety of me and those around me.

Usual: 5/5

Current: 5/5

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you will know that I love cheese. If you don’t know me at all, you’ve probably heard of me as “that guy who likes cheese”. If you know me but not cheese, you will know cheese as “that thing that I like”. If you don’t know me or cheese then to be honest you’re missing out on two pretty great things, but you should get to know cheese first. I’ll wait.

Pizza

This picture is making me too hungry so let's just all pretend I wrote something amusing here and move on.

Usual: 4/5

Current: 5/5

Pizza is essentially bread and cheese stuck together, with more delicious stuff put on top. I’d eat it raw at the moment if that was socially acceptable.

Olives

Tomatoes with cream cheese not included in the below analysis, mostly because I love both of those things and thinking too much about the beautiful combination might be unhealthy for me.

Usual: 0/5

Current: 2/5

Olives are salty and packed with calories and taste. It’s a disgusting taste, but the sheer quantity of it at this point almost makes up for the fact that I’d immediately regret it if I actually tried to eat them.

Olive oil

Crisp AND dry? Those are my two favourite types of spring day!

Usual: 2/5

Current: 2/5

I suspect a nice tall glass of olive oil would replace all of the calories I’ve lost this week.

Salmon

Unfortunately, I'm not quite ready to cook yet. But it's good to know that the salmon is.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 3/5

I’m a pescetarian (a word which Word does not recognise as real and suggested “desecration” as an alternative), which is essentially vegetarian plus fish. I do find salmon delicious, and today is no exception, but perhaps it’s because through the oats and the beans I’m probably getting way more protein than usual anyway, but the salmon didn’t look any more appealing than usual.

Steak

True story - despite being a vegetarian, I once managed to accidentally enter and win a meat raffle.

Usual: 0/5

Current: -1/5

Being a vegetarian means I just don’t understand steak. There are loads of delicious vegetables in the world – steak seems to be for people who say “Why don’t you take all those delicious vegetables, put them in one animal and then I’ll just eat that animal and cut out the middle man. How do I want it cut? Just lop a chunk of it off and pop it in some packaging, I’m not too fussy”.

Milk

On the right, we have a bottle of milk. On the left we have a bottle of water in a milk costume.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 3/5

This is what you get if you take the previous point, and say “You know what, I don’t really want to eat my food second hand. Why don’t you take that animal you’ve just put all those vegetables in, squeeze it really hard and feed me whatever comes out?”. But milk is delicious so it gets a pass from me.

Selection of desserts

This title explains why I got fired from that menu-writing business.

Usual: 2/5

Current: 3/5

This is basically what you get if you take all the things you’re probably not supposed to eat, and mix them together in a bowl. And they taste so good for it.

Juice

If only there was some idiom for comparing the differences between these two types of juice.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 4/5

I drink a fair amount of fruit juice usually, and I genuinely think this is what I am most likely to trip up on in the last couple of days. A couple of times, I’ve got myself a glass and got halfway to the fridge before remembering that juice is out – it’s my go to non-water drink. (And if you’re a juice manufacturer, feel free to use that as your slogan).

Crisps

Apparently the average house price in Leamington is £318,230. I'm not sure if I'd rather have a house or 318,230 multipacks of crisps. I think the only reason I'd choose the house is in case I needed somewhere to store all of my crisps.

Usual: 5/5

Current: 6/5

People often put sliced bread, penicillin or Stephen Fry’s voice as mankind’s greatest inventions. I pity such people for they have forgotten the wonder of the potato crisp. One of my greatest regrets in starting this challenge was not forcibly removing all of the crisps from my house before starting it.

Toilet paper

Because nothing says "notoriously clean" like a puppy.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 3/5

I’ve had pretty much the same desire to use this during this week as I have during any other. If I were going for another week or two this would increasingly start to look like a viable dinner option.

Canned soup

"The nation's favourite", eh? Heinz, are you really suggestion that people prefer your soup to the Queen, Wimbledon or complaining about the weather?

Usual: 2/5

Current: 4/5

Canned soup is often pretty dull, especially when compared to homemade soup (I like any recipe which consists of “Take all of the ingredients in the title of the recipe, plus stock, boil them until you can squish them, and then blend it”). But I suspect that the flavours in canned soup would make a fine addition to any of the meals I’m eating today.

Herbs and spices

Each pot is its own little flavour experience.

Usual: 3/5

Current: 5/5

I cannot state this enough – herbs and spices are wonderful. I genuinely think that the rice and beans meals I’ve been eating this week, with the right mixture of herbs and spices, would make a very tasty and filling dish. If I take nothing else away from this week, at least I’ll know how great these guys are.

De-icer

For some reason this photo is way darker than all the rest. It's the Christopher Nolan's Batman of these photos.

Usual: 1/5

Current: 1/5

If having too much ice was one of Jay-Z’s problems, he could buy this and be down to 98. Otherwise I think the description of 1/5 at the top is entirely apt for this.

Wooden train set

I choo-choo-choose this one!

Usual: 5/5

Current: 5/5

Hello? It’s a wooden train set! I’m never not going to want one of these.

Book about cooking

The fact that she has so many show-stopping recipes perhaps means she's less likely to get invited onto cooking programmes.

Usual: 1/5

Current: 4/5

I could be tempted by either the contents of the book, or simply eating the book.

And that was John Craving’s Newsround – extra-long edition! This evening’s update will cover all of today’s meals.

Thanks to a series of very generous donations, I have now hit my stretch goal of £350, which means I’ll be continuing the blog on to Saturday. This means there are still three days of the blog left to go, and so three more days of shamelessly asking for money. If anybody has any suggestions for further stretch goals that they think people might be willing to pay for, do let me know!

 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.

Wednesday evening – Hit Pea With Your Rhythm Chick

(Yep, it’s already getting to that point in the blog where the titles start to become real stretches)

Perhaps it’s Stockholm Syndrome kicking in, or perhaps all my taste buds have died and I’ve grown a new set which are simply “buds”, but lunch was actually a fairly decent meal. Having realised that the beans I’d bought earlier in the week weren’t going to be enough to last me the whole week (curse 300g tins of beans for being essentially a meal-and-a-half’s worth of food!), I raided the cupboard and discovered some black beans I’d forgotten about. I quite like black beans, so this seemed like a good idea, and actually as a combination it almost worked.

The rice was as usual inoffensive, and the black beans seemed to have enough of a taste to them that I actually almost enjoyed myself for a moment.

When it came to dinner, though, I decided to go all out. Since Wednesday is the middle day, I figured it was worth trying to construct a medley of all three ingredients to see how that went.

Chickpea Bake with Oat Reduction and a Rice Crust

1)      Remember the debacle of yesterday’s falafels and turn the oven on now.

2)      Microwave and mash the chickpeas.

I forgot to take a picture of this, so here's the one from yesterday. I don't mean to sound racist but I think all mashed chickpeas look the same.

3)      Microwave the porridge, briefly attempt to mash this before realising that mashing makes no difference, like cutting the head off a hydra or flossing.

4)      Clarify that actually flossing is pretty great.

5)      Also clarify that hydras aren’t.

6)      Mix the chickpeas and porridge together to make a chickpea-porridge hybrid that one could almost use to make falafel. Add mixture to a glass dish.

Displayed like this, it would make flat-lafel instead.

7)      Cook some rice, drain it, and don’t mash it.

8)      Put the rice on top of the dish..

This may look like just a bowl of rice, but trust me - under the top layer of boredom lies a whole new tier of monotony.

9)     Put the dish into the oven, leave it to go and write this part of the blog post, and hope that when you come back you’ll have produced something vaguely edible.

I ended up cooking the above for about twenty minutes, hoping that the top might start going a golden brown and make it look a bit more like a proper meal. Instead the rice just went crispy, which was perhaps to be expected.

I took two photos of this at various stages, and both are exceptionally blurry. I must have been shaking in anticipation at such an exciting dinner.

Again, the food actually tasted relatively decent, all things considered. The oats made the chickpeas go further without sacrificing much in the way of taste or texture (not that either sacrifice would have been especially substantial), and the fact that the rice was slightly baked meant that there was a sufficient range of textures for the food to almost be interesting. Not genuinely interesting, but if somebody came up to you at a party and started talking about something with that level of interesting, and you knew they’d have to go away in a few minutes, you’d be able to sit and nod politely through the conversation and perhaps throw in the odd sensible remark. You would almost certainly spend the rest of the evening casually trying to stay on the opposite side of the room to them so that they don’t actually try and continue telling you about it, but you wouldn’t feel like you had to resort to jumping out the window if you actually made eye contact with them.

Quantity-wise, this recipe actually made quite a bit of food (comparatively speaking), so I opted to only eat half and save the other half for lunch tomorrow.

Which brings me onto a serious note that has increasingly become obvious to me throughout this week – namely that there are so many ways in which I am so much more fortunate than those whose diet I’m emulating. Despite being limited to so few ingredients, I in practice have as much of each of them as I like to eat, so there’s no serious danger of me going hungry. I have access to as much clean water as I want to stay hydrated and to cook with. I have a selection of beans so that I can make each meal different.

And perhaps most significantly of all, I know that this is only for a few days. On Saturday I get to delve back into my cupboards and gorge on whatever I can find in there, and if I want pretty much any food, I can go to one of the many nearby supermarkets and buy it. People who actually have to live like this day to day are not so fortunate, and indeed are only one bad harvest away from having no food to eat at all.

Later in the week I’ll be writing a full serious post about how I’ve found this experience, as my first dalliance with what can often be deemed “poverty tourism”.

In the John Craving’s Newsround corner, bizarrely as I’ve started to enjoy the food a little bit more I’ve not really found myself with too many cravings. Note that I said “enjoy… a little bit more”, in the same way that if I stand on a chair during the day I’m technically a little bit closer to the sun – I still wouldn’t say I’m enjoying the food. But I have managed to stave off craving much in the way of food so far, and certainly the anticipated cheese withdrawal symptoms have yet to hit. Stay tuned tomorrow, though – I have a plan for testing how my food cravings are going.

 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 £320, which means I’m aiming at 1,800 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.