Monday evening – Haricotta Army

And so Day 1 of my exciting food experience draws to a close. The recipe I used for this afternoon was so good I decided to try it twice.

Rice avec Beans

Ingredients: rice, beans

1.       Cook the rice

2.       Cook the beans

It’s remarkable how such a simple recipe can result in so many exciting combinations. You can do rice and beans, or beans and rice, or alternate rice-bean-rice-bean (which typically results in running out of beans before running out of rice unless you’ve got the quantities horrifically wrong).

In reality, the meals are already spectacularly boring. It turns out that plain rice and plain beans mixed together make something that tastes rather… well, plain.  That makes eating it rather an interesting process. As somebody who has never experienced a shortage of nice food, food is something that I’m used to being able to eat for the purposes of enjoyment, and so if something tastes uninteresting I don’t feel like I have to eat it because there are usually other, tastier options around the corner. It’s why in the past month or so I have eaten a whole pizza several times, and a whole stick of celery zero times.

But as the week goes on, I expect I’ll progress from “food is something I like eating” to “food is something that I need to eat to survive”, and I think that’ll be an interesting transition.

At least there is still some variety in my meals (albeit not much) – namely choice of beans, and quantity. For lunch, I opted for chickpeas, and managed to get the quantities very heavily in favour of rice.

From a distance this may look a little bit like somebody dropped cat litter in the snow. That would certainly explain the taste.

This meant that most bites consisted largely of rice, and I ended up missing some of the blandness of unflavoured chickpeas, as they were drowned out by the blandness of plain rice. I do actually really like chickpeas, so I figured this would be a strong start.

However, I did feel like I let Team Bean down a bit in the war against Team Rice, so when it came to dinner I decided to reinforce the beans with a few extra soldiers and ensure in turn that the rice had a little bit less in reserve. I also chose to make a tactical bean substitution, using haricot beans instead. For those keeping track at home, haricot beans are the beans used in baked beans. In fact the only difference between tinned haricot beans and tinned baked beans is that when they make baked beans they put things in to make it taste nice.

The fork here essentially serves as a spiny metallic referee. Except when the war begins, it tends to leave impartiality in favour of stirring up trouble.

This ended up being a much more even fight, and beans and rice fought valiantly for every mouthful right until the very end, although I think we can all agree that the real winner was blandness.

At the end of Day 1, I can already see that this will be quite an interesting week. My calorie intake for the day is around 1,000, substantially less than I usually eat, and I already feel like I have a bit less energy than usual. It’ll be interesting to see how I feel in the next couple of days.

At this point, I should introduce Cravings Watch (aka John Craving’s Newsround), where I’ll keep track across the week of any strange cravings I happen to pick up. A day in and naturally there aren’t really any serious ones yet. If you think of cravings as horses, though (and many people do), there are some obvious frontrunners as far as I’m concerned as to which will win the Grand National of my mind, the prestigious “First craving” award. And when I say frontrunners, I mean frontrunner. And when I say frontrunner, I mean cheese. My body has already noticed that none of the three meals I’ve eaten today have included cheese, which is a pretty rare state of affairs in my life, and there’s a real possibility it will enter a state of shock when it realises that the next four days will also be cheese free. Writing that sentence is already a bit of a shock and I can’t dwell on it too much. Indeed, I camembert it.

Yeah, that seems like a good place to stop for the day. Except that I still have a few words left to write. Hopefully you’ll forgive me for borrowing these last few from Tearfund, who have stated in much better words than I have the reason this challenge exists; namely:

“…to help you really have an insight into what it is like to live on a bland and repetitive diet without much choice. For many even having rice and a variety of beans would be a feast. Living simply this week enables others to simply live.”

 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 £255, which means I’m aiming at 1,475 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.