Pesto Rolls rolling out of the oven at Boothieville, brimming with toasted mozzarella cheese, garlic, basil and onion

About the project

I got the dollar a day diet idea after months of thinking how I could help my family with our eating habits.  I didn't want to single out anybody about their food intake, because that is unproductive, it can backfire, and  also affect how others feel about the singled out ones. 

I'm not sure how it happened, but I came across a couple online who decided to eat for a dollar a day each.  Their food looked pathetic and small and boring.  Really uncreative. Oatmeal every day.  Peanut butter sandwiches every lunch. They stuck it out for a month, but said it was a difficult time, etc, etc.  And, they said in the blog that eating for a dollar a day was unsustainable.

This comment got my ire up a bit.  I thought eating on a dollar a day might be do-able.  Differently than they did it, of course.  They were vegan, and organic, so I can see their difficulty, but really!  People who just want to make a little social statement and then write a book about it---right after they have pronounced it unsustainable?

Well, I had always thought I could feed our family on $400 a month.  But now it became, well, not quite an obsession, but a challenge to see if I really could or not.  Kind of like Mike Mulligan and MaryAnne, one of our all-time-favorite children's stories.  Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel, Mary Anne, thought they could dig as much in a day as a hundred men could dig in a week.  But they were never quite sure, because they had never actually tried it.

I felt like now was the time to try it.  All my family is not living at home.  We actually have 12 children, and so there are 14 Boothies in all, but with two newly married, and two away at college, we are whittled down to 10 at home.  So, $300/month seemed a reasonable, if difficult, goal.

I searched online for ideas and found one other dollar-a-day experiment made by a single lady, but that, too, was not healthy or balanced.  These stories fueled my desire to see if we Boothies could pull it off, and so a project was born at Boothieville.  It is still unfolding....

Some people do not have options.  They don't have choices to buy organic, or substitute expensive vegan foods for the proteins and nutrients they need.  Our project is more akin to the way many people must make daily choices.  Using the sources around us to do the best we can to provide for ourselves and our families in the most healthy way possible within our budget.

Remember, even on a very, very strict budget, we Boothies are still spending 300 dollars a month on food, not counting holiday treats, or any of the other non-food grocery store items we need regularly.  Being on a strict budget is not just fluff for us.  Not just a tricky project because we have nothing else to do with our lives.  We're living pretty much at the edge all the time, and this project is giving me a focus, a goal to work toward, to free up some money for other places it needs to go, such as a new roof...

I hope you are inspired.  I hope you'll follow our progress.  I hope you'll think about trying it, and I hope you'll find satisfaction along the way.  It's all about the progress in the process, as we try what we can.

Your family may not be 10.  Most aren't.  I know that.  But 10 is really a handy number for me in figuring things out---after all, we think in base 10, and our money is in the same, but you can do it with any number of people.  Really, it is just a dollar a day per person.

And maybe you live where prices are higher, or maybe you can't get a hold of cheap fruit to can.  But maybe you just don't know what bargains and prices you can find, when you put your mind to it.

I am trying to focus on what I can do, not what I can't do, what we can eat, as opposed to what we are unable to afford, as I take my family through these next weeks. This is what I am striving to impart to them.  Making the best out of things when "the way things are is the way things are."

 Once you get past the gag reflex, all sorts of possibilities open up... (That's not original.  It's one of our favorite Boothie quotes, from the movie "Ratatouille.")  I think my children may have a chance to find out if this is true, though.  Because they may be seeing foods on their plates which they have never seen before.  We all might....