GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – As she concluded her quest to eat for 30 days on a mere $30, Maria Gajewski can think of nothing but . . .
“ . . . a big fruit salad,” she said, smiling at the thought.
So much so that an orange juice commercial she saw the other day made her mouth water.
“Anything with color, flavor and vitamins looks really good to me right now,” she said.
That's because Gajewski has been eating a lot of browns and beiges for the last month: oatmeal, brown rice, lentils, pinto beans, peanut butter, macaroni, wheat bread.
To highlight the hardship of eating nutritiously – and locally – on a limited budget, Gajewski launched The Great Rice and Beans Experiment. She pledged to eat for $1 a day for 30 days and donate the remainder of her $250 monthly food budget to one of her favorite nonprofit groups, Blandford Nature Center & Mixed Greens in Grand Rapids.
In appreciation, Blandford planned to host a reception in her honor. “There's going to be cake. I'm so excited,” Gajewski gushed.
Over the past month, her blog (ricebeansmixedgreens.wordpress.com) has tallied more than 5,000 visitors from across the country and beyond. Donations exceeded $700 and will be matched by the All At Once Foundation, created by singer and musician Jack Johnson. All At Once links people to their local nonprofit groups.
Gajewski blogged about creating a garden and harvesting dandelion greens. She broke down the calorie content and nutrients in her meals and took readers along as she tended to her mother's chickens in exchange for eggs and scrubbed the aluminum siding of a co-worker's house for some maple syrup and a bag of potatoes.
“You have to work really hard to live on that limited amount of money,” said Gajewski, a 30-year-old research coordinator at Grand Valley State University.
She won't forget the night she burned her dinner of lentils and rice, yet had to eat it anyway “because I had no margin for error.”
Another day, Gajewski arrived at home to find a couple of bags of groceries on her doorstep, a gift from friends. But her self-imposed rules barred consuming any free food.
“I ended up giving it all away,” she said.
Consuming an average of nearly 1,400 calories a day, she lost about eight pounds but gained an understanding of how Americans take food for granted.
“Having variety in your diet is such a luxury. We get used to Chinese for dinner one night and pizza the next, but that's not how the rest of the world is,” she said.
She wouldn't recommend her “anti-Atkins diet” as a weight-loss regimen, nor does she plan to launch another “no-protein, all-starch” experiment.
“I think I'm going to try a low-carb diet for a while,” she says. “I'll get my carbs from ice cream, cake and huge chocolate bars.”
And this: “I may never eat oatmeal again.”
