Well-meaning advice-givers will tell you that if you want to save money and eat right, you should bring lunch. Well-intentioned grad students named Phoebe have tried this approach, but found it lacking.
For one thing, bringing lunch means, if not an extra trip to the store, an extra bag to carry to campus, given that The Backpack is permanently at-capacity as is. The 'bring dinner leftovers' approach sounds so efficient, but if I make too much of a dinner I like, I just finish all I made right away, such that if there are leftovers, it's because whatever it was was so-so to begin with. And with lunches prepared specially bread's always stale by the time it comes out of the bag, plus add up the price of all the ingredients - purchased, inevitably, at various NYC establishments - and the difference is hardly that of making coffee or pasta at home.
But I just spent $8.17 (with tax) on a sandwich, and I'm ashamed. (I'm not counting the $1.75 on tea - the second of the day - because this is an investment in my not coughing for the whole duration of the class I'm about to teach, as I so charmingly did on Monday.) This can't be right!
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
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6 comments:
if I make too much of a dinner I like, I just finish all I made right away
You seem to be quite small, raising the question of where all that dinner can go. Are you like those skinny Japanese guys who win the hot dog eating contest every year?
I heartily agree. You can get a sandwich at the Teachers College cafeteria for $4-$5 and there's just no way I can beat that when you consider that all the other ingredients will go bad before I can make enough sandwiches to make it cheaper.
And yes, I'm already carrying a messenger bag and a laptop bag. I bring my own water bottle but that's as far as I'll go.
PG,
Replace hot dogs with pasta and... yes.
Becca,
Precisely! My usual sandwich is a $3.99 grilled cheese. It would cost nearly that to buy comparable ingredients, and the grilling is priceless.
Hmm...I think everyone needs to lower their standards towards lunch. What's wrong with stale PB&J? As for making food last longer, those ingredients are near indestructible, especially if you freeze the bread and defrost the slices as you need them. Not the tastiest option, but the bread will never go bad!! (I've eaten six month old bread from a freezer. Yes, it tasted like freezer but I ate it anyways and did not get sick). If your jam goes bad in a couple of weeks, put it on your jam black list, and never get that type again. Most jams should last for months, if not years. Also, if it's not too moldy, scoop out the mold and eat it anyways. It builds your immune system as well as saves food, so in the long run you have to see your doctor less).
(p.s., I'm only slightly kidding, these are basically the sandwiches I ate through childhood, my mother prescribing to the "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and "even picky children will eat what I serve if the alternative is starving to death" school of parenting)
Of course, cheese can be more expensive, and 3.99 is not bad, but still, you could probably make it cheaper or with better ingredients. they have to be making some profit, so figure they're getting cheap bread and cheese, and you could make the same priced sandwich with better ingredients if you did it at home. Also, couldn't you purposely make more dinner to the point it would be impossible to eat in one sitting?
To be honest though, I totally feel you, I too ate way more lunches at school than I meant to last year, mainly because of laziness/poor planning/convenience, and justified it in pretty much the same way. But even though buying a lunch can be cheap, making one can be even cheaper, you just have to be able to sacrifice a certain level of freshness and convenience.
Britta,
I think there's something to be said for having unpleasant food memories of childhood, so that once you're a bill-paying, Verizon-confronting adult, you at least have the joy of choosing your own meals. And while I did indeed have frozen-bagel pb&j for lunch today, I like knowing that this is not the only option.
This particular grilled cheese is not, I think, how this particular cheese shop stays in business, and strikes me as - as much as one can say this about a sandwich - below market rate. I guess what I need to do might be accept lunch-out as inevitable, but make sure the sandwich in question does not hit the dreaded $7-something mark, which means $8 once tax enters into it.
cheese sandwich on the cheap: http://www.cockeyed.com/inside/sandwich/sandwiches05.shtml
dave.s.
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