Menu: Week 1

If the project were a pool it would have walls:

Use as much of the re-claimed food as possible.

Use as little bought food as feasible.

Use little to no wasteful packaging.
No plastic bags. No plastic wrap. No plastic silverware. No sporks.

and a deep end: Use no meat. 

Looking at the ingredients we got this first week we came up with a menu. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are always a good, cheap option. The peanut butter has protein, which is important, and jam can add a simulacrum of fruit, and sweet, that takes it one step up from eating cardboard. These made the list, but from past experience I know you have to have another option. People are allergic to peanuts. By purchasing a few staple items, we saw we’d be able to make a vegetarian chicken salad, using all the vegetables for crunch: peppers, onions, even some potatoes. 

After some selection we set aside all the fruit we thought was in good shape to stay ripe and fresh for the lunches. With enough for only half the lunches we needed another item to balance out the other half. We had half a box of bananas that weren’t fit to pass out, but they were far from rotten; a little flour, sugar, eggs and yogurt and we could make several loaves of banana bread. 

This still left us with the leafy greens, but those will wilt in the bags, so we decided to take them down to a local food kitchen that serves fresh green salad each day.

To make our project feasible we decided to have a small stock of items on hand in a SUM pantry: flour, sugar, peanut butter, jam, butter, we would use herbs and spices from our own kitchen for now. We would also have to stock practical items such as paper bags, wax paper and paper towels/napkins.

Shopping list: pantry items plus, mayonnaise, tofu, half dozen eggs.

Cost (including pantry supplies): 33.00$