CNN/Time's Cheapskate Blog

Somehow or other, Brad Tuttle of Time Magazine’s Cheapskate blog, ran across fiftybucksaweek.com, and decided to do an article on it. He sent us some great questions, let us respond to them, and compiled them into an article that ran on Tuesday morning. You can read his Q&A with Emily, Cari, and me here.

You can also read the hate-fest that followed.

Seems folks didn’t like the idea of people writing about eating well on $50 a week, or having that writing written about by a large vertical media company.

“I have fed my family of 4 for less than $50 a week out of necessity, and yet you sit around and congratulate yourselves for figuring out a way to feed one person for $50 a week? I’m sorry, but you are going to have to try harder,” wrote nigelcorn.

“Oh these poor yuppies who can’t have their expensive coffee anymore, or just had to break the rules for that tofu dog, or can’t have their cheese that 99% of Americans can’t even pronounce,” commented jhick1981.

“$50 a week per person is nothing,” succinctly wrote unnamed6 (and, by “nothing,” meaning “too much”).

As ought to be expected on a web forum, a number of the haters apparently hadn’t bothered to read our blog, where we’ve been nothing but up-front about who we are and what we’re doing. Others rose to our defense, citing figures on average food spending, or the actual cost of eating supposed “budget” fast food. Some were PO’d at having wasted the five or so minutes it took to read the Q&A, and not being told what they wanted to hear. And some took serious issue with the consumption of cheeses with foreign-sounding names, and the (sedentary, self-congratulatory) culture that surrounds it.

Speaking for myself, I never pretended to be something other than a pastured-meat-chomping gastro-yuppie, and I’ve written as much repeatedly. Food is my pleasure, and my priority, cheeses with foreign-sounding names and all. But just because that’s how I eat, I don’t assume that’s how you can or should eat, too. I think it’s great that so many other Americans (and Canadians, and…) eat creatively on thirty, twenty, or ten dollars per adult per week. I, for one, would like to know how. So here’s what I’d ask: document it. Photograph it. Blog about it. Tell us what you bought, what you grew, how you prepared it, how it tastes. The tools are there online. Most of them are free. Use them to contribute to the growing global dialog on how we eat. As for ourselves, we at fiftybucksaweek.com will link to you, write about you, learn from you. This is important stuff. None of us is holding ourselves up as a dietary role model (though maybe it’s time I order that t-shirt). We’re just telling our readers what we bought, what we grew, and how we ate it, five days a week. We’d be honored if you’d do the same. We think the world would be better for it.

So come on, haters. Get blogging. Let’s see what you can do. Chances are, we’ll all learn something from it.

And, thanks, Brad. We all had fun responding to your questions, and were delighted to be featured in your blog.

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