Elixir of Life

My daughter Lee is on a path of trying to identify the basic nutrients that she needs, so she can create an "elixir of life", or a nutritional potion to substitute for food.  The idea is she could simply drink it and not  bother with the real food process.

 For her, one of the motivating factors was that she does not enjoy all the food related activities such as grocery shopping, cooking, washing dishes, etc.  She finds that stressful!  Her life elixir would be made entirely of soy or protein powders and spices and herbs perhaps, but no actual fruit or vegetables!

She sent me a link to a blogger who basically has the same idea.  It was a well thought out plan.  He focused on the various benefits.   He is a runner and needed to identify how much energy he needed to take in in order to expend the energy needed for running.   One of the benefits is financial.  He gave some information on what the average American spends of food.  This information I found quite fascinating.   I think his exact quote was:  The average American spends $605 a month on groceries, half of which is food.

I was not sure how that might stack up with what Google would say.  As a single male, no doubt half of his $605 a month would have been spent on eating at places other than home.

I did get the hard data from Google,  and then looked at how much we spend on groceries in a month. Very little of ours is spent eating outside the home.  Of course, the amounts given were on a chart with a range, depending on age, and whether one shops the "low budget plan" or the "liberal" plan.

Using that chart, I determined that the two of us (senior citizens) together should be spending approximately $650 a month on food, not counting eating out.   I was pleased to discover, looking back at our expenditures for last year, that we never did reach that total.  In January it was less than $400 a month, while presumably we were eating a lot of leftovers in the freezer from Christmas.  In June, it was over 600 but less than 650.  It was always between the 400 to 600 range.

Anyway, it was an interesting thing to explore and discover.

I wish my daughter well with her elixir experiment.   Occasionally, I do enjoy a smoothie for breakfast.   It is delicious, but not completely satisfying.

After a while, I need crunch, and texture and bread.   Actually, I could probably live on the bread alone, as my elixir of life.