I’d love to live like Gwyneth Paltrow, but it would probably kill me. We’ve reviewed the ridiculous prices for, like, a plain white t-shirt on Goop. We’ve also looked at how to beautify your “conscious uncoupling” with a mock divorce Pinterest board. I surely couldn’t afford that sort of lifestyle, but what if Gwyneth tried to live more like us plebes? This week we learned the answer, when Gwynnie tried to buy a week’s worth of groceries on a $29 SNAP budget. Here’s what she came up with:
Yo. That looks like the food version of being grounded. It is the dinner world’s answer to being in-school suspended. It’s like if a spin instructor was in charge of the menu for a jail.
This hurts me more than it hurts you: I’m about to do some math. Let’s do some good old-fashioned calorie counting! Word problems! For anyone currently muddling their way through Common Core, feel free to draw a spirograph or make a hand-turkey or however it is that you do math now.
12 eggs, at 80 calories per egg: 960 calories
Black Beans, 16 oz: 1552 calories
Frozen Peas, 12 oz: 264 calories
Whole Grain Brown Rice, 16 oz: 1609 calories
1 medium sweet potato: 115 calories
1 head romaine lettuce: 108 calories
1 medium white onion: 50 calories
1 green chili pepper, I think: 18 calories
1 avocado: 320 calories
Roughly 10 scallions, at 8 calories per scallion: 80 calories
1 ear of corn: 100 calories
1 tomato: 25 calories
1 head of garlic: 50 calories
1 bunch of kale: 140 calories
18 Guerrera flour tortillas, at 130 calories per tortilla: 2340 calories
1 bunch of cilantro, if you’re into that: 23 calories
Seven limes. SEVEN limes. Seven LIMES: 140 calories
Want to add it up? You don’t have to. It’s 7,754. There are seven days in a week. That’s easy to remember, because that’s how many damn limes Gwyneth bought. Okay, 7,731 divided by 7: 1,107.7 Let’s round up to 1,108.
Let me just write that for you again.
1,108.
That’s how many calories a person is supposed to eat in a day, according to Gwyneth. I’m just assuming this is for one person, because otherwise we’re at something like 553 calories a day for two people.
I think Gwyneth’s point was supposed to be that eating healthy on food assistance is hard to do, but ultimately possible. Instead, she proved what a lot of people already know:
- you can never have too many limes?
- you CAN have too many limes, but that point is somewhere in the double-digits for a week?
- a lime a day keeps the macrobiotics away? (Still not 100% on what a macrobiotic is, sounds like maybe a transforming food-monster action figure.)
- roughly half of your food should be from the onion-and-garlic family (no wonder Gwyneth and Coldplay got consciously uncoupled)?
- there’s no better afterschool snack than 1/7 of a juicy red tomato?
- That if you have a very limited food budget, you may as well buy 10 Totino’s pizzas for $8 or a loaf of day-old white bread for a few bucks so that you don’t wake up in the middle of every night with food nightmares.
Oh, Gwyneth, Gwyneth, Gwyneth. You seem like a nice gal just trying to spread the word about something you care about. But I can tell you first-hand that writing about things you care about on the internet is the surest way to get insulted by strangers. I can also tell you that this diet blows. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And the road to an electrolyte imbalance is paved with a menu of multiple scallions a day with a side of 1/7 of an avocado.
Cookies + Sangria 