The Man Who Ate Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

man from UPS has got used to lugging fifty-pound bags from Giusto’s every week or two, and I have vacuumed most of the organic bread flour out of my word processor. Most days the bread is more than good enough to eat, and some days it is so, good that we eat nothing else.
    November 1990

Staying Alive
    Years ago I read somewhere that the absolutely cheapest survival diet consists of peanut butter, whole wheat bread, nonfat dry milk, and a vitamin pill. Eager to try it, I rushed to the supermarket, returned home with provisions for a week’s survival, and went to work with my calculator and butter knife. Two generous tablespoons of peanut butter spread on a slice of bread and washed down with half a glass of reconstituted milk added up to 272 calories, including 13.6 grams of protein, 15.3 grams of fat, and a good quantity of fiber and complex carbohydrates. In a day filled with eight glossy open-faced peanut-butter sandwiches and four cool, foamy glasses of milk, I would consume 2,200 calories and many more than the 60 grams of protein an adult needs, and the vitamin pill would take care of the rest.
    My new diet was 50 percent fat, but twenty-five years ago nutritionists were worried about problems more urgent than the speculative link between dietary fat and chronic disease. They were concerned with the ravages of malnutrition and poverty, with vitamin and protein deficiencies and the minimum cost of subsistence, of staying alive and healthy. I called the Department of Agriculture the other day. Nobody works on subsistence anymore.
    Subsistence, I am happy to report, is not much of a problem for me these days either. I could probably subsist for a decade or more on the food energy I have thriftily wrapped around various parts of my body. And even in the past, when straitened circumstances forced me to live at the subsistence level regarding clothing, home appliances, and sports equipment, I have always been willing to devote more of my resources to food than have any of the people around me. I called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average American household spends $30,487 a year on everything, of which it allocates a pitiful 8.9 percent to food eaten at home and 5.4 percent to food eaten in restaurants. In telling contrast, I have spent between 30 and 100 percent of my income on food every year since I became an adult. Except for those few blissful days when I lived on the miraculous peanut-butter diet.
    One day I nearly dropped a bowl of oyster stuffing when I read with disbelief and disappointment that the average American family spent only $2.59 a person on Thanksgiving dinner in 1991, down from $2.89 the year before, an undeniable sign of the decay of family and national values under two successive Republican administrations. To be precise, I did not actually read that the average American family spent only $2.59 a person on Thanksgiving dinner. That’s what the National Turkey Federation press release wanted me to think I had read. The press release really said that a complete Thanksgiving dinner for ten need cost only $2.59 a person, considering how inexpensive turkey is. They’re right about turkey. I called the Department of Agriculture. Turkey is the cheapest form of animal protein you can readily buy, or at least it was in June 1991. Three ounces of lean, cooked turkey flesh cost 42 cents; three ounces of cooked T-bone steak were $2.35. The protein in beans is much cheaper, but the USDA’s 1991 list of “meat alternatives” left out beans. Incredibly, no one in or out of the government knows how much the average American family did spend on its average Thanksgiving dinner. I called everybody.
    The government does know that the average American household consists of one and six-tenths adults, seven-tenths of a child, and three-tenths of an elderly person (for a total of two and six-tenths humans), who collectively spend $4,271 a year on food, both in and out of the house. That comes to $4.50 a person a