For a challenge, and I’ll tell you why later, I’ve decided to not grocery shop for as long as possible. I’m just going to eat whatever i have in the house, in whatever combinations come up. I think it will be cool. This means that for dinner tonight, I had cheddar and sour cream ruffles, peach tea, and beans in a bag with basmati rice and goat cheese. super low cal meal. If that sounds bad, that’s because it is terrible. And probably going to put me on the toilet for a while. It looks like the inside of a feverish baby diaper.

As a side note, I pose this question:

nom nom

If you pulled down a sealed bag of basmati rice that you hadn’t opened in a few months, and then started preparing it, and found within your preparations, a tiny bug, resembling the black stormtroopers from Episode IV, but very very tiny, what would you do? Would you get rid of rice? Would you still eat it? Would you hope that the badness would somehow be boiled away in the process and assume you were safe?

OR would you say to yourself, “I don’t know how the heck this bug got into this closed bag, he must be a SUPER bug with SUPER powers and good luck!” and put him back into the pot?

Well. I threw him out. I continued making the rice. I am eating it. I forgot how good Ruffles are. They can’t be good for  you, surely. I know this because of the agent orange that remains on my hands for days after I have eaten them.

Steve Jobs has passed away, and lot of people are really feeling the loss, and there are some very inspiring articles about him out there. My favorite one being this one from the Nytimes.com. And I feel sad to a certain extent, because he was a genius and a Renaissance man, and an inspiration to visionary nerds everywhere. And it is sad when anyone dies and the world is a little bit different.

But as I stirred my rice and beans today, I thought about how this “weird” meal is a food millions eat every night, because that is their only option. I thought about the 22,000 children that die everyday worldwide because they are starving. Not just in the countries in Africa we think about. But in Latin America. East Asia. Here in the US. And I don’t see a ton of twitters and status updates and blogs about that. Not from me. I wrote a blog yesterday about a guy I never knew, who invented products I love, kind of as an obituary. Who writes them for the 22,000?

To live in this country, at this time, in this world…what is our responsibility? Are the products Steve Jobs invented as universe-altering as the leaving of one child’s soul every three seconds because she didn’t have enough to eat? All these thoughts sped through my head, and I thought “hey, man, I’m in school, I work full-time, I make no money. I’ll let someone else do it. Maybe I’ll help when I’m older.” But I know that’s not what we are called to do, when we are blessed beyond what we deserve.

So I went through my bank account, did some number-crunching, and figured I spend an average of $125 a month on food. I decided I want to try and save that up this month and donate it to buy a goat and two chickens through World Vision, an organization I think it really trying to do  something with the problem of world hunger. If I just eat all the things I have stockpiled at home, and only spend $25 this month to get some staples, I think I can do $100 by October 31st. Its not a lot, but it will mean something to somebody. Does anyone want to join me in this challenge? $100 this month to save a family’s life? Maybe if we all did something small, it could be something great. Steve Jobs believed in things like that. I believe in things like that. Do you?