Monday, July 12, 2010

No shopping experiment, the flip side

Once I got to Ithaca and got my kitchen set up, it was time to stock my cupboards..and my fridge..and my freezer..and my liquor cabinet.  Yes, I'm in the process of replacing many of those things that I systematically ate up a few months ago.  I spend a lot more than I'm used to spending at the grocery store, due to all those random supplies.
Part of me wonders if it would be cheaper to just never cook, and just grab ready made stuff at Wegman's, microwave dinners, and/or eat in the restaurants/dorms* around campus.  I did this in grad school, aided by the presence of the MIT food trucks and the 24 hour coffee house, and I sort of did this as a postdoc and in the early years at the startup company, since they fed us. And I'm sure there will be times when I revert to that when things are super busy.  But to make that work, you have to commit to it 100%, like I did when I was a grad student with no kitchen.  Going half and half gets pricy and time consuming- I ended up buying stuff I didn't use, and spending too much time going out to find food.

*  As a perk, faculty and staff can go to the all-you-can eat dorm lunches for $6.  Even when I was a young undergraduate biddy working in the dorm cafeteria, some 20+ years ago, it cost at least that much.  As a result, we didn't see many non-students.  The postdocs in the group are big fans of this, and they bring along some of the grad students. These are some big eaters, too. 

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