About Me and my Experiment

About Me and my Experiment

My name's Phil Hodges. I'm a 30-something Brit living in San Francisco, where I work for a money management firm as lead researcher on a $6 billion investment fund. I earn a little more than the San Francisco 2013 minimum wage of $10.55 per hour (the highest in the nation), or $21,100 a year.

Throughout January 2013 I will be living on minimum wage. There will be a few practical constraints but I intend to keep these to a minimum. At the end of the month, everything I earn and do not spend will be donated to Larkin Street Youth Services, along with any other donations that I can squeeze out of supportive individuals and corporations. The money will support the amazing work that Larkin Street with homeless, runaway and at-risk youth between the ages of 12-24 by providing street outreach and emergency shelter, primary medical care, transitional housing, and job training and scholarship assistance to get kids off the streets.

Please consider supporting Larkin Street at this link, or by using the donation widget on the right of this page.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Pinto beans are like cheap tequila


Pinto beans are one of the best nutritional sources for someone on a budget: $1 buys you 1500 calories, 85g protein, 60g fiber, 11% of your daily vitamin C requirements, 50% of calcium and 110% of iron.

I am totally sick of them. Literally and metaphorically.

After January I will never willingly eat another pinto bean.  Even now, the thought of eating more beans gives me the same Pavlovian gag-reflex response as doing cheap tequila shots. It took many misspent teenage years to develop the tequila response. This one has developed in 8 days.

Anyway, since I thrive on masochism and self-denial (yeah, I’m aware that this is BS, but it aids the narrative), my friend Kelley and I decided to make a new pinto bean-based dessert.

Yes that’s right: a pinto bean dessert!  And not one of those gelatinous-goo-with-beans desserts that have been disappointing white people at Asian restaurants for millennia.  No, a real sweet, creamy, chocolatey dessert based on pinto beans.

We found a recipe for pinto bean chocolate fudge here.  I won’t rehash it.  Suffice to say these were pretty good – probably my best dessert yet.  Sure they made us feel sick, but that was from stuffing our faces with deliciousness.
  






The moral of the story: They may make me gag, but there is nothing – NOTHING! – worth doing that can’t be done with pinto beans.

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