Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Frugally Eating Cherries

The other day I bought a special treat for our family: fresh cherries at $3.49 a pound. Ouch! I knew from past experience that some members of the family can inhale the entire bag single-handedly, leaving others in the family with nary a taste of the treat. So I set out to solve the problem, and here is what I came up with:I divided up the bag into four containers, one for each family member. Each lid has one person's name on it. That's their box of cherries, and they are free to eat it as quickly or as slowly as they choose. When their's is gone, it's gone. No raiding of other's allowed.

I didn't think to take a picture at the time I divided them up, but each box was full to the brim. And when I divided the fruit up, I did it exactly equally. I counted out the cherries by ten's until I had just a few left, then I counted them out by one's. It came out with no remainders. Notice the eating pattern seen here; some eat faster and some slower.

1 comment:

Heather said...

That's a really good idea. I remember when you would make trail mix rides, and how maddening it was to have all the m&m's disappear (or even to just be worried about them disappearing).

It was so much less stressful when we each had our own bag.

In my house, we have the opposite problem. I buy things specifically with Jared in mind (fruit, lunch meat, yogurt), but he doesn't eat them because either he doesn't know it's there, or he wants to be nice and save the "good stuff" for me. I eat what I consider to be my share, and the other stuff starts to go bad. I have to "force" him to eat it.