I am sitting here, in my home office (sounds so official), starving to death. Some people (you know the types), upon reading that last sentence, immediately thought, “well, you’re not really starving to death because you’re going to eat food soon enough. you’re just experiencing hunger pains because you haven’t eaten in a little while. if you waited long enough, they would go away. give it a day or two and then you’d really be starving to death.”

To those types of people I respond thusly: You’re wrong. I’m not experiencing hunger pains. You see, I started to eat a bag of chips right before I started writing this post. The feelings of death by starvation have been dissipating ever so slowly.

I knew when I opened the bag of chips that it might keep me from going outside (in the ACTUAL outdoors) to get food. I accepted the consequences, though I think I’ll regret it later.

I decided a few weeks ago that I was never going grocery shopping again (for as long as I don’t have a car). It wasn’t a completely silly thing to decide, and you might be making all sorts of wrong conclusions about my eating habits, but the decision did have one consequence I did not intend: starving to death.

In the battle of quantity vs. quality, quantity almost always wins. For example, I’d rather eat two bags of plain tortilla chips than one bite of amazing pizza. The deciding factor being this question: “if this is the last thing I eat, how long would I last before starving to death?”

There all sorts of flaws with my quality vs. quantity decision making, and an examination of my behavior would no doubt provide ample reason to distrust everything I have said thus far. The fact remains, however, that my cupboards are almost completely empty and if I don’t do something about it soon I could easily be hungry way more than I like to be.

I do have pancake mix, some eggs, some chips, hot chocolate mix, a bottle of hot sauce, and plain yogurt (I thought I was buying vanilla). This is a suitable amount of food on which one can survive (not for long), but not on which one would pleasantly thrive.

So, a few weeks ago I ordered food from FreshDirect, an online grocery delivery service for the New York area. I ordered, and the food arrived. I didn’t have to walk. I didn’t have to take the subway. It was awesome.

So I decided to shop like that for the rest of my car-less existence.

Then, I ran out of food. So I bought a few things from the grocery store. But not too much because it’s cheaper and easier online.

The problem with online shopping is that you have to wait for it. You don’t get instant satisfaction, which is fairly important when you’re trying not to starve to death.

So now that I’ve rambled on and on and have eaten way too many chips, I’m gonna go outside and find something to eat. Wendy’s? Subway? Crown Fried Chicken?

It would be nice if restaurants had signs that said “our food prevents starvation.” That way, if a restaurant didn’t have the sign, you would know not to get food there.