The Mathematics of Oatmeal

My microwave broke. I tried to fix the door-latch, making several attempts over ten days, but elected to call it a loss and buy a new one.

There is not much choice in Bonavista, but I paid $200, which included a $10 delivery charge and a $5 tip.

How much is $200 when you are on a small pension?

To find out I mused on my most common uses of a microwave today:-

(a) Reheating a hot beverage

(b) Heating a bowl of pre-cooked (by me!) oatmeal with bottled (by me!) rhubarb for seven months of the year.

(c) Heating a bowl of Turkey and Tomato stew every other night for five months.

A hot beverage can be had for about $2.50 anywhere in town, but I’d need a car for that, and the last time I looked (2003) I was paying $3,000 per year for a car.

The same is true for a hot breakfast or a hot supper.

Consider oatmeal. A one kilogram sack of rolled oats cost me $3.50 and lasts two months. So about five cents per day. I boil rain-water and drop in a cup of oatmeal, turn off the heat, and let it cook for an hour or two while it cools. The cooled mix goes into a two-litre ice-cream tub, which will last me a week. I keep two tubs on the go.

The rhubarb is free (grown by itself where I put it down the side of the house), and I boil it for an hour, bottle it for an hour, so the cost per jar is probably around fifty cents, and a jar lasts me twenty breakfasts. In March 2023 I am still working my way through rhubarb bottled in 2021 and have not yet started on the 2022 harvest.

I figure that my re-heated oatmeal breakfast over 200 winter mornings sets me back at most ten cents per day, or 2,000 cents. Say twenty dollars.

I paid $200 for the microwave which is ten years of oatmeal breakfasts.

Last time I looked a breakfast at Walkham’s set me back $10, and a cheap supper at PK's will be ten to fifteen dollars, so my $200 dollar microwave will save me twenty breakfasts (but I get ten years!) and fifteen to twenty hot suppers.

As well I’d spend the time walking there and back twice a day.

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