Do you need juice!?

Have you ever said to yourself, "i should eat more fruits and vegetables...but Whataburger sure is great"?  Me too!

Well, my mom bought my cat and i vitamins for Christmas, which i think is her way of saying i am unhealthy.  My Polish co-worker advocates eating primarily uncooked meats, and admonishes, "legumes are pretty much the worst thing you can eat."  Netflix keeps reminding me that everytime i eat a hamburger, i am LITERALLY RUINING THE WORLD.  And sad people in podcasts keep telling my passive ears that "exercise and eating right" will miraculously cure even clinical depression.

One thing i can say though is that plants look awfully healthy.  So...i should eat more of them...or any of them!  You already know what a passion i have for finding and purchasing the cheapest food.  But how do i consume it all before it spoils, when i often am gone at work 14 hours a day!?  My recent acquisition of a refurbished juicer helps!  And this' where graphs come in, obviously!

I need a chart where i can, with a glance, determine which produce items are closest to expiry.  I'd use a simple bar chart, but that would only show me the life expectancy of each item if they were all acquired, ripe, at the same point in time.  But i shop each weekend, and sometimes purchase unripe produce that will ripen at a later date.  Enter the Gantt chart!

Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project.  In our case, the project is consuming produce while it's still consumable.  In Excel, a Gantt chart is created using a stacked bar graph, but making the first level of the bar invisible.

Our first data point is date of purchase.  This will make up the first segment of our bars.  The reason this is made invisible is that the produce "doesn't exist" prior to acquisition.

Our second point of data is the minimum life expectancy of the produce.  I culled this data from StillTasty.com, a website i highly recommend to anyone obsessed with hard numbers, as opposed to relying on mushy produce.  This makes up the portion of the bar denoting the tastiest period of each produce item.

Our third and final data point is the maximum life expectancy of the produce.  This makes up the third portion of our bar (which is only the second visible portion).  The third portion is the time during which the produce will spoil.

Then there're a lot of tweaks:  i have to render the first portion (the period of time before the produce was purchased or ripe) invisible, reverse the order of the produce categories, format the date to be in an integer then tweak the axis bounds to only include relevant dates, etc.  Back in the data sheet, i created two sorting mechanisms:  primarily, beginning of expiration.  And secondly, end of expiration.  When this sort method is applied, produce is shown, from top to bottom, in order of what needs to be used first.  And for finicky produce, or that which i'm not too familiar with, i include tips (which i will expound on later)!

Now i take this chart and glance at the top item, which is "open" onion in this case.  So i go to my Juicing Bible, look up "onion" in the index, and find the tastiest sounding recipe that calls for the least unavailable ingredients.

1. Juice
2. Store
3. Profit

At this point, you may be asking, "where do we go from here?"  Glad you asked!  My next step will be to buy magnetic paper, and turn this into an interactive system that lives on my refrigerator.  When produce is obtained, it's proper magnet (Jalapenos, Lemons, Tomatoes, etc) will be placed on that date on the "calendar" magnet.  The bar for the produce item will extend to the date the item is scheduled to expire.  And on each fruit's or vegetable's magnet will be printed the tips to best care for it.  Huzzah!  Efficiency!  (I'll post pictures of the magnets once i've made them.)