Some of you may be aware of the Living Below The Line campaign. The challenge is to live on £1 a day for all your food and drink for the first working week of May (2nd - 6th), which equates to £5 for the week. The £1 a day come from the limit of extreme poverty, normally given as earning less than $1.25 a day. This is roughly the same as £0.75 a day, but not only must this pay for food, it also has to pay for everything else - rent, water, electricity, household items etc. For more information on this see here.
Now, living on just £1 a day for food is going to be quite a challenge, and the idea is to get an appreciation of how people live in the developing world. I can never pretend that by doing this I'm going to understand what it is like to live in extreme poverty. As I found in Nepal, I knew at the end of the day I have an emergency stop button, a Get Out Of Jail Free card, which i know I can pick up and cash in. To my rescue will come the bank, my parents or even the government. I will never be able to understand what it is like to live without that. However, I hope that it will be able to start to give me an understanding of the issues that affect people living in real poverty. To me, this isn't about raising money for MRDF or whoever the final funds will go to - although I am going to donate in all the money I'm going to save on food next week to MRDF's partners - it is about understanding people that little bit more, seeing things from their point of view, as Atticus Finch said "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." (Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird). By the way, if you have never read To Kill A Mockingbird, read it. It is one of the most amazing books I think I have ever read.
I managed to convince Hannah to join me in doing it, and so we decided to try and share some of the cost. So, the first job was to come up with a menu. Looking at the recipes online, we came up with versions of our own. So the menu for next week looks something like this:
Menu
- Monday (Cost 93.9p)
- Breakfast - Porridge Honey/Jam
- Lunch - Chickpea and Cauliflower with Chapatti
- Dinner - Jacket Potato with a Vegetable and Tomato Sauce
- Tuesday (Cost 96.5p)
- Breakfast - Porridge Honey/Jam
- Lunch - Potato and Leek Soup with Chapatti
- Dinner - Fried Rice and Vegetables
- Wednesday (Cost 93.9p)
- Breakfast - Porridge Honey/Jam
- Lunch - Chickpea and Cauliflower with Chapatti
- Dinner - Jacket Potato with a Vegetable and Tomato Sauce
- Thursday (Cost 96.5p)
- Breakfast - Porridge Honey/Jam
- Lunch - Potato and Leek Soup with Chapatti
- Dinner - Fried Rice and Vegetables
- Friday (Cost 96.8p)
- Breakfast - Porridge Honey/Jam
- Lunch - Chickpea and Cauliflower with Chapatti
- Dinner - Pasta with a Vegetable and Tomato Sauce and cheese
As there is a little left over each day, this can allow tea drinkers to drink some tea, or biscuit eaters such as myself, to indulge a little. From this menu, we scoured the internet trying to find the best deals on all food. Unfortunately, the cheapest seemed to come from Asda, not my most favourite of supermarkets (although probably more popular in Bristol that Tesco at the moment (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-13167041)). So, our shopping list and costs became as follows:
Shopping List
- Honey - £1.06
- Jam – 38p
- Porridge Oats 1kg – 75p
- Plain Flour 1.5kg – 52p
- Salt 750g – 40p
- Vegetable Oil 1l - £1.44
- Baking Potatoes (bag of 4) – 70p x2
- Onion 1kg – 50p
- Leek – 62p x2
- Frozen Cauliflower 900g – 76p
- Dried Chickpeas 500g – 78p
- Chilli Flakes 28g – 57p
- Cumin 41g – 40p
- Pasta 500g – 9p
- Plum Tomatoes – 31p x3 tins
- Mushrooms 250g – 83p
- Carrot – 7p x3
- Long Grain Rice 1kg – 49p
- Tin of Sweetcorn 326g – 32p
- Wyke Farm Extra Mature 200g - £1.50
Now the more keen mathematicians amongst you will notice that this doesn't add up to our allotted £10 between us. However, some of the items (e.g. honey, oats) will only be partially used, so we're only going to take the cost proportional to that which we've used. This may not be strictly speaking fair - could someone living in extreme poverty be able to afford these large items, and would we be saving money by doing it this way? - but as many items can't be bought in any smaller sizes (at least at a reasonable price) then this is the only way I can see of doing it.
Anyway, I'm going to be blogging about the whole experience, the food, the taste, the hunger and everything else all of next week, so keep your eyes out or have a look out on twitter (http://twitter.com/saminnepal) to see how I'm getting on. If you'd like to give some money for this campaign then look here (http://bit.ly/dLqvwP), although as I have said before, raising money is not my prime objective.
We're going to be shopping on Thursday, so I'll report back then.
SAM
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