£1.30 a day for Food Challenge

[Amaranth]

The £1.30 a day for food (£9.10 per person for a week) challenge starts this year on February 22, 2008.
http://2dollars.org/

It's a challenge to see if you can live for one week on only two dollars a day of food (roughly £1.30 when this challenge was first begun several years ago and the amount remaining the same even though the current conversion is different and would be more difficult), like nearly half the world's population has to every day of their lives

It may sound impossible, but through a fun programme of events, activities and socials participants will learn how to cook filling meals while stretching the food budget to the limits (useful skills for penniless students and others interested in frugality to have).

Would you contribute one or two of your favorite frugal recipes to the recipes forum(and post them here as well as it would help during regular times)? Previously when the forum was hacked, the great recipes that the forum users had collected were lost. The webmaster was doing research out of the country at the time and wasn't able to retrieve or restore the forum info so it's starting over.

Also any tips on especially frugal food resources would be welcome.

[Stonehead]

The £1.30 a day for food (£9.10 per person for a week) challenge starts this year on February 22, 2008.
http://2dollars.org/

It's a challenge to see if you can live for one week on only two dollars a day of food (roughly £1.30 when this challenge was first begun several years ago and the amount remaining the same even though the current conversion is different and would be more difficult), like nearly half the world's population has to every day of their lives

It may sound impossible, but through a fun programme of events, activities and socials participants will learn how to cook filling meals while stretching the food budget to the limits (useful skills for penniless students and others interested in frugality to have).

Would you contribute one or two of your favorite frugal recipes to the recipes forum(and post them here as well as it would help during regular times)? Previously when the forum was hacked, the great recipes that the forum users had collected were lost. The webmaster was doing research out of the country at the time and wasn't able to retrieve or restore the forum info so it's starting over.

Also any tips on especially frugal food resources would be welcome.

Actually, it's much easier to do this than most people think, provided you have space to grow at least some of your fruit and vegetables.

Our entire grocery budget is £35-40 a week (it should be £35 but prices are pushing up). That includes everything, not just food.

Our food bill for the past fortnight was £60.88 at the supermarket, £5.10 at the corner shop and £1.90 at the bakery for a total of £67.88, or £33.94 a week.

Our fruit and vegetable seed bill for the year was £249.50, which works out at £4.80 a week. Meat and eggs are cost neutral as our chickens provide enough eggs to pay for their feed plus their capital, while our weaner and pork sales also pay for the cost of our own pork plus their capital.

That gives us a total weekly food spend of £38.74, or £9.68 per person.

That's only 58 pence per person above the target and cutting back on one four-pint bottle of milk would see us come in under target.

And we do eat healthily and well.

Of course, I do have to work very, very hard to make it work but that's the trade off we've chosen.

The person for whom this would be hardest would be a single parent with three or more children, on restricted means that rise less than the cost of living, and who lives in a flat with almost nowhere to grow anything. I say almost, because I've lived in flats and managed to grow herbs, tomatoes, peppers, small squashes and the like on window sills and ledges.

[ina]

Not that long ago (around 1999/2000), I was in a fairly low paid job for a while (although just above minimum wage). Once I'd paid all my bills (bus to work, rent, minimal heating and electricity - no car, telephone or TV, as even if I'd wanted them, I didn't have the money for them), I had £50 per month left to live on: so that included not only food and drink, but also "entertainment". OK, that's still more than the £1.30 per day in this experiment - but it was do-able. Not that I got a lot of fresh fruit and veg on it, but I did get some (luckily a farmshop once a week nearby).

[hamster]

We're not far off it either. We spend more than the £18.20 a week for 2 people this experiment would allow, but we're only about £4-£5 off the target, and that's with growing very little (only a few herbs - that should change this year!). It's hard to see what we could cut out. We could buy cheaper things, but we've made the decision to pay a bit extra in order to buy things that are more ethical and environmentally friendly. I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of the world's poor, but in order to take part in this experiment I'd have to buy N*scafe instead of Fair Trade coffee, or imported juice from concentrate in tetra paks rather than English apple juice in recyclable bottles, or drive to T*sco instead of walking to Waitrose.

I support the ideals behind this challenge and I think that for a lot of people it could be a really useful and eye-opening exercise to live more frugally, but I grew up in a struggling agricultural area and have travelled a lot in Africa, and as somebody who is lucky enough not to have to count every penny, I personally feel I can do more good by spending my money wisely than by artificially cutting my food budget by about 50p a day. (I also don't agree with the bit on the website you posted that advocates importing more food from developing countries!)

I think perhaps we may not be your 'target audience' over here, as most of us are already pretty frugal about food and in tune with the issues you're trying to raise awareness of. I wish you luck with the challenge, though, and I hope you have some success convincing all those lazy students who live off ready meals and kebabs to join in. I shall think up some tips and possibly dig out some recipes for you, and try and interest some of my friends in the challenge.

[red]

I don't think it would be too difficult.. eggs would feature more in our daily diet... luxuries would go. It's doable.
as hamster said, most people here are already aware and on a budget

[Annpan]

We could definaelty do it... I used to feed 2 of us on £1 a day... I bought cheap everything... budget flour - 18p a bag, budget tinned tomatoes - 11p, budget mixed herbs - 25p, so on, so on, so on...

We didn't have a bad diet, all our food was bought from the big Asda round the corner. I had no plans on being self sufficient at the time (5 years ago - edit: no it was more like 8 years ago ) but to eat, I had to learn how to bake bread and cook meals for pennies, we bought really cheap meat and cheese and eggs- which discusts me now, but we didn't know any better.
One cup of coffee each a day (jar of coffee was £1.50 - can't stomach cheap coffee), packed lunches if we were going out (or for at work), no treats, no juice, no crisps, no biscuits (maybe bargin digestives 20p)

It can be done, you just can't afford the finer things in life - like organic, ethical or fairtrade... but if you have to eat, it is pretty easy, if you are not fussy.

I'll tell you there is nothing like being poor to make you appreciate what you have in life... just remembering it is making me feel really lucky - hard working, but lucky

[QuakerBear]

I did this for three years as an undergraduate. £10 per week for all my food, soap, loo paper etc. If you're giving it ago for a week you'll be fine as you'll have loads of stuff in the cupboards, you may not even notice a difference. After you've used those up though it starts to get really, really hard and you have to go down to a one meal a day system. Rice is good you can have that for your meal, it's filling and you can pay a couple of pounds and buy a really big bag that lasts.

[mrsflibble]

when i was a student i ended up eating nothing but oats, rice and frozen peas for 3 days and wiping my bum on torn bits of the free student union newspaper before ringing my mum in tears. within an hour my dad was outside my flat with a plastic box of goodies.
when i later spent 6 months unemployed and living with jim and his dad, me and jim would give Paul £30 a week between us which was all we could afford out of the JSA we got each.
Now I'm fairly good at budgeting, and i reckon we could live on £1.50 a day so long as that doesn't have to cover petrol as well. if it did we'd just have to do it on one of jim's "off" weeks :D

[ina]

Rice is good you can have that for your meal, it's filling and you can pay a couple of pounds and buy a really big bag that lasts.

Depending on where you live, though... I was out in the sticks back then, with no shop nearby to speak of. If you pay £3-£4 to get to the nearest supermarket with cheap stuff, that makes it a bit more difficult!

[Amaranth]

I agree about how it would be good to do as much of this as possible with local foods and whole foods. Doing a similar sort of challenge in September with access to one's garden produce would make a huge difference too.

And tips and recipes would be appreciated. One of the things people have commented on in the past in looking over people's food choices in these poverty awareness challenges is that too many people thought that frugal food consisted of a lot of ramen. In later challenges some people gave themselves the additional constraint of doing it without ramen to show that it could be done more healthfully.

Other people haven't realized until seeing what food others used that dry beans were often more frugal than tinned beans. So any suggestions on what people could best look for this time of year would be a help.

Usually I can find potatoes, a few kinds of dried beans, barley, and four or five kinds of greens that are very frugal this time of year. Often apples and onions are available inexpensively as well.