Living on a pound a day – possible?

Listening to the radio today and a woman is in her 3rd week of living on a pound a day (for food and drink)
Anyone else doing it?

What can you eat for a £1 a day? any ideas for a days food?

Mrs Grips lived on 2 euros a week in France in 2004, for about 3 months. Never mind iDave, the French diet definitely works 🙂

Ages ago I was reading a blog about someone living in a converted horse box. Scrumping for apples, harvesting rain water, and a lovely image struck me when they explained they could make very tasty, but cheap chapattis using their home made press, a fire and a bag of flour from Lidl for 18p or something. I think 1Kg is about 50p a bag ATM.

Oddly I was trying to search for that blog only yesterday, but unfortunately cant seem to find it any more which is a pity.

That’ll be the newly announced Job Seekers Allowance.

There is a subtle but important difference between living and existing.

Very difficult I think. When I bought my first house about 15 years ago I aimed to eat for £1 per day. Some days I’d manage it but on average I certainly didn’t. It did make me eat quite a healthy diet, loads of veg and beans etc as you get a lot of bulk for your money.

Our water bill works out at 71p a day, so that would leave me 29p to get my calorie intake for the day. Unless you are geographically fortunate* then I don’t think it would be very easy to sustainably live in the UK off of £1 per day.

* LIving near a plentiful source of free drinking water. Also wild fruit and veg would be handy. I guess the most useful would be if you lived somewhere that you catch your own fish to eat.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1641364/How-I-lived-on-1-a-day-for-a-year.html

She explained how she had lived on ‘just necessities’ for a year, although she considered a $70 (£35) haircut a necessity. What a cheat

😉

Anyone tried this?
http://freegan.info/%5B/url%5D

my weekly shop regularly comes in at £20 or just under / over and i dont exactly miss things out just shop carfully and buy fresh produce rather than ready made stuff.

ok so its 3 quid a day and i have cupboards full of spice’s etc which help flavour but i recon its not bad

but i do think £1 a day would be very difficult

There is a subtle but important difference between living and existing.

I’m sure the £1/day people would say the exact same thing to us 🙂

Also wild fruit and veg would be handy. I guess the most useful would be if you lived somewhere that you catch your own fish to eat

I’m sure you could live for £0 a day if you knew where to look. I bet Ray Mears could do it 🙂

There are plenty of rabbits around, I’m sure no-one would mind you trapping those and eating them. There are green things to eat year round too, but not many in the winter.

Shop in the “Whoops” section.

I had a chicken for 40p the other day. It wasn’t the best, but it made a meal for 2 x human, 3 x pussy cat and enough stock to beef* up 4 other meals.

*chicken

Freeganism, scrumping or eat nothing but oatbran.

There are plenty of rabbits around, I’m sure no-one would mind you trapping those and eating them.

Go easy on the rabbit – contains less vitamins than it takes to digest, so can kill you quicker than eating nothing (apparently).

Yes, did notice you also mentioned green stuff 🙂

There are plenty of rabbits around

Rabbit has little if any nutritional value.

RH: too fast for me!

I used to eat for about that as a student arround 2007, but inflation on food went silly arround that time (the price of most things seemed to double in my final year), we’d take it in turns to cook once a week and it was quite feasible to cook for 4 or 5 people for a little over £1 (jar of lidl bolognese sauce 29p, pasta 19p, 500g mince £1), our usual rule of thumb was you had to put at least 120g of meat in each portion, if we’d allowed veggie dinners it would have been even cheeper!

Porrige for breakfast (too cheep to calculate a price)
sandwich or a tin of tuna for lunch (~30p?)

The weekly treat was usualy a roast dinner where we’d put in a couple of quid each.

It’s probably still do-able, but either you’d be reduced to tesco value sauces or spend at lest double on the ingredients.

I believe the rabbit starvation factors in the amount of calories it takes to go out and hunt rabbits.

You could easily live on £1 a day for food and drink if you went bin diving round the back of your local supermarket. Even if you only took the boxes of eggs with 1 egg broken.

BITD of Kwik Save 4p beans, I seem to remember working out that you could “live” for a term for a tenner. 2 cans of beans and 1/2 a loaf of 10p bread per day, and a tub of marge for the whole term.

The house of students I was in had no-one in medicine, so we never explored the likely consequence of the diet…

I used to eat for about that as a student arround 2007, but inflation on food went silly arround that time (the price of most things seemed to double in my final year), we’d take it in turns to cook once a week and it was quite feasible to cook for 4 or 5 people for a little over £1 (jar of lidl bolognese sauce 29p, pasta 19p, 500g mince £1), our usual rule of thumb was you had to put at least 120g of meat in each portion, if we’d allowed veggie dinners it would have been even cheeper!

I wouldn’t want to put food that cheap into my body, sod that.

Go easy on the rabbit – contains less vitamins than it takes to digest, so can kill you quicker than eating nothing

Yeah, I watch QI too but I don’t just repeat the facts half-remembered 🙂

If you eat ONLY rabbit (as was laboured in the show) then you’ll die, but that’s probably true of most meats. Rabbit is not in itself bad for you, nor should you limit its intake. You DO however have to eat other foods as well, which is quite obvious.

I believe the rabbit starvation factors in the amount of calories it takes to go out and hunt rabbits.

I think the issue is more to do with the terrible shits you get, apparently if the choice is a water and rabbit only diet, you would live longer if you just drank water.

i Have done it but basically yuo have to accept you ar egoin gto eat the same foods ad naseum

Porridge every **** breakfast made with water
Some sort of flour based thing for dinner or perhaps cheap bread and beans on toast

So two meals in and you have had carbs only

Big bowl of something vegetable based for tea
Lentils and some cheap veg for example with pasts
Soup broth pack and some veg
leek and potato soup
Big bowl of chilli
However yuou made a big bowl and ate ot for 4 days in a row.
Getting food for nothing from bins etc is cheating IMHO
i used to get baddly bruised bananas from the veg stall that could not be sold and make them into banana bread for 10 p for a carrier bag full

I assume eating meat makes it much harder.

it is not tasty or varied or long term healthy as it is just survival rations
i am not sure you could do it for a £1 though anymore and I am not tempted to try

I wouldn’t want to put food that cheap into my body, sod that.

You should worry more about the ingredients than the price.

Yeah, I watch QI too but I don’t just repeat the facts half-remembered

You & me, we should have a memory-off sometime.

Become homeless and move to an al fresco location near a branch of Pret a Manger.

I wouldn’t want to put food that cheap into my body, sod that.

Now’t wrong with it, 3x 10p/tin of tomates, an onnion, clove of garlic, chilli and some basil would taste just the same. The only things we tried once and never again were really cheep sausages (25% meat) and tinned chicken curry.

I’ve a (in all practical terms) a limitless free supply on vennison liver (and any other bambi based offal) at the moment, epic ammounts of pate (mix 50/50 with pork mince, add flavouring and steam untill cooked then seal with glycerine)!

A pound a day for food & drink hmmm…

Have done the Value Beans & XTR thing a few times but even though I grow a fair few vegetables at home I think nutrition would suffer at £1/day. The in-laws are Whoopsie Vampires and buy all sorts of crap because it’s cheap but I don’t live that way.

‘Now’t wrong with it, 3x 10p/tin of tomatos’

Can someone tell me the benefits of 2×10 toms over 3×10?

…..I’ll get my coat.

Whoopsie Vampires

I don’t know what this means but is sounds a bit camp S&M to me 🙂

Me and the other half fairly regularly live on about 200 a month, which works out at ~2.50 each a day, wanting for nothing. I’ve no doubt you could live on a quid a day, without much effort and fairly healthily, yes. I can make a weeks worth of lunches for about £2, drink tap water, leaving £5 for beans, pasta, rice, a bit of veg – bought in bulk, not an issue.

If we are counting tap water as free then I reckon it’s quite possible.

i often go through the bins at the local co-op (they seem to be the only supermarket that doesn’t lock them) i used to get excited at the stuff i found but now it just upsets me.
when you are pulling multiple bin bags of organic bananas that have been transported around a world full of starving people, that end up in the bin while still green because the new stock has come in and shelf space is needed, the tendency is to start to question the morality of our way of life.
it should be noted that the supermarkets throw away 1/3 of their stock and factor that into the price you are paying at the till.
it should also be noted that what i am doing by saving this food (all in date by the way) from landfill could end me up in court on theft charges.
£1 a day? easy
water and electric and free food

As above, disgusting the amount that is thrown out.

There should be a way of matching the ‘surplus’ with local food banks in every town/city across the country.

Its doable but not a lot of variety

If you said strictly only food you’ve bought then a once a month trip to Iceland or Aldi would provide you with enough frozen carrots, peas, sweetcorn, pasta, tins of tomatoes, tins of tuna etc etc to be able to eat properly once each day. I did it for quite a few years on a budget not much bigger but there was a number of other freee sources for food that I had.

Dried pulses are you friend on that kind of income, as is learning to make your own bread and drinking black tea and coffee.

seriously though, why would you want to?

😯

when you are pulling multiple bin bags of organic bananas that have been transported around a world full of starving people, that end up in the bin while still green because the new stock has come in and shelf space is needed, the tendency is to start to question the morality of our way of life.

Absolutely. I’m guilty of it myself, but the consumption and waste of food in the western world is really quite disgusting.

If you’re gluten free it’s difficult, bread is out, pasta is out and the GF substitutes are much more expensive.

rather than focusing on only spending a certain amount I tend to try and only buy what I need and avoid food waste, even buying things on yellow sticker when they’re very cheap is false economy if you don’t use them.

It’s funny, if any of us lot were able to live on £1 per day, we would therefore be able to live for about a decade just by selling one of our bicycles. What a great idea 🙂

I might just sell some cranks on the classifieds and live for a few months though, just to see if it works.

Whoopsie Vampires

I don’t know what this means but is sounds a bit camp S&M to me

🙂

The Whoopsie section @ Asda is where they sell perishable/damaged products but you have to be quick