the challenge begins

This (+ a thing of porridge which I forgot to take out for the photo) is what I'll be eating for the five days.

I'm doing the Live Below the Live challenge to raise money for Positive Women, a charity supporting women and children in Swaziland with education and income generation programmes. The challenge consists of surviving on £1 a day for food and drink, and free stuff from housemates or conferences or parties or what have you is off limits (although I will say I have so far cheated on that slightly as I had a glass of beer that my housemate brews himself, and a small sip of my friend's hot chocolate as she in-sip-isted). The poorest (that's 1.4 billion people), live on less than $1.25 a day - about £1 in the UK, not only for nutrition but everything else. I feel like Living Below the Line is a good way of realizing how little that is, and getting a better understanding of the challenges faced by people in extreme poverty. I'm still paying rent, using my bike and clothes and cosmetics, so am nowhere near an actual poverty line, but restricting/reducing something as crucial as food serves as a tiny imperfect simulation. Shopping for £5 worth of groceries for the entire week (minus the weekend) has already challenged my habitual perspective.

This is what I bought:

0.75 porridge
0.17 kidney beans
0.49 split peas
0.35 carrots
0.30 garlic
0.64 green tea
0.60 apples
0.18 pasta sauce
1.25 rice
0.20 spaghetti

=
£4.93


I was not as ambitious as my friend Clare who did the challenge last week, who rightly said that buying Tesco Value products is not very ethical. This already shows how the cycle of poverty continues, as to buy the cheapest produce you need to take advantage of the exploitation that creates the cheap supermarket prices. Nevertheless, I went into a big Tesco and looked for things that could feed me for 5 days that would cost as little as possible. I didn't think I spent much on food normally, but realizing how expensive stuff actually was gave me a bit of a headache. Especially fruit and vegetables were not budget-friendly, in comparison to all the fill-up carbohydrates that were in my price range. I tried to include a reduced (!) piece of broccoli but it was still 0.69, which wouldn't have worked unless I substituted it for at least 3 other items; yikes. So it seems cheap food is also quite unhealthy: a small apple and a carrot a day definitely don’t cover your five-a-day. I was ecstatic to find a pack of green tea that fit into the fiver; it doesn't have much caffeine but the perspective of not being able to have a hot drink for 5 days really stressed me out. I also stretched the rules a little bit and used leftover vegetable skins and ends that I usually store in a plastic bag in the freezer, trying to make up for the fact that we don't have a compost and also to make veg broth out of. The skins and ends actually contain a lot of good stuff, so I'm hoping this will help at least very slightly with my vitamin intake. The broth is very simply made by boiling the skins and ends in water and cooking for about an hour, then sieving them off. I also added a few garlic cloves to make it taste a little better. I tried to do a similar trick with the vile Tesco pasta sauce, frying some garlic and adding the kidney beans, but it still tastes pretty awful. So basically, I eat porridge in the morning, an apple at 11, some rice and split peas cooked in the leftover veg bits broth for lunch, a carrot at 5ish, and some pasta with thin sauce for dinner, + tap water and up to 4 cups of green tea. After almost two days I'm not wildly hungry at all, just a bit bored, and tired. I also had to refuse a few sweet offers free stuff (homemade lemon cake my

All this is not a personal development challenge, though. Apart from highlighting the issue and learning whatever you can learn from it, its point is to raise money for anti-poverty initiatives. You can choose from a variety of organizations you may want to raise funds for: Global Poverty Project, Salvation Army International Development, Think Global, Results UK, Restless Development, SAFE (Sponsored Arts For Education), International Service, Christian Aid, Methodist Relief and Development Fund (MRDF). I chose Positive Women because I had the amazing opportunity to meet its co-founder Kathryn Llewellyn at an activist training for Tea Time For Change, and I was extremely impressed with the kind and amount of work she was doing with her organization. Both Positive Women and Tea Time For Change deserve their own blog posts, which I hope to deliver in the remaining three days of the challenge. I'll also hopefully post about how focusing so much on eating so little does not seem too unfamiliar to me, and probably any other woman, although being well above the poverty line it's for entirely different reasons that we are so scarily used to doing it.

In the meantime, if you could sponsor my efforts, and by that support women and children in Swaziland, that would be really, really great. You can do that at my sponsorship page: http://www.livebelowtheline.org.uk/martalucysummer. Any amount would be kindly appreciated!