celebratory full English breakfast with extra black pudding
Costing more than the entire week's budget!
It's day two of the El Reg Quid-a-Day Nosh Posse's Live Below the Line challenge, so let's see how our intrepid members are getting along on just £1 per day for food. First up, we haven't had a chance yet to consider Chris Winpenny's complete cornucopious stockpile, some of which we've already seen... Chris's initial stash of …
I don't know. But he ought to treasure them, because a quick and possibly careless analysis suggests that the milk & tea bags consumed 18% of his budget but delivered only 6% of the energy content, so that's an expensive luxury that's cost him the thick end of an additional 2,500 kcal. Tomatoes are another expensive luxury, using 5% of the budget for 1% of the energy content, or another 1,500 kcal.
If he'd swapped the milky tea and the toms for extra rice, oats, pasta or pulses then he'd be looking at around 2,000 kcal per day rather than the 1,500 he's committed to.
"It's not all about calories. "
It is when the challenge is to eat for a week on a fiver.
In a comment on a related article I suggested next year's challenge could be the cheapest nutritionally balanced diet that somebody could subsist on, I suspect that involves quite a lot more planning.
That's what it all needs I feel, a little dash of cracked pepper, pinch of salt, rosemary and perhaps some basil to bring out the best in those tomatoes.
Hats off to the folk embarking on this, they must be a wee bit embarking mad, but tis a splendid example and inspiration to us all. I for one will be foregoing Harrods Food Hall for a while and have already curtailed my orders with Fortnum & Mason.
Yes. Raiding bins and skips is also legitimate, and stealing pet and bird food also qualify. Insects (and all other wildlife) would count so long as there's no marginal cost of production eg bullets used in shooting and eating a dog have a marginal cost, whereas if you already own an axe and use that then there's no additional expense (ignoring fines or compensation to dog owners).
Eating grass is also on the foraging agenda, If it's not too parched, Lester should eat the lawn. A quick google suggests grass has 4.5 kcal per gram, so a kilo of wet grass would sustain him for a couple of days - although allowing for the less efficient human digestion of grass (cf ruminants) he'd either have to eat his own tods (like rabbits do) to get the full energy content out, or accept a lower metabolised gain, in which case he might be looking at a couple of kilos of fresh grass to give him one day's worth of energy. A quick google warns that the silica in grass will wear teeth down, so he'd need to stew the grass and swallow it without chewing.
" I'm actually going to pass on this one and let the donkeys do it."
I can understand that. Of course, if you didn't pay for the donkey, and don't pay to have it killed, it too might count as foraging?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Burger
That photo looks quite enticing, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given that nobody seemed to complain when Findus were serving horse meat lasagne all across Blighty.
Lester, what about rice cakes? If you have, by any chance, some egg(s) left over mix that with the boiled rice, form some sort of flat cake and fry in your pan. Should also work with the rice only. I looks like you're living quite a good life on 1£/day :-)
Btw, I like lentils. But I'm hardly friends with one of your friends. Probably not even know a person who is.
You guys would make great "Doomsday Preppers"!! Looking at the list of ingredients shows most of the produce would store nicely in plastic sealed containers for years.
You could quit you job and become a consultant to nervous rich kids on how to survive the coming apocalypse! :D
Either that, or astronauts on a trip to Mars.
The food stores in bags, as part of the radiation shield. Then once you've eaten, you poo in the bag, and back it goes into the outer skin of the spacecraft - to keep blocking the Sun's nasty mobile phone radiations.
As an extra bonus, you can harvest the methane from the capsule's atmosphere, and that gies you the fuel to power your return trip.
In Brian Aldiss' 'Hothouse World' the protagonists carve their way into an enormous caterpillar (?) which is slowly travelling from the earth to the moon. They basically expect to eat their way through their spaceship...
Oddly enough, very little SF deals with the problem of the poo...
The recent scifi novel, "The Martian" by Andy Weir does address poo, and is an amusing read besides. Actually, the first part of this "cast away" story is rather like this Register article: how to survive with very limited resources and dealing with the resulting monotonous diet. (Which consists of potatoes from poo-fertilized Martian soils.) It also contains useful tips on surviving in isolation when your primary form of entertainment is a collection of 1970s music and sitcoms.