Quid-A-Day veteran fuelled by vastly improved nosh stash We're pleased to report that El Reg Quid-A-Day Nosh Posse member and 2014 Live Below the Line veteran Toby Sibley has resurfaced, fuelled by a vastly superior diet to that which saw him subsist on a meagre 780 calories per day last year. Toby did the challenge in the immediate run-up to his getting hitched to Rosalind Griffin …
It's like some of my friend's Facebook pages, but less interesting because the food doesn't stand a chance of making me salivate at the sight of it.
Seriously, guys, the article is about a budget. How about telling us how that budget was spent, in detail, rather than "look at this pie!" and then lots of tosh instead?
Although, to be honest, even then I don't find it THAT interesting that you can live on a quid a day, because I've done exactly that too.
My notes say £0.58 for the pasta - 200g pasta, four tomatoes, four cloves of garlic, and a little dried basil, salt, pepper, and olive oil - and £0.18 for the pie (flour and margarine for the pastry). The rhubarb was picked from the garden, and we've eaten half of it (if I have to suffer, Anita has to suffer too).
I am trying to find a diet for the week which is varied and healthy and still meets the price limit.
Cheat!
"salt, pepper and olive oil"
Cost? Because unless you pinched a sachet of each from some restaurant, likely they cost you more than 58p in themselves (even if you spread that particular quid out over many weeks of actual consumption).
"rhubarb was picked from the garden"
How much had to cost to plant, water, feed?
And how much did the pie cooking cost? I'm guessing, say, 200C for about 30 minutes? That could be 18p in electricity alone.
I know we're not tracking things to that kind of accuracy, but it's basically cheating three times in one day already.
"A quid a day - in ingredients only, not counting what I've got in the garden or the cupboards already" is slightly less impressive.
I don't think many people doubt one can survive on a quid a day, the fundamental question is if a person (in the UK) can live on a quid a day as a functioning member of society. It's easy to do this nonsense for a week, but after month two you're going to be a the doctor's all bunged up and with rickets. Anybody looking at the amassed array of food should be able to figure this out.
As someone who was made to sit through the program where a family live in the 50's for a week, eating only 50's food and having only 50's appliances, etc. I think we could easily extrapolate back to a time when this could have been true of every human on the planet. But we're still here.
Rickets is pretty easy to cure. Sunshine and a drop of milk occasionally. The problem was only ever rife when indoors-living became the norm, or - like scurvy - if you were on a long sea-voyage away from fresh-food.
The thing about nutrition is that what's NEEDED it pretty miniscule, in tiny quantities, and naturally present in an awful lot of foods anyway. Malnutrition causing things like rickets is rare except where it's COMPLETE malnutrition - where no thought is given to food variety and people are given one particular food, or no food at all, for long periods. Just in the article, egg has enough vitamin D in it. A splash of milk (fortified in some countries!) provides enough calcium, etc.
The body is surprisingly durable. You would have to have a very, very prolonged and static diet in order to induce malnutrition in someone who has a free choice of modern food, no matter the spending limit.
Quite right. Getting people to loose weight is often undermined by dieticians and books which fuss about balanced diets, which of course obsesses patients about food, which was their problem in getting fat in the first place. Less of everything and you will lose weight (perhaps much less, so not easy). You will spend less on food as well. I have never had a patient on a successful diet become deficient of anything, apart from the odd anorexic whose BMI staring at 18 and never needed to diet in the first place ending up with BMI of 11. They are often bright orange from carotonemia on a broccoli diet.
"How I Lived a Year on Just a Pound a Day" by Kath Kelly (believed to be published in 2008)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Lived-Year-Just-Pound/dp/1906593124
So, time has moved on a little since this book was published, cost of living will have increased but if you are serious about trying to I would recommend to find a copy and read it. I have used a number of the points mentioned in the book in efforts to save up for a deposit.
Note: There is a lot of chaff around the key points, it is in effect a woman's diary - one year in the life of the author trying to live on £1 per day. I would still recommend reading it and to try and take in what you can from it.
I'd have no trouble living on a quid a day at the current exchange rate. Heck, I've DONE it. It's not fun and probably not healthy, but when money's tight it's very doable. It comes out to $1.50ish US per day. That's enough for toast for breakfast, a lunch meat sandwich or a couple hot dogs for lunch, and a filling meal of beans and rice (cooked on a rocket stove - yes I have one - with twigs from the yard for a zero energy cost) every night for dinner*. It gets even easier if I take a couple hours every day to make my own bread (then I could probably afford some butter for toast and cheese for the sandwiches, provided you're using a loose enough definition of "cheese").
But fresh veggies? Not a chance. A single serving bag of frozen veggies would be the whole daily budget and fresh ones are easily twice as expensive. Based on the prices here the veggies in that picture alone would have blown the entire budget for the week, if not gone over. They must be a lot less expensive over in the UK than they are here, which might just explain why America has such an obesity problem.
*There are other options, but I like beans and rice and it's hard to match how filling it is for how cheap it is with other things.
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