Re: quid a day
Remember though that it's £1 a day, not a meal. So you've got to get brekkie, lunch and soemthing to drink out of it. Obviously I just chose to have water that week, but I couldn't go without a few cups of tea a day. The office coffee machine comes out at 50p a cup, so that was right out. A teabag is about 1.5p.
Also the global poverty line measure is actually a measure of consumption. So it's an economic value put on everything that the poorest people get to consume, not how much stuff they're able to buy. Given that most of the world's poorest barely interact with the cash economy. So lots of them are subsistence farmers, and the $1.60 a day includes the value of the crops they grow.
I therefore decided that it was cheating to use anything I could grow, or get free. Though others took a different view. And in the end, there's no point going over the top.
Veg was what I struggled with though. I'm perfectly happy to go without meat for a week. As I in fact did. But finding nice veg that I could afford was much harder. Peppers were out of the question. I could have afforded a few apples. But basically had to settle for carrots, potatoes, onions, chickpeas and the like. Salad stuff was too expensive. And even things like cauliflower, leeks and broccoli were too much of a stretch. A decent portion of cauliflower cheese would have been at least 70p, which doesn't leave anything for some other veg, let alone other meals and a handful of teabags for the rest of the day.