Eating for £1 per day.

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lancashire lass
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Joined: 28 Jun 2007, 15:17

Re: Eating for £1 per day.

Post by lancashire lass »

People who have very little money for whatever reason might not have a kitchen cupboard or fridge/freezer full of basic foods such as milk, sugar, butter etc, nor a garden with home grown vegetables available, nor chickens for eggs or meat. Someone in a crisis may not have the knowledge or skills to recognise edible (free) wild foods such as mushrooms, berries, roots, leaves etc. Also, it won't be just a main meal but all your meals in a day (breakfast, lunch and supper plus drinks) Put that together, and to live exclusively on £1 per day then becomes a bigger challenge.

I think healthy eating would go out the window in favour of calories - unless you had some religious reason for fasting or are going on a strict diet, chances are you would want to feel filled and nourished. That means increasing intake of fats and proteins rather than carbohydrates which can make you more hungry. Buying a piece of meat however would blow a day's £1 spend but if the shopping was done for 5 days rations, then the meat could be stretched over 2-3 days meals, or people sharing meals with their £1 contribution to the pot would have one meat ration a day. Even so, it would have to be a cheap cut (preferably with a lot of fat in it), or something like offal which is very cheap, and the easiest way to stretch a meat food is to make soup, broth or stew with it.

How to increase the calories on the cheap - we have been so tuned into "healthy" eating that most of us would baulk at the thought of cooking with lard (cheaper than dripping) yet you can fry food in it, deep fat fry, or use as an alternate fat in dough making. Don't forget suet in dumplings and pastry - buy cheap flour, and add dumplings to soups or make pies. Fats make you feel full. - try it by eating a slice of bread, and compare to eating a slice of fried bread.

Well, some of my ideas anyway
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