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Rachel Hills did the Live Below the Line challenge in the UK between May and 2 and 6. As thousands of people in the US, Australia and the UK prepare to Live Below the Line in the coming weeks, here are her reflections on the experience, previously posted on her blog.
While doing Live Below The Line last week, I kept a running tally of everything I ate and how much it cost - less for myself, than because I wanted to show you that it was possible, and it's not as scary as it looks.
That's not to say it was fun. Despite the fact that I was eating three meals per day, plus snacks, I was pretty much constantly hungry, especially on the last two days. I woke up on Wednesday morning with a piercing headache, and spent most of the week in a peri-migraine state. We bought cheap, so we always had enough to eat, but it also meant the food was bland and poor quality (see, for example, the rotting carrot on day three).
And food was not so plentiful that we didn't have to negotiate what and how much we could eat. That egg I treated myself to for lunch on the last day, for instance? Was an egg The Boyfriend could not eat (but kindly gave up for me on my request).
There's been a lot of LBL-related media coverage in the UK and Australia (and I imagine the US) over the past couple of weeks, which has led to some interesting discussions of how accurately the challenge reflects the experiences of those people who really are living in extreme poverty.
Surely you can buy more with $2 in N'Djamena than you can in Sydney? (Nope, $2 is the Australian equivalent of what you'd have to spend, in N'Dajamena those living below the extreme poverty line survive on a lot less. That's what purchasing power parity is all about.) Why aren't housing and transport costs included? (Well, those really do cost a lot more in London/San Fran/Melbourne than they do in Brazzaville/Monrovia/Abuja.) Isn't this whole exercise really unhealthy? (Not if you're only doing it for five days.)
Living in extreme poverty - especially for a short, confined period of time - does not mean you are literally and continuously starving to death. In Malawi, a country where 73.9 percent of the population is living in extreme poverty, the average life expectancy is 56.5 years. Extreme poverty manifests itself in things like continuous poor nutrition, lousy health care, and high childhood and maternal mortality.
Would someone living in Malawi eat similarly to what I've outlined below? Probably not. My menu was based on the options and prices available in a London supermarket. And if 73.9 percent of people in Malawi are living below the extreme poverty line, it's fair to say that most of those people are spending a fair bit less than 90p per day on food.
But the main way in which Live Below The Line doesn't show you what it's like to live in extreme poverty? As of midnight Saturday morning, I was able to return to my normal consumption patterns. About half way through the challenge, I was reminded of the classic Pulp song, Common People. I sang it while walking home from the official London LBL dinner on Wednesday night.
But still you'll never get it right
'Cos when you're laying in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the walls
If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah
You'll never live like common people
You'll never do whatever common people do
You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view...
As I wrote in a previous post, the thing that makes extreme poverty so unjust isn't that feeding yourself on £1/day is impossible. (I suspect that the menu below isn't all that different to what many Europeans were eating on rations during the Second World War.) It's that when you're got that little wiggle room, there's no space for anything to get wrong. You can't afford to get sick. You can't afford to send your kids to school, to get the kind of education that might lift them out of poverty.
The good news is that extreme poverty is on the decline. At the beginning of the 1980s, half the planet lived in extreme poverty. Now it's sitting at around 25 percent. And the purpose of a project like Live Below The Line is to increase awareness so that we can build a movement that gets that number to zero.
Anyway, if you're interested in giving Live Below The Line a try yourself, here's what I ate...
Monday 2 May 2011
Breakfast: Small bowl of oats with boiled water (6p) and half a banana (7p).
Morning snack: Small carrot. (2p)
Lunch: Three slices of toast (8p) with spinach spread (6p) and two mushrooms (8p), chopped and cooked. Cup of tea (3p).
Afternoon snack: Small carrot. (2p)
Dinner: Penne (2p) with red onion (4p), frozen broccoli (6p) and carrot (1p). Stock cube (1p).
Dessert: Half a banana. (7p)
Total: 63p
Tuesday 3 May 2011
Breakfast: Small bowl of oats with boiled water and half a banana. (13p)
Lunch: Penne (2p) with red onion (4p), frozen broccoli (6p), carrot (1p) and chicken stock (1p).
Afternoon snack: Two carrots. (4p)
Afternoon snack part 2: Small apple (10p). Cup of tea (3p).
Dinner: Rice, with red onion, spinach, broccoli and carrot. (31p)
Dessert: Banana custard. (8p)
Total: 83p
Wednesday 4 May 2011
Breakfast: Small bowl of oats with boiled water and half a banana. (13p)
Lunch: Three slices of toast (8p) with spinach spread (6p) and two mushrooms (8p), chopped and cooked.
Afternoon snack: Two carrots. One half rotted by this point! Still, 4p.
Dinner: Spiced lentils and rice at Live Below The Line dinner. (30p)
Dessert: Apple (10p). Cup of tea. (3p)
Total: 82p
Thursday 5 May 2011
Breakfast: Small bowl of oats with boiled water and half a banana. (13p)
Morning snack: Carrot. (2p)
Lunch: Rice, with red onion, spinach, broccoli and carrot (31p). Apple. (10p) Cup of tea (3p).
Afternoon snack: Carrot (2p).
Dinner: Half a can of chickpeas (22p), with red onion (4p), broccoli (6p) and mushrooms (10p). Two pieces of toast (4p).
Dessert: Apple. (10p)
Total: £1.17
Friday 6 May 2011
Breakfast: Small bowl of oats with boiled water and half a banana. (13p)
Lunch: Three slices of toast (7p) with spinach spread (4p) and egg (14p).
Afternoon snack: Two carrots (4p). Banana (13p).
Dinner: Omelette with 2.5 eggs (36p), spinach (15p) and broccoli (6p). Piece of toast. (2p)
Total: £1.16
GRAND TOTAL: £4.61
To signup to Live Below the Line or to donate in support of those taking part, head to www.livebelowtheline.com |
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