How to eat healthily on £1 a day
bbc.co.uk
How to eat healthily on £1 a day
1–10 of 158 posts
Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day
#2As a bad but persistent cook, I'm convinced eating healthy is generally cheaper. A lot of the healthier food I eat is cheap: legumes, [sweet] potatoes and other root vegetables, broccoli, bananas, oranges, water, eggs, oats, frozen vegetables (spinach!), brown rice, tomatoes (canned if not locally cheap). I think people intentionally mix up expensive with more work...
Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day
#3The problem with this article is that a lot of things that are cheap for one serving go stale before you eat the second.
For instance, on day one, he adds some mint which cost ~50p to buy, but he calls 1p because he only eats a little. He does not eat the rest of the mint that week, so it cost him ~50p, i.e. half the days budget.
I am poor and eat very cheap. I do that using dry bulk foods and frozen veg. This is important because there are opportunities for free meals (e.g. if customers at work do not eat all the sand witches and biscuits, that can be lunch for 2 days). Friends invite you for dinner too. If you buy food that spoils, opportunities like this come at a price.
How about this for a suggestion - mix lentils, buck wheat, brown rice, dried beans, quinoa. These come in 500g bags for about a pound. You need 6 spoons of this mix per meal, so 10 pounds of mix will last you several months. Put in a rice cooker for 40 min (some beans need soaking first), with a chicken stock cube. Cook for 20 mins then add mixed frozen veg. This will cost you about 30p per meal, and is pretty much complete [1].
I eat the above most of the time, and take free food whenever possible. At the end of the week, I treat myself to a ready meal. You can add curry spice or other herbs for variety. After a year of this I feel pretty healthy.
As an aside, supermarkets are machines for making you overbuy. Between BOGOF offers and big packs of meat (or small ones at a huge premium), it's very hard to shop there on a budget because they are designed to trick you into making 'bad' choices. Avoiding them by living on a non-spoiling diet saves tons.
[1] I think. The key to a healthy diet is variety, but if your basic meal is healthy and cheap, you can make sure to be eating other things from time to time.
Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day
#4This reminds me of a project I did in November of 2006 when I decided to eat for $1/day for the month. The whole thing is chronicled here: http://www.hungryforamonth.blogspot.com/
I wouldn't say what I did was exactly healthy though.
Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day
#5It all sounds great until you think about how much they actually spent. It's more like "How to eat healthily on £1 worth of food per day, but spending a lot more because you aren't eating the majority of the food you have bought, which cost a lot more than just £7".
Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day
#6The problem with this article is that a lot of things that are cheap for one serving go stale before you eat the second. For instance, on day one, he adds some mint which cost ~50p to buy, but he calls 1p because he only eats a little. He does not eat the rest of the mint that week, so it cost him ~50p, i.e. half the days budget. I am poor and eat very cheap. I do that using dry bulk foods and frozen veg. This is imp…
If you're on a budget and you're buying fresh mint, then you're doing it wrong. Mint grows like a weed, in a patch of garden, or on a windowsill. Herbs like rosemary, thyme, mint, coriander, basil you should always be growing.
Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day
#7The problem with this article is that a lot of things that are cheap for one serving go stale before you eat the second. For instance, on day one, he adds some mint which cost ~50p to buy, but he calls 1p because he only eats a little. He does not eat the rest of the mint that week, so it cost him ~50p, i.e. half the days budget. I am poor and eat very cheap. I do that using dry bulk foods and frozen veg. This is imp…
My poor friend eats rotting veggies. She only buys food from that rotting stand in the grocer with the 75% off stickers. That plus rice and frozen veggies. Nobody poor buys mint.
Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day
#8A loaf of bread where I live is $4. Blew his daily budget with one purchase. Cant buy single eggs even from a local farmers market here so thats another $4-6. Cheese is probably the most expensive item at $10. If you bought everything this guy ate youre looking at $60 or so and it will last about 5 days, which is 7gbp per day. Must be cheap food in the UK
Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day
#9This reminds me of a project I did in November of 2006 when I decided to eat for $1/day for the month. The whole thing is chronicled here: http://www.hungryforamonth.blogspot.com/ I wouldn't say what I did was exactly healthy though.
In the bbc article the woman's diet for day one consisted of:
Breakfast:
- one piece of toast and margarine (6p - cost of tea)
- one cup of tea (6p - cost of toast - cost of margarine)
- one "unethical" egg (8.7p)
Lunch:
- one ham sandwhich, presumably just bread and ham (29p)
Snack:
- one "value" scone with jam (6p)
- one apple (free?)
Dinner: (37p combined, I imagine there are some more "free" ingredients in here)
- 1/4 zucchini
- 1/4 bell pepper
- 35g bacon
- 100g spaghetti
- 50g peas
- 10g "value" brie cheese
- 1 clove of garlic
Apart from some lemon juice and spices she added to her dinner, that's about it.
What I consider to be a scone costs about $1 alone where I live here in Canada. I would be a bit worried to eat one that cost over 10x less and the seller was still able to make a profit.
I remember paying ~$4 for an apple once when visiting France. Brian got his for free somehow. Perhaps he has a tree in his backyard.
Not to mention the massive overhead costs involved here with the fact that he could easily boil water to cook his spaghetti and a nice knife and cutting board which allowed him to make his sandwhiches. Plus a fridge to keep those remaining 29 unethical eggs in.
At the very least, it's a good read to get people thinking about efficiency.
Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day
#10This reminds me of a project I did in November of 2006 when I decided to eat for $1/day for the month. The whole thing is chronicled here: http://www.hungryforamonth.blogspot.com/ I wouldn't say what I did was exactly healthy though.
Wow, this is really good.
> [...]I’m consuming less than half the amount of food I used to and I don’t even notice it.
> Lately I’ve been thinking about anorexia. Not because I’m anorexic by any means, but because this month has shown me how a person could do it. Before, I assumed that anorexia meant constantly being hungry, so hungry that you were in constant pain. I never understood how people said they just sort of, “fell into the disease without realizing it.” But now I understand that like a lot of pain, the human body adapts around it. Like I said, if I wasn’t carefully monitoring my calories, I could easily eat way less than I should be eating and think it perfectly normal. If you were to add to that the psychological pressure to get or stay thin, I could definitely see how it happens.[...]