Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to eat healthily on £1 a day

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 158 posts

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#141

Post by keithpeter »

phaus wrote: post #136
keithpeter wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a/k/a the poor are only to stupid - look here they can live a healthy diet on even less)." Agreed. George Orwell explored this one in his Road to Wigan Pier , ch 6. I would encourage people to shop at their local food market. I can get all the fruit and veg we need for a week for £5 to £6 relatively easily at Birmingham's Fruit and Veg market.

I make a decent wage myself(well, its shitty for the field I work in but I have more than many do), but I live in one of the poorest parts of the U.S.. A 3 pound bag of apples costs about 4-5 dollars here. The farmer's markets are probably a dollar cheaper. I guess that's enough apples for a week, but I wouldn't consider myself to be stocked up on fruits and veggies.

There are only two of us, and in UK prices, 5 large apples is £1, you get 3lb to 4lb potatoes for another £1. Bananas £1 'a bowl' (about 5 large ones). Cabbages (savoy) two for £1 when in season, or broccoli. A few courgettes, peppers, and an Aubergine another £1.50. Carrots/parsnips whatever in season £1. Tomatoes £1 a bowl and OK I'm over budget. Add in rice, pasta, tinned tomatoes for cooking, tinned pulses, cheese &c bread and wine and we eat ok.

The market is significantly cheaper than the local supermarkets in Birmingham, I suspect because of proximity to the main wholesale market for the region and because the stuff might be 'grade 2', i.e. not pristine looking and all the same size. This is not a farmers' market (in the UK farmers' markets tend to have organically grown or very high quality produce from specialist growers sold direct). It does have organic stalls (I buy kale and lovely onions from one of them sometimes, but they are more expensive).

I'm a teacher on good hourly rate but currently working half time for family reasons so I am watching the budget a little.

PS: I can't edit my original post any more. I meant of course that I agreed with user fpp's point that it is unreasonable to expect people to live on emergency budgets for long periods of time.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#142

Post by namdnay »

shubb wrote: post #3

The 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…

I'm somewhat surprised by your assertion that you're "poor". 25k in London might be a very low salary for a software developer, but it's still way above minimum wage, and that's higher than what most people on benefits live off.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#143

Post by MisterBastahrd »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #130
takluyver wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most parents probably prioritise feeding their children above almost anything else. Then there are provisions like free school meals. So I wouldn't really expect the statistics to show many children not getting enough to eat. You seem to be focussing on the correlation between poverty and obesity. That's well known, but there are a couple of key differences from the discussion at hand: First, the poorest category is…

I'm looking at one of your citations now, and it lumps all households below about $20k into the 'poor' bracket. That's actually very likely the right thing to do. Thanks to various wealth transfer programs, anyone with earned income consumption of approximately $20k. ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt We don't need to see people literally starving to death to accept that people have a…

Calories are not nutrition. Food loaded with sugar and preservatives is much cheaper than healthy foods, and it also happens to be more readily available. Many poor neighborhoods don't have grocery stores where one can purchase fresh fruit and vegetables, but they do have convenience stores where you can buy all the candybars and junk food you can eat... at a considerable markup.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#144

Post by claudius »

driverdan wrote: post #119
claudius wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get jeans for 10 €, lasting about four months (so a year if you have three), shoes are roughly twice the price, three t-shirts usually come in at 5€ (Aldi is wonderful at that – thinking of which, I mostly bought my clothes there, including them in the general groceries category[0]). I bought a used washing machine when I moved in for 90 €, which had to be replaced after two years, so this would be 3.75 €/mon…

You could do much better on clothing. A single pair of Gap jeans on sale for $40-50 will last me over a year wearing them almost daily. Or go to a thrift store and pick up a pair for $5. You can get free swag shirts at any tech event.

Three 10 € jeans lasting a year in total is still less than one 40 € jeans lasting a little more than a year – not to mention that at least two jeans are usually a good thing to have.

I also didn’t mean to imply that I had found an optimal solution, but merely a solution satisfying the constraints.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#146

Post by RBerenguel »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #132
RBerenguel wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a 3rd clause there: "or generally inside the public transportation system."

I didn't mention it because outside of built up areas, public transportation is practically non-existent. A bus service that runs every few hours and not at all on Sundays simply doesn't count. Also, OP spoke of walking, not of public transport. If I use a bicycle, motorcycle, airplane, or rocket, I don’t need a car — that wasn't what was proposed.

I guess in the US may be different, but in Europe people usually make the weekly food shop either during the week (after work or before work) or on Saturdays. Almost everything is closed on Sundays. Also, what do you mean by built-up areas? In Spain, Germany and UK (countries where I've spent most time) you can get to almost any place with public transportation. Maybe they come once an hour, but for planned shopping this should not be a problem.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#147

Post by Samuel_Michon »

RBerenguel wrote: post #146
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mention it because outside of built up areas, public transportation is practically non-existent. A bus service that runs every few hours and not at all on Sundays simply doesn't count. Also, OP spoke of walking, not of public transport. If I use a bicycle, motorcycle, airplane, or rocket, I don’t need a car — that wasn't what was proposed.

I guess in the US may be different, but in Europe people usually make the weekly food shop either during the week (after work or before work) or on Saturdays. Almost everything is closed on Sundays. Also, what do you mean by built-up areas? In Spain, Germany and UK (countries where I've spent most time) you can get to almost any place with public transportation. Maybe they come once an hour, but for planned shopping…

This is the comment I responded to:

“You can get by basically anywhere in Europe without a car. Sure, you might have to walk 20 or 30 minutes or so (one-way), but the wear on your shoes from that is absolutely negligible.”

Ask yourself whether you agree with that statement, because it’s quite different from what you have been presenting.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#148

Post by yummyfajitas »

agilescale wrote: post #140
yummyfajitas wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking at one of your citations now, and it lumps all households below about $20k into the 'poor' bracket. That's actually very likely the right thing to do. Thanks to various wealth transfer programs, anyone with earned income consumption of approximately $20k. ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt We don't need to see people literally starving to death to accept that people have a…

So if everybody eats potatoes and bread all day... that's enough for you because it satisfies an incredibly obtuse quantitative metric?

If someone gets fat off potatoes and bread they are consuming too much. They could reduce consumption of potatoes/bread and spend the money they save on vegetables.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#149

Post by pfedor »

chernevik wrote: post #131
yummyfajitas wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same citation I added to my original post. You'd know this if you bothered to read the post you just responded to. http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hstat/hsa/pages/221oo.html

Read it, I'm not seeing it either.

I'm guessing he's referring to the fraction of underweight children, 5.1% below the poverty line and 5.7% above 4x the poverty line.

Not sure whether 4x should qualify as "rich", but more importantly, being underweight is pretty low bar. For example, I am underweight.

The actual number as reported by USDA is 1%. The keyword to look for is "very low food security", formerly known as "food insecurity with hunger", which is the lowest range of food security measured by USDA. (The second lowest range, "low food security", formerly "food security without hunger", means poor diet but no reduction in food intake. Note that even among the "very low food security" households less than half reported "lost weight" and less than a third reported "did not eat the whole day".)

One interesting observation: "Typically, households classified as having very low food security experienced the condition in 7 months of the year, for a few days in each of those months." I'll go out on a limb and hypothesize that these few days are the last few days of each month. So one thing to try to reduce that number would be making welfare payments daily, instead of monthly. (I read that welfare these is delivered electronically, you carry a special card which looks like a credit card and a certain amount appears on it the first day of each month. So it shouldn't add any overhead to switch to daily installments.)

Sources:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/foo... for the definition of food insecurity levels.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r... for the 1% number.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#150

Post by kragen »

yoster wrote: post #112
kragen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guys who sell flatbread on the street here cook it on reused refrigerator condensers on top of a bed of charcoal, which can be on the ground between rocks, or more commonly, in a metal pan atop a (presumably stolen) shopping cart. This is better than a hot plate if you can reliably find nontoxic wood.

I use a Lodge double dutch oven that is cast iron. It is a combination where the lid is a skillet and the bottom is a 5-quart pot. You can cook everything imaginable in this combination. It is far superior than the nonstick pans that are toxic at high temperature.

Cast-iron cookware is very expensive here, and therefore scarce. If you're cooking in a shopping cart it's unusual for cast iron to be a viable alternative.
Post reply on HN