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How to eat healthily on £1 a day

bbc.co.uk

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Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#61

Post by Samuel_Michon »

claudius wrote: post #40
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the author bought everything in larger quantities while conveniently not taking into account limited shelf life. He also makes trips to 5 different supermarkets to get the cheapest prices, which takes a lot of time (research & shopping) and gas. One of the best ways to cut costs is to not cook for one, but to cook together with others. Then you can buy in bulk like the author suggested. I live alone and I do co…

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.

That is simply not true.

I live in the third most densely populated country in Europe (after Monaco and Vatican City), the Netherlands. It has 1287 people per sq mile. Yet, the country has plenty of rural areas from where it takes hours to walk to the nearest town or even the nearest shop. Belgium, the UK, Germany, and Italy are ranked 4, 5, 7 and 9 respectively. They too have large rural areas.

In the less densely populated European countries, it’s even more problematic to live outside of a city without a car: Iceland (8 people per sq mile), Russia (21 people per sq mile), Norway (41 people per sq mile), Finland (48 people per sq mile), and Sweden (60 people per sq mile).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#62

Post by hkmurakami »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #21
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…

Entirely agree, when you are poor your biggest problem is not actually quantity of money. It's the flow of money. So the problem is often not "I have £50 to plan food for the rest of the month" but "I have an unexpected expense and now I have £2 I found behind the sofa and a bare cupboard/fridge to feed myself until I get some more money". I also found that when I am poor I am much more reluctant to go out and buy in…

>but "I have an unexpected expense and now I have £2 I found behind the sofa and a bare cupboard/fridge to feed myself until I get some more money".

It seems that the most common of these unexpected expenses include automobile related repair expenses (which come once every few years that even the best of us tend to forget to budget) and health expenses. Are there any others that come to mind?

Of course, automobile and health costs are the ones that are typically mitigated by insurance to some degree. Oh and what do the poor in countries like the United States rarely have? Insurance.... :(

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#63

Post by neltnerb »

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…

Fascinating, this is almost exactly the recipe I use, except for the buck wheat. What does that add? I also always add ghost chili powder and a little butter or oil since the dry grains don't have much savory flavor on their own.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#64

Post by Thrall »

mtct wrote: post #53
hexonexxon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extreme poor area I lived in was also full of drug addicts who spent all night going through trash bins and cleaning out anything of value to support their habit, so if your plan is to mine for recycled bottles and cans to return then you're in for a surprise when you find out that hustle has already been cornered by violent drug addicts and alcoholics who won't let you near their garbage 'turf'. They also rob ea…

So, why you don't move to another (better) area? It's not like you have an house or anything else that bind you there. To be clear, I'm not saying that is an easy life, I'm only saying that is difficult die of starving in a modern first world nation

The better areas are taken by those with money. You can move to a better area, but the police will turn up before long to move you on.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#65

Post by jiggy2011 »

hkmurakami wrote: post #62
jiggy2011 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entirely agree, when you are poor your biggest problem is not actually quantity of money. It's the flow of money. So the problem is often not "I have £50 to plan food for the rest of the month" but "I have an unexpected expense and now I have £2 I found behind the sofa and a bare cupboard/fridge to feed myself until I get some more money". I also found that when I am poor I am much more reluctant to go out and buy in…

>but "I have an unexpected expense and now I have £2 I found behind the sofa and a bare cupboard/fridge to feed myself until I get some more money". It seems that the most common of these unexpected expenses include automobile related repair expenses (which come once every few years that even the best of us tend to forget to budget) and health expenses. Are there any others that come to mind? Of course, automobile an…

If you are very poor, even smaller expenses like a power bill that is higher than you expected, having something that you rely on break (maybe the HDD in your computer fails and you relied on using your computer for some portion of your income) or you get a hole in your only smart jacket etc can throw a spanner in the works.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#66

Post by RBerenguel »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #61
claudius wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is simply not true. I live in the third most densely populated country in Europe (after Monaco and Vatican City), the Netherlands. It has 1287 people per sq mile. Yet, the country has plenty of rural areas from where it takes hours to walk to the nearest town or even the nearest shop. Belgium, the UK, Germany, and Italy are ranked 4, 5, 7 and 9 respectively. They too have large rural areas. In the less densely p…

Clearly the commenter means in cities or towns, or generally inside the public transportation system.

I'm from Spain (and I have been to several other countries in Europe from the list you give.) I live in a small town (22000 inhabitants) and I don't have a car. Anything I need for day-to-day life I can find in town, for anything else I use public transport to get to Barcelona, which is just 30 minutes by train.

In most of Spain, except for the most rural places there are public buses that can get you from unheard-of-on-sea to closest-big-town without many problems, and my experience in Germany and UK is the same.

Of course Iceland and Norway are completely different, specially Iceland (I was there for 18 days) where from "big" city to the next you can count on seeing just a few farms, at best.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#67

Post by Thrall »

cbhl wrote: post #13
dobbsbob wrote: post #8

A 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

The trick to the author's math is this: A loaf of bread has, say, 24 slices in it. If you ate two of them, then the cost of bread was that day $0.34, when you amortize the loaf of bread over twelve days. If you can find a $2 loaf of bread with 24 slices, it's only about $0.08 for a slice of bread. But yes, I agree -- if you actually had to maintain this budget, you'd probably buy one kind of breakfast, lunch, and din…

> The trick to the author's math

That's the trouble with this article; With the dependence on buying everything in bulk (and somehow using it all up before it goes off), it appears to be more of a fun theoretical calculation than a practical weekly diet.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#68

Post by solnyshok »

Thrall wrote: post #56
jkat wrote: post #2

As 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...

I agree. Local seasonal veg from a good greengrocer or market is cheap and healthy.

depends on the part of the world where you live in. In Latvia where I live, tomatoes grow in July/August. The rest of the year we can have Spanish tomatoes at 3-5$/kg or locally grown in a heated greenhouse, at $10/kg

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#69

Post by takluyver »

shubb wrote: post #43
hexonexxon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1%?? Lol they charge 150% where I live until the regulators clamped down on them and class action lawsuits happened. Now it's $50 maximum per week they can charge, but they get around this with NSF fees and late charges. They also hit bank accounts with EFT withdrawal up to 3x per day if the first one didn't clear, which is $40 NSF charge each time. Unfortunately because these lenders signed a piece of paper allowing…

1% a day is 360% a year, which sounds very high, but is less than missing a payment sometimes. You would use them when it made sense, and borrow an amount that you could pay back. Many people are paid weekly, so it might cost £5. Things were very bad in the UK until recently, and in many ways still are, but the companies have come under a lot of regulatory pressure, and are being... better. I'm afraid that sometimes…

If you go to www.wonga.com, you can fiddle with the sliders and see how much a payday loan costs in the UK. For instance, if you borrow £100 for 10 days, you're paying back £115.91, which is just over 1% per day. I can definitely imagine someone accepting that to pay for an urgent cost.

I expect that if you don't repay when you agreed, though, you're going to end up paying a lot more.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#70

Post by wklauss »

I see a lot of anger in the comments, some of them questioning the practicality of it or the actual approach you'd use if money was an issue in your household.

The BBC didn't do this in order to educate people on how to eat cheap. This is just a flashy piece intended to provoke the "oh look how easy is to make something cheap look nice and healthy" reaction.

In that sense its similar to the "deconstructed McDonalds meals" by famous chefs or the "how to substitute x by y and make your children eat y" ones. No one who has to leave on £1 a day will look here for practical advice and discussing the practicality of it is, therefore, pointless.

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