How to live on £1 a day

3 Oct 2008Since reading this article an obsession has been growing in me to work out how you could live on £1 a day. I don't know whether I'm going to try it or not but I think I've got it figured out:

1. Buy 2kg of rice, 2kg of pasta, 5kg of potatoes and 2kg of oats, all from your supermarket's economy range. This should come in around a fiver, and (with the addition of a few loaves of cheap bread) will sort out your carbohydrate needs for at least four weeks.

2. From the freezer section or from Iceland buy cheap frozen burgers, whitefish fillets and fishcakes. They should come in around £3 and should last you three months (i.e. you won't be eating them very often -- just as well, since the burgers will consist mostly of brain and testicles, the fishcakes of potato, and the whitefish is probably the last one left in the north sea). In each month you can spend another pound or so on (fresh economy range) sausages, bacon, mince or eggs. These will have been produced under the cruellest conditions imaginable. "How to live ethically" is a separate topic.

3. Buy half a kilo of chick peas or dried beans, a kilo of lentils, and a couple of tins of tomatoes and baked beans (another £2-3). If you need them, buy salt, sugar and sunflower oil. These should average around £1 a month.

4. Having bulk-bought these essentials, all that's left for your weekly shopping is milk, bread, occasional fresh meat, and fresh fruit and veg. A loaf of cheap bread and two pints of milk is around £1, leaving you with a luxurious £3 - £3.50 a week to spend on (tinned, frozen or fresh) vegetables and the odd bit of fruit. This is actually quite a generous amount as long as you don't buy anything too exotic. Fresh carrots and onions, and frozen peas are surely the cheapest items. For other things buy seasonally, remembering that the delicious seasonal freshness of your veg will be compensating the drab nourishing utility of your other items. Fruit and veg from the market are often cheapest; you don't necessarily save much by buying frozen.

This remainder also gives you room to buy the odd budget frozen meal, if you're feeling lazy, e.g. chicken kievs or pizza from Iceland (at an exorbitant £1). Alternatively, you might want to spend it on spices (say one pack a month so you gradually build a collection), otherwise your food's going to be on the bland side.

When it comes down to it I would have a lot of difficulty sticking to this plan for an extended period, though, mainly because there isn't much scope for cheese, chocolate, tea or coffee, let alone booze. To make it really liveable perhaps one could add, say, £4 a month of treat money, to be spent alternately on chocolate, cheese, wine, beer, tea and coffee.

I haven't included other household essentials but reckon you can get these for under £3 a month. If you're using a bike as transport (as I do) you'll also need to keep a couple of pounds a month for repairs, light batteries, etc. If I was going to do this I would initially aim to spend £1 a day on food and allow myself to spend whatever I want on other items (drinks, music, films, socialising, household goods, transport). If that went successfully I could see whether I could work the other items in, although I don't think my cd habit would ever fit within any kind of reasonable weekly budget.

I haven't concocted 28 recipes yet to show how you could live off this array of nasty cheap food. For the sausages, bacon, mince and burgers I would probably add them to some kind of spicy tomato sauce with vegetables and serve with rice or pasta, scooping up the leftovers with stodgy white half-stale bread the next day.
Personally I'm not that fond of potatoes but they're a very cheap form of carbohydrate and I can imagine becoming quite dependent on them to fill up. In fact you might want to decrease the amount of rice, pasta and bread in order to get through the 5kg of potatoes that come in an economy-sized bag.

The oats are also an important part since a good bowl of porridge in the morning (more or less) removes the urge for mid-morning snacks. The lentils would get made into curry, kichuri or soup; the beans would end up in a spicy sauce, similar to the meat (sometimes combining with the meat, e.g. chili with mince and kidney beans), or in salads (e.g. with grated carrot); the chick peas could become hummus. Fishcakes with peas and salad; burgers and chips; omelette and mashed potato; sausages and mash -- would form a blander (and easy-cook) complement to all the spicy sauces. For quick lunches (to take to work), you could get cheap jam to spread on the bread, but it would be a lot more nutritious and filling if you can manage always to have some leftovers, baked beans, cheese, or cooked eggs or meat.

None of these things would take more than 10 or 20 minutes to make (plus a bit of soaking, defrosting and oven-cooking time). You could, of course, venture into home baking, but I'm not sure that would actually save much money given the cheapness of supermarket baked products. A more useful direction would be to grow my own veg and herbs. Apparently growing more potatoes than you can eat is pretty easy.

Of course this whole thing is ridiculous, when you're spending hundreds of pounds a month on rent/mortgage and bills. I'm not sure why it fascinates me so much. It really emphasises how ridiculously high the cost of housing is, though. I spend around £12 a day on rent. What kind of warped values are we assigning where just to have a roof over your head costs twelve times the amount needed to eat? Supposedly the era of cheap food is over - no, not yet it's not.