This week I’m doing the Live Below the Line Challenge: living on $1.75 per day for food and drink–the average amount 1.4 billion people around the world living in extreme poverty have to spend on everything in one day.
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Poor Andrea: She’s our chef on Day 5, and it’s now two days since we ran out of money. The best of the ingredients have been picked over and she’s left with a random assortment: roiboos tea, onions, a couple cloves of garlic, canola oil, one white potato, three sweet potatoes, chickpeas, rice (groan) and our beloved hybrid dip–peanut-butter hummus.
Lucky us: Andrea is French! She chops every last onion in the bag, tosses in the last of the garlic and oil, and slow heats the lot for almost two hours, creating the richest, most intensely satisfying heap of caramelized onions I’ve ever tasted. The rice, she boils in roiboos, making it fragrant and sweet. She dices both kinds of potatoes and roasts them together; they come out the oven golden around the edges and sticky. I don’t know what she does to the last of our chickpeas, but they also taste amazing: cooked through, but still firm and nutty.
Another group member, Sean, turns up with a bag of nettles, freshly foraged from High Park. He washes and blanches half of them, completing “Small-Plates Night” with a steaming bowl of greens.
The rest he boils, then strains to make an earthy digestive tea.
We’re verging on giddy as we sit down to eat together for the last time. It’s Friday night, and our official end time is Saturday at noon. Every other night, we’ve divvied up the main meal, keeping half for lunch the next day. Today most people decide that rather than face hunger and leftovers one more time, they’re going to stay in bed tomorrow and sleep as long as possible, only getting up when the deadline has passed. That means our table is laden with food. Kneeling on cushions around this abundant spread, we feel like we’re at a Moroccan feast.
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Over dinner we add up what each person typically spends on groceries in a week and reach a group total of $550. We’ve fed ourselves on just $70 for the past five days. This is eye-opening.
To be honest, I couldn’t even conceive of how living on $1.75 a day would be possible before starting the challenge. While there were headaches, and some black-hole moments of hunger in the afternoons–especially towards the end when the snacks had dried up–we didn’t starve. And nutritionally we did OK. More vegetables would have been wonderful, especially greens, but we sat down to some pretty delicious bean-based fare all week.
All of us vow to slash our grocery budgets from now on, to plan meals more carefully and to cut our own food waste. We also promise to do more “pop-ins” on one another. Having realized how much our social lives are structured around paying to consume food and drink in cafes and bars, just for the privilege of spending time with friends, we think it’s time to revive the lost tradition of dropping by at someone’s home for a chat and a cup of tea at their kitchen table.
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While there’s a festive we-did-it vibe on the last night, we’re well aware that that extreme poverty is not a dinner-party series. Yes, we felt low at times, but we always knew there was an end-point. The rest of our lives were comfortable and our stresses few in relation to somebody trying to food, clothe, educate and shelter a family on an extreme budget.
We did feel our perspectives shift though, and it took experiencing discomfort first-hand to start to understand how malnourishment reduces your capacity to think straight, fulfill your physical potential and respond calmly to everyday challenges.
Since completing the challenge, my son has started volunteering at a soup kitchen; and I’m making a commitment here and now to write more in this blog about organizations and initiatives created to feed communities and help them thrive.
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Live Below the Line is an annual event and fundraiser. If you’re interested in participating next year, find out more here.
And finally, thanks for following our group throughout our week of living below the line!
