How to eat healthily on £1 a day
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
If someone else is paying utilities (say, your local university, or your landlord), and you already own kitchen equipment (say, hand-me-downs from your mum) perhaps this is a reasonable assumption. But for those who are actually in poverty, the upfront capital cost of cooking tools and the hidden costs of energy in cooking might be prohibitively expensive.
That said, cooking in bulk is indeed cheaper. So if you're trying to conserve, it might help to find two or three good friends and cook your meals together.
Some don't get $2, not even $1. Some are lucky to get $0 instead of losing money every day.
Sure, some homeless people get assistance from public or private sources, but many others are too mentally ill, depressed, or self-destructive to seek, find, or even accept aid (when aid is available, which it not always is).
And yes, these people do die of starvation, exposure, malnutition, illness, suicide, drug overdose, etc..
They also rob each other when they walk out of the recycling depot with cash in their pocket. Since you live in an alley you don't have security
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
these articles should be done starting in a single room occupancy hotel with a hot plate and nothing else, because that's what you get when you are poor: nothing.
Then there's the rice cooker - good for a year, and costs $20. That's another 5c.
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 bulk. Even though it would at least give me food enough to last, there's something scary about blowing your entire budget in one go.
If you are poor it is also harder to get to places that sell things cheaply in bulk (because perhaps you don't have a car) and you are more likely to get things from a corner store as needed where there is a higher markup on prices.
I think instant pay day loan companies like Wonga have done a lot for the cash flow problem. Personally, I've never used them, but if you have a bill and need to avoid a £50 late penalty, you can get a $100 loan at 1% interest a day, which is a brilliant value proposition if payday is a week away. I've seen a lot of criticism of these companies, but I think it's from people who don't understand the problem.
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 for automatic withdrawal, the payday loan company then steals all your money the day before you are paid, so your account will be debited -$200 for a $100 loan you missed a payment for, factoring in all the NSF and late charges. Since most people are paid with direct deposit nothing they could do to stop this. Bank will also charge interest on the overdraft.
So on payday you have nothing, and are forced to go back to the payday loan company just to survive but are now paying even higher interest, because you defaulted once. Sounds like they are well regulated where you live but not here they are still loan sharks.
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 you have to choose between 2 evils.
People are not dumb, and 1.2 million (3/100th the population) took a payday loan in 2009. You could credit a lower number to individual poor judgment, but these are rational economic operators borrowing small amounts at high interest rates to avoid hunger or larger losses due to cash flow problems.
Of course that sounds worse than it is because the loan is short term.
Still though, I wish there was a more reasonable solution to this problem. I wonder how much of these rates are due to the risk involved in loaning to the sort of people who take these loans and how much of it is "because they can".
My bet is that most of the people that use these services couldn't make a simple interest calculation
I expect that if you don't repay when you agreed, though, you're going to end up paying a lot more.
I lived in the "poorest postal code in Canada" and it was full of guys who traded food to each other like they were still in prison. If you didn't pay the huge interest payments you found yourself assaulted, unable to work, and deeper in the hole
If you find yourself with a week until payday and £0 in the bank it may be difficult not to consider the option.
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.... :(
a few thoughts on this article:
(1) compare the energy / fat / etc in this article with the rations given to the British people during WWII and shortly afterwards - I estimate the article's diet is even below those and nobody would ever dare to deny those enduring that time lived in abundance or a healthy diet.
(2) one more "... live on xxx £ for a few days" - Hypocrites, a few days does not make a difference. You can easily live on a few sugar cubes & apples (plus water) for 10 or more days. Most people would not feel different after that, and in our obese societies some even pay thousands of £s for such a minimal diet to loose some weight. The difference comes from 2-3 months or a year. When you're actually poor like many in the UK - being in such a situation (for indefinitely or until you win the lottery - about the same) adds a massive psychological toll on top that should not be underestimated. Hint to understand: If I tell you at the beginning of a 2 months software development task that all code you're going to write during these 2 months will be dumped unseen, ask yourself how much of a great coder you will be - so much about motivation and psychological toll.
(3) it is generally no fun to be poor even if some tell you otherwise - you're excluded from society, constantly humiliated and shown that you're worth nothing. This is even worse if you have children.
(4) With the changes in the social systems during the last decade(s) in Europe there is almost no chance to get out of this situation by yourself particularly if you're over 50 or have been unemployed longer than 2 years. And you get there much quicker than any politician would publicly admit. If you're self-employed, a few people not paying their bills, a few new contracts not signed - bang you're there.
There is a petition running at change.org that already more than 475'000 Brits have signed to asked bigmouth IDS (work & pensions secretary) who claimed he could easily live on £7 a day to actually do it and do it for longer than a few days - sign it to at least show you disregards with these politics ( http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/iain-duncan-smith-iain... ).
So I lived off (700 - 310 - 100 - 50 = 240 €)/month, which I found to be no particular problem – ~150 €/month on food, toothbrushes etc. (general groceries), 30 €/month on telecommunications, 35 €/month on electricity which left me with 25 €/month for eating out once or twice plus clothes.
Hence, I’d say that 7 £/day is perfectly possible, provided that rent is covered by other means (as it is for German long-term unemployment benefits of ~350 €/month).
It is relatively easy to live on a budget starting from a position where you have all relatively new stuff, and where you have a full closet of relatively new clothes.
Also: €25 for eating out once or twice plus clothes?
Tech was relatively decent (used X300, used X41, a weird desktopy-mediacentery thing) when I moved in, I got a T410s after two years from the money I had saved when the battery in the X300 failed and sold the latter for 500€ (350 after replacement of said battery). Trips to my parents were usually paid directly by them, but they obviously weren’t strictly necessary either.
You can get a döner and a drink or two for ~8 € – surely not eating out, but not eating in either.
[0] I spent about 25 € there per week, which would give 120 €/month for strictly groceries and a further 30€ for extras (cheap pans, clothes, paper etc.).
I also didn’t mean to imply that I had found an optimal solution, but merely a solution satisfying the constraints.
(4) Brings to mind the "Unfit for work" report on America's "disabled workers" (non)solution for those who are effectively no longer employable given their skill set and physical state: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5424241
I was under the impression that UK welfare benefits are far more generous than those in the US - is that incorrect?
(Full disclosure - I've spent a grand total of 5 days of my life in the UK, most of it in zones 1-2 of London. I know virtually nothing about your situation, which is why I'm asking.)
[edit: citation on poverty and gluttony. I'm surprised that this is still a controversial fact.
http://www.mchb.hrsa.gov/whusa11/hstat/hshi/pages/210oo.html http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hstat/hsa/pages/221oo.html ]
Job seekers allowance (the standard benefit for the unemployed) will net you around £50 per week. Out of that has to come all of your expenses including energy , food , travel etc. You may be able to get rent covered by separate housing benefits.
Of course the right wing press will often print examples of families on benefit who are pulling in large sums of money from the taxpayer. I think in most cases these are cherry picked cases.
You do of course get more money if you have children, so perhaps if one can produce enough children to benefit from economies of scale it becomes more likely.
Our family live on far less than that each per week after housing and we're working ... clearly we're not doing it right but it seems that is more than sufficient. Indeed my experience is that those I know on benefits can afford to live quite badly, wastefully.
By the time I've used Energy/Gas + Internet + transport I've taken a huge bite out of that, not to mention food , phone etc.
x2 for 2 wage earners.
$1/day(!) per person is another $5 each.
Replacing worn out clothes adds a touch.
Water/sewer is ~$5/wk/person for very light use. Energy for light/heat/cooking is similar.
That is bare minimum for survival.
The right uses the former group to claim that welfare programs are overly generous, and can be scaled back. The left uses the latter group to claim that the safety net is barely adequate, and should be strengthened. I'm more inclined to agree with the left; I'd rather the safety net was a bit too cushy for some than that people went hungry. In the last few years, the number of people using foodbanks in the UK has increased dramatically, for instance.
Of course, politicians regularly try to tweak welfare to reduce both extremes. But reality is too complex, and you always end up with some people not getting enough while others get more than they need.
In the last few years, the number of people using foodbanks in the UK has increased dramatically, for instance.
This does not mean people aren't getting enough to eat. The human body responds in very predictable ways to food consumption - do waistline measurements suggest anyone is lacking food?
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.
For example, someone I knew in high school (a number of years ago now) qualified for the school lunch program, so nominally his family was poor. But they lived in a house, with a yard; had cable TV, computers, and Internet. I would say they're working-class, or maybe even lower middle-class.
If the lowest-income 20% of the population is labeled as poor for the purposes of this statistic ("nominal poor"), but the number of people who are so poor their children are starving in the streets ("desperately poor") is 0.20% of the population, then it's not so surprising that statistics over the nominal poor much more closely resemble the general population than the picture of the desperately poor.
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 generally quite broad. I'm looking at one of your citations now, and it lumps all households below about $20k into the 'poor' bracket. The fact that obesity is more prevalent overall in that bracket doesn't mean that everyone in it gets enough to eat.
Secondly, getting the food you need isn't just about calorie intake. After all, a cup of vegetable oil has almost all the calories you need for a day. People need a balanced diet, including vitamins and protein and so on. So waistline measurements alone aren't enough to determine how many people aren't getting adequate food. News stories such as tinyurl.com/cqw7r43 suggest that poorer households are cutting back on fruit and veg as money gets tighter.
Finally, when people can't afford enough food, they are likely to turn to unconventional sources like foodbanks and dumpster diving. That people need to rely on charity and scavenging is a failure of society. We don't need to see people literally starving to death to accept that people have a problem getting enough food.
That's actually very likely the right thing to do. Thanks to various wealth transfer programs, anyone with earned income <$20k has 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 problem getting enough food.
Are people even becoming slightly less fat? That will happen long before anyone starves.
Have you considered how easy it is to stuff yourself with simple carbohydrates? Do you
Ah, the T-bone steaks and Cadillacs meme.
This statement surprises me, as it contradicts a lot of what I've heard of poverty in the US.
Do you have a citation or several I could look at?
Five minutes' Googling will make it abundantly clear that "they're fat because they have a moral failing" is a seriously unhelpful point of view.
(For anyone interested - the phrase "obesity-poverty paradox" is a good place to start.)
(There is one exception to this - tall muscular people. This is a known problem with BMI.)
It's also a product of low exercise (common if you're scraping by with two minimum-wage jobs), depression (common when you're poor), eating (cheap) junk food instead of fruits and vegetables, etc.
I successfully maintain a healthy bodyweight through periods of low exercise (typically resulting from injury). Right now I put in the effort to eat 4500 (reasonably clean) cals/day. When I'm unable to train, I cut it to 3000.
People suffering depression may choose gluttony at a rate higher than others, but that doesn't mean depression causes obesity. Gluttony does.
If a person were truly financially constrained, they couldn't engage in gluttony if they wanted to.
Are you saying that it's impossible to be malnourished and obese?
If so, that's provably untrue.
From what I've read, the primary diet-related medical problems that the poor suffer are diabetes, heart disease, and similar things. Scurvy and B12 deficiency are very far down on their list of problems.
Feel free to do a google search and prove me wrong.
There is one absolute best way to spend less on groceries, and it is something that everyone can do, regardless of where you live, what diet you're on, or how much money you have.
What's the secret? When you're shopping, write down the cost of every item before putting it in your cart.
You will be amazed at how your food choices will change. For example, once I started doing this, I shifted to buying fruit and vegetables that were in season (and thus less expensive), rather than just buying things randomly and oblivious to the cost. The same goes for choices of meats, fish, and even non-food household items like soaps, detergents, toiletries, etc.
This is by far the best method of spending less on groceries that can apply to everyone. If you've never done it, I challenge you to try it just once. And if you have any suggestions on how to make this strategy even more effective, please let me know!
The Victorian age is back in the UK and seemingly not only by wealth distribution (that has already been achieved a few years ago). The NeoCons would say we're half way there (on the journey back to times before the Age of Reason).
Even still, I myself that groceries I eat are super cheap compare to food I throw away and restaurant meals. (And I avoid packaged meals and name brand cereal, which are near restaurant priced)
Every now and then I remember that the vast majority of people don't or can't think about food costs, and shudder. Paying $2 for a bottle of water with a scoop of sugar poured in. $5 for a box of Kellogs instead of $3 for generic. $4 for the frozen brocolli with fake cheese sprinkled top instead of $2 for plain. Etc
Now, we consciously look at prices before putting items into the cart, and like you said going for store-brand and avoiding packaged food. (On non-packaged food: I am continually astounded at the ridiculous amount of fruit and vegetables you can buy with just a few dollars.)
In this way, we save literally hundreds of dollars per month. It is downright incredible!
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.
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.
Biscuits and margarine are certainly not healthy. On one hand you have a high glycemic, gluten-laden processed food that turns into sugar as soon as you eat it. Then you have a highly inflammatory industrial vegetable/seed oil with a very poor fat profile.
Better options are to shop at farmers markets, grow your own garden, get bulk stuff from Costco, buy cheaper cuts of meat and braise them, ferment your own veges, and make bone broth.
Good health rarely comes from a package in a supermarket. The only packaged items I buy are ghee, coconut oil, butter, and canned wild sardines.
I look at it like this: if a food doesn't spoil[2], it is most likely because bacteria and fungus can get no nutritional value from it. Do I want to eat that?
1. http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Scienc...
2. There are some exceptions, of course, but surprisingly few.
Here are two other reasons bacteria might not be able to eat something you can eat:
1. They can't stand the chemical environment -- pH, poisons, salinity. You're just eating it, and can compensate for a lot; they have to live in it! Examples: Honey, garlic, onions, hard liquor, vinegar, salted butter.
2. It's too dry; you can drink extra water, but they need it to come from the environment they live in. Examples: Any dry food, really, but stale bread and dried meat are good examples.
. . . and cheating a bit, here's one more:
3. The food could spoil, but is in an otherwise inhospitable environment -- too cold, too hot, no oxygen, already sterile/sealed. Examples: Frozen food, food in the slow cooker, canned food.
None of those have much to do with nutrition! You're just a more robust organism than bacteria, is all.
Even "poisons" in the first one is misleading -- a lot of what the microbial world sees as poison, you and I see as tasty. :)
Brown rice and dried beans don't spoil and are extremely cheap. Most other foods can be frozen to prevent spoilage.
I wouldn't say what I did was exactly healthy though.
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.
When I paid $4 for that apple: it was the middle of winter in Paris, France. I was in a grocery store, or Paris' equivalent of one at least.
Cheap, which they call value.
Expensive, which they call finest or luxury.
Regular.
Here's a link to the scone product. (https://secure.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=25828...)
Here's a link to a price comparison website. (http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/grocery-categories/Scones_in_...)
So, you can get value scones at 50p for 10, with these ingredients {Wheat Flour,Water ,Sugar ,Vegetable Oil ,Sultanas (7%) ,Whey Powder ,Raising Agents (Disodium Diphosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate) ,Pasteurised Whole Egg ,Preservative (Potassium Sorbate) ,Emulsifier (Mono- and Di-Glycerides of Fatty Acids)}
Or you could get Tesco Finest Butter And sultana Scones at £1.50 for 4, (37.5p ea) with these ingredients {Wheat Flour,Sultanas (21%) ,Buttermilk ,Cornish Unsalted Butter (11%) ,Sugar ,Free Range Pasteurised Whole Egg ,Cornish Clotted Cream (3%) ,Raising Agents (Disodium Diphosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate) ,Salt}
(https://secure.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=25384...)
Some of the value items are good. But you need to be careful. As you say, these value scones are not nice. Even the finest scones aren't great, compared to scones you can buy in cafes.
A lot of supermarkets, at least in the UK, sell various basic foodstuffs as loss leaders[1], so they are making a significant loss on each one they sell. They do this to get you into the shop, in the hopes that you'll buy other more profitable items once there. Also, in university towns supermarkets are prepared to take a loss in order to secure the long-term brand loyalty of students who are shopping at supermarkets for the first time and forming their opinions, and will go on to become professionals who can afford the more profitable products.
If you are smart you can take advantage of these to get food very cheaply indeed.
> [...]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.[...]
The ridiculous dietary-fat-fearing, obsessed-with-fruit Food Pyramid looms large in this article.
"Here are the rules:
1. All food consumed each day must total $1 for each of us.
2. We cannot accept free food or “donated” food unless it is
available for everyone in our area. (i.e. foraging, samples in
stores, dumpster diving)
3. Any food we plant, we pay for.
4. We will do our best to cook a variety of meals; ramen noodles
can only be prepared if there is no other way to stay under one
dollar. (We have six packages and will buy no more)
5. Should we decide to have guests over for dinner they must eat
from our share; meaning they don’t get to eat their own dollar’s
worth of food.
[1] - http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/it-star...
I think the cost of "healthy food" is mostly rooted in ignorance and a taste for simple sugars:
"For a Brit, there can be no greater comfort food than a custard cream."
There's your problem.
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 cook for one. I probably spend more on food than most. However, I chose to live in a compact city with relatively low rents. This way I don’t need a car. I live in walking distance of supermarkets, health food stores, farmers markets and bakeries. I live 1 minute from a bus stop, 5 minutes from the main train station. What I spend more on groceries, I make up for in low rent and using public transport instead of owning a car.
Also note that a bicycle for as little as £20 can speed up transportation immensely at nearly no cost (of course, you might want to invest a further £3 in chain lube, but, well).
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...
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.
I doubt that’s what he meant, because that wouldn’t be much of a statement to make. When you live in a town or city, of course you can walk to a grocery store – that’s not unique to Europe.
I lived in rural northern New Mexico, the 6th least densely populated state of the 50 United States. Even there, I could walk from my home to Wal*Mart, a nearby gas station/taquería or farmers market. Walking on the side of a state highway just isn’t much fun, especially at night.
“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.
On the other hand, you ignore that bicycles are perfectly fit for use as transportation, especially in rural areas with little traffic, reducing the need for a car even further. You can get as far as 20 km easily by bike (about an hour, tops), and I will be very surprised to learn of places where the next shop is more than 20 km[0]
Additionally, you ignore that the average population density of a country is no measure whatsoever of how said population is distributed – if the vast majority of the population live in villages and cities, it doesn’t matter whatsoever whether there are fifty trillion square miles of forest around them or not.
Futhermore, I have to admit that I did not necessarily consider Russia and Iceland to be part of Europe in this regard.
My sister’s husband owns a home on an island in Norway which has been in his family for several generations. They spend several months a year there. There are no shops on the island at all, it takes more than an hour by boat to get to a supermarket. I’ve never visited Norway, but I’ve been told this is quite common.
“if the vast majority of the population live in villages and cities, it doesn’t matter whatsoever whether there are fifty trillion square miles of forest around them or not.”
It does matter to you, if you happen to live in or near a forest. In Iceland, two-thirds of the population lives in the Reykjavik area. If you live outside of that area, you absolutely need a car.
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 dinner and eat it every day for a week.
http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=262358089
As I recall, however, you have to be quick. The cheapest bread tends to vanish from the shelves within minutes of being put out.
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.
Where are the old days of baked beans on toast and either oatmeal with salt or sugar?
"But when it is your way of life, and you haven't got any choice over it, it's not a fun experiment."
Appendix: Rs. = Indian rupee; 1 USD ~ 55 Indian rupees
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.
If it was actual advice on that then yes I would have found that useful.
The BBC should be doing better than this sort of Broadsheet newspaper piece - they're probably employing poor people, perhaps they should have spoken to some of them about it.
That's not going to work for _everyone_.