Living below the line

I’ve always hated shopping; queues, mind-numbing boredom, and the desperate fear that you won’t have enough food to keep you from starving during the week. Okay, the last one’s probably not your average thought as you trudge through a Red Sea of Sweetheart cabbage in Tesco’s vegetable aisle, but it was a concern for me as I began one of my biggest challenges.

I set out to complete the ‘Live Below the Line’ challenge, which would have me living on only £1’s worth of food per day, for five days. As you’ll often find me gorging on processed meat as I throw money away across Leamington’s fast-food outlets, it’s a task that I’ve been intending to do for a long time. Raising money for the Laksh Foundation in India this year, a series of rural schools where I will be volunteering, I had the perfect opportunity.  

I began to prepare for a delightful bout of scurvy to make my week of starvation that bit more exciting…

Bargains being a necessity, my adventure began in the exotic realm of Aldi. It was here that I was gripped by blind panic as I slowly remembered that my culinary skills only stretched to my famous Pâtes dans l’eau (boiled pasta to the uninitiated) and I was clueless as to what I could eat to sustain me throughout revision.

After indecision and frantic calculations, I settled for a weekly diet of kidney beans, tuna, porridge, pasta, rice, wholemeal bread and many, many eggs. Fruit and vegetables came in the form of slightly radioactive-looking tinned carrots and three bananas. In other words, I began to prepare for a delightful bout of scurvy to make my week of starvation that bit more exciting.  

The result? Me crawling across the piazza with yolk-stained hands…

I began Monday morning with a microwaved bowl of porridge oats. Unfortunately, the microwave still had traces of last night’s dinner inside it, giving my normally bland porridge an ‘interesting’, vomit-inducing aftertaste. After accepting the disappointment of this breakfast, I set off for campus drying my tears.  

Lunch followed in the form of two sweaty boiled eggs between slices of brown bread, a meal that I’d repeat throughout the week. Even this failsafe meal proved complicated, mainly because I’m impatient and refused to wait longer than five minutes. The result? Me crawling across the piazza with yolk-stained hands.      

It taught me a lot; principally, that I have a caffeine addiction that I was probably happier not thinking about…

Dinners varied between the totally indigestible and just plain inedible. My first few meals of pasta, chopped tomatoes and kidney beans were placed firmly in the latter category. Chewy in all the wrong places and treating my stomach like Hiroshima. Rice, tuna and the saddest fried egg you’d ever see soon followed, and weren’t much better.

The support of my friends was touching (even if most found the spectacle of my starvation amusing) and helped get me through a physically and emotionally difficult week. Importantly, it taught me a lot; principally, that I have a caffeine addiction that I was probably happier not thinking about, but also how difficult and generally draining it is to live in such conditions. And I had it easy – I still had a warm house and a bed to get into at the end of the day, whereas most that live on £1 a day don’t.  

It’s a challenge that I’d recommend to anyone. Whether you have a masochistic penchant for sh*t food or you want to spend your week meaningfully and gain some perspective by the end, it’s definitely worth your time.