This week (May the Fourth Be With You - Friday 8th May), Oaktree Australia is challenging people around the country to live on $2 of food and drink per day. This is equal to the World Bank's definition of global absolute poverty - where currently about 1.2 billion people sit at (or below). While the experience doesn't pretend to replicate how people in extreme poverty live, the aim is to raise funds and, essentially, to check your privilege.
So, first up, you can go to my profile on the Live Below The Line page here to donate. All you have to do is put in an amount (even $2, $5, don't care - any number gives me warm fuzzies and tells me you care and that you're happy to forego a coffee or something to help out), put in your card details and that's it!
While the focus of the campaign, and that of many other charity initiatives, is on absolute poverty in the world's poorest countries, my interest is actually on what happens in our own back yard. All of the money raised by me and everyone else will go overseas (particularly their work with local NGOs in Cambodia), which is great, but I'm mainly doing this to shine a light on relative poverty.
At the end of the day, the absolute poverty line has very limited relevance in Australia and many other countries, so we use the relative poverty line which is defined as 50-60% of the median income of that country. According to a 2014 report from the Australian Centre for Social Services, this is currently at a disposable income less than $400 a week for singles and $841 per week for a couple with two kids. It also found that 13.9% of Australians - 2.55 million people - are currently at that level or below.
That's pretty fucking gross.
Worse, the OECD found that figure has increased over the last 20 years, and is now 12% above the global average of relative poverty. The numbers also mainly consist of the usual suspects - single parents, youth, the elderly, people with disabilities, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, etc.
I have always, with distant worry, read about the phenomenon of the working poor in places like the USA, which is where people work full time - more, sometimes 2, 3, 4 jobs - and still live below the poverty line. For me, this situation smacks of extra bullshit when it's in a country that is supposedly rich, free, land of the giving, opportunities or whatever and just generally somewhere that people literally leave their families and risk their lives to live in.
Low income American families live on $29 of food stamps a week, which Gwyneth Paltrow recently tried (and failed) to do - and, I know, but she actually gives a good summary of the situation here. John Cheese of Cracked fame also penned this great article that opened my eyes to a lot of what it's like to be poor in a wealthy country - e.g. I'll probably sound like a dick saying this, but it never occurred to me that low income people get heaps of canned, tinned and frozen shit food not only because it's cheap, but because it won't go off - because they can't afford to do grocery shopping more than once a month.
What's really disturbing though is the rise of the working poor here in Australia. Currently a third of those living under the poverty line get their main source of income for wages - i.e. they work and they still can't afford a basic standard of living - over 1.5 million people.
Not okay, people.
SO, with all this in mind, I started to PLAN. Because the only way you're ever going to do this is by planning everything down to the last gram and the last cent. Obviously this is an extreme version, but doing so certainly reminded me of the millions who do need to budget pretty tightly and keep pretty close track of what they buy. As that Cracked article says, you learn to count really well. And you don't have 'about $70' in the bank, you have $68.14.
The rules are these:
- Only eat $10 worth of food and drink over 5 days.
- No free food.
- Drink as much tap water as you want.
And my own rule:
- To eat as well balanced and nutritious a diet as I possibly can. As some are doing, you can quite easily get a giant box of oats/cornflakes, 2L of milk, a couple of packets of 60c pasta and a bottle of pasta sauce. This is all very nice to live off for five days, but obviously no one can live like that. I wanted to see how far my budget would go and how healthy it was actually possible to be.
I hunted around online, got a few recipes in my head and dragged my mum around to Safeway, Aldi, Dandenong Market, and even an NQR (they still exist!) to get specific specials I found. Yes, I understand that someone on a very low income will not have the means (time, petrol, energy) to drive around town to find the cheapest things, but...
Planning doc looked a bit like this:
 |
| Ugh, ugh. |
And my days looked a little bit like this.
Day 1
_________________________________________________________________________________
What I ate and what it cost:
Breakfast: Oats
- 1 cup oats
- 1 cup milk
- 1 banana
- 1 cup of tea
Total cost: $0.50
Lunch: Instant noodles
- Noodles + flavour sachet
- 1 cup frozen veg
Total cost: $0.30
(I won't insult you with an image of what instant noodles looks like it's okay)
Dinner: Roast veggie soup
- 4 potatoes
- 200g pumpkin
- 1 carrot
- Half an onion
- 1 clove garlic
- 25g Greek yoghurt
Total cost: $0.77
 |
| Diiiieeee. |
Weird things I did that I wouldn't normally do:
- Delayed breakfast as long as possible.
- Had oats in two lots over the day - half being an arvo snack. I can't function when hungry, so I figured this is a good way to ensure constant energy supply. Working okay so far.
- Left the skin on the pumpkin for the soup - a bit strange but you don't start cutting hunks off your precious 200g!
What I learned:
- A random coffee mug does not a metric cup make, so filling half of it with milk and dumping it on your oats will ruin your milk quota and screw up everything.
- If you roast vegetables without any oil or salt they taste like shit.
- A ticket to the Met Gala costs TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Watching celebrities parading up the red carpet dripping in millions of dollars of clothes and jewellery while I eat my sad soup trying to raise awareness for extreme poverty is...a surreal experience, to say the least.
- Instant noodles gives me severe heartburn.
Day 2
_________________________________________________________________________________
What I ate and what it cost:
Breakfast: Pancakes
- 1 cup wholemeal flour
- 1 egg
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 stewed caramel apple
- 25g yoghurt
Total cost: $0.60
Lunch: Broccoli and pea soup
- Noodles + flavour sachet
- 50g dried peas
- 1 head broccoli
- 1 clove garlic
Total cost: $0.64
Dinner: Lentil curry
- 50g dried lentils
- 50g brown rice
- 1 carrot
- Half an onion
- 1 clove garlic
- 1tbsp rendang curry paste
- 20g spinach
- 25g Greek yoghurt
- 1 cup of tea
Total cost: $0.87
Weird things I did that I wouldn't normally do:
- Couple bits of carrot fell on the floor and normally tiny amounts I'd put in the bin but not this time! Back in the pot.
- Stretched lunch into two parts as well.
What I learned:
- Trying to make a caramel with a measly 1/4 cup of sugar won't do shit for flavouring apple. Nice try, though.
- Filling pancakes with sugar instead of milk to try and mask the fact you're making them with water won't make them taste any better.
- Or cook any better.
- Soaking and cooking dried beans/lentils/peas is kind of tedious.
- Trying to stretch one two-cent teabag into two cups of tea is a terrible idea and no one should attempt it ever.
- Vegan lentil stew was actually kind of....nice???!!!
- It's definitely the noodles that give me heartburn.
Day 3
_________________________________________________________________________________
What I ate and what it cost:
Breakfast: green smoothie
- 1 banana
- 1 caramelised apple
- 20g spinach
- 25g yoghurt
- 1/2 cup oats
- water
Total cost: $0.50
Lunch: chicken noodle soup (variety is the spice of life)
- instant noodles + sachet
- 1 cup frozen veg
Total cost: $0.30
Dinner: tuna pasta
- 125g pasta
- 1 cup frozen veg
- 1/4 tin tuna
- Cup of tea
Total cost: $0.80 (you've gotta splash out every now and then)
Weird things I did that I wouldn't normally do:
- Rinsed smoothie container with water and...drank it.
What I learned:
- A bowl of pasta after over 7 hours of not eating, even with no cheese or any other kind of flavouring, is the most wonderful thing you will ever eat.
- The amount of social activities I've had to adjust greatly to (bringing sad soup to a networking event) or just skip altogether this week has been surprising. More than simply going alcohol free, it really restricts how you go out, your interaction with others and if you do, you have to do this ridiculous rigmarole of preparing meals in advance and bringing little tubs and containers of shit with you everywhere.
- Speaking of preparing meals in advance - this kind of living requires a LOT of planning, budgeting and forward-cooking if it's going to work at all. Obviously something most low income families cannot do. Case in point: I actually planned a few nice lunches, but I never get around to cooking them the night before (I obs can't cook them at work), so I end up just having heartburny instant noodles again. yaya.
We're over half way!
Day 4
_________________________________________________________________________________
What I ate and what it cost:
Breakfast: Oats again.
Day 5
Breakfast: Oats again.
- 1 cup oats
- 1 cup milk
- 1 banana
Total cost: $0.48
Lunch: Chicken noodle soup
- Instant noodles + flavour sachet + heartburn
- Nothing. Forgot cup of veg, bloody idiot
- Cup of hot water (really)
Total cost: $0.18
Dinner: Potato fritters
- 3 potatoes
- 50g dried peas
- 1 cup frozen veg
- 25g butter
- 25ml veg oil
Total cost: $0.84
Weird things I did that I normally wouldn't do:
- Packaged up my milk and brought it with me in my handbag on the train.
Things I learned:
- Not a great idea to forget half your bloody lunch.
- Also DON'T ONLY EAT HALF YOUR BREAKFAST WITH THE IDEA TO KEEP IT AS AN EMERGENCY AFTERNOON SNACK THEN FORGET ABOUT IT AND NEARLY FAINT AT 5PM.
- Lack of food makes you hungry - obviously Headaches? Yeah not unexpected. But today I was freezing - just so, so cold the whole day. Food warms you up - it's actually literally a heating energy source.
- Your colleagues coming back to the office with fancy lunches and making happy eating noises and having hampers of fresh produce and discussing dinner plans and very terrible and sad and they have all promised to donate more monies to make up for it.
- A cup of hot water is a very, very, very, very poor substitute for a cup of tea.
- There is no way to sustain a diet/budget like this if you do any kind of activity whatsoever.
Day 5
_________________________________________________________________________________
What I ate and what it cost:
Breakfast: Scrambled eggs + spinach + left over potato fritters (so "free"!)
Breakfast: Scrambled eggs + spinach + left over potato fritters (so "free"!)
- 2 caged eggs
- 20g spinach
- 2 potato fritters
Total cost: $0.45
Lunch: Chicken noodle soup. Shocking, I know
- Instant noodles + flavour sachet + heartburn
- 1 cup frozen veg
- Another cup of Sad Hot Water
- Also last potato fritter
Total cost: $0.30
Dinner: MOAR TUNA PASTA. PURE INDULGENCE
- 200g spaghetti
- Half tin tuna
- 1 cup frozen veg
- 25g butter
Total cost: $1.32 (WHAAAAAT)
Okay so what happened is that when I did my last calculations before my last meal and throughout the whole week I had only eaten $7.53 of my monies, which was amazing, but also irritating which means I could have had some popcorn or more tea and few mugs of Sad Hot Water over the week.
What it DID mean however was that I could recreate my most delicious meal of the week x10: TUNA PASTAAAA with ALL (well, half) the tuna and a bit of butter and I even put in a little salt and pepper and lemon from my mother's seafood dinner (how rude) and thus did my most accurate impersonation of a turkey thus far (gobblegobblegobble).
$1.32 worth of gobble.
That still meant I had only used $8.85 during the whole week. That's almost an entire day of food allowance I simply hadn't used.
The world was mine!
Actually all I did was have a couple more teas and go to bed because restricted diets are exhausting, y'know.
Okay so what happened is that when I did my last calculations before my last meal and throughout the whole week I had only eaten $7.53 of my monies, which was amazing, but also irritating which means I could have had some popcorn or more tea and few mugs of Sad Hot Water over the week.
What it DID mean however was that I could recreate my most delicious meal of the week x10: TUNA PASTAAAA with ALL (well, half) the tuna and a bit of butter and I even put in a little salt and pepper and lemon from my mother's seafood dinner (how rude) and thus did my most accurate impersonation of a turkey thus far (gobblegobblegobble).
$1.32 worth of gobble.
That still meant I had only used $8.85 during the whole week. That's almost an entire day of food allowance I simply hadn't used.
The world was mine!
Actually all I did was have a couple more teas and go to bed because restricted diets are exhausting, y'know.
Weird things I did that I normally wouldn't do:
- Get really, really inappropriately excited about a homebrand pasta dish that didn't even involve cheese.
The next day on Saturday, I had a free range egg on some fancy toast with fancy cheese, fancy salt and avocado. Then I went out and ate $45 worth of yum cha. Je ne regrette rien.
But, like this whole week, put into perspective how much money we spend on food, and how little we even bloody appreciate it.
So please, please, please understand how luck you are.
Don't waste food.
Eat high and wide and get all the nutrients you need because you can, and that's amazing.
Be kind.
And donate.
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