Group efforts make sense
Even two people with £10 benefit, a family or group of housemates much more so.
El Reg reforms the Quid-A-Day Nosh Posse
We're pleased to announce that we've reformed the El Reg Quid-A-Day Nosh Posse to tackle the 2015 Live Below the Line challenge to exist for five days on just £1 per day for food. Over the last couple of years, we've raised a good wedge of wonga in support of Malaria No More UK, and we hope to do the same from 27 April to 1 …
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Tuesday 24th March 2015 23:04 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Fair warning...
its a shame I don't make jam. Perhaps it's time to make an emergency visit to the market, in hopes of cheap end-of-day fruit.
I'm planning to make bread during the week. I'm wondering what's cheap that goes with it. Other than baked beans? The correct answer is bacon, but that's not affordable.
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Tuesday 24th March 2015 21:29 GMT Dennis_the_performance_dork
Any other 5 Eyes El Reg readers forming vulture teams?
Noticed that they had a separate selection for each of the US, UK, AU, NZ, and CA. I've followed the quid-a-day for the last 2 years, and it looks, um . . . *challenging* It doesn't look like the US version has Malaria No More as an option for donations (despite there being a US branch https://www.malarianomore.org/). Any other readers/contributors from Vulture West or Vulture South up for the challenge? Maybe even some cross continental rivalry?
If not, any idea how confused the system will get if I try to contribute my strange US dollars with no picture of the queen to Malaria No More UK in support of my brave Reg correspondents and their soon to be lentil heavy diets?
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Tuesday 24th March 2015 22:46 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Any other 5 Eyes El Reg readers forming vulture teams?
From signing up to the website, which bizarrely seems to favour pale orange text on a white background (Aaargh!!!!!), it might be ignoring my charity setting - as a member of the El Reg group. So I think all donations go to the group, not me. I shall test this by donating to myself later on.
I don't know how other countries do it. But another reason for the UK site, is that charities can reclaim income tax paid on donations using Gift Aid. I think it requires the donor to declare themselves a tax payer, and give their address.
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 04:19 GMT Dennis_the_performance_dork
Re: Any other 5 Eyes El Reg readers forming vulture teams?
Seems that they took my card for a 50 GBP donation. Best wishes Vulture Central on your quid a day! Going to try to recruit some here across the secession pond ;) Make Simon write more BoFH articles and Verity do more too, even if she still uses Delphi intentionally :)
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 10:04 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Any other 5 Eyes El Reg readers forming vulture teams?
Lester,
If you go to your own user page, it has the group shown in it. And only the donate button for that. They also do a popup saying your goodies to to the group.
Which is a shame. My charity was going to be the relief of distressed Englishmen unable to afford 50 year old whisky...
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 13:57 GMT launcap
Re: Any other 5 Eyes El Reg readers forming vulture teams?
> unable to afford 50 year old whisky..
You poor thing you, I feel your pain! I know, it's terrible having to subsist on fermented and distilled sprouting barley that's only been aged for (shudder) 21 years.
In other news, I've discovered that gin can make a respectably decent drink (neat naturally - none of yer poncy quinine-based tonics - unless you live in malaria alley of course).
Hic, haec, hoc!
(In my younger days I've been tempted to drink spirits in icon-sized glasses..)
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Tuesday 24th March 2015 22:54 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Moral dilemma
So, how about the spices?
Is it cheating to pro-rata a cost to use stuff from my well stocked spice cupboard? In fact this could apply to other stuff, like tomato purée, tea, pasta, rice etc?
Am I allowed to take the cost at the bulk price I normally buy at, or should I have to pay the full whack for whatever I can use that week? Often poorer people suffer from this, as they don't have the cash to save money by buying in bulk.
What do the Commentard starvation soviet think?
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Tuesday 24th March 2015 23:37 GMT The Nazz
Re: Moral dilemma
Proportioning the cost of existing bulk buy stocks sounds ok and legit to me. Precisely as would happen if it was "live on a £1 a day for a year".
Other peoples' inefficiencies ( ie a £10 pizza with bits of cheese and tomato on ) shouldn't be your problem.
I eat well anyways and don't spend much more than a £10 week on food most times. Wine and Chocolate is a different matter.
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 04:19 GMT Dennis_the_performance_dork
Re: Moral dilemma
Rule in the past has been pro-rota. A cheap scale will let you apportion the salt/pepper/flour/oil/etc. that would normally be bought over a longer period. Check out the last couple of years, and you'll see how they cut down portions of things that we all have in our cupboards into what's for the week. Pretty sensible as engineers at El Reg should be expected to be and are.
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 06:48 GMT Neil Barnes
Re: Moral dilemma
Pro-rata is the only way to do it that makes sense, if you want any sort of variety. It's how I priced things in the book, too: if you've only got a tenner or so for a week, you don't blow it all at PapaJohn's (best delivery pizzas round here) - you think about what you're going to eat, and if necessary, you try and save something so you can afford herbs and spices because that's what you use to make things different.
My minimum spice list: salt, pepper, dried basil, tandoori masala, worcestershire sauce - but even that will eat up most of your tenner if you buy it in one go. Nonetheless if you get them one at a time every week or two, it's doable... and they all last a lot longer than a couple of months.
The actual cost is pennies or less; some the quantities are just too small to measure.
I'm planning on eating mostly from the book, having done all the research, though I'll perhaps scale things a little. Home-made muesli and sourdough bread (not at the same time) and jam for breakfast and lunch, lapsang souchang tea!
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Tuesday 24th March 2015 23:35 GMT armyknife
Day in Day Out
Unless you're telling us you live on £365.25 of food per year, I don't see the point of this challenge.
Or perhaps it's one of those dual-edged charity events that can't be criticised; Oh look I'm doing this for 'charity' so aren't I marvelous, but the subtext is "see I can live on a pound a day, so why can't poor people in this country do that, rather than just sitting around watching Jeremy Kyle all day on their huge flat-screen tellies, paid for with tax payer's money"
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 01:13 GMT Robert Helpmann??
Re: Day in Day Out
From the Live Below the Line web site: "Join us from 27 April - 1 May by living on £1 a day for 5 days to deepen understanding and raise vital funds for the 1.2 billion people who live below the extreme poverty line." My emphasis. The idea is to raise awareness of the issue and increase empathy for those who have no choice but to live off of such a restricted budget. Yes, there will be people who are more in it for some self-serving reason, but so what? They may accidentally do some good and they certainly are not getting in the way of the main goals of the project.
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 04:19 GMT Dennis_the_performance_dork
Re: Day in Day Out
I don't think you've followed this over the last 2 years. People fail on a 5 day run of what other people have to live with day in and day out their entire lives, and those who make it end up delirious, hungry, grumpy, and all sorts of awful with crazy weight loss. It's kind of like the Oxfam hunger banquet here in the States -- not really designed to live in poverty but just to give a short term idea of how difficult it is and raise some funds.
1.22 of my favored beers would eat my whole week's funding (on the 1.50 of USD vs 1 GBP). If some martyr wants to abstain from all beer or decent food for a year for charity, I'd happily contribute a good sum to charity. If not and they're willing to go a few days (in really idealized ways since utilities don't count to the sum), I'm glad to help out those who have to live that life every day.
I don't think anybody's saying that it's possible to live on a quid (or a buck-fiddy) a day in a happy way in any of the targeted countries. I doubt anyone in the readership of the vulture rag has to worry about that. Even here in the weird old USA, even the worst off get plenty to eat for the most part. But 1.2 billion people in the world have to eat on 1 pound/1.48 dollars a day. Experiencing similar hardship, even in a limited way, is informative to people who never have to worry about having an ale or two and having food for the next few weeks.
Living as the "other half" do, even if it's limited and brief, is always informative. If some funds can be raised to fight disease, homelessness, environmental devastation, and hunger in the process, what's wrong with that? I don't think that any sensible person is saying that it's reasonable in any 1st world country that you can live comfortably on that sum as some sort of "poverty is not an issue in developed countries because well paid/fed tech professionals can live on third world rations for a week once a year" statement.
If you don't see the point, join the challenge and see how you feel after 5-7 days of living on the equivalent of a GBP a day with no cheating and try to extrapolate how that would work for the rest of your life. It's kind of like biking/walking everywhere for a week. Nobody's saying that's sensible, but it's informative.
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 07:46 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Day in Day Out
armyknife,
It's an excuse for a charity fundraiser. Which you are free to ignore, as you wish. As a campaign it also makes a point, in an easily digestible manner, about how little some people have got.
You're over-thinking it though. As with all things, it should be approached with a sense of proportion, and a sense of humour.
From my planning for this year, and reading about the guys who've done it before, it's clear that this is not a good diet. Which is, after all, another point of the challenge.
It is true that you can easily live on £15-£20 a week, if you have time to spend cooking and budget carefully. Not only that, but you can eat well too. The fact that people don't is more a failure of education. We as a society haven't been passing those skills on to kids, either at home or at school. Only about half of my friends can cook, and I'm in my early 40s. I don't think schools have re-started teaching home economics since my day. They stopped teaching it before my day, round here.
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 08:08 GMT TheresaJayne
This is quite hard to complete though, I worked out that to eat well for 2 Days will cost me 79p + 9p
Which is half a pack of (insert supermarket name here) Value Spaghetti + (Supermarket Name) Value Chicken in white sauce,
Cook the spaghetti up,
Drain and add chicken in sauce,
Serve half
Put other half in fridge for tomorrow.
So that would give me an extra £1.12 for other stuff..
Most students and low paid worker live on less than £1 for a day.
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 11:50 GMT Spleen
Most people on a quid a day live in countries with a much, much lower cost of living. Is this not taken into account? If you're not going shopping in one of these countries then you should be scaling up the £1 according to Purchasing Power Parity.
And while I'm being a heartless economist bastard, many people on less than a quid a day grow their own food or have a few chickens and goats. Don't forget to get some of those.
I'm not under any delusion that people in extreme poverty are actually living some simple bucolic lifestyle. Poverty is horrible. But arbitrary "challenges" like this don't raise awareness of anything but how Westerners prefer cheap posturing to actual awareness of the reasons people are poor.
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Wednesday 25th March 2015 14:43 GMT Dennis_the_performance_dork
"Westerners prefer cheap posturing to actual awareness of the reasons people are poor."
That's kind of the point of exercises like this -- to raise awareness. Is it flawed? Yup. Does it gloss over details of cost of living/exchange rates/lifestyles? Absolutely. But I just downed an energy drink that costs, accounting for common currency exchanges, the wages that millions of people will take home today for a long hard day of labor.
It's a challenge -- a game of sorts like football or tennis -- but with the goal of raising money for a good charity doing good work rather than lining a corporate/celebrity bottom line. Knock it if you want, but if you're not willing to try it before you knock it, at least donate to Malaria No More.
And if you have some better solution for global poverty awareness, by all means. . . we're waiting.
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Thursday 26th March 2015 12:22 GMT Santa from Exeter
Re: Easy
Recipe for 5 gallons of 'Mock Hock'
5L clear apple juice
50g dried Elderflowers
5Kg white sugar
1 sachet wine yeast
Water
Pour apple juice into 5 gallon wine fermenter.
Add sugar
Add 2 kettles boiling water and dissolve sugar
Top up to 5 gallons with cold water
Add wine yeast and stir
Suspend small muslin bag containing elderflowers in top of liquid
Screw lid on and ferment under airlock until bubbles are < 1/minute
Rack off sediment.
Fine if needed
Filter/Polish if wanted
Bottle
Drinkable straight away, tastes better after about a month, keeps for 18 months without deteriorating in taste.
Makes about 30 bottles.
And yes, I brew beer as well :-) --->
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
