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Living below the line 2014

LittleGreyCat

Well-Known Member
Retired Moderator
Messages
4,402
Location
Suffolk, UK
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Tablets (oral)
Dislikes
Diet drinks - the artificial sweeteners taste vile.
Having to forswear foods I have loved all my life.
Trying to find low carb meals when eating out.
As a regular reader of The Register I noted the following:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/17/quid_a_day_challenge/
which led to the Living Below the Line page at
https://www.livebelowtheline.com/uk/challenge

Now I can see that you might be able to do the £1 a day by eating bulk staples - which are mainly carbohydrates - but could you do this on for instance LCHF?

I am for the moment assuming that we rule out skip diving, hanging around outside restaurants begging for leftovers, mugging pensioners for McDonalds takeaways, and eating family pets.
Eating ' free' from allotments or other home grown food should probably also be excluded.
The rule I would expect is that you have to buy everything apart from condiments for the 5 day period, and not accept food from anyone not also on the challenge.
Clubbing together would be acceptable - for instance if you were living on bulk staples then clubbing together to buy a large bag of rice might be a reasonable way to go. and reflect 'real world' approaches to budget living.

So what could you eat for five days which costs £5 in total?

There are additional tricky issues such as eating free range eggs and chicken, but realistically if I was struggling to survive animal welfare would probably take second place to my own.

Shopping location is important as well - for example I can get six large free range eggs from Lidl for £1 but they const over £2 in most shops.

Anyway, my first step would be to prepare a 5 day menu which provided about 1,000 KCals per day at a total cost of £5.

Second would be to prepare a LCHF and 'no hold barred' menu for comparison.

One aspect might be to demonstrate that people under financial pressure may be forced to eat unhealthily.

Another aspect might be that taking on the 5 day challenge might be an incentive to live on stored fat - in theory most people could get through 5 days by just drinking water although that would be a truly horrible experience.

Suggestions for a diabetic friendly £5/5 day diet most welcome

Cheers

LGC
 
Now I can see that you might be able to do the £1 a day by eating bulk staples - which are mainly carbohydrates - but could you do this on for instance LCHF?
Click to expand...
This is of course why we have bothered to eat grains at all - the planet simply can't support the current population if you are going to eat only meat.
 
Eat foods which are not quick, convenient or fashionable. Tinned fish is cheap and you used to be able to get large cans of pilchards for about 50p until TV chefs started to use them. They're about £1 now. Nonetheless, you can make excellent fishcakes with them and you'll have enough for two meals. Any asian store will have huge quantites of lentils and chickpeas at low prices and although 'carby', are very low GI. Mixed with asian spices, you get super meals, nutritious and cheap. Morrisons do a large bag of converted brown rice for 99p. You'll get a lot of meals out of this for around 15g carbs per serving. You can use it with the tinned fish above to make a sort of kedgeree, or use pearl barley for a different taste and texture.

The OP mentioned the importance of location. I'd also add the timing. Most places have much better deals towards the end of the day. Flexibility and versatility are the keys. You become better placed to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves. Learning to cook with what you've got is vital. Most people get what they want to cook, which allows shops to take advantage of them.
 
AlexMBrennan said:
This is of course why we have bothered to eat grains at all - the planet simply can't support the current population if you are going to eat only meat.
Click to expand...

Mr. Picky says that grains are not the only vegetables

Also, a lot of the grains we grow are used as livestock feed so that we in the UK can generally afford to eat meat.

However I take your point that bulk production and storage of carbohydrates such as grains and root vegetables has removed the threat of famine over winter in the developed world.

We have, in fact, far too much food available in the UK which is why so many people are overweight.

Cheers

LGC
 
Aldi have cauliflower for 49p in their Super 6 deal this week. I am mad for cauli so would be happy as a pig with this menu.

£2.45 = 5 caulis
£2.50 = big block of cheese from Tesco
£0.05 = rainy day


I think it is important to maintain good relationships with neighbours and family so that you can trade and borrow if you are ever in a position that you only have £1 a day. My lot are always swapping food, sharing BOGOFs, giving away garden crops etc.
 
AlexMBrennan said:
This is of course why we have bothered to eat grains at all - the planet simply can't support the current population if you are going to eat only meat.
Click to expand...
Or to put it another way, when we discovered grains it allowed our populations to expand at the expense of their health. Agrarian societies have worse health than hunter gatherer and pastoralist societies - this can be seen clearly from skeletal analysis. So yes we now have a population that we could not sustain on a healthier Paleo type of diet. We have billions of suboptimally nourished people.

Sent from the Diabetes Forum App
 
I've thought about this quid a day dilemma. I would hate to have to come off LCHF due to unemployment etc. I think any solution begins in Lidl and Aldi. The problem I think is you would end up eating a lot of processed meat. Albeit German and similar processed meat which is much better quality than our ****.

Sent from the Diabetes Forum App
 
This is for 2 people so £10 , I think it would be harder for one and easier for four. I've just had fun but wasted a lot of time thinking about this one.
Sorry, I can only think of using lentils for some of the main meals and one has to think of lunch and breakfast as well.
500g chana dahl Asda = £ 1.00( Asda)
2X 400g tinned tomatoes = 0.68p (Tesco)
4pts milk =£ 1 (Tesco)
337g lambs liver = 84p (morrisons) You can get 600g pigs liver in Tesco for only a few more pennies but I was shaving things down.
500g frozen Pollack = 1.62 (morrisons)
1 Savoy cabbage = 40p (Tesco)
500g leeks =0.49 ( Aldi)
400g carrots = ). 30p (Tesco)
tea 80 tea bags = 27p (Tesco)
Every day cream cheese = 49p Tesco
15 Eggs £1.35 (Tesco)
(an alternative to the lambs liver and Pollock would be 1kg shoulder pork for £2.99 but then there is 40p short for veggies which are already low)
either butter or sunflower oil 0.98 (Tesco) need some fat to cook with.
As a non low carber I would add
white flour 45p (Aldi) (prefer wholegrain but twice the price)
2 cans new potatoes 0.30p (Tesco )

My total is just over at £10.17 but would have lots of tea bags left over(can't start the morning without it though) and probably some oil/butter, lentils and fish . If I was sharing with others I would mix and match flours/starches (buckwheat, oatmeal and other pulses as wouldn't need full packets)

There is not nearly enough veg but I think could get more for the money in a market and could also pick dandelion leaves, nettles, wild garlic, cress, briony shoots, pine nuts. Definitely could use these make salad or soup for lunch.
we have onions, chestnuts and walnuts in store, are we allowed them ?. Not the time of year for any wild fruits though soon be wild strawberry time.
I'm lucky though and live where I can get these things
Have got lots of things like spices, vinegar, mustard etc in store cupboard and they are expensive to buy.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

I read the post below (my bold)


And I thought
'Well you won't maintain good relationships with the amount of wind those cauliflowers will produce!'

I must be tired. Long week - even though it was only 4 days long!
 
Budgeting isn't hard but it does take time to do it properly. We shop once a fortnight mostly because we live 30 minutes away from town so I plan a menu for a fortnight, write my essential shopping list from it, add all the other bits like washing up liquid and only buy what's on it. I don't deviate from it unless there is something I honestly need and have forgotten. I find out biggest expenditure is meat so LCHF can be a bit stretching but there are many cheap cuts out there. I buy any meat on special and mince my own if I need mince. I never by pre-prepared meals or fast food. We eat remarkably well. We also keep chickens for the eggs.

I find that we can live very well on our fixed govt. income doing this. I use the online info from the supermarkets to help me write my list and we don't generally buy anything that isn't on special. I budget EVERYTHING including utilities and all our regular bills including incidental stuff like car repairs etc. This works for us.

LittleGreyCat said:
Eating ' free' from allotments or other home grown food should probably also be excluded.LGC
Click to expand...

The above would be particularly difficult for us though as we grow a huge amount of the veg we eat. We eat only what's in season and that is usually what's in the garden. If I had to buy all of our veg I might have a few problems in robbing Peter to pay Paul. We preserve a lot of stuff too like the fruit from the trees in the garden. I pickle beetroot and small onions. I can freeze a huge amount of things like the excess garlic, onions and chillis we grow. We have had a bumper crop of tomatoes this year, I cut the stalk end off and freeze them free flow, bag them and we use them all year in soup, stews and all that. We also barter our excess with the oddest people sometimes. Our local car mechanic will accept a load of potatoes and tomatoes for the car WOF (MOT in the UK I think). We also keep chickens for the eggs.

I know this doesn't have a huge amount to do with the OP but it does illustrate that there are many and varied ways of achieving a good lifestyle without breaking the bank.

Having said all that, I realise that the biggest advantage I have is time. I have the time to do all this and can also take my time. In my 'small kids' days it was very different, I definitely couldn't have done all this then! Budgeting changes with our lives and like us it has many incarnations doesn't it?

One pound would be around $2 here I think and if I had to buy all of our food with just that I would find it very difficult indeed.
 
I don't find caulis to be a particularly "windy" veggie. Cabbage, well, that's a different story.
 

If that were true, we wouldn't have billions of people with the longevity that we see.

The "affluent hunter-gatherer" paradigm is only partially sustainable. Humans were well-adapted to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a very long time. Species that aren't well-adapted tend to die out. It is also true that the onset of the Neolithic was associated with negative health trends, exhibited e.g., in skeletal pathologies, and probably the result of a greater disease load due to higher population densities and a shift in diet or possibly, according to Boquet-Appel, due to the zoonoses of domesticated animals. Bird flu and swine flu remain major dangers to health. But, humans evolve and most changes to diet, skin, hair and eye pigmentation has done so under conditions of positve selection during the past 6000 years. The studies that make the comparisons invariably compare the Dobe !Kung foragers with early neolithic man and reach the conclusions that you reiterate. However, when comparing the Kalahari !Kung with modern populations, we see a different picture:

"The theme of the 2011 meetings of the German Anthropological Society, "Biological and Cultural Markers of Environmental Pressure", provides the entree to revisit one of Anthropology's most enduring canons - hunters and gathers are well-nourished and healthy. The Dobe !Kung foragers of the Kalahari Desert often serve as a model of hunter-gatherer adaptation for both extant and Paleolithic humans. A re-analysis of food intake, energy expenditure, and demographic data collected in the 1960s for the Dobe !Kung finds that their biocultural indicators of nutritional status and health were, at best, precarious and, at worst, indicative of a society in danger of extinction. Hunting and gathering is the lifestyle to which the human species was most persistently adapted, in terms of the biological, cultural, and emotional meanings of the word 'adapted.' However, the few remaining foraging groups studied in the 20th Century are unlikely to serve as the ideal models of that ancient way of life."

!Kung nutritional status and the original "affluent society"--a new analysis.
 
My mother tells a delightful story about how she ate cauliflower when breast feeding and my sister, the beastfeedee, got terrible cauli wind.

Maybe it's a family thing.
 
Whilst I think I could manage the challenge for 5 days,, the people that the challenge is highlighting are doing this all day, every day. They have no store cupboards, no excess of toiletries, no spices and herbs, some have no cooking facilities, no access to clean water, absolutely nothing.

We couldn't keep the challenge up. Imagine no cup of tea/coffee when you wake up, no shower gel, no shower, the same drudgery every day of your life, food shortages if crops fail and no solution to improve matters..
 
Yorksman said:
The "affluent hunter-gatherer" paradigm is only partially sustainable.
Click to expand...

It's not sustainable at these population levels. I'm not saying it is sustainable. I'm saying that agriculture enables expansion beyond the population levels sustainable by affluent hunter gatherers, with a trade off in individual health. This then can't be reversed other than by mass die-offs.
 
Spiker said:
If it wasn't true, we wouldn't have billions threatened by T2D.
Click to expand...

We don't have billions. That figure is just a knee jerk reaction.

The population of the planet is just over 6 billion and for 'billions' to have T2, ie at least 2 billion, would mean that over 30% of the world population had it. This is not the case at all.

T2 rates have been increasing in industrialised nations and only in the past few generations. It is likely caused by a change in patterns of food processing and consumption. We did not see comparable rates of diabetes in the 19th century for example even though far less meat and more grains were consumed.
 
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