Living below the line, on £1 a day: the response
Our Living Below the Line article was one of the most popular pages on lovefood across the whole of 2012. Forty-five of you commented, and here Stephen Brown from Living Below the Line answers all of the questions you raised.
Charlotte's challenge
Back in November, lovefood published an article by Charlotte Morgan describing her time taking the Live Below the Line challenge – to feed and water herself for five days for no more than £1 per day, the threshold below which 1.4 billion of the world’s population must feed themselves and their families. It became one of the most viewed pages on lovefood in 2012, and instigated a huge amount of comment and debate among you.
Lovefood has kindly offered us the opportunity to explain a bit more about Live Below the Line, as well as respond to some of the questions and topics that were raised by Charlotte’s article.
Some of you took the challenge yourselves and wrote about your experiences; some of you asked what else you could do to get involved; and some of you suggested great advice for anyone struggling to afford food. We were delighted to hear about the fantastic response from the lovefood community, as starting these kinds of conversations is what the Live Below the Line campaign is all about. We believe that to combat extreme poverty, we must first understand it.
We want to help people to engage with this issue, to create awareness on a global scale and, of course, to raise money for our partner charities, who do fine work every day in helping to make the world a fairer, better place.
Why £1 a day?
Several members of the community questioned how the sum of £1 per day was arrived at, and whether it was an accurate measure of the difficulty of surviving in extreme poverty, given the relatively high cost of living in the UK. It is of course true that £1 would enable you to buy varying quantities of food in different countries around the globe.
For example, food in London is on average 43% more expensive than in Sao Paulo, 100% more expensive than in Khartoum, and 208% more expensive than in Delhi, according to recent figures.
That £1 figure is an accurate reflection of what extreme poverty looks like, proportional to the cost of living in the UK. The international poverty line is recognised as being $1.25 (in the USA) by the World Bank, and can be judged in different places around the world by adjusting for exchange rates and the Purchasing Power Parity index.
It is also worth remembering that if you are taking the Live Below the Line challenge, all you have to worry about is food and drink. For many people in the developing world, the equivalent of £1 in our money has to pay for everything – food, water, healthcare, education, clothing and shelter.
Our aim here isn’t to replicate extreme poverty exactly, but to give participants an understanding of some of the challenges faced by those that do live in extremely poverty, and inspire participants to take action afterwards.
'Why didn't you buy in bulk?'
Similarly a few people pointed out that the challenge doesn’t account for ways you in which you might be able to accumulate extra food without spending as much money, such as buying basic products in bulk to last for several weeks at a time, buying locally-sourced food or growing your own. While it’s true that these are all excellent methods for managing your food budget, many people worldwide simply don’t have those options.
For families living in extreme poverty, meals are defined by what is available and what is affordable – and growing crops requires land, more money for tools and water, not to mention the right climate in order to grow the balanced range of foods we need to survive. Again, we’re not trying to give people an exact experience. We are trying to prompt thinking and discussion, which we know leads to a greater appreciation and understanding of the issues and, ultimately, more action.
The difficulty of achieving a balanced diet on this kind of budget is perhaps one of the most important lessons that can be learned from taking the Live Below the Line challenge. Charlotte tried to replicate the range of foods available to the areas of the developing world, meaning that grains, pulses and vegetables formed the bulk of her diet for the week (although she did succumb to some ‘luxury’ cheese in order to get her required dose of fat and protein).
Cheaper food = less nutrients
As was mentioned in your comments, some of the cheapest foods available in UK supermarkets are often those with low nutritional value, such as packet noodles and soups, processed white bread or some canned goods. This is an issue that people living below the poverty line in Britain constantly face.
Many people will choose to go for food that will fill them up more, rather than food containing a healthy range of vitamins, minerals, protein, fat and fibre. You could live on this processed food for a week – you might even enjoy it – but imagine if it was your only option, week after week.
The Live Below the Line challenge is still young, and as we move into our third year we’re very proud to have raised over £700,000 in the UK and over £2 million worldwide for international charities. As a result of taking the challenge, 40% of participants responded to our survey saying they would take more action, and over half said that they waste less food.
I hope that this article has helped you to understand a little more about what Live Below the Line is about, and what we’re trying to achieve. We want to get people thinking about the challenges that poverty presents, and the kind of difficult choices that those 1.4 billion people have to make each week. Ultimately, it’s about doing what we can to reduce that number, and taking steps towards bringing about an end to extreme poverty.
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