Thrifty Thursday

Day 4 of the Waste Less Live More Better Food for all Challenge, is Thrifty Thursday, and looks at the issue of food poverty.

In the UK alone, more than 4 million people are affected by Food Poverty, and many people have just £2.57 a day to live on.
So the challenge for today is to live on £2.57.

I have to confess to only having read this part of the Challenge on Wednesday night, and so am without any kind of preparation (bad blogger)
BUT I have an archive (that word again) of blog posts from our Live Below the Line week, where we lived on £1 per day per person for 5 days, so I thought you might like to re-visit those (good blogger)

• The Prep
• Day 1-saw me making some of Jack Munroe’s fabulous sunshine buns, and a cheesy potato thing for tea

Sunshine buns!

• Day 2-another great recipe for A Girl Called Jack, falafels!
• Day 3-in hindsight, we basically just ate from Jack Munroe’s blog for the week-today we had carrot, cumin and kidney bean burgers, and they were delicious
• Day 4-homemade pizzas!
• Day 5-saw us reduced to pasta and tomato sauce with cheese, but the Smalls were more than happy with that

Food Poverty is a very real issue for millions of people, not only in the developing world, but here in the UK too.
Living on a very tight budget is, needless to say, hard.
Living Below the Line highlighted that for me.
I felt the worry each time the Smalls asked for snacks or another helping of food and trying to work out whether or not that would leave us short by the end of the week, and I had the safety net of knowing that if it really came to it, I wouldn’t let the Smalls go hungry and we could stop at any time.
I can’t imagine how it must feel to have NO safety net, and to be accompanied by that nagging fear all day, every day. To know that if the kids eat more one day, then you yourself will be going hungry by the end of the week.

I think alongside tackling the huge and complex issues that surround food poverty, another really important thing is teaching people how to feed themselves well, for less.
Blogs like A Girl Called Jack, and (for all the stick he has had) Jamie Oliver’s new series on cooking on a budget, are just brilliant at doing this.
But surely, we should be teaching our kids these basic skills at school, and running free courses for parents in disadvantaged areas, so that they are armed with the skills and knowledge necessary to be inventive with the ingredients they have.

Any top budget recipes from you lovely lot?