Live Below the Line: All Done! Thank You! And a Review :)

The first thing I want to about my Live Below the Line challenge, which I finished a few days ago, is thank you so much to the kind people who sponsored me and helped me raise £243 for Action Against Hunger (including my offline donations). This was really what it was all about, and I am so happy that so many people wanted to support me to do this challenge, and donate to a good cause.

Otherwise - I think I'd like to concentrate this post on what I learned over the past few days. Oh, and that I'm really proud of myself for going out on Friday night and only having a glass of tap water, while my friend had a glass of wine. But on a reality-check level, this highlights the less realistic side of Live Below the Line. I may have been controlling what I ate and drank within a daily allowance, but I had still paid £15 for the ticket to the show we were watching, even though I drank tap water!

But that aside, one of the most important things to learn from Live Below the Line, I think, is how hard it is to eat very healthfully on a strict budget such as £1 a day. It isn't that hard to fill up on £1 a day (bearing in mind if you have access to a kitchen, cooking facilities, low-cost shops etc), but filling up is very different to eating quality, nutritious food. And a lot of the very cheap food available is just carbs - like pasta, oats and rice.

Doing Live Below the Line - how was it for me?

I do have a lot of self-taught knowledge about healthy eating and budget cooking, so I think I did pretty well. Although I didn't strictly stick to the rules of spending my £5 budget all at once, as I had food in that needed using (which I just accounted for it in my budget), I was careful to stick to £1 a day. Pretty much the last 4 posts I've written, starting here, give you a good idea of how I got along.

On my last day I couldn't face the lentil soup I was supposed to be having for breakfast, to fit my remaining meals in, so I opted for porridge and banana instead. The lentil soup has been partially distributed to the dogs. I don't think that's really 'allowed', is it? I was glad to get the dreaded pasta over and done with, but as always, once I was eating it, it wasn't as bad as I thought.

I really got fed up of what I was having to eat, so much so that the above scenario happened. I'm sure if I was starving, I'd be more focused on just trying to eat, than thinking I couldn't face what I was eating. Which is another aspect of Live Below the Line that doesn't really transfer from what the reality must be like for the millions of very hungry people living in extreme poverty, to how my comfortable, home-based attempt at eating on a tiny budget, with a packed store cupboard of spices, was.

But it did give me some insight into being poor in this country, and what my options would be if my budget was pressed to such a level that I had to rethink the sorts of foods I currently purchased. Even though I live on a pretty limited budget now, I make food a priority in my life, and choose healthy, fresh foods. While doing Live Below the Line, I felt deprived of greenery.

Since getting back to 'normal', I have never relished my morning smoothies so much. To have all that fresh, nutrient-rich fruit and veg (I often put kale, spinach or avocado in them) in one glass is bliss. And I also massively notice the difference in how I feel. My smoothies REALLY get me geared for the day with a nutrient-boost.

And just as a tip, if for time reasons or whatever, you struggle to ensure you have a decent quota of fresh food in a day - smoothies are the way. They take minutes to whizz up, and you can pack several of the best 'super foods' and vegetables in them without tasting them as vegetables. My smoothies now pretty much always contain at least one green, leafy vegetable - normally kale, as I have a bag of kale at the ready in the freezer - and mixed berries (again, from the freezer). The other ingredients depend on what I have in.

Healthier as a vegan on Live Below the Line?

I wasn't looking at meat and dairy options, obviously, but certainly as a vegan, vegan proteins that I could buy cheaply, like tinned kidney beans (21p a can from Aldi) and lentils (I had some in, but they are cheap from Indian grocery stores), are far healthier and better for you than anything such as 'value sausages' (which I have seen other Live Below the Line participants blogging about). I cannot even imagine what is in those 'food' items such as 'value sausages' that could be considered in any way 'nutritious', so I reckon I probably did better on a health and variety level than most omnivores would.

This is taking into account that I already have an awareness of healthy eating, can cook fairly well on a budget, and know that a healthy vegan diet, which doesn't rely on processed foods, is one of the cheapest there is, as well as most nutritious.

I think omnivores trying to include animal-based proteins would suffer more in the long-term, health wise. Even though I wasn't getting my usual quota of fresh green vegetables, I was still basing my meals around some veg and legume or bean protein, rather than the sweepings of the slaughterhouse floor infused with phenylbutazone.

It doesn't surprise me, after looking more closely at what is available cheaply in supermarkets, and what isn't, that a recent report from DGCAssetManagment says one in 3 children will have a junk food diet by 2030. According to David Garner, the agricultural expert involved with the report, "By 2030, high-yield crops such as corn, maize and wheat, the backbones of the fast food industry, will have replaced the healthier and more expensive organic produce in our shopping baskets."

With the land available now, farmers are already struggling to produce enough food. In eight of the past 13 years, we have consumed more grain than we have produced, with more than a third going to feed animals that will be turned into 'meat'. Profit-driven, aggressive planting strategies are also driving out rare crop species, reducing the diversity of food grown, and by 2030, the predicted 0.4 degrees Celsius temperature increase means climate change will cut world-wide productivity by a further 10%. Oh - and there will be an estimated 8.3 billion mouths to feed by 2030.

So really, the kids that get a junk food diet are the lucky ones, compared to the kids that don't get fed at all. And raising awareness on this issue, for me, is exactly why Live Below the Line has been worth doing.

The thing is, there is ENOUGH FOOD FOR EVERYONE in the world...

IF we didn't feed grain to animals for the meat and dairy industries, instead of to ourselves. IF we didn't allow massive corporations to land grab in poor countries, so stealing any hope of communities growing their own food. IF we regulated the banking sector again to prevent them speculating on food prices, so pushing food out of the reach of the poorest people. IF we didn't waste so much food. And so on.

WE can ALL do something to help stop the injustice in this world that is a child dying every 15 seconds from hunger, when there is food available that could save them. The post I wrote when I signed up for the challenge has some pointers of how each one of us, as an individual, can make changes that have an impact on hunger. Here it is:

http://www.chocolateandbeyond.co.uk/2013/05/live-below-the-line.html

Thank you SO VERY MUCH to everyone who supported me.