A social experiment - day 3

So one thing I've found (no surprise really) is that making a decent job of writing up our £1 a day experiment is as time consuming as doing it. But as we did see the process through for a full week I am going to try to get everything written up.

Day 3, Sunday, was always going to be interesting as we were going orienteering, which meant taking a packed lunch.

We got off to a good start with breakfast though. The kids had been slightly shocked at how much of the £1 a day budget was down to their bowls of (relatively cheap) cereal - about 25p each. So they and Nic opted to go for porage for breakfast made to Nic's recipe (add water) rather than mine (add milk). Approx 50g of porage oats per serving costs about 6p using the Sainsbury's oats we normally buy (though could be brought down to 4p if we bought Tesco's Value version) - but they did add some milk and sugar on top (they're not hard enough to go for salt) so I reckon they had breakfast for 10p each. OTOH I couldn't face porage so I had a couple of slices of toast with a mere scrape of butter and marmite.

Getting back to lunch, I'd baked bread the day before, but that still left the vexed question of what to put in our sandwiches? Normally it might be cheese and pickle but in £1 a day world that would be out of the question so instead I went for...

...cucumber!

"Mmmmm, delicious", you're probably not thinking. Cheap though. One cucumber is 80p and half a cucumber does sandwiches for four. We also took two bananas to share so another 24p there.

So lunch after a hard run around the woods in the cold, was adequate, if a little dispiriting.

At the event the kids also had a go at the String Course, which is a special simplified orienteering activity for children that usually earns the participant a small reward - in this case a chocolate, which the kids appreciated much more than they might normally have done.

On the way home we also needed to call in on some friends whereupon we had slices of "Yum" pressed upon us (we didn't resist very hard) along with cups of coffee - Yum is their name for some chocolate based tray bake confection - not sure of the other ingredients, but very nice and outside of our £1 a day ration.

For tea we had...

... the same as yesterday!

Leastways the kids did as there was still a small amount of crumble left over. But Nic and I had the same as yesterday minus pudding. I might have felt bad about that, except that I went and did some babysitting for some friends and they had kindly left me a portion of their tea-time pudding, which turned out to be...

... apple and blackberry crumble with custard.

They also left some beer in the fridge. Thanks Tania.

So anyway, totting up our costs for the day we have a mere 40p for breakfast, £1.24 for lunch (bread, butter, cucumber and bananas) and 40p for tea to cover the cost of more peas to go with the free (leftover) pie. Add in a few more teas and coffees (we took a flask with us to the orienteering) at 28p and we get to a grand total for the day of around £2.32 - under budget!

So luckily we all had some "free" treats to keep up moral during the day, but of course had we had to pay for them we would have blown the budget again.

A social experiment - Day 2

Having spent double the budget on day 1 I was quietly optimistic that I could do something to redress the balance on day 2, not least because of my cunning plan...

So, nice and early in the morning I took the kids down to the weekly market and had a word with the guy who runs the fruit and veg stall. I told him about our aim of living on £1 per person per day for a week. "A pound!?" he exclaimed. Then I put it to him that we would be delighted to take some of the broken,bruised and otherwise less than perfect fruit and veg off him that he puts aside as unsaleable each week if he could let us have it at a low price...

"That's what my wife and I eat" he said. "And anyway, we've got pigs and chickens so we feed that stuff to them." he added. "And anyway, the only stuff we really have that needs getting rid of is stuff you wouldn't really want anyway, like a box of over-ripe mangoes". So that was that idea scuppered.

However, one thing he said that was helpful, after I'd mentioned the £1 a day thing, was "So you'll be making your own bread then?" Well, I had hoped that I might still be able to afford to buy something as basic as bread within the budget, if not the white loaves that we normally buy from the Sainsbury's bakery counter for £1.35 each. In my mind I somehow thought that there would be sliced white loaves available for about 40p, but those days it seems are gone - at least in Sainsbury's. The cheapest white loaf that they do is still 85p. So I thought that I would have a go at making my own. With help from Delia Smith I managed to produce a white and a wholemeal loaf each of which cost, I reckon about 45p. And to use up a bit of Feta cheese that was lingering in the fridge (usual story - too expensive to buy if I'd really been on the £1 budget during the preceding weeks - but I didn't want to waste it) I made some Feta, rosemary and potato bread, which we had at lunchtime with the leftover soup from yesterday. Yum.

Feta, rosemary and potato bread

So anyway, making one's own bread is a massive money saver (relatively speaking and under the terms of the experiment) although in real life it's hard to imagine spending probably an hour every other day baking bread to save £1.80 a time. OTOH, it was fun and the bread is lovely. In particular (I now know as I'm writing this the day after) the wholemeal bread makes amazingly good toast. It is quite dense and becomes even more nutty and chewy with a really crisp crust once toasted - really, sublime!

Bread!

One slight (huge in £1 a day land) indulgence during the morning was coffee made with ground coffee. I wouldn't have had this but Nic decided that she would forgo breakfast if she could have nice coffee instead. Our stove top pot takes about 25 gm of coffee, which costs about 30p, but we also added about 10p worth of hot milk and some sugar. The pot makes a bit more than one cup so I had to help out there. Total cost 45p.

I was determined that tea wouldn't be a bowl of slop and Nic suggested another recipe (or at least a modified version of a recipe) that we had tried before, namely Gardener's Pie, from an old Cranks recipe book that we've got. Gardeners pie is a vegetarian version of Cottage Pie, with a filling made from onions, carrots, brown lentils,tomato puree, mushrooms and walnuts. The budget woudln't run to mushrooms and walnuts, so I left those out, but to add flavour I added fennel and cumin seeds and a splash of Worcestershire Sauce. After some sautéing and simmering I had poured off the juices from the filling, added a splash of white wine vinegar and a little water then thickened with flour to make an amazingly nice gravy.

I wanted to serve the pie with some green veg and having looked at all the options in Sainsbury's the cheapest I could find was "basic" frozen peas at £1.20 per kg (compare fresh broccoli at £2.20 a kilo)

Gardener's pie with peas

Also whilst at Sainsbury's I found a tin of cheap Marigold stock powder and a tin of kidney beans - both severely dented, but 30% off. I thought I would include the beans in a veggi chill, the recipe of which I was yet to invent, but the stock is a staple as far as I'm concerned and hard to imagine doing without, so that was a bit of a find, allowing me to bring down my spend by a few pence over the week.

Dented cans - cheap!

Pudding was left over crumble from day 1, but with another batch of custard.

So costs for the day were breakfast, about £1.15 because of the coffee. Lunch was partly free as it was mostly yesterday's left over soup, but the feta bread cost about £1 (would have been about 30p without the feta in it).

Tea was £1 of potatoes, 30p red lentils, 10p onion, 40p carrot, 30p tom puree, 10p stock powder + a third of the peas, so about £2.20. Custard was 40p.

Once again there were teas and instant coffees to account for which cost 20p.

I won't add the cost of the bread yet as it will be accounted for as it is used, tomorrow and the day after.

So overall the spend for the day was about £4.95, a bit nearer our £4 target + we have enough Gardener's Pie left over for tomorrow's tea.

A social experiment - Day 1

So anyway, where was I?

Ah yes, the price of fish.

Well actually the price of all food.

So last week I read something somewhere about a couple who were living on £1 a day each for their food and drink spend over Lent. I mentioned this to my kids, the eldest of whom, Agnes (now 9!), immediately asked if we could try it.

We had a small discussion about what that might entail, and because in any case we are already well into Lent decided on a compromise solution of trying it for a week, starting on a Friday so I could make the most of our local Saturday market to stock up with cheap veg near the start of our week.

Well, today was Day 1.

First of all I have to admit that we had(have) a few consumables in the fridge that need eating this week, but which I would not be able to afford on our £1 a day (£28 for the four of us for the week) so I'm not quite decided how to reconcile that, but I'll worry about it later.

Today, I have mostly been eating... (anyone else remember the Fast Show?)

... soup.

Actually I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Firstly, breakfast. The kids had cereal; Agnes, Sainsbury's Bran Flakes; Arthur, Sainsbury's Wholegrain Malties. Both of these are own brand and relatively inexpensive at 27p/100g and 21p/100g in the sizes we buy. Given that the kids have around a 60g serving we're looking at 12-16p each plus around 10p each for milk and a sprinkle of sugar. I had about 15p worth of bread in the form of toast with about 10p worth of butter and Marmite and Nic had toast too. So in total breakfast may have cost around £1 from our £4 daily budget. Yikes!

I'd already decided that our main meal was going to be an old favourite, that I know is dead cheap, but which is so delicious that it's a favourite of ours and the kids too in any case, even without the budgetary constraints - Lentil and Lemon Soup, from the Covent Garden Soup Book (the first one). In brief the recipe (serves 6 (according to them - ha ha)) calls for an onion (sweated), garlic, fresh thyme (I use dried), red lentils, stock, tinned tomatoes and some puree, seasoning, and finally just before serving, but essential for adding zing, some lemon juice.

Lentil and Lemon Soup - even better than it looks and sounds.

I planned to make double quantities with a view to having some for lunch tomorrow too so decided to check out prices at our two (small) local supermarkets. We don't have access to a huge supermarket and I know that I am not going to be able to buy larger size packets that would get me the best prices. Nor do we have a discount store like Lidl or Aldi. We just have a Co-op and a Sainsbury's. However there's no way of knowing which is going to be cheaper for a particular product without checking, which for me meant visiting the two stores on the way back from dropping the kids at school.

Checking prices of the two main items I found that red lentils were £1.29 at Co-op and "basics" tomatoes were 34p a tin. Then I got on my bike to Sainsbury's where lentils were £1.09 (hurrah!) but tomatoes were 35p (aaargh!). Now, if I were really, really trying at this game, I might have bought the lentils in Sainsbury's and gone back to Co-op for the tomatoes, but I just didn't want to have to cycle back across town to save 2p on two tins of tomatoes. But by the end of the week, who knows?

Usually when I get home from dropping the kids I have a coffee made with ground coffee. I've not bothered to work out how much that costs because I'm pretty sure that the budget won't stretch far enough to carry on with that. Maybe if I'm running a surplus in a few days I'll do the calculation, but I'll be surprised.

For lunch I had the small amount of leftover pasta (with salmon and spinach) from last night's tea. I'm not going to count the salmon and spinach as it would have blown the budget and I'd not have bought it  if I were living on £1 a day permanently, so I'll just put down 20p for the pasta, which I might have eaten with a bit of butter and black pepper if I'd been going for a proper frugal lunch.

The other thing I forgot to mention was the kids' packed lunches. They have school dinners on a Monday and Tuesday for convenience as we do a swim session before school on a Monday and I often fast(ish - just eat a few hundred calories of food) on a Tuesday so I don't cook an evening meal then, but I do sandwiches Wednesday to Friday, usually cream cheese and cucumber or plain cheese. Normally they get a round of sandwiches an apple and a bit of cake or similar. Today they got no cake, just an extra half a round of (different) sandwiches Agnes - golden syrup, Arthur - Marmite. Arthur had a Granny Smith apple that I already had in the fridge (V expensive 6 for £2, so about 33p) whilst Agnes had a "basics" cox - smaller, but only £1.50 for 9, so about 16p. She also had a legacy banana (12p). In total then I think I spent around £1.10 on the two lunches.

So, the costings of our soup. 2/3 of the lentils - 70p 2 tins toms - 70p, 2 onions - 20p, oil - 20p, tom puree - 30p, stock (Marigold, expensive but good value) - 15p, 1/2 a lemon 13p. Total cost £2.38 + bread, about 50p.

I also decided to make a pudding. I used 4 Bramleys that I also happened to have in the fridge, that cost £1 from the market. If I'd not had them in they would have been too expensive and I'd not have used them, but I supplemented those with some rhubarb from our allotment (I'm lucky enough to have a variety that comes a few weeks earlier than most people's and this was our first picking). I also needed 75p worth of butter and about 40p of flour and sugar, so around £2.15 in total. + custard (milk, sugar custard powder - 40p).

We also had a bit of luck in that Nic's school has a cake sale as the kids leave on a Friday afternoon and she spotted 4 unsold cakes that had been left behind and nabbed them rather than letting them be binned.

A "free" cake

The kids ate their soup at tea time, ate a small cake each and then went to a triathlon club training session. They had the crumble when they got back.

I've also got to add the cost of some teas and coffees. We use fair trade Earl Grey and a fair trade instant coffee. I reckon they average at about 4p per cup including milk. 9 cups between us during the day x tea/coffee = 36p.

Apple and rhubarb crumble and custard.

Total spend for the day was around £8.09 - DOUBLE THE BUDGET!!!!!!!!!

But we do have half the soup left for tomorrow's lunch and half the crumble for tomorrow's pudding.

Remotely Controlled - or, how I came to understand the Taleban

I'm just reading Remotelly Controlled by Aric Sigman. The subtitle is How television is Damaging our Lives, which just about tells you everything you need to know about this book. Actually if you want a review I would say that the book is a bit too strong in its subjectivity, which means that it is too easy to present counter-arguments to these parts, thereby allowing the sceptic to pronounce the book garbage without ever having to trouble themselves with the objective or more reasonable sounding subjective parts. However, as I start from the position of already believing the central premise (event though at age 15 I won a competition on the subject "Does television influence our lives for the better?" - with an unambiguously positive essay) I was quite happy to read on and add some colour and texture to my own arguments.

Although I'm still only part way through, I have already had my eyes opened to one significant finding, which I guess I already knew subconsciously, but have now been thinking about explicitly, which is that TV is damaging our lives in (at least) two different ways. 

The first way is what I was thinking about when I bought the book, which is that TV is damaging particularly our children's (but also adults') ability to concentrate, empathise, socialise, imagine, play/work independently etc. etc. (obviously I take this as read - read the book if you don't). Specifically it does this through the use of rapid movement, fast cuts, unnatural breaks in narrative (for adverts) and many other methods to do with the way TV actually physically works. But it also damages their/our sense of self-worth, promoting unrealistic aspirations through its content, in particular through a focus on the cult of fame and celebrity.

However, the second way in which TV is damaging our lives is in a way that I hadn't really thought about too much, and which actually I might not really have come to see as a problem, because I live in the West and don't travel much to other parts of the world. 

Unfortunately, because most media organisations are based in the West and most of the programmes are made there (or more specifically in the USA), then cultural imperialism (not sure if Dr Sigman actually uses this term!) is absolutely inherent in TV globally. Dr Sigman gives many many examples of how Western dress, diet, language, morals, music etc. are to his mind infecting and diminishing other cultures via the medium of TV.

Which brings me to my reference to the Taliban (sorry GCHQ, not much meat for you here). Of course, in no way do I support the extreme ideas, or more particularly the actions of the Taliban, or Al-Qaeda, or the Slow Food Movement (... hang on, yes, I do support the Slow Food Movement...), but what I have been reading did strike a chord and make me understand a little more about what these groups might feel they are fighting for. Leaving aside religion, maybe there are actually a lot of downsides to our so called liberal democracy. Maybe people do need to be protected from some of the "choices" that the west offers. I've never been to Bhutan, but maybe the people there would have been better off not introducing TV into the country in 1999 given that their crime stats have risen from "none" to "some" since then. Maybe Mali would be a more interesting place without the baseball hats and hip-hop clothing worn by some of the inhabitants of Timbuktu, even though they have never left the most remote town in Africa.

In short, this book leaves me with the feeling that not only is TV damaging individuals, and society both locally and nationally, but that it is also having an even greater and more serious effect globally. The phenomenon of bland and boring near identical high streets has already been much discussed and tutted over, but unfortunately it seems that TV is becoming a driver of bland and boring (or loud and aggressive) near identical everything everywhere. Maybe we need to do a bit more tutting about that, and even, dare I suggest, we might try a bit of self-censorship. Maybe then, some of those troublesome foreigners might start to think that we have (counter-intuitively I know) a bit more to offer.

 

How about making life easier for teachers and saving fuel at the same time?

OK, so I'm now well into the The Transition Handbook. In order to make a point about the sheer wastefulness of much of our trade a few random examples are given of imports V exports of various commodities to various countries (actually, some of these are taken from The UK Interdependence Report). Just one small example, that I find astounding - in 2004 the UK exported 1,500 tons of potatoes to Germany. In the same year the quantity of potatoes we imported from Germany was.... yes, you guessed it - 1,500 tons. There are many more much worse examples than this, but it seems to me absolutely unconscionable to be doing that. Actually the amount of scarves that we exchange with Canada (39,000) is as bad, but at least, I guess we send them different designs to the ones they send us, but potatoes! Even if the varieties are different, there is no possible reason why the ones we send there couldn't be grown here, and vice-versa.

Which brings me to an idea that came up in a conversation with my wife the other day (I think she may have thought of it, but she says that I did - not such a bad thing to differ on), which kind of resonates with the trade point above. She is a teacher and every day she travels about 16 miles each way to school, usually by car. This is clearly not ideal and of course she would prefer to work somewhere closer to hand, but as it is there are no jobs available nearer to us. At the same time we know of a teacher who travels around 40 miles each way to work at a local school. Most days she probably passes my wife coming in the opposite direction. Wouldn't it be great (and I admit that this could probably only work in a centrally controlled, but geographically disparate profession such as teaching) if they could swap jobs? In fact wouldn't it be great if the Department for Children, Schools and Families were to look at where teachers lived and to offer them the ability to job swap to reduce their commutes?

Another good book

I've just been reading Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. The book is the story of her family's attempt to eat only locally grown or reared (mainly homegrown, and by default mainly seasonal) food. My wife read the book first and recommended it. Given that the author is extremely successful I feared that it would be another self-indulgent middle class feel-good book, but it's not. Clearly Kingsolver and family spend a lot of time digging, planting, picking, bottling etc. which to my mind is what validates the whole thing.

It is very american in flavour, but that doesn't detract. The most important thing for me was the overall message that with a bit of land, a bit of effort and a bit of help from your friends and neighbours (with some given in return) it is possible to do this and to enjoy doing it. I'm currently reading The Transition Handbook (peak oil and global warming and what to do about it) of which I will write more later, but which also makes a similar point, that moving away from consumerism can actually be enjoyable.

Library books

Well it's been just over a year since my last post. Maybe that's about right for me, or maybe there is some fundamental and general constant that governs these things - after all that's the frequency of the much maligned Christmas 'round-robin'- although I have managed to start a couple of posts, but didn't get them into good enough shape to make it out of draft form. Anyway, I digress already...

I actually want to write about some books I've been reading - from the library of course - the first of which is The Selfish Capitalist by Oliver James. It is a companion to another book of his that I read a while ago, called Affluenza and in fact covers the same ground but with references to academic work rather than case studies of individuals, so in the former you get some quantitative evidence to support what he is saying, whereas in the latter you just have to take his word for it - which allows him to write in a more accessible fashion.

Take his word for what you may ask?! Well, it is James' assertion that the form of capitalism we have in the English speaking western nations is ruining our lives and leading to widespread 'distress' as James puts it, which basically covers everything from stress to depression to suicide. None of what he says really came as news to me, but he does put the case in a well ordered and interesting (if voyeuristic in Affluenza) way, and he does confirm a lot of what I take for granted as common-sense (though of course, it's really not so common)

The essential point he makes is that the stimulation of consumption is the driver of our economy and that it is taken as a given by most people that a growing economy is a good thing, ergo, that consumption is a good thing. He goes on to point out though that the process is out of control, that the public are bombarded with marketing messages and that this leads people to have unachievable aspirations causing them distress.

So what good is all this? Probably, if you are bothering to read my blog then you are already thinking along the same lines as James anyway. If you're a waverer, then maybe reading his book will help you to see that it is OK not to go along with societal norms. If you're already a convert and care about the rest of society, buy the book, remember how he uses some of the arguments for use in future discussions, then pass it on to someone who you don't think would read it except on your recomendation.

Another book I've just read is Pratt a Manger by David Nobbs which is an easy going novel about a late middle-aged chef with a complicated family life who becomes a celebrity. Strangley I would say that there are as many lessons to be learned from this book as there are from the James books, but they come from the way Nobbs has thought through and illustrated the consequences of the actions of his protagonists. The book also contains a gag that really (...no, really...) did make me LOL - WARNING SPOILER COMING - when one of the characters outlined his idea for a gay version of Dad's Army, with the inevitable catch-phrase "They do like it up 'em"

Finally, I am now reading The Fight For Fordhall Farm which shows yet another example of how capitalism can ruin lives. In this case third generation farmers were being evicted from their organic farm because the land had become so financially valuable that the owner wanted to sell out to developers for a huge profit rather than continue to take a moderate rent. Fortunately, in this case, the good guys won. More inspirational stuff.