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Rice, corn, beans and potatoes. Those are the foods that sustain people at the poverty level in other countries.
However, in America I frequently observe people using food stamps in the grocery stores. Many of them tend to fill their carts with frozen dinners, soda, potato chips, snack cakes and boxes of cereal.
If you have to live on $1.50 a day for food, you will die. It's as simple as that. You can either buy extremely fattening foods that are loaded with salts, preservatives, and sugars and die of diabetes, or buy healthier options at the cost of not getting enough calories. Lose-lose.
I have a family of 3 so that would be $31.50 per week (@ $1.50 per day per person).
Shopping with coupons and shopping smart & not buying "extras" such as junk food , I could absolutely feed my family on that.
No you couldn't. That's an absolute lie. Unless of course you're feeding them prepackaged/frozen/canned garbage that will make your kids obese and diabetic by the time they're 22.
I know what it is like to live off of $20 a week I'm in grad school. And that's for just one person. It isn't healthy at all....
The $1.50 per day is a mark for people around the world. $1.50 per day carries a lot more weight in places like South East Asia and the Middle East than the US.
I could do it easily if I had to; it was the way I lived when I was in college and I remember it well. Lots of carbs and not really a healthy diet, but it keeps you alive. I got in the habit of eating once a day and as long as I could get my stomach full that once a day, I was okay. My roommate ate things like rice with gravy (we bought the packets of gravy and made it and mixed it in with some rice), elbow macaroni and tomato sauce with some butter - if I had it - mixed in for taste, peanut butter sandwiches, Kraft macaroni and cheese, egg sandwiches, baked potatoes, fried potatoes. For a while in the early 80s my diet consisted of one bean burrito from Taco Bell each day. I think they were 59 cents then. I was poor and I wanted to stay thin (yeah, I know - stupid!) so it worked for me.
I can feed us on $40/week. It only gets tough when we're trying to buy things like laundry soap and toilet paper with the money also.
One thing you need to remember is that people don't need to eat meat every day. You can have a few meatless days and not starve.
I make my own bread, tortillas and muffins. Beans and cornbread for dinner one night, refried bean tacos and rice for dinner the next. The day after that, spaghetti with garlic bread. Next day, fried rice with chicken. Cheeze pizza the next night (homemade crust, sauce made from tomato paste and tomato sauce), hot dogs wrapped in bread dough the day after (with fries if you have any taters), lemon chicken and rice the last day. For breakfast, pancakes or muffins. (you can make your own syrup from water, sugar and a little bit of vanilla or maple flavoring) Kids get milk with breakfast also. For lunch, peanut butter sandwich and a cookie, or leftovers from the night before. Any veggies leftover in the freezer or pantry from more ample times get served along with the dinner.
It's not a very balanced diet, but it's not a forever diet anyhow, it's how you get through times when there's less money than you were planning on and you have to keep everyone fed.
Easy... Ramen noodles. Add some beans, rich, potato, as many have already mentioned. Use butter and salt to add flavor.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fibonacci
The $1.50 per day is a mark for people around the world. $1.50 per day carries a lot more weight in places like South East Asia and the Middle East than the US.
Except, food is also expensive in these places too. The only difference is, when the price of corn goes up 15% in Mexico, the population is hit quite a bit harder. These folks spend quite a bit more of their income on food than we do because they earn less and have no government involvement that keeps food prices stable and low. Folks in this country enjoy the benefits of subsidized agriculture and we also have migrant laborers willing to pick crops for $4/hr.
If you have to live on $1.50 a day for food, you will die. It's as simple as that. You can either buy extremely fattening foods that are loaded with salts, preservatives, and sugars and die of diabetes, or buy healthier options at the cost of not getting enough calories. Lose-lose.
Okay, a bit of seriousness here. What do you folks think about the $1.50 a day challenge? The $1.50 a day is supposed to be the U.S. equivalent of the extreme poverty line - the amount an individual living in extreme poverty is allowed to spend on food each day. The challenge is to spend five days living on $1.50 to spend on food each day.
Could you do it without relying on your current stock, available garden veggies, or animals on-hand?
What types of meals could you prepare and what diet deficiencies would you encounter?
A family can pool the money and you can purchase the week's worth of food up-front.
I am asking this without any political motivation or bias for or against this "challenge." It just piqued my curiosity.
I don't get why they don't adjust it for cost of living. Living on $1.5 a day is much harder in hawaii than in a poor country where prices are 1/3 of Hawaii.
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