The Eat for £3.50 a Week Challenge - The Why and the History

You might be wondering why I decided to do something that seems to be almost impossible, to be honest perhaps I am too!!  

But I am in a Facebook Group called 'Food - Surviving on 50p a Day' ... I think a few of my readers are on this  too ... so I thought that in this time of hugely increasing food bills, and with energy prices going through the roof causing so many people to really panic and worry about the simple job of feeding themselves it could be a useful challenge to generate some ideas for absolute rock bottom price eating, and to test out if eating for 50p a day is possible ... and could it even be more than just surviving?

The simple task of keeping body and soul together on a budget that seems barely enough to feed your goldfish can get to be just too much for most people, and sometimes seeing something written down that inspires you to make more out of what you already have can be a little glimmer of hope in an otherwise ever darkening struggle.

I am going to be completely open and upfront, these days this is a Challenge to me and not something that I have to do, but I HAVE been there in the past so I do not do this out of a sense of fun but rather as a way of hopefully helping.  Back in the day I was feeding a family of four, two of them growing boys and one an outdoor working husband on a budget that varied from week to week but that never topped £20 and sometimes sank as low as emptying out the penny jar*.  

We survived, perhaps in some ways more by luck than management, as like many I had to learn on the job.  You don't get taught household money management at school and years ago there was no internet with ideas to Google, no Facebook chums to help out with ideas or even encouragement, we were just young Mums keeping our children fed and clothed on tiny amounts of money and doing the very best we could.

What I do now when I decide to do a Challenge like this is use the money that I would normally spend on my own food shopping ... my average per week for just myself including a bottle of Aldi Pinot Grigio is around £25 ... to buy food for the local Foodbank trolley in the supermarket.  So it's a bit winner, winner, winner as I get to learn something and push myself in the kitchen, I hopefully get to pass on a few ideas that might help someone and the Foodbank gets some much needed extra supplies.

Anyway enough of the waffling, it's time to go get the food and begin the Challenge.

*How do you shop when using coppers from the penny jar?  I scrabbled together all the 1p, 2p and the odd 5p coins from our huge whisky bottle and went around the indoor market in Barrow in Furness which had a lot of fruit and vegetable stalls and asked if they minded some small change.  Four bananas on one, half a dozen potatoes on another, carrots on another ... you get the picture, with the money being counted out from a handful of coins pulled from my coat pocket.  A couple of dented cans of beans or peas for 10p each from the basket on the floor of the grocery stall and if I could, a small bag of penny sweets for each of my boys.  I came away with a carrier bag of food and a much, much lighter pocket with all that loose change gone ... and most importantly of all we survived another week.

Sue xx  🥫