‘A Week Without’ gives a glimpse of some tough realities
Could you feed yourself for £1 a day? That’s what Revd Carlton Baxter and others on the staff and CAP team at Magheralin set out to do for a week at harvest time. Carlton reflects on the experience which offered a glimpse of some tough realities.
I just want to say at the start that there is absolutely no way anyone can truly understand the plight of those feeding themselves on £1 a day unless you actually are in the middle of those circumstances.
In such a situation it’s not just food that one is thinking about; it’s the rent, the electric, the debt repayments, clothing, heat and, well, everything else on top of putting food on the table.
The stresses and pressures of this strained living cannot be replicated in a week of ‘having a go’ at getting by on £1 for one’s food everyday. We were particularly conscious of the fact that 67 per cent of CAP clients have skipped a meal because of debt!
Yet if we are to have any semblance of an idea of what it might be like, then we have to try, and hope and pray the good Lord teaches us something in the midst of our feeble efforts.
For the two of us, spending £14 on food for the week proved a lot harder than say spending £50. We walked around Tesco (and yes, there are other well–known high street supermarkets) with a calculator for at least an hour and a bit trying to purchase according to our planned menu and finding ourselves running backwards and forwards along the aisles like eejits, replacing and substituting products, as we continually blew our budget.
And then when we got to the checkout we were 18p short of the £14. This was not celebrated as a saving but rather evidence of bad budgeting and so we racked our brains trying to decide what we could buy for 18p. Another banana seemed the obvious choice but we chose to wait and see what the week would bring, knowing we had 18p in reserve.
The week’s food was predominantly porridge for breakfast, carrot soup and bread for lunch and then a choice of pasta, eggs or spuds for the evening meal; I say spuds but it was really just one potato each for dinner. It was then packed out with either baked beans or bacon bits and butter and cheese. The pasta was laced with a tomato sauce, garlic and onion.
The surprise buy was a 500g pack of what was called ‘cooking bacon’ – well what else would you do with it? It was rashers of intertwined bacon, which could be broken off, chopped and cooked, then added to an omelette or the pasta or placed on top of the spuds. Not bad!
Day–to–day was challenging. The calorific count was down on a normal daily intake and so we did feel hungry, and there was no room for fruit in the diet apart from the lone ‘nana’. Milk was tricky to buy – getting the right sell–by date proved elusive and so the milk went off before the end of the week.
But we did feel God teaching us some lessons in the midst of this, which were primarily around our attitude to food. We have been wasting too much; not consuming what we open because we may not fancy it two days in a row and aren’t creative enough to use it in a different way. And, we don’t plan meals well enough in advance so to only buy what we need and not tour the supermarket aisles simply buying what we fancy.
We got a glimpse, and I stress a glimpse, into what some people are coping with on a daily basis. With 64 per cent of CAP clients living below the poverty line, the challenge is surely in your face – to do something about it, to put care and concern into action and to see our community for the reality it is – a plethora of individuals and families of every hue and cry making their way in this world and for some their pain is masked and often deliberately hidden.
We must surely love as Christ loved; humbly, compassionately and selflessly.
If we’re going to claim his name then I guess we better make sure we’re living his life.
Carlton