And so the end of the challenge was nigh, and thank goodness because my bread really was starting to taste a bit questionable. There was a bit of a disaster on Thursday as I forgot to put the food I had cooked the previous night in the fridge, so when I went downstairs in the morning it was sitting on the counter looking less than appetising. Luckily I still had enough of my soup (/baby food) to split between lunch on Thursday and Friday, and of course an abundance of odd bread. One of the things that I really found tough is the amount of planning that has to go into doing a task like this. Every meal has to be meticulously thought through and often prepared in advance so you spend so much longer preparing food than actually eating it, only to be confronted with a great culinary disappointment when you actually do get round to having it. My last two days of food were much the same as the rest of the week, with carrots a very prominent feature as they are particularly cheap. Lunch was carrot and potato soup, with carrot sticks as an afternoon snack and carrot and tomato pasta for dinner. I think I might be steering clear of carrots for a while now!
The challenge was made all the more bearable by the shared experience with the others in the Restless Development office doing it at the same time. As those famous High School Musical lyrics tell us: We’re all in this together. It was nice to share (and in some cases over-share) the effect that eating this diet was having on us. It was great to get back to eating ‘normally’ at the weekend and being able to eat pretty much what I wanted, when I wanted. Living on such a low budget does not just mean being short of food, it means eating a very unbalanced diet which is very carb-rich which in turn means feeling tired and lethargic a lot of the time. It also means missing out on sharing food with other people, and the social element that comes so often with eating with others. It means spending a considerable amount of time planning how you are going to be able to feed yourself and worrying about if you will have enough. I am glad that my week is over, but it’s fine for me, it was a choice, but for some people it is a daily reality, and I think that it was such a valuable experience to get a small, personal, experience of what it is like to Live Below the Line.
If you would like to sponsor me then the address is: https://www.livebelowtheline.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=Fiona+Brown&commit=Search
I added a bit more water to make it slightly more like soup and slightly less like baby food.
Tomato and carrot pasta
