Square Food Foundation teaches people from all walks of life to cook from scratch. But, they say, “if we’re going to walk the talk, we need to prove that cooking from scratch really DOES make a difference to how well you can eat on a budget.”
With this in mind and against a backdrop of nationwide benefit cuts, Square Food Founder Barny Haughton and school manager Lucy Holburn have decided to set themselves a challenge. Chefs, foodies and self-confessed gluttons, these two cooks are to try and live on just £2.92 per day for two weeks. Not simply an arbitrary figure, but an approximation of how much is left over when you subtract bills, travel and everything else from the £53 per week (or £212 per month) that Iain Duncan-Smith insisted was enough to survive.
Lucy and Barny are set to start their two week experiment, known as the Square Meal Challenge, on Monday 22nd April. One of them will shop in supermarkets, looking for the best deals on healthy convenience food whilst the other buys raw ingredients from independents, barters and forages for food where necessary and cooks everything from scratch. They’ll allow themselves the bare minimum of storecupboard ingredients to start with – spices, oil etc but no fruit and veg, no meat, fish or dairy and no staples such as rice or pulses.
In the week leading up to the challenge, they’ll each keep a food diary with costs for comparison and throughout the experiment, they’ll both post blogs in a kind of exchange, discussing how each other is getting on, the challenges they face, pitfalls, achievements etc. You can see how they fare in their blog, which they’ll be updating here.
This isn’t about politics. It’s not even about money because they’re both lucky enough to have enough to eat well. It’s about testing Square Food Foundation’s theory that in the longterm, a few life skills can make all the difference to our health.
Find The Square Food Foundation on the Bristol Bites Directory…
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