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Day 3: Live Below the Line

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This week I’m doing the Live Below the Line Challenge: living on $1.75 per day for food and drink–the average amount 1.4 billion people around the world living in extreme poverty have to spend on everything in one day. Click these links to read about Day 1 and Day 2.

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Day 3. It’s the first dawn-to-dusk sunny day of spring, so we haul the dinner table outdoors and eat al fresco, to the sounds of salsa tunes on the laptop, occasionally drowned out by hippies singing along to acoustic guitar in the nearby park. It’s Taco Night!

Deep sighs of delight when we first set eyes on tonight’s dish, with not one, but two fresh vegetables in it–three if you count the onions.

It feels so satisfying to crunch lettuce between your teeth–we get one big and one small leaf each. Cherry tomatoes have never tasted juicier.

No sour cream, charred chicken strips, pulled pork, hot sauce or grated cheese for us, but a blob of peanut-butter hummus and a spoonful of beans per tortilla for protein. And everybody gets an eighth of a lime.

We gather up the squeezed wedges at the end to refrigerate for a second use: perhaps to flavour Friday night’s rice or make a dressing.

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I keep asking my son if he’s doing OK the next day. He has end-of-year papers to write this week, and I’m nervous about his energy and focus. He says that when it’s hot outside, his appetite wanes. Good point. We’ve been extremely lucky the challenge fell this week and not last, when it was cold, wet and windy, and all you wanted to do was devour doorsteps of buttered bread and massive bowls of meaty stew.

Still, I’m slipping my kid Omega oils and multi-vitamins. We’ve decided that everyone can make the supplements call for themselves. I’m popping prescription iron, but most people are going without supplements, to get as authentic an experience of living below the line as possible.

One group member, who reacts badly to white rice, gets a brutal migraine. She feels guilty about taking codeine, but has to weigh up how much work she can afford to miss. None of us had considered over-the-counter drugs a privilege before.

We also acknowledge that catering to food sensitivities and ethics is a luxury. There are several dietary restrictions in the group, and while we’ve worked with them as much as possible, most people let hunger shift their boundaries.


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