Living below the line

The Technomage and I have been scouring Sainsbury's basics section after reading yesterday of a Guardian journalist's rather unsuccessful attempt at meeting the Live Below the Line challenge of eating for five days on less than £1 a day.

The basics prices mean that we have each managed to come up with five days of food for the two of us for £10 (£9.99 in my case) - assuming everything is in stock. But now we can't agree on whose shopping basket to buy. I quite like his idea of including flour and yeast to make rolls and even pizza but he doesn't have any potatoes, which I think is a mistake. Nor does he have any treats - I felt that a welcome inclusion would be my 33p for 10 scones and 22p for lemon curd, or 38p for their excellent basics peanuts. Otherwise, about half of our ingredients are the same.

In many ways I feel today's supermarket's value ranges make the challenge too easy and I'm sure that whoever's list we decide on will provide a good variety of food. And of course the people actually living on £1 a day wouldn't have the equivalent of a Sainsbury's range of 450 ultra-budget decent-quality products, some at prices you can't imagine them making a profit at.

If nothing else, it's made me consider every penny of the budget, swapping in something that's a few pennies less than my first choice. That, I guess, is an important lesson of the exercise.

And it does bring home the extravagance of the casual way we would normally open a £3 or £4 bottle of wine - and how lucky we are to have unlimited tap water on demand. And the benefits of a fridge and freezer to keep the food fresh so that it can all be bought, effectively in bulk, at the start of the week. Oh yes, and the fact that we do have the full £10 available at the start of the week, instead of having to go out each day with the previous day's earnings and start from scratch.

It's a shame that the BBC isn't reshowing any of its excellent Blood, Sweat and Takeways (or T-shirts or Luxuries) series next week to coincide with the challenge - it's a very good at giving an insight into people's lives in these kinds of situations.