a peek inside the fishbowl

Wow. More donations! Thank you Peter Goold for your support! If anyone else would like to make a donation it would be very appreciated. My page is right here. I’ve really appreciated your tweets and Facebook shares too. Thank you so much!

The end is in sight, and I am grateful, because I can’t sustain this much longer. Imagine however, all the people in the world for whom this is a daily reality, without respite.

It’s clear that I’m eating just enough to keep my body functioning. I can’t say the same for my brain as I’ve been feeling somewhat foggy and tired. If I had a more active lifestyle or a job that demanded physical labour I wouldn’t be able to pull this off.

$1.75 a day does not buy a lot of variety. It buys cheap carbohydrates. And in my case, not a lot of vegetable, fibre, or protein.

Here’s my breakfast, same as before:

Live Below participants were sent an email today and I wanted to share a bit about that $1.75 amount we’ve been tossing around:

1.4 billion, or about 1 in 5 people, live in extreme poverty. Those living in extreme poverty would have to make that $1.75 a day stretch for absolutely everything. The $8.75 that we just spent would be split in countless directions – health, education, clothing, transit etc. And don’t forget that we in Canada are fortunate to have clean water coming straight out of our taps! Every day across the world women spend up to 200 million hours just collecting water.

Clearly, this is an issue that deserves some of our attention.

There have been some negative comments about this campaign floating around on Twitter and Facebook. So I ask you negative naysayers out there, is the poppy campaign at Remembrance Day a waste of time? Is it a waste of time when elementary school kids participate in miniature Terry Fox runs around their school every year? Is it a waste of time for high school kids to take a vow of silence for a day for children’s rights?

I hope you never have to know what it’s like to be hungry and need help.

Here’s my lunch, a modest improvement over Tuesday’s dinner, which looks pretty much the same as this. I added 1/2 a vegetable bouillon cube which improved its flavour somewhat.

That’s 1/3 cup of rice (measured uncooked), with 1/4 cup of peas and 1/4 cup of diced onion and 1/2 a vegetable bouillon cube added to the water as seasoning.

I had a bit of an epiphany as it pertains to how food makes you feel. This will seem pretty obvious, but when you’re eating food that you like, you feel happy. When you’re eat food you don’t like, you feel miserable. Could I eat rice every day and be happy? It feels impossible.

I had a cup of tea and a hard boiled egg as a snack in the afternoon, and dinner was this:

1/2 cup of pasta (measured uncooked)
1/2 cup of diced tomatoes mixed with 1/3 cup of diced onions softened in a dry pan (no cooking oil was in my budget)

That’s it.

This was the kind of gorgeous sunny day in which food and drink would have featured heavily, whether it was in the form of a leisurely gelato from a shop in our neighborhood, a tall glass of ice cold lemonade on the back porch, or a shared beer with dinner. But sadly, none of those happy things were available to me today, and they aren’t for many other people… not just for five days, but all of the time.

This post was written for the Live Below the Line challenge, in which I am trying to feed myself on $1.75 per day, for five days. You can support me by making a small donation right here. Even donating the amount you’d spend on your coffee today would make a big difference. Thank you!