Advertisement

Winnipegers take up challenge of living on $4 a day worth of food

Could you live on $4 a day worth of food?

Social activists in Winnipeg will mark World Food Day on Sunday by outlining their experiences after taking the challenge to live on a welfare budget that gave them less than the price of one fast-food combo meal for their daily food budget.

"That is approximately the amount of money that Manitobans on social assistance have to spend on food without the benefit of fully stocked pantries and kitchens, accessible and affordable transportation, and free food skills resources," says the World Food Day Human Library Facebook page.

Blogger Aiden Enns took up the challenge to do it for six days. He wondered how to count fresh vegetables he gets from his garden.

"I'm assuming I shouldn't eat them — because low-income and hungry folks don't have gardens," he wrote on his Geez blog. "But that's a quick and easy stereotype. I wonder if it's true."

But while he's prepared to take up the challenge, Enns wondered what organizers hope to achieve.

"Do we simply want to raise awareness and get more people to give money and time to food justice groups and charities, such as the sponsors of the event, Oxfam, Winnipeg Harvest, or Canadian Foodgrains Bank?" Enns wondered.

Enns also suggested the $4 food challenge smacks of tokenism, like a recent event where successful business people spent a night on the street pretending to be homeless.

"I'm suspicious of top-down change . . . I want to be part of an action that doesn't just share surplus food from the middle and upper classes; I want to be part of a society where no one is hungry. How does my eating $4 worth of food per day fit with that goal?"

However, members of the Food Adventure Club blog are diving whole-hog into the challenge.

"This challenge isn't about saving money, or a cool way to lose weight because you can't afford fatty things like cheesecake," one post said. "This about some people having very little money for food and others gaining some insight into what that's like on a daily basis."

The $4 daily allowance means buying bulk, eating monotonous leftovers and "splurging" on a lemon for 69 cents to add some zest to basic dishes.

The challenge also means maximizing the stuff that normally gets abandoned at the back of the fridge and making the most of simple ingredients. A bruised apple, chopped and baked with some brown sugar, became dessert.

The blog features a number of recipes to make the most of basic ingredients. One unidentified blogger remembers growing up poor "so I've got money-saving chops.

"My parents taught us to buy bulk food, buy day-old food, buy semi-rotten but still good food, to grow food, to make food. All of this takes time though, to hunt around for deals or to think ahead and make your own bread for cheap rather than buying a loaf for 3 bucks."

Participants in the challenge will be sharing their experiences at Winnipeg's Millennium Library on Saturday afternoon.

(Getty Images)