Non-chicken plan - Live Below the Line

The plan I posted about yesterday was based around getting a whole chicken (a Lidl free-range one) and making the most of it in a variety of guises.

That is the idea I've had in my head, getting a few bits of different things and then making them stretch for the 5 days.

I guess that is because this tends to be the way we eat anyway, but with our normal budget we add things as the week goes along. It is kind of a rolling programme of leftovers, we start with chicken (or ham, etc) on Sunday, then we add a spanish tortilla on Tuesday, make a risotto with the stock we have made, add a flan or tart of some kind, maybe make some hummus, cook some sausages, and it just kind of grows and evolves over the week. We use the food for both lunches and teas.

It also felt more authentic. When you don't have much money to spend on food (even when it is more than £1 a day) then you don't get to make many choices. The monotony is one of the demoralising things about poverty; the reality of that lack of choice particularly in such a consumer society grinds you down. If you've bought a bag of rice, then you're having rice, you don't have the luxury of just being able to make a simple choice like swapping to pasta.

And the lack of choice isn't just food, you often don't get to choose a job, where you live, what you eat, what you wear, you just take what you can afford and hope that is in some way works. It is one of the reasons that when you have a limited income (be it benefits or with a low-income job) you buy small 'treats' even when know that you can't really afford them, just for the relief from the relentless sameness and lack of choice. For some people, and particularly in some countries outside the UK, this lack of choice may mean having to move your whole family away from the place where they have always lived, it might mean not being able to choose an education for your children, it might means having to leave your family to go and find work so that you can send a little money home to them to help them survive.

But, these thoughts aside, I thought I should maybe try looking at our Live Below the Line budget another way, so I'm going to try and plan an alternative menu which doesn't use the chicken and buys things on a more day to day basis. I'll see how it goes and keep you up to date.

As a PS, while we're talking about poverty here's a nice graphic showing how relatively few people really are on unemployment benefits as a share of total welfare spend (only 3% on Job Seeker's Allowance). The current rhetoric on benefits doesn't help anyone, and those on severely limited incomes can certainly do without the 'scrounger' stigma that is being pushed by the government and media (and those on benefits may be in or out of work - many people on welfare are on in-work top ups of their low wages) :

Image from Jon Leighton on Facebook, click on his name to check out his info on it.