Eating For £1 A Day. The Latest BBC Propaganda.

I have been reading quite a bit recently about the subject of eating on a greatly reduced budget. I work for  a free advice agency and I know for a fact this cannot be done, not without ending up weak, stressed and ultimately in hospital.

Before this latest piece of budgeting advice kindly circulated by the BBC, I saw a client who lived on plain boiled pasta and nothing else. She had bills and debts to pay off, so she prioritised those over eating. She ended up suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition; hardly the best outcome for someone who should be fit and available for work according to the government.

There is "cheap" food available in supermarkets; labelled as "value", "basic", "economy" or similar. On the face of it this cheap food does appear to offer good value for money but turn over the packaging and read the list of ingredients - fat, sugar, salt, flavourings, starch, emulsifiers and preservatives to mention a few, not forgetting the ingredients the manufacturers don't list - fried faeces in turkey mince anyone?

I personally live on a diet as frugal as I can possibly make it. I cook cheap curries using lentils, fresh vegetables, onions and curry powder. I make a potato stretch between three of us by using it as an ingredient in stews or as fried slices served up with omelettes. I use a lot of pasta and rice in my cooking. These are filler foods; items to bulk up a meal and leave your stomach feeling satisfied. On their own they are pretty worthless nutritionally.

Sometimes for quickness I buy the cheapest, nastiest pizza at 60p in the supermarket and top it with my own onion, sliced pepper, tomatoes and courgettes. I can make these vegetables last for a week and use them in a multitude of ways.

So on the face of it, I'm a careful shopper. I rarely buy ready meals and I look for fresh fruit and vegetables in the reduced sections of supermarkets or at my local greengrocer. But to do this for £1 a day? I don't think so. And nor does anyone else with a shred of commonsense or decency.

I am interested in learning about freeganism or dumpster diving as it is called in the US; the practise of taking discarded food from supermarket skips. This food is destined for landfill, so if we don't take it, it goes off to a dump where it will sweat in the sun and create methane. This is food still fit for human consumption but the supermarkets don't want us to know that. They want us to keep buying more and more, while they waste more and more. What a crazy, mixed up capitalist world we live in.

Shame on you BBC. Big shame on you.