Voucherbox.co.uk has teamed up with UK based charity Zamcog and set up a £2 challenge - feed each person in your family for £2 per head per day.
It costs £2 to feed and educate a child in Zambia every day, which is also the approximate amount of money children who are in poverty in the UK get to spend on food and drinks. We and other bloggers were invited to take on the challenge in an effort to change the way we think about food. By taking up the challenge, Voucherbox.co.uk will donate £50 to Zamcog to help the charity continue their goal of supporting Zambia's most at-risk children.
So a couple a weeks ago, we spend a Saturday where we are all together to do the challenge.
Breakfast: Golden Syrup Porridge with water, tea and coffee - £1.12
Lunch: Plain instant noodles with soup and water -£1.80
Dinner: Tuna, Sweetcorn and Seaweed Pasta and water - £5.05
Total spent: £7.97 for 4 person
It was easy for us with drinks as we mostly drink water anyway. I did have a tea and hubby had a coffee, which turned out to be cheaper than we thought, but we could imagine it adding up if you drink more than a cup a day.
The main issue we had was to carefully plan our meals and weigh the ingredients, to make sure that we wouldn't spend over £2 per person for the whole day on food and drinks. Breakfast and lunch has taken up more from the budget than expected as we didn't plan well in advance. We would have probably saved up more if we went for toasts for breakfast. It also made us realise that instant noodles, although simple and plain, was actually a luxury (£0.45 per person), and it's not even nutritious.
Dinner however was sumptuous and packed with nutrients, but only cost the 4 of us £5.05. For another 20p it could easily cover both our lunch and dinner, bringing our total spending down to £6.17.
Thoughts:
It's not impossible to eat well for £2 per person for a day, provided that you do a very careful meal planning. I knew that we and many people are very spoilt, we can eat until we feel full and don't need to carefully weigh ingredients to make sure we are within budget. By taking up the £2 challenge, it showed us that money and food could have lasted us longer if we plan carefully.
We also noticed that, to eat something healthy and filling, as well as tasty, seasonings are a necessity.
Many times we would wonder if donating £2 can really help someone. We now know that we can actually feed someone for the whole day, so even if we can only donate a small amount, it will make a bigger difference than we think. By taking up this challenge and writing this post, Voucherbox.co.uk will donate £50 to Zamcog, which means that we have just fed 25 children for a day, or a child for 25 days. It covers education in Zambia too. So it was definitely worth doing.
I am supposed to tag fellow bloggers to take on this challenge, but instead, I'd like to challenge any of my blogger friends who've read this to take on the £2 Challenge and help with what we can.
