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Bare-bones food budget challenges Winnipegger

By: Geoff Kirbyson

Posted: 10/17/2011 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Enlarge Image

Sarah Michaelson participated in a challenge to live on a $4-per-day food budget.

If you were invited over to Sarah Michaelson's place on Saturday night, she would have offered you the only thing at her disposal -- tap water.

That's because the club DJ and food blogger spent the last week living on $4 per day. Not out of necessity, mind you, but by choice as she was one of several Winnipeggers who took part in the World Food Day Hunger Challenge.

A couple and a family with kids also participated in the initiative, which was designed to raise awareness of the many people for whom living on a couple of toonies a day is the harsh reality.

They were allowed to stock their pantries with five items before they started -- Michaelson chose salt, olive oil, steel cut oats, coffee and flour -- and then live on the barest of bare-bones budgets.

Luckily, Michaelson has a garden and grows her own vegetables but she still had to make a plan for every day and then take price comparisons to a whole new level.

"I bought tomato sauce at Dollarama," she said. "I was buying discounted and semi-rotten food (at the grocery store). I'm hungry all the time."

In five-and-a-half days, Michaelson spent $20.12. Her diet was vegan for all intents and purposes because incorporating meat would have been too expensive. (She admits to treating herself to a single can of tuna.) But perhaps the biggest impact she experienced was socially. She couldn't go out for dinner or drinks with friends and she didn't look forward to meals like she usually did because they were "pretty much flavourless."

"Food and relationships are so intertwined. Everything shifted for me because of what I was eating," she said.

Michaelson said this sort of cost consciousness would also leave people without any "kitchen capital."

"If you're living on $4 a day, are you really going to go out and spend money on spices?" she said.

Darlene Dunn doesn't need to take any food challenge to know what Michaelson's experience was like. Living on social assistance, she lives it every day, keeping her budget to about $50 per week.

While that might sound impossible for most people, Dunn said it's not as difficult as you might think. She grows many of her own vegetables, she has friends who hunt and give her fresh moose meat and most everything else she needs, she can get at Eat It.ca, an online organic store with a bricks and mortar location on Wall Street.

"I'm still pretty much a millionaire compared to people in so many countries in the world," Dunn said.

She's fully in favour of others getting a taste of what it's like to live so frugally, too.

"It's important to go through the exercise. We have so much money here (in Winnipeg), people should not be on the street," she said.

Anna Weier, program co-ordinator with the Manitoba Alternative Food Research Alliance at the University of Manitoba, which co-sponsored World Food Day in Winnipeg, said as realistic as the challenge was for participants, they had several key advantages.

They had access to a functional kitchen and multiple appliances, they possessed cooking skills and they had transportation to the grocery store.

Now that her challenge is complete, Michaelson said she's looking forward to using her condiments again.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 17, 2011 A2

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