From $20 per day to $20 per week, and beyond.

Posted by Brody

I buy lunch every day, and sometimes breakfast and dinner. I don't know exactly how much I spend on food, but it's probably around $20 per day. I like the eating, but not so much the preparation, so it makes sense to outsource the planning and assembly and sit comfortably at the end of the supply chain.

People survived on much less than $20 a week before Consumerism, and many still do in parts of the world, but it's hard to imagine what that's like. So what if my circumstances, or the system that provides cheap food, were to change for some reason? How well prepared would I be? If I can go from $20 per day to $20 per week, maybe I could go to $2 per week if I had to, like if the world were overrun by zombies.

So after spending what probably amounts to a hundred dollars' time and petrol bargain hunting, I came up with this; $19.51 worth of homo sapien sustenance:

1. potatoes (4.1kg) -- $2
2. 10 pack of beef instant noodles -- $4.07
3. Loaf of white bread -- $1.45
4. pasta (500g) -- $1
5. mince (524g) -- $3.5
6. rice (500g) -- $2.59
7. pumpkin (1.5kg) -- $1
8. onions x 6 -- 60c
9. rose apples x 12-- $1.30
10. cabbages x 2 -- $1
11. parsley (90g) -- $1
    

If my daily budget works out I won't even have to eat the sculpture.