The £2 Challenge: Can you feed each person in your family for £2 per head per day?

30th January 2017

Feed your family for £2 and help support Zambia’s most at-risk children

As we look ahead to the new year, lots of us are hoping to make positive changes – to save some money after Christmas, eat better, or start doing some exercise. To kick start this sentiment, and raise some money for charity, Voucherbox has teamed up with Zamcog to present The £2 Challenge: Can you feed each person in your family for £2 per head per day?

The £2 Challenge: Can you feed each person in your family for £2 per head per day?

Zamcog is a UK based charity that is dedicated to helping feed and educate Zambia’s most at-risk children, and along with Voucherbox.co.uk – one of the UK’s leading voucher publishers, they have challenged me to feed myself and my family for £2 per person for one day, and share my experience, and then Voucherbox will donate £50 to Zamcog to help the charity continue their goal of supporting Zambia’s most at-risk children through food and education. They will also donate £50 for every other blog post published – so if you’re a blogger and feel like joining in then please do!

It costs £2 to feed and educate a child in Zambia every day. The challenge attempts to make us change the way we think about food, and so Zamcog would like the blogging community to cut down on their food spending and waste for one day.

Voucherbox, along with the blogging community are hoping to raise real awareness and money to support the amazing work that Zamcog do each year and help to continue the education and feeding of at-risk children in Zambia.

The £2 Challenge: Can you feed each person in your family for £2 per head per day?

Julie-Anne Uggla, Founder of Zamcog says:

“We’re delighted to work with Voucherbox.co.uk to raise awareness to one of the integral aspects of Zamcog’s work. At the Shitima School we not only educate children to improve their lives but also provide basic needs such as food and clean water. Any money raised from this campaign will go directly to funding nourishment at the Shitima School. The blogging community are incredibly influential and with their help we can raise money and awareness for Zamcog and continue to support our children.”

On Saturday we took part in the challenge to feed the three of us for £6 for the day. I honestly thought it would be pretty easy – it seems like quite a lot to spend on food for a day at home, and I didn’t really think that we probably spend more than that most days.

But, once I started to think about it and work it out I realised that it wasn’t so easy after all. We had already planned to make a Lasagne for dinner, and I worked that out to cost £4.45 in total, which seems a lot I think, until you think of that as £1.48 each, which doesn’t seem so bad for a big dinner with plenty of veg in. But that only left £1.55 to feed three of us breakfast, lunch and snacks – that’s 52p each – which doesn’t seem like much at all!

The £2 Challenge: Can you feed each person in your family for £2 per head per day?

We had toast or cereal for breakfast which wouldn’t be much per portion, and then sandwiches for lunch. The bread we buy is usually about a pound so using about half a loaf between us for lunch used up another 50p and probably the same again for the fillings.

So all of that pretty much takes us to our £6 limit already! Luckily we got up pretty late after a late night at my brother-in-law’s for his birthday, so we ate breakfast late and so didn’t end up wanting any snacks.

It was so much harder to stick to a £2 per head budget than I thought it would be, and it’s made me think a lot more about how much we spend on food without even thinking about it. Obviously I’m not going to restrict the amount my family eats, but I will make more of an effort to think of dinners that cost less overall, as that is obviously the meal that costs the most.

The amount we spend on food in a day for the three of us could easily have been way more – if we’d decided to have a cooked breakfast, some snacks throughout the day, and maybe some chocolate or a pudding at night, and it could have easily got towards £10 on food for just a day spent at home. That just seems crazy to me. Perhaps I’ve just been a bit naive about it, but I will consider the cost of a meal per head more now. We have recently started to budget more on the overall shopping that we buy, but it would make sense to think about the cost of individual meals as well.

I will also try to think about cooking meals that will last for two evening meals – for example a roast chicken one day and then a curry with the leftover chicken the next, or a great big Lasagne that will do a dinner and then lunches the next day.

The £2 Challenge: Can you feed each person in your family for £2 per head per day?

It’s been an interesting challenge and I’m glad to have taken part and been pushed to think about how much we spend – we’re very lucky in that we don’t always have to think about it, but unfortunately it isn’t that easy for these at-risk children in Zambia. We’re so used to just being able to grab some food whenever we want it, and it’s been good to be reminded that we can take that for granted sometimes, and for a lot of the world they have no idea where their next meal is coming from.

For more information please visit https://www.voucherbox.co.uk/blog/the-2-challenge/

 This is a collaborative charity post with Voucherbox and Zamcog.

One response to “The £2 Challenge: Can you feed each person in your family for £2 per head per day?”

  1. Voucherbox says:

    Thank you for your post! We will be donating £50 to Zamcog which will feed, educate and clothe an at-risk child in Zambia for 1 month.

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