Reflections of day 2

My 5 days worth of food!

Its the morning of day 3 and I have today off my work...I slept through to 10am, which may o ay be a reflection on my lack of food. Even though I am eating fairly well I am still going to bed a little hungry (really needed to get out of the habit of nibbling at night anyway, so that it one good thing that has came from this!) However, I am also genuinely knackered...have had a couple of late nights at work and busy weekends, whatever the reason I loved it! (although I ran in a panic when I heard the bin men and thought I had missed them...they only come every fortnight!!)

Click here to donate!

Had to actually stop half way through this blog to have my breakfast...crumpets...again! But with scrambled egg, a splurge this morning but hoping it'll see me right through to tea time, where I am having rice, veg and curry sauce....again!

Its a VERY small plate!

Repetition of food if definitely another of the points of this challenge that you see very quickly! I may never look at another crumpet at the end of this challenge, or an egg!

However, yesterday something else quite interesting happened. I was at work and it was manic and I had to stay late. Now, I am always, always, hungry at 5pm when I leave work. Its probably more a phychological issue than a physical, but when it was the back of 6pm my stomach was echo-ing around the empty office and I started to feel quite sick. This would probably be the situation regardless of if I was on live below the line or not but I also knew that my dinner was a long way off. So I broke into my emergency 5p cup of soup I have had at the bottom of my bag and managed to work through and had my dinner at 7!

What struck me though was how organised you have to be to survive on this. I have a drawer full of snacks, nuts and seeds, at work, and always have fruit. But I can only afford an apple once a day because fresh fruit is so expensive! Having that cup of soup really saved me from getting to a point where I was going to be really uncomfortably hungry and binging when I got home! Planning is certainly a key.

Which is fine. Its fine when you have a local store, which is always in stock, and your income is steady, and regular. Its fine to be organised, and plan it out, when there are less variables. In fact bad planning for us really equates to laziness! For 1.4 billion people in the world, this is  not the case. Their shops may be their neighbours, they depend on the harvest, and people have stock to sell at the same time. But most of all they depend on a wage, a steady wage, and for many this is the difficulty.

That's why it's important for us to make choices here, every day choices. Like purchasing fair trade products. Yes, they are more expensive, but that's because they are fair. Those prices are what we should be paying, but instead we choose companies that cut costs, and therefore prices, to make more profit. Now I don't tar them all with the same brush: Ben and Jerry's and Cadbury are huge companies that are fair trade as well, they have obviously found alternative, fairer, ways to cut costs whilst still giving those who are growing, picking, harvesting the raw materials that make our food a fair wage for their labour!