One Dollar Diet Project vs One Dollar Family Survival Project

Christopher and Kerri are a couple and social justice teachers out on a mission. Since the beginning of September 2008, they have been on a unique 30-day experiment on food choices, consumerism, waste, poverty and social psychology - trying to live on a one dollar a day diet.

But this insightful challenge - in their own words - to help us better understand and teach about a variety of concerns, could have been more interesting if it was broader in perspective.

Instead of trying to spend just a dollar on food daily from their comfort in Encinitas, California, where a tub of toothpaste costs $4.99, they should have enlisted a family in, say, Chittagong, Bangladesh or Turkana, Kenya, and asked them to survive on a dollar a day.

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There is a herding community -men, women and children - in Kenya’s Rift Valley that survives on wild fruits because their cows don’t produce milk and their goats are too thin to provide meat enough to feed the family. The fruit is cooked in boiling water for ten good hours before it can be safe to eat when all toxins have been steamed by the water.

For more than 1 billion people worldwide, normal life means surviving on $1 or less a day. With this, a family of eight in Nampula, Mozambique will buy their food, water, medicine and afford them commute to a dilapidated village school that has no running water or electricity or low-paying factory work.

With the same one dollar, the mother of the house must also save a few coins to pay her subscription with the local women’s micro-finance project or benevolence fund, otherwise known as merry-go-round!

But Christopher Greenslate and his partner, Kerri, are bold - just having started the project to raise funds for Community Resource Center and ONE, the advocacy and campaigning organization, was not easy but still it may offer a window to the plight of suffering millions of people elsewhere on the planet.

Yet they would hardly have survived or been successful if their experiment was carried out at some spot in the developing world where hapless, malnourished children know only too well the sound of hunger pangs.

And their diet would consist of none of the steak strips, peanut butter, frozen broccoli or tortilla let alone three meals a day.

Image credit: N Creatures at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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