“Could you live on $1.50 a day? For a
week? Ben Affleck is joining Josh Groban, Sophia Bush, Debi Mazar and other
stars to take the 2013 Live Below The Line challenge issued by the Global
Poverty Project. They will live on $1.50 worth of food and drink a day — which
means no Starbucks! — from Monday to May 3 to raise awareness about poverty. The
$1.50 figure is the equivalent of the global figure used to define extreme
poverty. The celebrities hope to encourage others to support the cause and do
the same.” (USA Today, Wednesday, April 24,
2013)
I didn’t realize that I
was living in extreme poverty until I read the above blurb in the USA Today
newspaper. What does that really mean? The Global Poverty Project defines
extreme poverty as living on $1.50 worth of food and drink per day. In Florida,
the state budgets $1.54 a day (down from about $2.80 a day 30 years ago,
equivalent to perhaps $6.00 in today’s inflated dollars) for each prisoner’s
food, three meals, which is four cents over the global figure, but surely a
dollar-fifty goes further in Haiti, Sudan, or Bangladesh than in high-cost
Florida.
Since Ben Affleck probably
doesn’t have much experience living on such a meager food budget, with his
multi-million dollar a year income taking good care of his superstar wife,
Jennifer Garner (“Alias,” etc.), and privileged children, I thought I would offer a few tips
gleaned from my 35 years of prison food background.
First, Ben, get ready to
eat a lot of bread. The traditional prison diet consisted of bread and water,
but times changed somewhat. No pumpernickel, rye, or sourdough! Buy a lot of cheap
flour, mix up a pan of biscuits, let them get hard, cold, and stale, like ours,
then eat two each meal. Drink a lot of water to wash it down and fill you up. You
can also use the flour to make bread variations for breakfasts several days a
week — two pancakes, or make a pan of “coffee cake,” and cut two little squares
for Saturday AM. Share the rest with Josh Groban, Sophia Bush, Debi Mazur and
the other celebrities. Don’t feed any of these meals to your wife, Ben, or
Jennifer might pack up the kids and walk out in a huff. To add some filling
food value, buy a big bag of oatmeal, boil a few ounces down to the consistency
of wallpaper paste, add no seasonings or flavorings whatsoever, plop a sticky
spoonful next to the pancakes, enjoy. Bon
appétit!
A bag of dry corn meal
grits will alternate with the oatmeal a few mornings a week. Don’t waste a
penny on any kind of seasoning.
Next — potatoes! A big bag
will suffice for servings up to three times a day, a spoonful each time, for
pennies a serving. Again, bland is the key. Don’t squander a dime on butter or
sour cream. Not in the budget.
Don’t forget beans — the
cheapest ones you can find. For years we lived on white beans and pinto beans —
don’t overcook — leave them half-boiled like ours. But for the past six months
or so, the prison system has been buying tons of black beans, or frijoles negroes, as the Latinos call
them. Some suspect Florida may have made a
clandestine deal with the Castro government, shipping oranges to Cuba in
exchange for black beans. We certainly aren’t getting them! Oranges, and all fresh
fruits, for that matter, have been off the prison menu for years. A couple of
weeks ago, fifty of us were lined up outside waiting our turn to enter the chow
hall. A guard standing by took banana
from his “Little Debbie” lunch cooler. A hundred eyes focused on him as he
peeled and ate the banana, smiling, taunting hungry wolves.
Forget the fruit, Ben, it’s
not in the budget. Boil the beans, spoon a few ounces on your tray, no more
than three or four — serve the same to the other celebrities — try to find some
salt if you can, otherwise, get used to it. The beans will serve for two meals
a day, along with the all-purpose potatoes.
Using that cornmeal again,
Ben, you can alternate the hard biscuits for little flat squares of cornbread
for a few meals a week.
Perhaps you can get a deal
or some greens, collards or turnips in season, boil them to death, don’t
concern yourself with washing them very thoroughly, the tasteless sandy grit
adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the
gastronomic process of prison realism.
I hesitate to mention the
word, meat, Ben. You’re probably better off going vegan, but they do serve sort
of pseudo-meat-type products at times, an indecipherable ground-up gray
substance that I call “possum” — it’s certainly not beef, pork, or chicken, in
the form of a “patty.” Once a week or so you can serve two thin “poultry dogs,” they call them, but
probably not “poultry,” and hopefully NOT “dog.”
Once a week — a chicken
leg and thigh with a real bone in it — our only clearly-recognizable animal
product, is served, Ben, but rumored to be replaced soon by a “zesty patty,” “southwest
patty,” “country patty,” or “Salisbury patty,” composed of the above-mentioned “possum,”
patties that differ only in their names, an unknown soy/meat combo squashed
into squares or circles.
Ben, I hope these hints
help you stay within your budget, and you make the best of raising the world’s
awareness of extreme poverty. Alternately, you could invite your friends down
here to Okaloosa County, to the prison, and share our
meals with me. Don’t worry, most of the prisoners will behave like perfect
gentlemen, although they will desperately stare at the “womenfolk.” They don’t
dare act up, or risk going to lockup, where they have to live on the meager
trays shoved through the slot in the steel door, deprived of coveted access to
the prison canteen, where one can buy a cheeseburger (two bucks, far more
costly than the three prison trays, $1.54 per day) if he has funds sent from home.
Trust me on this, Ben —
extreme poverty is not a condition you want to extend beyond a week, especially
if you’re in a prison and forcibly separated from your loved ones.
Charlie
