Eating on Less than a Pound a Day - the Beaker Way

There has been much rubbish spoken lately about how to live on food costing less than a pound a day. And yet it's so easy! Here at the Beaker Folk, our eco-chef Bernie manages to produce simple, traditional foods on less than a pound per head. Here's how he does it, as we go through a few days menus. NB as with all irresponsible media diets, consult with your doctor before you cause yourself serious health issues by following this regime. He/she had better be ready for all the problems you're gonna cause yourself, and may even be able to talk you out of it.

Sunday

I don't know about you, but we like to start our weeks on Sunday. It's traditional, it's hallowed by 2,000 years of religious observance, and you can pretend to yourself there's two weekends in every week!

Breakfast: Water. I wouldn't like the Beaker People to come to worship all bloated and lethargic and full of bacon. Water for breakfast ensures they are in the right state emotionally and physically. Low blood sugar, combined with tiredness from the hunger pains overnight Saturday, can really help to encourage spiritual experiences.

Lunch: Hedgehog roadkill with a blackberry jus. We encourage the Beaker People, following their primal ancestors, to be hunter gatherers. In the autumn they roam every roadside for miles picking Nature's Bounty from the hedgerows. Then we freeze them in giant vats. The same goes for the hedgehogs.

Dinner: Crow in apple sauce. Crow is in many ways Bernie's signature dish. They taste awful, so the best bet is to hide it under as much apple sauce - grown in our sacred orchard - as you can. Boiled potatoes and parsnips are the perfect side dish.

Monday

Monday is named after the moon. So we celebrate this connection by eating eggs, which look a bit moon-shaped.

Breakfast - boiled eggs. Thanks to the Beaker Chickens we have plentiful eggs, at a relatively low-cost. The Beaker Folk sometimes take advantage by eating six or seven, which gives the Community a convenient saving in its toilet paper expenses as well.

Lunch - roast chicken. The advantage of having all those chickens is that sometimes they drop dead. It's a popular Beaker game, sat at dinner pulling the wishbone and trying to diagnose the cause of mortality.

Dinner - Cut-price Banquet. By hanging around in Tesco's for hours, Bernie can often make fantastic savings. Our Cut-price banquet is made up of all those things that Bernie grabbed just after they were reduced in price. Chicken and stuffing sandwiches, sushi, sliced bread and wilted bags of prepared salad is just the sort of thing we can look forward to on a Monday!

Tuesday

Breakfast - wallaby bacon. An old local speciality. We believe they originally escaped from Woburn or Whipsnade, before developing communities in the wild on the Beds / Bucks borders. All the hunter needs is wit, cunning, and the courage to run across three lanes of the motorway to scrape up a squashed marsupial.

Lunch - Rose Hip pie. You'd never believe how this tastes. Awful.

Dinner - Peacock. It's a lovely, tasty bird. But it's only a matter of time before the Abbey finds out it's our fault they keep disappearing. Served with boiled potatoes.

Wednesday

Breakfast - Bread. In remembrance that we do not live on it alone. If we're lucky, Bernie has managed to scrape together enough flour to bake some lovely fresh wholemeal bread. If we're not, it's the out-of-code stuff left over from Monday night.

Lunch - Owl. Woden was the god of wisdom, and the owl is a wise old bird. So what could be more natural than having a nice roast owl? Be aware that owl-hunting is illegal in this country - yet more interference from Brussells, I reckon. But they can't prove, if you drive into one, that it wasn't an accident.

Dinner - Cheesy Wotsits. If you buy the bumper packs they can be surprisingly cheap. And eaten in vast quantities, they can cause young people to dream dreams and older ones to see visions. Unfortunately they can tend to cause an increased expenditure on toothpaste. Serve with boiled potatos.

Thursday

Breakfast - Porridge. We recommend porridge to any Beaker person who is hungry at any time, as it's filling, healthy and, above all, cheap. Not those little pots, though. Do you think I'm made of money?

Lunch - Fondue. We think most traditional things are good, and what could be cheaper than dipping unidentifiable parts of cheap meat into a sauce made out of all the odd bits of cheese Bernie found at the back of the fridge?

Dinner - Doily Surprise. Being in the paper doily industry, we do build up a lot of  chads. But, soaked for long enough in an enzyme solution, you can render them into something almost indistinguishable from wallpaper paste. It then makes a repulsive and potentially lethal pie, topped with mashed potatoes, but it's dead cheap.

Friday

Friday is a traditional fast day, so we save on  money and improve everyone's spiritual (and arguably physical) health by giving everyone the day off. Water's allowed, if you must, but even that's on a meter these days. And the water from St Bogwulf's Spring is hallowed, full of tasty minerals, and contaminated by diesel fuel. Best not.

Saturday

Breakfast - Eggs. After half a week, you'd hope people could face eggs again. For an exciting variation, Bernie will often cook omelette with an egg filling.

Lunch - Badger with boiled potatoes. There's nothing like a roast badger. Obviously, there's a number of diseases you could catch, but whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Badger is particularly popular in the early months of the year, when they're lying all over the place.

Dinner - Saturday night is pizza night! We save money by using those little sachets of sauce you can pick up in service stations, and smearing those over plain dough bases. Because it's the weekend, we will even splash out on catering packs of medium, Slovakian authentic cheddar for that continental touch.