Friday evening – The Bean Oatimatum

And so the final meal of the Mean Bean challenge has been eaten.

I considered getting each bean a little flag to wave in celebration, but then remembered that I'm not a crazy person. And more saliently I don't have enough cocktail sticks.

What else could I finish with, but the classic combination of rice and chickpeas which has been my staple throughout the week. This evening’s meal was essentially a victory lap in honour of all the foods that have served me so well this week, and perhaps as the night draws in on the final day of the Mean Bean Challenge, I should give a few awards:

·         The Most Surprising Bean award goes to the borlotti bean. Almost pleasant by itself, I reckon it would be delicious if it was cooked in something with a taste.

·         The Trickeist To Spel Bean award goes to the cannellini bean, which has several times been very nearly identified as the cannelloni bean.

·         The Surprising Omission award goes to salt. Having discovered on Monday after my first porridge experience that salt was allowed, I decided to see if I could go the week without adding it to anything. Turns out I didn’t miss it all that much (or maybe the missing it got absorbed in the missing of all the other foods I couldn’t have).

·         Most Valiant Attempt At A Meal award goes to Tuesday’s falafel. If I’ve learned nothing else this week, it turns out if you take a recipe and remove the vast majority of the ingredients, it often doesn’t taste as good as it might otherwise taste. I am very tempted to try making my own falafel at some point soon, though.

And now we come to the most prestigious award:

·         The Best Bean of the Week award goes to… La La Land! Oh, sorry, wrong envelope. It actually goes to the black bean. The chickpea did ride it close, and I did buy a lot of them in preparation for the week in the expectation I would use them a lot, but I used up all the black beans in my cupboard due to their strong taste and bravery under fire.

I also wanted to mention a few small things that I noticed during the week, that should fit in a nice list for a round-up:

·         Honestly, toothpaste has never tasted quite so good as it has this week. It’s almost been a little bit of a treat to brush my teeth and to get something with flavour in my mouth – to the point where I’ve almost felt guilty for doing it. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to do rice- or bean-flavoured toothpaste.

·         One of the small disadvantages of cooking the same thing (more or less) for every meal is that you don’t get a chance to get behind on the washing up; if you don’t get it done immediately, you have to do it before the next meal.

·         On a related note, this week has confirmed to me that sieves are the world’s hardest thing to clean, perhaps only beaten by an angry rhinoceros finishing a mud bath in a volcano – and even then, at least with the angry rhinoceros there would be two of you. I swear that the sieve I have must have some sort of rice generator, and that the roof of my kitchen must occasionally drip starch on it when I’m not looking. I definitely won’t miss having to clean that twice a day.

·         One of the positives from this week is how easy it is to plan meals through the week, and how little food shopping I had to do. It’s also remarkably cheap – my shopping in preparation for this week cost me a little over £4, and although I also used a couple of tins of beans from the cupboard I had already, the whole week can’t have cost me more than £6. If I were planning to do Live Below The Line (where you live off a pound per day for food), this would certainly be a viable option (perhaps with some slight limitations on quantity).

·         If I ever do Live Below The Line, I am definitely not doing rice, beans and porridge every day!

We now come to the last serious box of the blog – this time on poverty tourism.

Even if you haven’t come across the term “poverty tourism” before, you can probably guess what it means. It essentially refers to people who, in some way or other, “visit” those who are struggling in one way or another for a short period of time, before returning to their ordinary lives without that struggle. It can take the form of people visiting poorer parts of the world to understand more of the realities of life in extreme poverty, sleeping on the streets for a night to sympathise with the homeless, or (in my case) slightly reducing their diet for a week to attempt to emulate the food eaten by those who have nothing else.

The term “poverty tourism” is often used derogatively, albeit usually most of their scorn is reserved for those who actively travel to poorer parts of the world simply to see what life is like there.

I should emphasise at this point that this is absolutely not a critique of people in general who work in poorer areas. I know many people whose dedication to charitable endeavours is inspiring, and I would hate for you to think that was what I am talking about here.

The issue I have is described well in this article by Kennedy Odede from the Kenyan slum of Kibera, where many visitors there are literally poverty tourists. As Odede describes: “Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from.”

Could it be argued that this is a fairly good description of what I’ve been doing this week? I have been writing for a week about the “difficulties” I’ve faced, in a manner which has hopefully been entertaining, but it is something I only have to briefly endure. I’ve sometimes been slightly sceptical of challenges such as this in the past - I’m not directly demeaning people by going and taking pictures of their lives, but does simply imitating the diet of somebody else do any good, or is it just a longer-range version of poverty tourism?

Having completed the week, I do think this has had a positive impact (something which can't really be said for poverty tourism), for the following reasons:

·         Firstly, and most obviously, it involves fundraising. This isn’t something I’m doing simply to see what it is like, but to generate money. At the time of writing Tearfund has raised over £110,000 through the Mean Bean challenge, which will do great work to helping thousands of families.

·         Even if it wasn’t sponsored, I think there is some benefit in experiencing a small taste of what life is like for those from whom this, and much worse, is a daily experience. It’s one thing to simply be aware of the fact that there are millions of people starving each day; it’s another entirely to live through the impact that even just a brief dietary restriction can have on your energy levels, mood and quality of sleep (all of which I’ve noticed in the past few days). Empathy comes through walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes, and although I’ve only walked a few paces in shoes far more comfortable than I deserve, it gives some insight.

·         Following on from that, starting with empathy towards the situations that somebody else faces makes it a lot easier to get involved in some way to help alleviate their situation. I really hope that this week won’t be something that I do and then forget, but that it will spur me on to go further and do more to help work towards an end to world hunger.

·         It’s also very beneficial to me personally. We live in a materialistic culture, and although I can only speak for myself I know that I am very lucky to have all that I have, and I know that I have far more than I need. Knowing how little I actually need to survive means that I know I have more to be generous with.

So, although I do think that poverty tourism is not particularly helpful, I wouldn’t put this experience in the same category. It’s definitely been eye-opening, and although I can’t say that I enjoyed it particularly (nor should I be able to say that, really), it’s been a very interesting journey and one which I would highly encourage anybody reading this to consider giving a go next year.

I still have one more day of the blog to go, where I will be making dishes based on the ingredients I’ve used throughout the week, but also with plenty of other things added into the mix too. But now seems like as good a time as any to thank everybody who has been reading this blog over the past week. It’s not every week that I sit down and write eleven and a half thousand words (and counting) about not eating very much (indeed it would be weird if it was), but I’ve very much enjoyed doing it. A special thanks to everybody who donated as well – I’ve raised far more than I ever expected to during this week, which is shown in the fact that I really wasn’t expecting to be writing 2,000 words a day by Friday! I hope you feel like you’ve got your money’s worth. And if not, there’s still tomorrow!

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £410, which means I’m aiming at 2,250 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.