One Dollar A Day Diet Project

I've mentioned before how little most of the world lives on.

During the month of September two teachers from San Diego decided to try and eat on one dollar a day for a month. They blogged about it at One Dollar Diet Project to raise money and awareness.

I thought it was an admirable effort. While it is easy to think of children in India, this poverty isn't the kind you don't have living all around you (especially women).

One of the comments on the About page included statistics released in 2007 from the census

Jess
November 5, 2008 at 9:43 pm

The U.S. poverty line (about $14/day/person 2007, depending on household size and composition) directly based on what people spend on food. Essentially, the amount spent per day on food by the poorest quintile of Americans in multiplied by 3 to yield the poverty line. So if a household of 4 (two adults and two related children) spends $1,752 on food in 2007 ($4.80/person/day), and this spending is 1/3 their income, then they will live just ON the poverty line. This means that there are 37.3 million Americans (12.6%) eating less than $4.80 a day or paying more than a third of their small income for food.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/threshld/thresh07.html

On the food cost index page, comments seem to criticize their pricing ("too low"), and suggest on how to make the project more realistic, but the logistics could have panned out a thousand different ways. The project was a huge success in getting the discussion out there.