It’s shocking that children in one of the world’s most affluent cities are starving
Luisa Tam says attempting to eat HK$15 meals for three days left her agitated, angry and deprived – imagine doing that all the time
Shame, shame, shame! How can this city, with its highest numbers of Rolls-Royce and Mercedes cars per capita, the priciest property market in the world per square foot and the highest concentration of individual wealth in Asia, allow a substantial number of children and adults to starve on a daily basis?
Last week I put myself on an experiment for three consecutive days to see what it would be like to live a hand-to-mouth existence, allowing myself HK$45 for food per day.
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The first day went relatively smoothly and I spent less than HK$10 on a sandwich, mostly because I was given some food by a colleague when he saw me counting spare change and thought I must have forgotten my wallet. I accepted his generosity gleefully.
On the second day, I picked at some leftover sandwiches from the day before and had a chocolate bar and some small snacks for dinner because I was planning to save some money for a better meal the following day.
On the last day, I had a total of HK$92.50, more than half of which was money saved from the earlier two days. I decided to cheer myself up and splurged on some takeaway dim sum; but that was my only meal all day.