To think this increase in cost is going to break me?

Heres a radical idea.

If peppercorns are too expensive DON'T BUY THEM. They're not an Essential, they have 0 nutrition.

Olive Oil has rocketed, so I use much more sparingly and use cheaper oils where appropriate for health and taste.

Same with anything - adjust your mindset. Lots of foods are out of season here and rack up the carbon footprint for no real need. No-one needs to eat salads in winter nor strawberries in Spring.

Self-indulgence is what it is. Pack it in.

I mean everyone get together like they did with the poll tax.

YANBU
I've kept all my Hello Fresh and Green Chef recipes and I buy the ingredients myself in bulk and batch cook the recipes, this works quite well. I shop around for cheapest ingredients but I am lucky that I have a car

It's the same shit show every year for me
Min wage goes up, great
The next month the letters start about council tax increase, water, gas, electric and I'm back to where I was

it's not completely irrelevant, as it's useful to know whether it's just a british issue, or a much larger one. If it was just here then it would make it more likely the government could perhaps do something to lower it, or at least there would be clear explanations (e.g. being on an island making it harder to transfer goods/our climate making it harder to grow some things). The fact that prices are high worldwide means that even if the government could perhaps do more to help, some things are out of their control.

I saw a tiktok today of someone in the US where a 12 pack of basic, non free range eggs were 7 dollars (about £5.65, whereas they would be about £1.60 here). So more than 3 times as much, and there were lots of people saying in the comments that $7 was cheap compared to where they lived.

However it's also important to bear in mind that, while food might be more expensive in other countries, either many wages (at least professional, if not minimum wage) are also correspondingly much higher, e.g. in the USA, or Canada, or quality of life is usually considered to be better (the nordic countries).

Being a low wage country, with continually stretched resources AND expensive food is a bit of a perfect shit storm.

We buy spices and condiments in Home Bargains. Ditto loo roll, bin liners, cleaning products, painkillers etc. Never from a supermarket.
And screw you Sainsburys for pricing coffee at £7.95 when the same brand in a bigger jar is £5 at B and M opposite.
We stopped buying olive oil completely. We get rapeseed or a blend of olive and another oil.
To the poster considering a water meter, we were paying £80 a month(family of 4) and it’s less than half that since the meter was installed. No change in the usage.

We all know prices have always risen, but they have never risen to the extent they have since Brexit. Surely you must have noticed!?

I have my groceries delivered (can't get out to supermarket easily) and finding it increasingly difficult to eat within my food budget. I'm also seeing less price difference between the likes of tesco & sainsburys vs waitrose & m&s - often the difference in cost comes down to ~£5.

Don't have an aldi or lidl near me & I'm thinking about growing my own veg this year to try & keep costs down

Absolutely agree with you and the prices you mention per week are exactly the trajectory my Lidl shop has followed. I now go to Farmfoods for some things and use the Lidl app to at least claim my free items. Heck, as I only shop once a week, I turn straight back round and go in again to get the free thing as the voucher only lasts a week. For Morrisons, where I go to shop for an elderly relative so sometimes have to do my own shop there through lack of time, I buy a pre-paid voucher and get 5% off. It’s not a lot but it’s worth having.

Sometimes only the packaging is different though. For example, we found that the contents of two own brand boxes of Christmassy chocolate biscuits were exactly the same from Waitrose and Aldi. Only the outer cardboard boxes and the prices were different, with the Waitrose ones from memory being a couple of pounds more. The manufacturer must have been the same.

There’s a cut off to how much rent you get on the housing element / UC. Which is difficult in private rentals because landlords are taking the piss out of tenants with a new increase every year, this is why we are seeing so many homeless people and no fault evictions.

Housing benefit doesn’t match rent prices anymore unless the tenants are in social housing and there isn’t enough of them to go round. As we are a growing population with no adequate affordable housing thanks to various governments in the past 40 years.

You also have to pay small increments of council tax every month, which as you can imagine once they have paid gas, water, electric, subsidised their rent etc theres very little over to afford food, travel etc.

I volunteer in a food bank so i get to see how tough it is first hand how difficult it is for these people. It really boils my piss that some people believe media / tabloid propaganda and that all people on benefits are lazy or living the high life because most are certainly not.

And now we have labour going for the disabled and “lazy” when what they should be doing is putting an end to unstable zero hour contracts, building more social housing ALL over the uk not just down south. Not building new bloody runways.

It’s just a cycle of poverty in this country if you’re unfortunate enough to be born on the bread line. The older i get i’m starting to believe thats how our governments want it.

Disgruntled labour voter who will not vote for any of the lying shower of shits again in my life.

You are people, are you going to refuse to pay?

Supermarkets have enormous control over meat production.

"How the supermarkets came to own UK agriculture | The Farming Forum"
https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/how-the-supermarkets-came-to-own-uk-agriculture.337882/

Can I say that nowadays I find Sainsbury’s cheaper than Asda. Also yo can game their nectar card system. If you buy the same stuff every week they will offer you cheaper prices and then you can stock up. One week tomatoes will be 69p instead of 99p. One week bread will be cheaper. This week I was shocked when they offered me cheaper olive oil! Let me show you.

Quite often though with the Aldi or Lidl copies you will find that the ingredients aren’t as good as the real thing.

Yes, us too. One sausage less, add a slice of bread, all happy! Beans/cheese/sardines/eggs on toast used to be a lunch. Now it’s a main meal.

My understanding is that many people on UC still have to pay some rent too as not all the amount is covered by UC in these days of awfully high rents. I also understand that many people on UC are also in paid employment. My own thoughts are that not needing to be on UC - for reasons of low pay, serious disability or serious illness, for example - is something to be grateful for.

I disagree- I think you’ve got cheap prices and crap food quality in England. It’s bad for everyone’s health and the agricultural industry. The only ones who really benefit are the supermarket big wigs. Everyone else loses long term

I am buying very much based on price. We are also eating more bread.

Good for you! Doesn’t mean everyone should do the same.

The problem is zero wage growth. The cost of food in the UK is cheap and has been for a long time. The problem is that those at the top also want very cheap labour and so most people’s wages are literally the same as they were in the 90s.

Mine is over £1200 this year 😱 we definitely need to switch to a meter

I stopped buying orange juice around 20 years ago because it was bad for me and expensive.

I only drink water..

Water rates and council tax will be going up soon too - by a lot for many.

I just don't know how the people living hand-to-mouth with no safety cushion are managing.

Food may be quite cheap relative to other countries but we are a low wage economy, soon to be the employers v the employees & unemployed. A lot of the problems with unemployment is that companies are reducing jobs to make that extra profit and therefore senior management salaries and dividends.

Nothing is going to happen until there is a tax on ultra high salaries and to ensure that any money being transferred off shore has already paid UK tax on it.

It's time to put the blame of the economy on the rich rather than the poor and struggling.