15% of households skipped meals last month because they couldn't afford to buy enough food

[cakeorwine]

‘Health emergency’: 15% of UK households went hungry last month, data shows | Food poverty | The Guardian

"Millions of people – including one in five families with children – have gone hungry or skipped meals in recent weeks because they could not regularly afford to buy groceries, according to new food insecurity data.
According to the Food Foundation tracker, 15% of UK households – equivalent to approximately 8 million adults and 3 million children – experienced food insecurity in January, as high food prices continued to hit the pockets of low-income families.

Expects warned the persistence of high levels of food insecurity among low-income families was a “health emergency” that would drive the prevalence of conditions linked to poor nutrition, such as malnutrition and rickets.
Nearly two-thirds (60%) of food-insecure households reported buying less fruit and 44% bought fewer vegetables as they struggled with the ongoing cost of living crisis. By contrast, just 11% of food-secure households bought less fruit and 6% purchased fewer vegetables"

This is awful data - and something that should be being talked about. Being in work does not protect you from this. Life is just very expensive for some people - and costs are still going up.

@Menomeno In these specific circumstances private rent becomes unaffordable. Most likely this person would present themselves to the council and as they have children would be added to the housing waiting list and be placed into temporary accommodation.

I think if they were working it would change the amount of UC but as there is a 2 year old in the family I assumed that the parent was not able to work at this time.

Indeed, council tax being a hideous example.

I would suggest Huel but they won't send out fewer than two bags and that's over £50, which I suspect that you wouldn't be able to find all at once. It's not cheap, at over £1.50 per 400kcal meal, but it's quick, minimal effort, and balanced so useful for bad days.

Thank you for your suggestions.

I'm already on the frozen vegetables. Very useful for bulking out stuff like soup to make a whole meal.

Huel is quite expensive to get in, but I've had it before and found it very useful.

I'm not so much against making a big order for something where I can. I spend a lot of time looking for things I can bulk buy to save money long term. It takes some searching, as even this is often getting unaffordable, but if I can find a multipack of tins or cleaning products for a reasonable price, that's a lifesaver.

We are on the way to having the first trillionaire, yet it’s the poor that are the problem. Absolutely shameful.

I saw mentioned a few posts back about cooking in school, they don’t cook in school for the same reason they don’t cook in hospitals. Profit- Sodexo to name one. The meals are awful. It’s no use harping on to what it was like years ago. I don’t begrudge anyone benefits but what I do begrudge is the greedy politicians and the like of British Gas making insane profits when we dare not use the heating.

Following the background links it seems that 15% of a sample of just over 6000 UK adults in Jan/Feb this year have skipped meals because they could not afford them.

That is a very different thing to saying "15% of UK Households".

Hyperbole is something of a Guardian house style (& I'm a Guardian reader).

I have worked as a volunteer for two food projects.

The users were mainly

Single parents, people that worked but in very low income roles, we used to have a woman turn up in her healthcare assistant agency uniform every week, unemployed, people with addiction issues, people with disabilities, people with additional needs, pensioners. Some single parents may have very well paid jobs and an ex that gives good amounts of maintenance. But there were a lot of single Mothers coming along. There has also been a massive societal shift of the amount of people who live alone, it has doubled since the early 1970’s. This is rarely considered as a reason for an increase in poverty but it is. There was a lot of signposting to services for users. It becomes apparent how complex their lives are. The difference now is service users are not always people with such complexity in their lives they have just run out of money. Poverty is far more complex than just suggesting people eat lentils.

I think if people have a support network of family and friends they can’t really grasp just how alone some people are.

£3.40 to feed 4 people.

Which is a lot of money when that's for one meal out of 21 each week!

I agree in theory with your first point, but kids in school are difficult enough to control without having 30 of them in a dangerous environment with sharp knives and hot ovens.
we had hubs that did this in some places. My friend worked at a Surestart centre in one of the most deprived towns in the UK in the nursery and they had cookery, maths and parenting classes running. The Tories closed it down with a year of coming to power in 2010.

There have been many threads on MN about many school cookery lessons being unrealistic as well as bizarrely expensive, with children being asked to take in silly little amounts of expensive ingredients many poorer households wouldn't necessarily have, and/or asked to contribute £££.

The cooking sessions at Sure Start were amazing. Really grounded and sensible.

Metabolic issues, chemicals in food, stress, poor food choices, lack of time to exercise, tiredness from job, etc.
All these are factors in being overweight.

Wake up, educate yourself and stop your thinking being so one-dimensional.

Well someone earlier in the thread quoted 99p for a pizza was cheap, but it's not as a 99p pizza will only feed one person so that would cost £3.96 to feed family of 4 which is more expensive than my healthier meal options.

Can do it cheaper than that.
£1.33 10 eggs
£0.56 2 tins beans
£1.29 2kg potatoes
You'll have half the eggs and potatoes leftover, which brings it to 50p a portion.
And can be cooked in a microwave (jackets) at an approximate cost of 17p, or single hob burner (mash) for 30p. Plus no refrigeration necessary, and requires minimal utensils.

A lot of people prioritise gas or electric so if they have a gas oven they might not be able to use it for long periods if they prioritise electric over gas.

I do this when I'm running low at the end of the month. We had no gas for the last 4 days. I got paid today so we have gas again but if I can only afford to top up one it will be electric, leaving us with only the air-fryer or Forman grill because our oven is gas.

We have a slow cooker but I work 12-hour shifts. Getting up at 6 am is hard enough without gas in a freezing single brick house without having to get up half an hour earlier to start chopping veg before work, so I do keep pizzas/frozen sauages/chicken nuggets and other cheap crap we can chuck in the air fryer to hand.

Now I use a slow cooker but didn’t know you could bake potatoes in them- you learn something new every day!

Those figures aren’t realistic. Rent, council tax and utilities would all amount to far more than that.

Yes if you access to Asda or Aldi without travel expenses or delivery costs. You want to try living in rural Wales. Nearest aldi is 28 miles away. Our nearest supermarkets outside of coop are 18 miles away. So that wouldn't be the case here.

More realistically the pizza would feed two kids and the mum would go hungry.

Because quite simply, if you are really on the breadline.. a 6pack crisps or smartprice sausage rolls costs the same as a small pack or berries.. Healthy foods are more expensive than junk.

Supermarket delivery slots start at £1. I imagine you'd recoup it in a single shop vs the expensive coop.

Most families would struggle on, racking up huge debt and rent arrears before being evicted. Presenting as homeless is a last resort. The knowledge that you and your kids could be living in one room for potentially years with no cooking or washing facilities would prevent making it a proactive choice for most. And where would they boil their lentils then?

@BIossomtoes The figures are realistic. They are for a 2 bed social rent, the council tax figure is the amount paid following the discount. The utilities could be different if on a prepayment instead of DD.

Any idea what the prepayment figures would be?

The council tax is ridiculous. My son lives in a Band A property in a cheap town. His council tax is double that including the 25% single person discount. His utilities are more too - for just one person.

This 👆

Chronic financial mismanagement, skewed priorities in some families, unnecessary debt / credit card repayments.