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.

Probably because you wouldn't be thinking that using that bit would mean dry toast for breakfast at the end of the month because you've only got one tub of butter/marg in the budget and when it's gone, it's gone.
I got a tub in a too good to go bag a little while ago, thought all my Christmas' had come at once because I had two tubs that month.

I get if you don't live like that then you don't know, but people need to stop with the 'advice' when it's blatantly obvious that they are assuming a lot of things based on their own circumstances which are light years from those they're giving the advice to..

Has it occurred to you they might have taken those on before losing their job?

I've just upgraded our wifi to Virgin's ultrafast BB for £87 a month. I'll now have to pay that out of UC when my job ends because I'm in a 12-month contract with them.

Ditto the 36-month phone contract I took out last year for £35 a month.

I could afford both of those things when I took them but will struggle now my job is ending unless I find something similar before my contract at work ends.

Well then, someone could use beans instead of peas and they wouldn't need butter etc on their potato and it wouldn't be dry and it would still be cheap.

these are things that should already have been built up in the cupboard,

1. When? There's always a first purchase that has to be made and how do you afford that when you are impoverished?
2. There's the replacement costs when spices run out. Spices on Ocado are £2.15. Tesco will do a pizza for less than that. A whole pizza. An entire meal for at least one hungry child. Compared to a little jar of calorie-free flavour.

Why would you be buying spices on Ocado? Obviously that's not going to be cheap. Most spices are £1 from supermarkets, per kg price even cheaper if you can stretch to the big packs in the "world food" section. At least use a reasonable comparison.

If you're suggesting that people eat ready cooked rice from pouches then you really don't understand food poverty.

How many people on this thread understand that poverty can be chronic and last for years? That we aren't always talking about a few rough months whilst a parent is between jobs with the ability to rely on a pre-existing stock of spices and flour, but can last long enough for the cayenne pepper to run out?

Aldi spices are even cheaper, most of them are 0.65p.

I don’t know if people realise that a parent on UC is actually better off than a working single parent on a low income when you look at the take home after tax. They don’t get other payments to help them such as the extra energy payments either. Probably why so many people don’t bother to actually find a low paying job. So my heart does go out to working families on low income who are renting. This was my childhood. These families are most certainly skipping meals and luxuries such as meat etc. We were even then twenty years ago. Not to mention that wages have pretty much stayed the same whilst the cost of living has increased massively. So I can imagine it is much worse now.
Eating fresh healthy food is expensive because a lot of it goes off really quickly too. When you’re working long shifts on your feet all day all week it is hard to stay on top of batch cooking and freezing raw ingredients etc.

Three pots of Aldi spices will get Tesco's cheapest pizza. When every penny counts and you or your kids are hungry now, what are you going to spend the £2 in your pocket on?

Even so - if you don't have £1 you don't have £1.

And even if you were absolutely broke and you did have £1 spare, you wouldn't be spending it on cinammon or garam masala. You'd use it buy a loaf of bred, or some jam for sandwiches, or a cheap box of cereal.

You're not going to buy spices that you can't cook with because you can't afford all the other ingredients needed to make up the dish yet.

Of course there are people down to their last penny. As disgusting as supermarket profiteering, the need to use foodbanks etc are, these particular figures are based on surveys... how can anybody trust anything self-reported? Especially as the people willing to answer a long list of questions are likely to be tempted by the financial incentive.

https://foodfoundation.org.uk/initiatives/food-insecurity-tracking#tabs/Overview-of-surveys-

Gas prices have gone down, energy prices are due to drop but will food become cheaper? Nope.

I was googling spice costs and ocado showed up. Then I googled pizza costs and Tesco showed up.

Plenty of posters have described growing up in poverty. Which means this is not as unique to the evil Tories that some posters want it to be. And there were far few benefits back then too.

You know we had previous Tory governments right?

But again, if you have nothing to cook with garam masala, you're not going to spend 65p on it in case you can afford some lentils (or whatever) in three weeks time.

You're going to spend it on a loaf or two of cheap bread, or some milk so your children can have sometihng for breakfast.

You can feed a family very, very well for £70 per week. In my view, that’s what you need for a good healthy diet for family of four. £70 per week.

Such a stupid thing to say.

Haha shows how out of touch someone is when they think you have to buy spices in Ocado and pizza in Tesco. Tesco sell spices for £1 (so do Asda!)

That depends where you live and what shops you have access to.

If you drive or live within walking distance of an ALDI, maybe. If you don't drive and only have a co-op or a Spar, then £70 isn't going to get you very far.

Does a known contract ending count as 'losing your job'? I thought contractors know they're disposable (well, a bit more than permies, all of us in 2024 are disposable really) and plan accordingly.

In my view

What empirical and thorough representative data is your view based on?

Do you not understand that people are already doing that and still cannot afford to pay for everything by the end of the month?

Beans on jackets/toast and eggs on toast are staple foods for 99.99% of people on a tight budget but no one is going to eat that for 2 meals a day/7 days a week which means on the other days they are looking for other cheap meals and frozen pizzas and chips are cheap.

Beans on toast/Eggs on toast was our "Oh fuck it's the 18th and I don't get paid until the 26th and we are skint" meal. By the time the 26th rolled around no one wanted to look at another baked bean or egg ever, ever again.

1. The meals they do eat are fat and carb laden because they are cheap.
2. The female metabolism will slow down if you eat less unless you do strength training to force it to stay high.

I think the problem is multi factoral. I drive through one of the poorest cities in the uk daily and there is always a massive queue for McDonald’s. I am guessing because it’s cheap but also because a lot of people I meet cannot cook. I agree that the poorest are getting fatter because they are filling up on starchy food. It can be expensive to eat healthily but it is possible to cook economical meals that are healthier and more filling than a McDonald’s.

I'm starting to think that some people genuinely don't understand that that's all some people have to live off for weeks on end because they can't afford anything else.

Beans/egg on toast once or twice a week is one thing. Eating those things twice a day, everyday for weeks on end is just soul-destroying. It might be healthier than frozen pizza, or chips, or nuggets, but fuck me is it dull and depressing.