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.

Tesco delivery. I buy an annual pass which is an investment, yes, but you get that money back from Tesco prices and club card points. There is no ‘it depends’ because I’ve been doing it for years with two teenagers. We have lovely meals and this also includes packed lunches.

effort is required. I’m not pretending it doesn’t. I spend a long time in my kitchen. And yes, I work. Full time.

Sorry, I worded that wrong. The contract I work on is ending therefore my job is being made redundant. It wasn't known that this would happen until Christmas. We assumed the contract would be renewed.

I took out the new contract with Virgin in November and my phone over a year ago.

The 12 month contract is clearly with Virgin, not her employer.

I'm on an open-ended contract. My employer has just announced voluntary redundancies. Compulsory will follow if they don't get enough takers. I'm terrified because I have a mortgage and a broadband contract that I am locked into for two years.

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

How is that possible? The working mum would still be eligible for UC, would have a disregard for the first part of her wages and keep 45p in the pound of anything over that. She won’t get raking it in but will see the benefit of her work in her income.

122 sovs a month for a phone and broadband?!

Ever heard of Martin Lewis?

All it shows is that I reached for a search engine to get prices.

Supermarkets are glaringly-bright noisy hellscapes for this autistic and I avoid them as much as possible.

I notice that the posters mocking me for using a search engine to find spice prices are strangely silent about the poster who suggested that pouch rice was cheap...

PP said her 'contract at work' and that her 'job ends'. I've only ever heard contractors use that language because well their contract has an end date.
I've never heard of 'open-ended'. Do you mean permanent?

Usually people just say they got made redundant or lost their job with no reference to contracts of any kind.

If you've got £70 a week, do a supermarket delivery shop.

There's no such thing as "permanent". Open-ended means that there's no defined finish date.

@TheThingIsYeah I was working at the time with no hint that my job would soon vanish and that jobs in the same industry (network engineer) for my skill level and experience and in my area would become as rare as hen's teeth.

I worked from home so didn't want to take the chance of changing providers and a screw-up potentially leaving me without BB (and therefore the ability to work since my office is hundreds of miles from my home) for days/weeks/months.

And, I could afford it at the time. We needed a fast, reliable BB connection for my job and the package we were on just wasn't enough. The connection was constantly dropping out while I was in meetings. Speed and reliability were more of a concern to me than price at the time.

That's the wording everyone uses. I'm in IT now previously in finance. It was either permanent or contract roles.
Never heard of anybody use the word 'open-ended'. I suppose in legal terms the contract could be open-ended but people refer to a 'permanent contract'.
Maybe different industries are different.

It's a higher education thing.

£87 a month for broadband? Why on earth would you pay that much?

Absolutely that's what you should do.

But most families still won't change left over to stock up on garam masala

If network engineers aren't getting hired, we are all screwed. I think there's only Oracle DBAs and cyber security specialists that are harder to find in IT.

Pouch rice is cheap isn't it? 0.45 a pouch in Tesco.

This is terrible. I think people overspend over Xmas and January is a long month. I can actually recall a post on MN in January from a lady saying she had no food in house and about 8 days before payday.

Because that's what Virgin demand for that speed on their DOCSIS connection, the alternative is BT ADSL over three miles of copper to the exchange, and CityFibre haven't rolled out to your area yet?

@Frequency Did I get the right combination of acronyms?

I did data cabling and IT rollouts into buildings that were still being built for a while.

£70 a week for a family of 4, guarantee I could budget for some seasoning. I'd rather than some flavour than the empty calories of a box of cereal.

45p for one meal component for one person.

Except the box of cereal will mean everyone gets breakfast for a few days.

You can't make a meal out of a jar of spices.

But you're not just going to eat dry, plain rice for dinner.

When you are trying to feed children so that they have the energy to stay alive and learn and grow, there's no such thing as "empty calories", there's just "calories".

My mum used to make potato omelette. Pan fried sliced potato with the egg poured over.

Have you seen the price of butter lately?