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.

Depends what you find delicious.

Don’t I? My mum was a (very young) SAHM and my dad a low earner. One of 4 siblings at one point we shared a double bed. Dad got a better paid job but remarried a year or two later and stepmum wanted me out so I left home at 18 with £700, moved into a house share and worked for years on NMW as a cleaner and bar maid doing split shifts. I then slept on my ex’s mum’s sofa on a ‘rough’ social housing estate for a year so I could save a flat deposit. Eventually I got a full time (NMW) admin job and a room in a house share where I lived for years until I got an inheritance from my Dad, a promotion and life looked up. I haven’t been home since I left, since 18 I’ve had no family home to go to, and even when I was very very very seriously ill and nearly died at 23 I went back to my house share with nobody to look after me and was back at work the moment I was able to leave my bed because I was so worried about losing my job and going back to no money.

Nor does she want to. I'm not sure if it's a psychological defence mechanism or something else.

BTW, some nurses are poor @CuttingMeOpenthenHealingMeFine. Before Covid, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the CoL crisis and PM Liz Truss's utter insanity, I had regular appointments at a hospital where there were posters in all the lifts advising staff that HR could give them vouchers for the foodbank.

But I guess Povvo Shaming and sticking your fingers in your ears is easier than facing the reality for millions of people in the UK in 2024. Times were tough before. They're a lot tougher now, that's why we have seen strikes and people going without meals.

No what I mean is you have concluded thta others on this thread who don't agree with your view are speaking from a position of privilege.
You don't know this.

You literally said only you, and the poster you agreed with, had experienced poverty. That's quite an assumption.

She did not say that.

Nobody mentioned expensive tastes. We’re continually told here how cheap vegetables are. They’re not if that’s just about all you’re eating.

They won’t want to hear it but those of us with real life experience know exactly what you mean.

Ok, not exactly but it's implied.

Depends on what you think is delicious doesn't it? Some people would say pizza is delicious but I don't really like it. I would prefer a casserole which some on here hate.

Have you lived on a social housing estate? Have you worked on NMW for years? Have you been, on paper, homeless?

How on earth am I ‘povvo shaming’ )eugh btw this really reeks of someone who lives in privilege and is trying to fit in with the ‘poor people’- I assume you mean poverty shaming. I literally earn on par with these professions and I acknowledge that different people have different circumstances but labelling all nurses and teachers as ‘poor’ is bar shit crazy. My next door neighbours are teachers, they are in a detached £250k house with a Mercedes and a BMW they are not fucking poor and neither am I.

I grew up in poverty, my parents will tell stories of waiting for my brother and I to finish eating so that they could have our leftovers, my Dad is a skilled tradesman but we were on the bones of our arse, I understand poverty as much as any modern ‘poor person’ that you want to put on a pedestal. I won’t have any useless keyboard warrior telling me that I am judging people, I am speaking from lived experience but if you want to live in the la la land of ‘all poor people are saints’ then go right on ahead, it doesn’t affect me any.

Exactly!

It's really not your business .

But since you ask, yes to two of those. Sorry to disappoint.

https://soyummy.com/food-news/poor-families-junk-food/ makes a good point that ping food is easier for latchkey kids to prepare themselves. I can well imagine the adults buying ping food for the kids, despite the cost, and funding it by going without themselves.

For someone who isn’t bothered that’s a hell of an angry rant @CuttingMeOpenthenHealingMeFine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/13/being-poor-changes-your-thinking-about-everything/ explains how poverty alters people's entire way of thinking, an assertion backed by academic research.

Lived experience of this:

• https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/07/14/330434597/this-is-your-stressed-out-brain-on-scarcity
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131109113219/killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decisions-or-poverty-thoughts-1450123558

So you make a week's worth of meals based on just these purchases. Can you tell us your meal plan, please?

Firstly, I don't live in privilege, I live in poverty and am actually poor. I was poor growing up as well so I recognise Pov shaming when I see it and I'm seeing a lot of it here.

Secondly I never labelled all any profession anything. I'm glad your neighbours are doing well, that doesn't mean all nurses and teaching staff are in the same boat.

Thirdly I'm not putting "modern poor people"on a pedestal or claiming they are saints. That's a really bizarre thing to infer from my posts.

Back in 2017 PM May recognised that too many people in the UK were JAM, just about managing. They were not poor, they were, as she said, Just About Managing. Getting by on £260 per month food shops. Since then their costs have increased considerably to the point where people are skipping meals because they can't afford food.

It is not because they're shit at budgeting or cooking or fussy eaters. It's not because they're spending their money on takeaways, iPhone contracts or Netflix. It's certainly not because they're following the latest diet fad. It's systemic. This government have ballsed the country up. That's why people are going hungry.

But you keep your fingers in your ears and pretend it's all about the feckless poor. That is Pov shaming.

It’s possible to buy bit by bit, week by week and start stocking up on ingredients until you have the basics.

i made a curry for four tonight with chicken, chick peas, fresh ginger, tin toms, tilda rice, naan bread and a spoon of garam masala (cost a quid) and the entire meal was around £8. It was absolutely gorgeous and I have left overs for lunch.

tomorrows recipe involves potatoes, chorizo, pepper, chilli beans and toms with sour dough bread and some chilli and paprika and will cost even less.

So in those two meals I have three new spices on the rack. It’s cheaper than getting horrible shop bought jars of sauce. It just takes learning - you have to learn how to cook. Time and effort.

my recommend is to always have butter (expensive but necessary) eggs, dried yeast and different flours so you can bake something; and porridge oats, potatoes, rice and pasta. Plus tins of beans, tomatoes, tuna and minced beef, chicken thighs bone on, good quality sausages or pork and breaded fish. Then fruit, salad and veg.

with that you can make tonnes of meals.

you can get that lot for £70. Best stagger it though and buy the dried stuff in bulk.

Some interesting perspectives on this thread and I consider them all to be valid even if they differ from my own.

One observation I would make is that growing up in a poor household isn't necessarily comparable to being an adult in one. I grew up in what would be considered a poor household today. I didn't really notice it until I left home. Sure, I recognised that all my clothes were hand me downs, that treats were in short supply, that holidays only happened if my grandparents arranged and paid for them, that I couldn't go on many school trips etc, but so many of my peers were in the same situation it felt normal. What I didn't realise until many years later was the sacrifices my parents had made to make to ensure I never felt hungry or a financial burden. I strived to replicate that with my DC when I was in poverty when they were young. It seems to have worked because they describe their childhood in terms of all the fun (cost-free) things we did. However, my memory of that time is dominated by huge feelings of anxiety about money, with hours spent trying to shave £2 off a cost here or there and sheer panic when an appliance broke down or shoes needed replacing prematurely. My memories and my DCs memories differ so much it's as if we were recalling completely different events.

The real tragedy with sustained poverty is the relentlessness of it and the toll it takes mentally to juggle it. I coped like that for 5 years before I was able to dig myself out of it through a change in career. It's the closest I've ever come to broken (and I've experienced bereavement of multiple family members, relationship breakdown and abuse, sustained single parenthood, friends with serious illnesses and a career where death, injury and misery are commonplace). For some people it's their whole lives and they have no opportunity or support to escape it.

The real tragedy with sustained poverty is the relentlessness of it and the toll it takes mentally to juggle it.

I think it’s really easy to overlook just how exhausting it is to live in poverty. I don’t mean tightening your belt til pay day, I mean knowing that pay day won’t make a blind bit of difference, that this week you’ve struggled and you’ll struggle next week, and the week after with no prospect of that changing.

Knowing that you can’t afford to buy the kids shoes, so need to find a clothing bank with shoes that might fit well enough, constantly having to say “no” to a bag of sweets, knowing that if your washing machine breaks down you’ll be handwashing things for the foreseeable future. Knowing that no change of job is going to improve things because you can’t afford to do a course or retrain for something better paid.

Constantly trying to make ends meet, knowing that having managed, just, to work out a plan all it takes is an unexpected medical appointment to knock the whole thing off because you haven’t budgeted for bus fare.

And then someone on mumsnet says you can feed everyone a baked potato and peas.

I agree @Jellycatspyjamas

I would not have broken free had I not had a measure of good luck and amazingly supportive friends (no family as all dead) who provided out of hours childcare so I could take advantage of an opportunity to retrain which changed my life. I shudder to think about how different it could be. I'm honest enough to recognise that I was so worn down after my relatively short stint of 5 years that I'm not sure I'd like the person I would be had I not got out of it. It's why I won't judge people for their 'poor choices' (as some see them) when they're in poverty. Unless you've lived it long term you can't understand how blowing £4 on a rare bottle of wine on the day you get paid, when you could have spent it on fresh fruit and veg, is perhaps the only thing keeping you from falling off a mental cliff edge.

I’m so glad you had the support to make a change @Resilience, it’s hard to explain how relentless poverty impacts every part of your being. The stress, anxiety and shame of always watching every penny knowing you’ll fall short no matter what you do, robbing Peter to pay Paul and then robbing Paul to pay something even more urgent. I’ve not lived that way as an adult but have worked with families on the absolute bones of their arse, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone or indeed judge the ways they found to cope.

One observation I would make is that growing up in a poor household isn't necessarily comparable to being an adult in one.

That is definitely true. I have skipped meals because DS2 had a growth spurt and I had to shell out for a new uniform, shoes and coat. I've skipped meals to pay for a residential school trip for DS1. That's on top of wearing knickers where the elastic has gone and knackered bras and shoes which is par for the course. When DS1 has asked "are you not having anything", I've told him I'm eating later.

The idea that I and others like me are skipping meals because we don't know how to cook spuds and lentils is fucking ignorant!

I usually think that people who evangelise about cheap bags of porridge oats and lentil and tinned tomato casseroles have never actually had to live like that. It is utterly joyless and soul destroying. The daily grind of being cold and hungry gets you down. There is nothing to look forward to about another bowl of gruel. If I were back in that situation I would 100% try to get some pizza or mini rolls for tea because something that wouldn't even register on most people's radar as a treat is an almost unimaginable luxury for someone who is really struggling. Things like milk on cereal were utterly decadent for me at my poorest. Even the cereal itself was an extra. We would eke out a box of kwik save no frills cornflakes for days. Health just doesn't come into it at that level of poverty.

What's wrong with dhal? It's delicious, nutritious, cheap and easy to make.