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.

Sorry for not doing poverty the acceptable way.

You can do poverty any way you like, but arguing a bit of garam masala is the “help” for people in a desperate situation is ridiculous and you know it.

Poverty is relative. Anyone who had been absolutely broke for a prolonged period would understand the point that was being made. It’s over 40 years since I didn’t have enough money for both bread and milk but I still remember how unremittingly, grindingly hard it was.

The compassion from some people on this thread is astounding.

I have only skim read so maybe this has been mentioned. To get free school meals / pupil premium a family income has to be below £16,190. That means a family on £16,200 would not get it. There are so many families in our nice area who get FSM, and there must be many more who just miss out. Given the COL rise I'm not surprised there's families missing meals.

I am surprised that so many people can't find any sympathy and compassion. Not everyone is in a position/ able to go out and find a better job. Not everyone is as amazingly capable as people like @Hoppitybobbins for a start. And not everyone is doing this 30 years ago when the Tories hadn't been in screwing the country for 14 years.

Exactly this.

We have never looked after each other. Where to you get it from? You’re believing the ‘good old days’ lie, which never happened. In fact working class people used to look down on each other, if you were one you’d know. Yes, people looked after each other post war but that’s because the whole system and food supply chain collapsed so there was a spirit of pulling together.

you think people cared about the plight of single mothers back in the day? Ha. You’d have your baby taken off you and you’d be assigned to a life of shame. Never has society been more understanding than today, in Britain.

You’d have your baby taken off you and you’d be assigned to a life of shame

Not in my adult life and I’m 70.

Never has society been more understanding than today, in Britain.

That’s the biggest load of bollocks on the thread and the bar’s high. Never has society been more divided, selfish and contemptuous of the have nots than it is now. The statistics speak for themselves. One million children living in destitution - one million. No decent society would tolerate that.

In my local community there is a long running standing joke about lemongrass after a resident complained bitterly about standards slipping on our local high street because the Co op didn't have any fresh lemongrass.
It came to mind with all this talk of garam masala and Dahl.
I come from a bog standard white working class family from a large northern city. I'm pretty sure that the only condiments my mother possesses are salt and pepper. I'd say the same for most of my family. Not because they can't or won't cook. It's because they grew up on meat and two veg meals and that's what they still eat.
I've travelled a lot, have probably drifted out of working class into middle class, I still wouldn't know what to do with garam masala.
It all smacks a bit of let them eat cake.

This just isn't true I grew up in the 60/70s and you may laugh at hippies and the like but for a while there people were a bit kinder and wages were a bit more equal and you could support a family on them. My dad worked in a factory and bought a house and raised two kids on one wage.
Ever since the 80s we've been going backwards. Now the gap between rich and the rest of us is getting wider again.
Libraries? Youth clubs? All of that sort of thing seems to be disappearing before our eyes. Don't let the working classes read...it'll give them ideas.

I agree. The problem is, what do we do about it?

This just isn't true I grew up in the 60/70s and you may laugh at hippies and the like but for a while there people were a bit kinder and wages were a bit more equal and you could support a family on them. My dad worked in a factory and bought a house and raised two kids on one wage.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s, families where I lived knew each other, there was a collective care giving. As a child I knew if I stepped out of line someone in the street would think nothing of pulling me up and I’d be expected to get back in line. If I was playing with a group of friends one of the parents would feed the group, if my mum was ill someone would pop in with something to eat so she didn’t need to cook. If someone (often us) was short one week someone would drop off a bag of basics to help out.

Society is much more individualistic now, just look at the reaction if someone should dare to correct a child that isn’t theirs. People are busy feathering their own nest and let the devil take the hindmost. The government have done a great job of setting groups of people against each other and people are more reliant on the State for help, and that help is more grudged than ever before.

But that comes from the fact women work now, we don’t have the time to be cooking meals for 6 children or popping in on sick neighbours. Most of my colleagues get home at around 5.30, if they have small children it’s a quick tea, bath, stories and bed. I do get frustrated with people, particularly women (like my MIL) who bang on and on about how women should be more caring toward elderly relatives and neighbours totally neglecting the fact she only worked part time yet put her parents in a care home 100 miles away

Many women have made that journey and disappeared because the "friend" met online turned out to be a human trafficker.

Having the money for a five hour train journey is itself a form of privilege.

Having a friend in another town is a privilege that most people do not have.

There's a whole series of autobiographical books, starting with "Tuppence To Cross The Mersey", that detail what happened to a family who tried to move to where the work was. Plot summary: they didn't find any.

Then another poor soul takes your place at the bottom of the pile as you have lifted yourself up.

The problem is structural, as you admit with this sentence. We better ourselves under crony capitalism at the expense of other people.

I never once thought that my impoverishment was anything other than circumstantial and that it came about through my own decision making and actions.

Then you deny your own statement. All of us are one compulsory redundancy, company collapse, or accident that leaves us disabled away from being back at the bottom. If your parents picked a decent school for you so you had a better chance of decent grades, that was on them, not you. So much in life is beyond your control. You are deluded to think that every good thing or bad thing in your life is solely down to your own actions.

it cannot be that people who are not contributing to the system (in terms of paying tax) receive anything but the bear minimum

I'll tell you who contributes nothing in the way of tax: the landowners like the Duke of Westminster, whose land was stolen from the English people at swordpoint in 1066 and never given back. These wealthy inheritors use trusts to avoid even paying inheritance tax. A land value tax would make these bastards pay.

I'll tell you who else contributes nothing: big corporations hiding their money in shell companies based in the Cayman Islands and claiming that despite having millions in turnover that they've made no taxable profits. It's these people you should be going after, not Jane down the road who had the misfortune to be born in an ex-pit village.

@Naptrappedmummy any chance of seeing your meal plan for your bargain £63 weekly shop?

I am having trouble working out how you would feed everyone for a week on it. It might be help others struggling if you set it out. Even just a rough idea of each day's main meal?

Good post @VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia

Nah, don’t bother with this. Lazy work shy bastards will just come to expect it.

Better to just bin off free school meals, food banks, benefits etc and just let them starve. On the plus side there’ll be loads of 75” tvs and brand new iPhones flooding Facebook market so the better off can upgrade cheaply!

Yeah no worries.

Day 1 - roast dinner
Day 2 - use leftover meat, veg and potatoes to make a simple mashed potato meal
Day 3 - Chickpea curry
Day 4 - Fish fingers, sweet potato wedges and veg
Day 5 - Scrambled egg on toast, fruit (do a quick tea 1 day a week)
Day 6 - Rice bowl (cooked rice, kidney beans, peas, broccoli and tuna with either soy sauce or grated cheese)
Day 7 - Sweet potato and lentil curry

@Naptrappedmummy what about breakfast and lunch? Drinks? Dare I say it - snacks?

And how would your budget work if your children were 13 and 16?

But that comes from the fact women work now, we don’t have the time to be cooking meals for 6 children or popping in on sick neighbours.

Women have always worked though, my mum did as did most of my friends mums. My mum worked opposite to my dad’s shifts, childcare was cobbled together with other parents - formal childcare just wasn’t available/financially accessible which meant people had to pull together to some degree. Don’t get me wrong, I barely have time to feed my own kids much less anyone else’s but community was different, gaps tended to be filled through informal networks. Community has changed, the State now fills in the gaps and we are poorer for it.

Sounds good, but you are obviously supplementing some of your shop with store cupboard things. (Oil, seasonings etc).

Also can't see how you can have those dinners plus breakfasts and lunches from the £63 shop? Bagels for breakfast, maybe?

Maybe that's why mine is £60 for just me
I'm including everything - coffee, tea, washing up liquid, lunches, snacks, additional seasonings and oil stock ups
I honestly didn't think £60 for me was mega expensive (aware that it is not a very very tight budget but I'm not buying caviar and steak!)

@PawsisShady mine also runs about that (not right now because there's 2 of us until September) and yes, that includes toiletries, dish soap, bin liners, oil, herbs and spices etc.

Not only are there no breakfasts (maybe bagels for a day then dry toast the rest of the week?), lunches, snacks or drinks. There are also no cleaning/household products or toiletries (apart from toilet roll). This isn’t a ‘big’ weekly shop. The £63 would be easily doubled if it included everything, not just evening meals.

I remember very well what it was like too. Don't you see the problem with suggesting that anyone who has a different viewpoint to you mustn't have been in real poverty?

Another supplement from naptrappedmummy's store cupboard would be lentils for the curry.

I'd like to see portion sizes too. The bag of sweet potatoes must be pretty big or the portions small, for example.

Yep. It is a large top up shop, not a main shop.