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.

The nit picking and attempted ‘gotchas!’ are hilarious! This is my main shop, I’ve shown the meals I make. You can either desperately reach to prove I’m ‘starving my children and hiding ingredients’ or you can just accept it’s possible to eat healthy meals cheaply and maybe we don’t need to break the bank and ruin our health eating red meat and rich artery blocking food every single evening. The obesity epidemic in the U.K. will back this up.

Off the back of another thread, I've put together a spreadsheet to see how cheaply you could eat healthily. It is just about possible for £15 per person per week but even the most dedicated lentil muncher would cry. I'm not sharing it, some fecking 30p Lee would suggest it was fine.

If you are in dire straights a 55p pack of digestives will give you almost 2,000 cals, 82g of fat, 260g carbs, 12.4g fibre and 29.2g of protein. They'll keep you alive and quite frankly some people eat worse. But really, this is for an emergency day once a year or DoE awards.

Does anyone have any good ideas on cheap, easy, nutritious food?
I might be able to come up with a meal plan that people want to eat.

Microwave rice pouches are a rip off, it is cheaper to buy a saver chicken curry and rice ( if like me you are a nerd who looks at calories per penny).

@naptrappedmummy, yes it is possible to make meals cheaply and you are obviously good at that.

But pretending £63 (or £50, you said you could have got it down to that) a week can feed two adults and two very small children without acknowledging at least some supplementing from existing supplies is disingenuous.

You are not as extreme, but your posts remind me of the time Jack Monroe claimed her £20 Asda shop could feed two adults and a 12 year old for a week. Then admitted she had a bulging freezer and storecupboard to supplement her shop.

ETA: plus of course there is the issue of the cost of cooking everything.

So you don't give your children breakfast and lunch? Because they aren't on the meal plan. Or did you forget to list them?

I could produce a really cheap weekly shopping list if I didn't list two-thirds of my meals, but it wouldn't be accurate!

I don't think it's so much a gotcha as people pointing out that while yes your shopping list does make seven dinners, it doesn't account for the other meals in the day. So wasn't actually a full week's shop in the true sense.

I spend £54 per month on milk alone.

Not strictly true. In my student years I bought whatever was left at the market, and dined most weeks on fish and masses of vegetables, eeked out with rice. Certainly a vegetarian diet with what's cheaply available in season is going to be cheaper than pre-prepared highly processed food

I think a bigger problem is lack of home economics classes in school, and now a generation of parents who do now know about nutrition and how to cook.

When did I say there would be no supplementing? I didn’t. Of course you supplement - who buys every single item in their food shop with absolutely nothing at home already? It’s a total nonsense. The only extras you need there are oil, butter, tea/coffee, and an extra spread if you don’t fancy peanut butter every morning (we also have marmite and jam at home). Even if for arguments sake you added these it would be an extra £10.

If that £73 isn’t there, then it isn’t there, and you can’t magic up the ingredients I listed and then you ARE in food poverty. But I’m willing to bet a cross section claiming good poverty DO have £70 a week for food but spend it on items like the photo PP posted, that last 2 minutes and aren’t even good for you. Then wonder why the money isn’t stretching.

While nobody should go without food, we have never been more obese or unhealthy as a nation. I don’t think spinning the line that unless you eat enormous portions and have rich food at every meal you’re ‘in food poverty’ or will end up malnourished is the right message. There’s a lot of defensive posts where I suspect they know there’s an element of truth in this.

@PawsisShady and @pointythings

I've done it (according to what I've spent in Feb) for £20 less for two of us but 5 days a week we both eat a meal at work so it's not big meals each evening and DD is at boyfriends 2 days a week most weeks, I also sometimes bring home a meal from work as well, and as the chefs are fond of piling it on they feed both of us or me for two days. And neither of us eat breakfast, so it's all groceries but really only enough for two meals a day.
It would likely have been more but since October last year we've had a large bill each month unexpectedly, like a car repair, dental bill etc. So I find I'm back to my old scrimping habits from when she was little.
The real issue is that as DD is on placement year and living at home, I'm effectively fully supporting another adult, student loan was enough to pay her travel to placement and nothing more. Though at least I haven't had to find that! Some things haven't gone up like the rent, council tax or water, but increased usage and increased prices together has made it all a bit precarious.
I generally would buy herbs and spices to replace what runs out but I haven't the last few months, I've just run down what we had really as the money was better used elsewhere.

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.

This is part of the problem with this country...it's feudal. It's not even the Royals, it's the bloody aristocracy. The Duke Of Beaufort own Badminton Estate in Gloucestershire. It's 50,000 acres of private land that we peasants aren't allowed on. None of these people ever pay inheritance tax. How much land in this country is owned by people like this? Sometimes I think that the French had the right idea.

@Naptrappedmummy what do you think are the reason behind the enormous rise in the number of food banks?

I’m a republican but IHT on big estates will make nothing like the dent needed to transform public services.

@Naptrappedmummy what's wrong with the photo I posted? Take the protein pots away

Bread
Milk
Red pepper
Mayo
Budget dark chocolate
Budget cooked chicken (cheaper than buying and cooking chicken breast)
Salad
Big pot of yoghurt
Cheese

I was pointing out with that, that it was £42 and there is nothing there that is extravagant
Take the protein pots off and it was still £37 for normal, bog standard, supermarket branded food

It sounds quite challenging but many 21 year olds do step out into the world like that- especially in the past, when systematically working at something did reap rewards, I.e you build up some work from temping and then move out from friend's flat. That is not a realistic process anymore due to wage stagnation and high rents.

What a depressing thought, that we have reached peak compassion and understanding. Have we really?

It’s not “usually temporary” for loads of people.

My DSSis is a single mum, with two kids. She works hard, on minimum wage. She works in a shop during the day, and behind a bar in the evenings. She struggles. Both jobs are zero hours, so sometimes she’ll work crazy long hours, and sometimes she’s struggling to get shifts. Her wages are topped up by UC, but obviously the weeks she works extra she won’t make a fortune more because UC take back half of the extra wages. She rents privately, though she’s been on the council list for over ten years, since her husband left.

With the best will in the world, she will never earn more than this. She’s a lovely girl, but being brutally honest she’s thick as a pan of mince and barely literate. She’s just not cut out for college. And frankly, we need people to work in these type of jobs and they still should be able to live. Her only chance of escaping poverty is if she moves in with a man who will share the household bills, which is a truly sad state of affairs.

The reasons she struggles are because she’s raising children on one income, and housing and utilities cost more than she can afford. Not because she can’t cook.

Also worth mentioning that most women don’t have kids with feckless men. They have them with seemingly responsible men, who suddenly decide to leg it when their head is turned. Men compartmentalise, and as soon as they set up home with another woman they often have a complete personality change and forget about their responsibilities to their first family. Even where men do ‘pay their way’, their £300 a month contribution won’t make a dent toward the £1200 a month mortgage and the £1000 a month childcare bill.

In an ideal world we'd get rid of them all together. Sell them all.

Whilst everyone is busily competitively shopping, no one seems to have mentioned this rather big problem yet:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/18/cost-of-british-food-basics-increases-by-up-to-80-in-a-year

Sorry to be a pain in the arse but where did you buy that shop and how much were the items? That is wildly expensive. I shop at Tesco, not even Lidl or anything, and could’ve bought twice that amount of food for the money.

Seizing private land isn’t really a thing now. People have rights, even privileged people.

According to ONS the most deprived families are Pakistani/Bangladeshi, multiple children households. This throws up all sorts of other reasons and issues as to the core challenges of assistance. The mother's unable to work, poor language, lack of support etc etc.

It would be interesting to see the breakdown of those asked, and the statistics upon which the extrapolated percentages were based.

I mean yes, cooking for one as a student is cheap. As a student I sometimes had a tube of smarties for dinner, that was pretty cheap, not healthy though. However, a family of four, two teenagers, the necessity to cook a healthy family meal is not going to be cheap. Both my two are skinny, no obesity crisis but my 17 year old in particular needs loads more than a sweet potato curry for the whole day, he needs snacks, good ones are pricey like Rye bread and houmous, bad ones like crisps add up too and yes, yes I could probably make my own crisps but I don't have time! My two can't afford to get any skinnier so I do need to feed them at least 3 meals a day not just dinner as they are not infants!

They do still have HE lessons but it costs parents a fortune. Mine had to make pizza the other week, we had to buy bread flour, yeast, toppings and mozzarella cheese, it cost about 12 pounds in the end as I also had to buy a cheap Tupperware big enough to bring it home in! The most exasperating thing though was that DD forgot to put the oven, so she was told to go away and it would be cooked in the lunch break, she returned and it was all burnt and inedible and had to go in the bin, the teacher told her that next time she will remember to out the oven on! I told DD to have some for lunch so she didn't have any lunch that day and no pizza at all after all that money. We can take the hit but it is still wasteful and when I was buying the ingredients, I did wonder what those do where this is just unaffordable.

Why rye bread and humous? Just wholemeal toast and peanut butter is healthy, filling and much cheaper.

It's not nitpicking to say your £63 shop wouldn't feed a family of four for a week.

Your evening meals are great examples of cooking on a budget and it's obviously something you're good at, but there's no mention of lunches, dinners or snacks on there, or even hot drinks.

You also have a baby and a toddler - when your kids are teenagers and eat more than you do, it suddenly becomes a lot more difficult.