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.

You still need electricity or gas to cook a pizza.

There are more people living like this than we’d care to acknowledge
kids might not be starving like you see on the news but there are some that aren’t very definitely malnourished - not that they are not eating at all but that what they are eating has little or no nutritional value
its all very well to say well if they or couldn’t they just but by the time you’ve eaten poorly for a while the parents just don’t have the energy or motivation that is needed
this is a sad state of affairs

Yes, it is, and of course that will be a major issue for a lot of people. But I am talking about those people that are cooking food, but are making very poor choices. Perhaps I am on the wrong thread for that. I will say though that all of this is a ticking time bomb, children will not benefit in the long run from a poor diet. That should be a Societal concern.

It's not a budget for me, my children are long out of my home. This is a standard UK household that would typically use a foodbank.

What's air fryers got to do with anything? You can cook salmon, chicken, roast veg, etc in them. They don't exclusively cook chips and nuggets.

It is. And all those items you mention carry VAT at 20%. Proportionately the poorest people are taxed most highly through regressive taxes.

Of course it isn't, one 99p pizza isn't going to feed a family of 4.

6 free range eggs £1.50
Bag of potatoes £1.10
2 tins of bins roughly 80p

£3.40 to feed 4 people.

I'm surprised this figure isn't higher.

There's a big correlation between being disabled and being poor. Disabled people as a class are more likely to find scratch cooking hard to do and less likely to be able to use money to compensate for that by buying meal prep kits or the healthier types of "ping" meals.

As an example: me, I'm autistic. Today's a really good day for me: I've had a shower and brushed my teeth and got dressed before sitting down to my desk to work, instead of being unwashed and in my dressing gown. I've not had breakfast yet because I didn't have the mental run time to deal with food preparation and also deal with mentally preparing for my first meeting. Brunch will be in a few minutes and will be a shaker of Huel. Dinner will be a shaker of Huel. Supper will be a shaker of Huel. Cooking is an utterly daunting task that I can manage perhaps twice per week, usually at the weekend. When I last heated a pizza, I forgot about it and it burned. This is normal for me.

I also have chronic tendonitis in my wrists. Some days, I cannot hold a knife strongly enough to cut veg even when I have the mental run-time to cook. I use frozen veg to work around this, which means owning a freezer, which meant an initial outlay that many people can't afford. I can't just push through the pain and cut veg anyway because then I can't move my fingers at all and I have to type in my job. A lot of my job involves spreadsheets and databases and you can't do that with dictation software.

There's also the mental load of remembering what goes out-of-date when. It's all very well saying "plan a week's menu and buy to the plan", but when I get home from an office day and don't have the mental run-time to cook, that day's ingredients are wasted.

As disabled people go, I am extraordinarily lucky because I have an above-average paid job that leverages my strengths and so I can afford Huel to cope with the fact I don't have the mental capacity to work and cook. If I couldn't afford Huel, I would be eating toast, pasta, crisps, canned soup: unhealthy high-carb fattening stuff that needs bugger-all effort. This is what unemployed and underemployed disabled people end up eating.

So it's not a case of "just go to the greengrocers and buy cheap veg and scratch cook" because some of us can't.

Did I mention pizza? I don't think I did in that post or any prior to it.

Because a cheap frozen pizza and a bag of frozen chips from Morrisons are a lot cheaper than the ingredients and power needed to make a healthy stew.

Total sympathies, @CeilingGranny

There's some days I couldn't even answer the door to a shopping delivery. And there are some days I've eaten nothing.

@Whatsthesecret
According to entitled to (no idea if the figures quoted are correct) but here goes.
Single adult with 3 children (6, 4 and 2), not working, living in social housing with a rent of £680 a month. Partner not paying any child support. Living in London.

Incoming
1900 per month from UC

Outgoings
680 - Rent
46 - Council tax
130 - Gas and Electric (DD)
30 - Water (DD)
30 - Internet
15 - Mobile
50 - Monthly bus and tram pass
8 - Disney+
13 - TV licence
100 - Loan payments

Disposable Income - £798

In this scenario the DI should be enough to budget for food plus emergencies.

Does anyone pay £46 a month on CT? I would love to live somewhere where CT was that cheap. I pay 3x that and I live nowhere near London.

£680 rent a month? Sure thats not a week? Even in Yorkshire that would be cheap.

That's cheap if you have all the other ingredients - what if you don't?

I have had to use the food bank in the past, it’s not the best but it can help when times are tough. For 3 years I did fruit and vegetables picking as full time work. For another four years I did it in the summer using my annual leave from my other job to work my fruit picking job and save money. Strange I didn’t meet any English there except for the farmer and his family. Not a single English man to do that job - it pays well but is extremely tiring working. Most work that the uneducated English are suitable to is ‘beneath’ them and they would rather be at home. All the Eastern European and and Polish came here to ‘steal’ all the English jobs so now lazy English people have to sit at home on benefits and moan. I don’t ask the government to pay my mortgage or childcare which I struggle to pay. People see this underbelly of people who don’t want to work and suck the state dry, many working people can’t make ends meet but this is just it - they are propping up the non-workers.

That’s £23.80 per week, assuming they eat that every day. If your food budget is £100 a month you’ve already almost gone over just on the evening meal alone. What pays for breakfast, lunches, snacks and drinks?

@Frequency

I think that'll be what the person is expected to pay after CT benefit or any deductions are applied?

@PuttingDownRoots

I agree that is cheap even for SH in London I pay £450 a month in SH in a backwater in the North East, but maybe it's the same as the CT as above that it's what the person paid from their income after the HB etc is applied?

Yes that is a month for social housing 2 bed roughly.

Why would air fryers cause cancer?

And those in privately rented accommodation? You can add another £1000 to that rent.

If you have a freezer, using frozen veg will change your life. No chopping and no worrying about spoilage.

I completely understand where you are coming from.

People don't understand, or do understand but don't care, that any povvo-bashing thread is inherently disablist because disabled people are so much more likely to be poor.

Sympathy from me too 🌺🌺

Yes, I know the feeling of not being able to take in a food shop. Not being able to go out also means you can't get any yellow sticker items that might help stock a freezer. And of course, it means you can't use a food bank.

Then not eating makes you even more ill and even more unable to do these things.

Plus, there's absolutely no chance of being able to eat a diet that might improve my symptoms.

It's very frustrating to continually read posts that I'm just not trying hard enough to not go hungry 😑