Just had to put a food shop on the credit card, fed up!

[whatsausername]

We don’t get paid until next Thursday. I’d ran out of essentials like coffee, hand wash, toothpaste, chips etc. Needed the usual packed lunch stuff too. £78 in Asda. I have £82 in the account until payday but need to keep it in as direct debits due day before payday.

I just feel bleugh. We both work full time and having to put a weekly food shop on a credit card is just soul destroying.

anyone else feel like this?

Coffee - dig up some dandelion roots from your garden
Hand wash - refill yours in the supermarket toilet
Toothpase - try chewing sticks like they did before inventing toothpaste
Chips - maybe check behind your kids ears to see if he’s growing some potatoes
🙄

When people are healthy there is no reason not to live well into the eighties at a minimum - - as you see when life expectancies rise with prosperity. Life expectancy has risen quite a lot between the mid-twentieth century and today.

Similarly, in many cities in the UK the life expectancy of men in particular can vary by ten years or more from the poorest to the wealthiest areas. That’s pretty significant.

There’s a huge difference between dying in your early seventies, shortly after retirement, with limited mobility and several years of cancers, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and other chronic lifestyle-related illnesses; and dying in your late eighties as someone who’s had a fit and active retired life.

Yes, because more people are eating cheap processed food! That’s the entire point. Suggesting that people cut their costs by eating even more is setting up a health time bomb.

But life expectancy relates to when you were born, not current life expectancy.

They might have done pretty well to get into their seventies

You only have to if you can't afford not to. No sense getting into debt when it can be avoided.

We have gone back to using bars of soap all the time now. Much cheaper, and no plastic. A win all round.

We have a takeaway a couple of times a year. I don't know if this is normal or not. I prefer my own food, and they are wildly expensive. I think people's expectations have changed so much over the years; if they don't have a holiday/takeaway/streaming channels/costa coffee every day they feel deprived.

@NormaNormal it’s pushed all the time from Reform supporters and I think is the typical kind of mysoginistic bullshit we can come to expect - they no doubt think it’s amusing - maybe we could push Nazi Nigel . To be frank she’s a damn sight more qualified than some of the people the Tory’s had in influential positions - I doubt Sunak being a merchant banker ( and I’ve worked with merchant bankers) had a deeper understanding and then of course we had Johnson - a tabloid ‘hack’ , Braverman who it turns out had done little more on the legal front than dealing with pub licenses as attorney general - a whole raft of them with zilch behind them

But they didn’t, because they all had long years before they died of living with unpleasant illnesses associated with lifestyle factors like poor diet, high salt, high sugar, etc. It was not exactly nice living for years with lymphoedema, poorly controlled diabetes, CKD, various unpleasant cancers and so on in the 1980s.

Don’t you remember seeing old people back then with significant humps, huge painful legs from oedema, bad feet from diabetes, Zimmer frames, and sitting at home with oxygen tanks? You don’t see those things as much now because medical care is better (and smoking is massively reduced), but it’s also a fallacy to think the population was healthier than today. Lots of people, especially the poorer working classes, had a really poor diet of processed foods, and ended up with significant and debilitating health problems as a result. In many ways we’ve got a lot healthier and diet is one of them, despite the increase in obesity. (Not all food-related health problems are down to obesity.)

But it’s simply daft to say that we should revert to cheap processed ham sandwiches because generations before us who weren’t fat also ate them. Well they also often died of unpleasant lifestyle-related illnesses too, and a lot earlier!

I remember interest rates being 15 percent. That was crazy. Working full time and staying out of debt is good. Scrimping may be hard, but there are times in our lives that that has to happen. The important thing to do is not to spend when you don't need to and then get in over your head in debt.

The current life expectancy for someone born 70 years ago ( l don’t know when your relatives were born) is about 68.Si even if they were older than that they still did pretty well.

My relatives are loads of sandwiches and stuff. They were all obsessed with m and s food. All lived well into their late 80’s.

Interest rates were 15% for six months, and came back down really quickly. Five years later the economy was starting to boom again.

Whereas this current grinding food inflation and decreasing living standards has been going on for years — at least since the 2008 financial crisis — and no end in sight for quite a while to come. Our economy certainly doesn’t look to be booming for the next ten years at a minimum — house prices will need to come down massively first before that happens!

@Beesandhoney123 , fuck about in allotments that labour want to build houses on.
the damage was done by the previous government.

Yeah same here. I put all my expenses on my credit card and then direct debit the full statement each month so I didn’t really understand the “soul-destroying” part about having to pull the credit card out for £78.

Also agree with other posters, absolutely no idea why an essentials shop would cost that much.

Prices will continue to rise. It's not going to get easier. The good times are behind us.

But one of the main issues is wages. They have just not kept up at all. It's infuriating and depressing. A lot of the profit now gets funnelled back to shareholders/billionaires, whereas previously it would be more spread out. So long, middle class..

Yes, it’s awful. I only buy essentials, other than biscuits for the kids and the odd can of beer for me at the weekend.

Don’t eat meat. Buy the cheapest veg. Grow some of my own.

The cost is creeping up and up. Supermarkets still making huge profits for their shareholders, I see. They’re having a laugh.

My parents and GPs ate that kind of diet, as did I. My GPs died in their mid eighties - two were smokers, one a chain smoker (I'm not advocating smoking btw, just commenting) and my parents in their late 80s. I'm in my mid 60s and rarely visit the GP. No-one in my immediate family had diabetes, and cancer can strike anyone, no matter how healthy they eat. There are loads of people here in their 90s and even early 100s who also would have eaten that kind of diet. I think it takes a a lot more than a daily ham sandwich and yoghurt to cause diabetes.

You could be right, but I remember the interest rates under Thatcher, which was over 6 months, then Lawson, again over 6 months, and for four years at ten percent or above as a result of Black Wednesday. I think I want to say that this sort of thing happens over and over again.

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow Those are mean average life expectancy figures and include the effect of infant mortality, though. So you see a dramatic increase in the mean average during the twentieth century as that gets stripped out by modern medical care and antibiotics, but that’s an effect of the averaging.

Life expectancy once that effect is removed has always been much longer. The ONS calculates that the most common age at death in England and Wales in 2010 (around the time my grandparents died, in fact!) was 85 for men and 89 for women, for example. (Like your relatives. But I imagine the M&S food was much better quality than the Kwik Save processed bread and “wafer thin” processed ham my grandparents ate!)

There are now much more useful and accurate ways of understanding life expectancy, like median and modal age at death, which researchers now use to strip out the mathematical effects of early mortality. Take a look at the really interesting tables in this resource, especially tables 1 and 2 which you can use to scroll to see how divergent modal age at death (without the effects of infant mortality) is from mean life expectancy (which includes infant mortality):

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/mortalityinenglandandwales/2012-12-17#trends-in-average-life-span

Longevity is mainly in the genes I’m told.

Diets weren’t a priority back whenever. Some people died early, some lived for ages.

I don’t think ham sandwiches and yoghurts caused diabetes either. My dm lived on ham sandwiches.

Naice ham and M&S yoghurts probably not. But cheap sugary yoghurts and processed meats and breads (which the previous poster was recommending), do. Processed cheap white bread is full of sugar and salt. Cheap ham is chopped and shaped pork byproducts from the meat industry with injected water, including lots of nitrates and preservatives. Crisps are full of saturated fats, acrylamide, salt and artificial flavourings. Saturated fats contribute to heart disease, salt to chronic kidney disease; nitrates and acrylamide are carcinogenic.

A good answer to rising food prices is not just “well just eat cheap crap food then”. Unless we want to simply displace all the costs into our healthcare system instead (because that’s been working so well for he past few decades!)

But you do understand that anecdote is not data?

Type 2 diabetes is overwhelmingly related to diet. Heart disease and kidney disease are. Many cancers are, too. Even Alzheimer’s and dementia are increasingly thought of by researchers as related to diet, especially to diabetes. Are you seriously suggesting that because your grandparents were hale and hearty that we junk all statistical medical knowledge about heart disease, diabetes etc. from the last fifty years?

Hattie, what on earth do you mean you are older and immune to pricing?No one is unless they are super rich or re you feeding into the narrative that older people are wealthier.Many are not and the c o l hits them hard too.

The OP isn’t asking for ways to reduce spending at the supermarket. They’re feeling depressed at how the cost of food, drink, toiletries etc. has so dramatically outstripped the average wage. Which is objectively true and no thanks to successive governments. I can’t stand seeing people bicker over whether coffee is essential. I’ve felt the pinch become a squeeze become a chokehold over the last 10 years. We have almost no disposable income after mortgage, bills and food and we have a newborn so childcare is still to be added.

Get lost. In no world can £78 cover a full shop for a ‘huge’ family.