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?

Yeah agree

Its weird to me that OP is worrying about money but then spaffing £78 on a "top up shop" and £50 a week on lunches.

You could have done a 'whatever coffee was on offer, cheapest hand-wash and toothpaste' for well under a tenner. Concerned about money then spending an extra £68 on random crap doesn't really match up.

How often do you even eat chips in a week? Couldn't you have just had one or two meals without them and then bought them next week?

And the lunches! £50 for 3 of you is about £3.35 a meal, that's hardly the cheap option! When I think of making lunch to save money i think of toasties, salad, soup, yesterdays leftovers etc. All filling and tasty for about 50p per portion. Even including snacks as well that's a quid a day.

I'm not particularly struggling for money but I'd never spend that much on lunch every day!

Fine if you want to moan but it's a bit weird, and, tbh offensive to then use figures that many (most?) people would think of as treat spending. Let alone call it "soul destroying"

Another example of lunches. DH eats a fixed lunch - week after week - which is brown rice with thai green curry. It is insane he can eat the same thing all year round. His costs are -

1. Tesco chicken drum fillets 600 gm £2.99
2. Green curry paste which works out at 50 p each week.
3. Light coconut milk 75 p
4. Growes harvest frozen veg 1 kilo £1.
5. Brown rice works out at £1 a week.

So the cost of each such absolutely heavenly cooked hot lunch he takes to work to microwave is about £1.25 per day. He adds limes and chillies.

You may disagree about the lunch choice - and it may turn your stomach or whatever - and I myself dont see how he isn't bored to death - but you have got to admit that a brown rice-high protein-high in veg lunch for £1.25 a day - is not bad?

For just 30 mins effort of a Sunday evening while rice cooks in rice cooker.

I've had to do food shopping on a budget before (£50 for four, 2016-18) so i know it can be done but it's not easy.
Can I ask those stating that £50 for packed lunches for four is excessive or ridiculous and they do it for a quarter of the cost, what are you actually buying?
Because even the cheapest options as far as I can see would come to £17 at Tesco (price matched to Aldi) and that is the absolute cheapest of everything (plastic cheese slices, budget ham etc) and not quite enough for everyone to have everything every day (18 cereal bars for instance)
And before I am told to bake my own flapjacks, has anyone worked out the actual cost of doing that properly? Because i think you might get a shock (caveat: my point is not how much nicer, unprocessed, filling etc hm is, just the actual cost)

And why are the supermarkets in the Netherlands and Belgium cheaper, then? My Dutch relatives tell me the prices there are normal. We had to go to A&E briefly in Belgium and there was zero wait and the entire visit was 1.5 hours, quick, efficient, free (with GHIC) and no issues at all. What a difference from even the average minor injuries unit here.

People in the U.K. who voted for Brexit have a very big investment in not acknowledging the economic damage caused by it, and by Tory economic policy over the last 15 years. Why in 2012 did we look modern and forward-looking within EU nations, and now, just about everything is more expensive, grottier, more precarious, more dirty and broken? Everywhere in the Netherlands it was greener, cleaner and cheaper, with lampposts covered in flowers grown by the local councils, roads clean and safe without potholes, people looking cheerful and happy. (In France, I’ll grant you, things have always been a bit more “bof!” as a way of life).

But just compare the U.K. now to the U.K. in 2005 or 2010. We’re poorer, more dissatisfied, crapper streets, crapper social support, crapper towns, crapper healthcare (remember when it was shocking if A&E waiting times went over 4 hours and a hospital would get fined?)

Remember when we also used to have local council gardeners and flowers round the lampposts? Or local baby centres? Or roads without massive craters in them? Yeah, me too. Food price inflation has been on the rise for a long time, and people have been compensating for it for years by going to Aldi, etc.; but now it’s coinciding with a really noticeable, measurable downturn in our living standards and quality of life in lots of other ways.

And the lunches! £50 for 3 of you is about £3.35 a meal, that's hardly the cheap option! When I think of making lunch to save money i think of toasties, salad, soup, yesterdays leftovers etc. All filling and tasty for about 50p per portion. Even including snacks as well that's a quid a day.

Have you actually worked out the cost of these things?
It's easy to airily say 50p a portion for all those things but I think you may get a shock to work out the actual cost. I made lentil soup for four yesterday and the cost of the lentils alone was 50p per portion, before you add onions, carrots, celery, a stock cube (10p each cheapest) and oil.

Absolutely
The Op states her DH and DS are getting haircuts this weekend
Food is far more important IMHO
Many foodbanks are reporting people turning up demanding food who have the means but would far rather spend it on crap
They feel entitled to it.

@Terfandsurf , you miscomprehended @LuckyNumberFive 's post.

@katypp, which lentils did you use? A 2Kg pack of green lentils is about £4 when I buy them.
I otherwise agree with the 50p per portion being low.

@greengagesummers
You mentioned your GP and Boomers specifically
That's what I replied to
Anecdotes about what they ate dont correspond to the data.
Early death was due to poor air quality due coal fires, infection, poor medical care, smoking related disease was rife , most people smoked-things have advanced

They didn't die because of what they ate
Conversely the current generation are obese and at risk of obesity related death

Anecdotally none of my relatives ate any of that stuff known as " muck" in our house !
Working class family

Bread and cakes baked
Butter not " spread"
Chickens, ducks, rabbits raised and killed
Fresh eggs
Fresh veg
Seasonal fruit

No eating between meals

Look up " The men who made us fat"
I cant get over the irony of moaning you cant afford food yet half the population are on WLI and food waste in the UK is
9.52 million tonnes per year !
Granted an awful lot of that is commercial but 17% of everything bought is binned by the average family .

I’m explaining why seasonal food in the UK appears more expensive than in most of Europe whilst you are on your Summer holidays. The market operates differently because British consumers behave differently. That is nothing to do with Brexit as you claim, its entirely to do with market behaviour.

Strawberries in Summer are cheaper in most European countries than the UK. Strawberries in Winter are cheaper in the UK than most European countries.

This was the case before Brexit and will remain the case until British consumers change buying habits.

I’ve lived and worked in different European countries, I have family in several. Food prices have gone up in every single country.

What on earth does the structure of the NHS A&E system have to do with Brexit? Wait times and lists were a problem before Brexit and continue to be a problem after Brexit. You are looking at the difference between state backed insurance models and the NHS model, not pre and post Brexit models of health care.

Are you near an Aldi
just noticed your comment re stick cubes at 10p cheapest. Aldis are 12 for 70p.

Have you tried Mujaddara. Delicious and Very inexpensive

@IAmNotASheep and @NormaNormal I absolutely take your points, my prices were based on Tesco as I could look them up online. I realise they could probably be tracked down cheaper (I actually buy my lentils etc at a zero waste shop anyway)
BUT my points were that a household with two workers should be able to shop without too many concerns about the cost of basics and should not have to search out the absolute cheapest way of eating all of the time.
And I still stand by my post that a lot of people completely underestimate the cost of foods they actually buy. Most soups, salads, toasties etc will cost quite a bit more than 50p and leftovers are not free.
In fact, I am making a salad for lunch today so I shall cost it out and report back.

This is just wishful thinking. Huge amounts of preventable illnesses in the U.K. over the postwar period were to do with poor diet, high levels of saturated fats, salt, sugar, and so on - why do you think so many people in the U.K. died and still die of heart disease? Chronic kidney and liver disease is linked to poor diet, as is diabetes (not just sugar but high salt, fat and nitrate foods). Why are so many people on statins now? Why is dementia so high? Why did manufacturers remove trans fats and saturated fats from foods?

It’s simply not like “people in the past were much healthier and now they’re less so”. People in the twentieth century had unhealthy diets and suffered from lots of diet- and lifestyle-related illnesses, some of which we have now got better at treating and preventing. People now also eat processed foods and are obese, but there wasn’t some mythical Daily Mail time when everyone was all natural and healthy. Unless you were pretty wealthy for most of history you wouldn’t have been getting much of a sniff of chicken and so on — most people ate a very limited diet, and a lot more processed and tinned foods than you think.

As for “chickens, ducks, rabbits raised and killed” don’t make me laugh 😆 (The entire point about keeping poultry is that you don’t often kill them.) What is this, some kind of rural James Herriot fantasy? My grandparents and their parents, like most of the population in the twentieth century, were urban poor living in tenements in a city and then in a council estate. My grandmothers (born in the 1920s) worked as a cinema usherette and a corner shop girl. My grandfathers were a building labourer and a mechanic at BOAC. They lived in a time of TV, aeroplanes and urban sprawl, not in a fantasy straight out of Cider With Rosie. Poaching rabbits in the 1960s and 1970s? People were eating boil in the bag fish with Smash, Mr Kipling fruit pies and takeaway curries, not jugged hare from the local landed estate 😆

What on earth does the structure of the NHS A&E system have to do with Brexit?

You must have recently arrived from some kind of time portal from 2005? You can’t imagine why the NHS has been hit hard by Brexit (also backed by the same people who ran down the NHS in the first place?)

Costing that salad would be interesting @Katypp
meanwhile I might have a go at costing that mujaddara dish.

as you say we often forget the little add ond like stock etc

Although my parents grew up in the country. It wasn’t a fantasy James Herriot world though and they couldn’t have afforded the cider.

They did have plenty of cabbage, potatoes and onions though. Perhaps their long lives was all that cabbage

Ours is about the same,no way of getting it down unless we stop eating fruit/veg and meat!

@greengagesummers

I nearly spat out my tea at the chickens, ducks and rabbits
Also from a city living northern working class family. I'm 60
I recall chicken was expensive and a bit of treat. Our usual Sunday lunch was stuffed hearts. We ate a lot of offal, mince and potatoes, scouse ( second day became scouse pie)
Fray bentos pies, fish fingers. Mackerel from the fishmongers occasionally, pork/lamb chops as a treat. My mum and nan did bake but not bread.
We did eat seasonally though, because that's what you did. You only ever saw strawberries in the shops in June. Tangerines were for Christmas.

I think a big part of the issue is people expecting strawberries and blueberries in the middle of winter. If you want out of season fruit and veg it costs.
I can remember really looking forward to June because it was my birthday and I could have strawberries.
I do have an allotment and grow a lot of my own fruit. I haven't bought berries for 6 or 7 years now. I eat from the plot as it appears, freeze some if there's enough. But I won't buy them out of season now.

Following up on the cost of Mujadarra. As I said I would ( bit of a derail I know )

For the
rice, lentils, onions, oil, cumin and salt-exact quantities costed for four

shopping at Aldi and using two tins of lentils rather than dried ( which might be cheaper I suppose )
Its spot on
£2 for four people

@Katypp , I buy the lentils in Tesco when they are on special offer. The offers come round quite often.
I batch cook my lunches, but they'll usually have lots of spices, and those would be expensive if I bought them all at once.
My income is irregular and I am constantly watching the pennies.

@greengagesummers
I'm describing the lived experience of my working class rural family through the postwar years- 50s-60s/ 70s
Chickens, ducks and rabbits were commonly kept even in back yards .
Hens for eggs/ cockerels for meat

Yes poaching also rife

Just because you are ignorant and refuse to believe it doesn't mean it didn't happen

Ditto @Ted27
Dont choke on your tea
It's clear city life was very different to rural life in the 50s-70s

@CatInspector

My grandad did turn up with the odd rabbit, no idea where from

Ive no doubt at all that life was very different for people in rural areas. But most people do live in towns and cities, even in the 50s and 60s.

Lidl/Aldi. Paid 67 for a big weekly shop for 3 people in there last week.

We shop in Morrisons with 15%staff discount. I feed 3 adults all meals and snacks I'm roughly 80 per week that usually includes a couple of toiletries as well

You misunderstand - I’m not saying it didn’t ever happen (in the rural prewar in particular) — but it simply was not the experience or life of the vast majority of the population between 1945 and 2000, most of whom lived in urban cities and towns and not rurally.

I still think you are massively romanticising this, though. The rural poor were not all eating constant healthy balanced bucolic meals of chicken and rabbit either in the prewar or postwar period. Even the romantic Enid Blyton image of the rural farmer’s wife making cakes and rabbit stew and lashings of creamy butter etc. etc. was by the mid-century a fantasy — that’s precisely why it caught the imagination.

There’s also a reason why people in the U.K. took to processed food — it was a lot tastier than the dismal cuisine of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Cabbage is quite good for you; but not that much after being boiled for hours to a soggy white mush.