To be seriously worried that the cost of food is getting so scarily high

[thebird]

I am not extravagant I buy shop own brands where I can, I try to shop on a budget, I cook from scratch and have given up buying extras like wine (well just the odd bottle to keep me sane) but still each week the cost of my food bill goes up and up. I know inflation is running at around 4-5% but I cant understand this as many basic items have increased almost 30-50%. When the hell is it going to stop or I really will be living on beans on toast every night(and even they've gone up lots!

And yet, people still seem to me wasting money on needless items like biscuits, sweets, chocolates, mochas, etc.

There is too much rubbish on offer at the supermarkets unfortunately.

Agree Victor - if this winter is as harsh as last year utility bills are going to be astronomic

I'll put my hand up as someone who "wastes" money on chocolate and biscuits. I bought 5 jam doughnuts for 60p and a bar of Basics chocolate for 31p in my last shop. I couldn't make the doughnuts for less than that, when you factor in the cost of electricity and the large amount of oil to cook them. And I would much rather have blueberries, but they are so expensive. I would rather have home-made cakes, come to that, but with the cheapest butter at £2 a block that's bloody expensive too. We are being super-frugal at the moment (for a variety of reasons) and I need to factor in some treats to stop us all being miserable.

We have a Costco but its about 5 or 6 miles away, I could get a card as I'm a Childminder. I shop at Aldi and Lidl and occasionally at other stores such as Asda and Morrisons when am not able to get certain things.

We have 4 adults in the family and one 9 yr old so feeding them all can cost a bit but it doesn't have to. I am going to have to budget this coming year as my daughter is on a course not 'approved' by Child Benefit but don't get me on that!

Just checked predictions on winter 2011-2012 - " This would result in the fourth bad winter in succession for the UK, and should prove to be the worst of them all."

globalcoolingnewiceageuk.blogspot.com/2011/01/uk-summer-and-winter-weather-forecast_31.html

At least I have a head start, and will start buying extra gas/electric now

So why is everyone addicted to supermarkets? There are one or two negatives to shopping in supermarkets which affect:

Farmers,
Farmers income is squeezed so many only cover costs. This causes problems for UK farmers but farmers in the Third World are forced into absolute poverty by price squeezing

Animal welfare,
Farmers are expected to work to impossibly small margins and sometimes have no option but to intensify production using battery farms in order to try and cover their costs.

Garment workers,
A quarter of all clothing in the UK is bought from supermarkets After decades of scandals and abuse in the garment industry, mistreatment of workers is still endemic, only made worse by aggressive buying practices from supermarkets in forcing down prices to suppliers

UK workers
For every superstore that opens 276 workers lose their jobs in the local economy
Profits go to Head Office and are not spent in the local economy
Most jobs created by supermarkets are low-paid, low skilled and part-time.

The environment,
As local shops are closed the environment degrades
Fewer local farmers and shops mean both customers and goods need to be transported further. This means more pollution from cars, as people drive further to shop, and more pollution from aircraft and lorries, as food is transported from around the world. One in 10 car journeys in the UK are now to buy food. DEFRA suggests that car use for food shopping results in costs to society of more than £3.5 billion per year from traffic emissions, noise, accidents and congestion.

The size of supermarkets means they are some of the most energy-inefficient buildings in the retail sector.

Food poverty,
Diet-related ill health is costing the NHS increasing amounts through illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, obesity and coronary heart disease. . The development of superstores on outskirts of town centres and out-of-town sites, and the closure of many local independent shops as a result, has created ?food deserts? ? areas where it is almost impossible to buy affordable healthy food.

Supermarkets offer best value for car-based bulk buying through offers such as ?two for one.? Not only are these special offers mainly for processed food, but lower income groups without access to private transport, are less able to advantage of them. NCH the Children?s Charity found that travel costs to go food shopping added 23% to the shopping budget of low income families.

and there's more but that is enough for now!

YANBU
We go to wholesale places as well for stuff like bulk toothpaste, kitchen roll, soap and shampoo etc. So supermarket is purely for food for the five of us. Considering we cook a lot of indian food at home ( lentils, chappaties and rice and these are fairly cheap and bulk brought) we still end up spending £80-£100 in a supermarket whether i go weekly or fortnightly... I hate the feeling i get when i stand at the till and always go through my receipts to figure out what i could have left out but its useless. I just have to get used to it or just go supermarket once a month... Back in the days even with a toddler and baby i spent 40/50 pounds nappies included.. ( should have stocked up then lol)

YANBU at all! Past the seond week of every month we are counting pennies and tend to go to the supermarket every other day to peruse the reduced bits. Our local supermarket now charges for parking if you spend less than a tenner, which is very annoying when you only have a few quid in your purse.

The tap water here isn't very nice - I think it's because it's very very hard?? So I have to buy bottled water as I prefer water to most anything else. Aldi had it on special 5ltr for 79p - haven't tried it yet, but will today and if it's OK I'll be stocking up. Especially if it's a going to be a bad winter I like to have a good supply in, just in case there's any problem with the pipes etc

I agree with what everyone has said about costco - it can be good for non perishables, but you need to know what you normally pay even for the non perishable stuff because sometimes it's the same per kg/ltr/whatever as you pay anyway, just in a bigger box.

Quite a few people nowadays are buying food which is past its best before date - still perfectly good to eat (not to be confused with use by etc).
Usually half price or less. That is a massive saving. Saw an article recently where a food scientist gave alternate dates for products with best before dates of 2013. For pasta it was 2023 and jam? 2113!!
Read about some chines soup found in a brass bowl which was 3000 years old. That was probably off though. And probably didn't have a date on it anyway.

YANBU.
I often find good quality food far more expensive than cheap processed food.
I don't live within walking distance of anything other than a butchers (higher priced than the supermarkets and the veg is very old and minging looking), and a small co-op. Again high priced and limited availability, there is no way on earth I could afford just to shop there. Otherwise there is the local shop which charges 3 times the amount for basics than Asda.
I hate supermarket shopping but what other options are there for a working mother of 3 plus dh.
The real issue is that the poor and by that I include working poor, are much harder hit by increases in the basic cost of living than the wealthy.

Archie, you are right. I bought some eggs in Sainsbos the other day, reduced to half price because I bought them on their display until date, but they have another week before their use by date!

Janelikesjam - was that me you were taking a dig at about spreadsheets? If so, cheers.

I think its a sensible idea to know how much I spend on my bills, my shopping and fuel etc so I know how much I have to save/spend. I don't list items in my shopping file, just the total cost. So yes, since this time last year I spend about £30 a week more. Useful to know, huh? Especially living on my DH's salary alone as I am a stay at home mum.

I suggest you look for something else to find humerous. I have seen truly awful situations when I was working (in finance) when people genuinely don't know how they will provide the next meal for their children. Pardon me for ensuring that doesn't happen to my family.

As you were.

Problem with not shopping in supermarkets is where you do get non food items and non fresh food items from?

Fridge and fresh food we buy from markets etc. but supermarkets have driven stores that used to sell other items out of business.

Lara, I am sorry to say that I am one of those people in the awful situation. I wish I could be as organised as you and have a damn spreadsheet!

We have just gone through a period if having literally no money left over to feed ourselves we made sure ds was fed and this is how I got buy if it helps.

I started shredding chicken breasts instead of cutting them into chunks , it makes it go a lot further .

Condensed soup with a tin of tuna sweetcorn and pasta makes a nice tuna bake and it is a very cheap meal.

I buy big bags of mixed vegetables from asda instead of fresh , that way it doesn't go off in a few days and you can use what you need.

I always have eggs and potatoes , good cheese (taste stronger so you use less) pasta and tinned tomatoes in my cupboards so on the days there is not much left you can have egg and chips spicy tomato pasta omelette etc.

Porridge is cheap and you can get smartprice honey which does the job.

I have to say without asda smarprice I would have starved, you can get curry sauce for 9p and smartprice oven chips for 89p which are actually really
nice , noodles with a cup a soup on them were a specialty for a while, filling and cost twenty pence a meal , maybe not the healthiest meal but you can chuck in a handful of frozen veg and it does the job.

We got our first real shop last week and felt like kings unpacking it all , nothing fancy either just stuff we used to cook before our money dropped by half and had a baby to buy for with it too.

Lidl and adli are not as cheap as you would think , the pound shop is very good for cleaning products and excellent for baby things like bowls bibs cups etc I saw the same things I bought for ds in boots for double the price I paid.same goes for shampoos and the like.

eBay is your best friend when it comes to buying clothes for kids a lot of items are a pound each and normally it is brands like gap and next etc.

Sorry about the essay , all these things really helped us get through

I also shop online now as the delivery is three pounds fifty , compared to fifteen pound for a taxi or ten pound bus fare/ screaming ds and lugging it all back it has been a sanity and time saver.

Bodyof eeyore - :( Sorry to hear that. I guess being organised and using spreadsheets to monitor monthly expenditure comes from the finance background I have - we have always used it.

Thankfully my DH is great on Excel, so he has set one up that we take the brought forward balance (ie what was left at the last banking day of the month), and then deduct all the bills to give us a projected balance ie what is left to spend/save. Then each time we take out cash or use our cards, we enter it onto the spreadsheet and it automatically deducts that amount. We are even so pedantic that we note down what each debit card or cash withdrawal was for!

It works well for us. Don't want this to sound patronising or teaching you to suck eggs, was just explaining how our spreadsheet works.

I hope things improve for you, best wishes.

I go to the local horse/cattle market and buy a huge sack of carrots for £2.I give some to the pony and then chop and freeze the rest.Far cheaper than buying them form the supermarket at 79p a kilo.Also buy herbs, spices,rice and poppadoms from the indian supermarket-it is still cheaper after driving 10 miles to get there [and a very nice man always offers to carry my huge sack of rice to my car for me.]

Lara That sounds like a great plan. We use an amazing website called mint.com that links to your bank and then categorizes everything and gives you all kinds of cool graphs and visuals to show where your money is going. It even gives you "warnings" when you are close to overspending in one category. I'm not sure if it's set up to be compatible with UK banks but I'm sure there is something similar (it's free).

MrsW, excellent advice there.
Lara, I am jealous . DP and I are crap with money and we know it.
I was rather chuffed with some free cabbages at the weekend - we walked the dogs around a cabbage field and there were some that had fallen off the wagon (lol).

mrstittlemouse have you tried making cakes from butterspreads? I use butterlicious from Sainsbury's, £1.10 for a big tub. I think it makes really nice cakes and my kids don't complain.
I agree about spreadsheets, it's a very sensible idea though I'm not as organised as that. In the 'old days' plenty of people used to keep a household account book with incomings and outgoings. It's the same thing really.

Spreadsheets are great. We have one which has everything on it, mortgage, bills, all DDS, food fuel and disposable income etc. And we do keep a note of everything we spend during the week - we have a weekly allocated amount to spend. This has become especially important now that I am on magic beans SMP. And we've still found that we'll have to dip into savings towards the end of the year just to make ends meet. The rise in fuel costs have been one of the major hits, which is really galling when these massive companies release their quarterly profits. They are unscrupulous thieves :(

We've also found that the food price hikes over the past year have hit our pockets hard - up 20squids from last year. We probably don't help ourselves by trying to be ethical in our shopping - only organic meat/milk, all fruit and veg must come from Europe at the furthest - which is why we eat meat once a week at the very most. But this is our choice, and we had long discussions about it. We decided that we'd rather cut back on other stuff and pay a wee bit more for food. We have found that buying bulk on line for cleaning products etc a bit cheaper (like the ethical superstore). We have also found that planning bulk meals really helps - ie big dahls that last 2-3 nights, and buying whole chickens that you can get 2-3 meals from (roast, risotto/curry, soup).

Although now we have our first on the way, and I am dreading how much our food bills are going to go up when she starts eating

Anyhoo - Granny sucking eggs etc

No, BodyofEeyore that is not what I meant. You have to be careful with food with sell by or use by dates on (dairy, meat, fish,eggs etc) as it will deteriorate quickly after the date. But best-before stuff can be eaten years past the date and still taste fine, like rice, beans etc.
Penguin ? loads of non ?fresh food? at this site: www.bestbuy-foods.com. I?ve made 3 orders and upto 25kilos I think for £4.50 delivery and all less than half-price. That certainly makes the family food budget go further.