to think the price of shopping is getting rediculous?

[Ilovesunflowers]

Especially tuna. Noticed a pack of 4 was nearly £9 in my local supermarket. I use a lot of tuna and it used to be a cheap meal (pasta, tuna and veg).
Bread is crazily expensive. It's hard to keep costs down for shopping now.

[inchoccyheaven]

I always use to shop in sainsburys but when Lidl was built here switched to that. Now I go around Sainsburys resenting their prices if I have to buy there if I can't go to Lidl. especially for fruit and veg. sainsburys thinks offering 2 lots of fruit for £3 is a bargain when it is so much cheaper in Lidl and quality is just the same.

[Theas18]

Said it before and I'll say it again-try aldi or lidl.
I smile every time pretty much.

Fully trolley load £70 .usual shop £50 or so.

Stocked up in the large held prove hunts at xmas-less than a tenner a go and feed 4-5 of us for 2 roast dinners and a hash/soup/pasta meal.

I'm a life long savvy shopper. I wonder what purple who have a weekly shopping bill of over £100 buy, but then I go to tesco and buy coffee and decaf tea (there are just a few things we doubt like in aldi) and see a large box of cereal could be £3 rather than £1 to £1.50 and I fan myself in horror at the realisation!

[delilahlilah]

MSE is great for tips on cutting the price of your shop. There are loads of things you can do. You can almost always get away with cheap cuts of meat just by slow cooking them. Frozen mixed peppers / chopped onions can work out cheaper, depending on circumstances as you have no waste.
Risotto is another cheap dish you can make from very little / left overs.

Shopping in the evening and looking for reduced items can help or the other extreme, shopping online and sticking to a list. If you do the latter, my supermarket helps you find cheaper alternatives etc.

[wannabedomesticgoddess]

Buying pasta in bulk will save so much.

500g penne in asda is 95p. Sometimes on offer but usually that. 3kg of fusilli is £3.50 (but is down to £2.87 atm) so thats only 0.58p per 500g.

[Meglet]

I've noticed potatoes too. I swear they used to be £1 a bag for the cheapy basics ones in Sainsburys, fine for me as I'm not fussy about spuds. I don't think Sainsburys even stock a basics potato bag anymore, I haven't spotted one in months. I assume all the wet summers have knackered the potato crop.

Butter was 65p when DS was born 6yrs ago. Basic butter is £1.10 now.

[TheLateMrPamuk]

I buy the massive bag of pasta from Asda it is about the size of a carrier bag.
Cost is around 3.20 and 2.99 when on offer.
Coop have started a special weekend deal last week it was huge boxes of Diaz for a fiver. This week it's tuna at unde 3.00 I think.
Supermarkets are being very sly. I used to buy two packs of large bridge rolls for 1.50. Today I noticed they had halved the size of the rolls and ifyouwanted large ones there were only 4 in a pack and you couldn't buy two packs for 1.50.
Potatoes are very spensive now. Drives me mad.

[ScarletLady02]

We get everything from Aldi. Did our weekly shop today and it was less than £20 (bear in mind I will need to buy more bread and milk, and we already had a few bits in the freezer/cupboard).

Tuna is 55p a tin in there and it's no different to anywhere else.

Their "specially selected" bread is lovely as well and it's only 70p odd for a multigrain wholemeal loaf.

[MrsGeologist]

This summer has fucked over crops so much that my local tesco actually had a notice above the onions saying that due to the bad weather, all the onions were shite (I'm paraphrasing).

If I'm careful I can shop for four on ~£60 a week, but it isn't the easiest thing in the world, and I'll often skip lunch (only occasionally eat breakfast) DH only really has one (very big) meal a day and a snack (toast usually) as well.

We've never been big eaters, so the skipping meals isn't difficult.

[Ladyflip]

I've posted this on the frugal February thread but I'm always amazed that people, particularly families, buy their potatoes in a supermarket.

We always buy them by the sack (available from local agricultural merchants, but also check farm shops and local markets). They cost about £10 for 25kg, which is £2 more expensive than last year but is still a lot cheaper than a supermarket. I checked Tesco this week and their cheapest potatoes were 73p a kilo.

Because the spuds are dirty and kept in a brown paper sack, they keep very well. It takes us about 6 weeks to eat a sack once it is opened. You get a variety of sizes in the sack so sometimes it feels like you are peeling more but it's worth it!

[Pixel]

All our allotments had potato blight last year too and none of the soft fruit did very well apart from raspberries for some reason.
The previous year it was tomato blight and everybody's leeks just died overnight. We've given up on sweetcorn as the badgers always get it before we do, and we were told when we took over our plot that no-one bothers to grow parsnips as they just won't grow here. We have tried various methods in a bid to prove the oldies wrong but have had no success.
We do get a lot of food from our allotment, I'm still getting leeks/greens/sprouts etc over the winter but it's quite hard to predict what you will get in any given season. It's a lot of work but there's no doubt the food tastes better. I can barely face a shop-bought tomato nowadays.

[NorthernLurker]

I get our spuds in a big bag from the farm shop. Last year it was £5. This year it's £8.99.

[natwebb79]

We swapped Tesco for Aldi 2 weeks ago. Won't go back to Tesco! We're amazed at the difference in our food bill for pretty much the same products. Probably knocked £40 off a fortnightly shop.

[ELR]

Cutting down on meat will help with reducing your shopping bill. Try adding half meat and half lentils and tinned pulses to stews and mince dishes ect

We very rarely have roast dinner so don't need to buy joints of meat which can be expensive. If we do have roast it's usually chicken which can be used for several meals.

Make a big batch of meat/veg sauce to use three ways then bake some potatoes scoop out the flesh to top a third of the mixture, for a shepards pie which you can freeze for later in the week. Then use the skins to make crispy potato skins by roasting them in the oven. Then the remaining two thirds of the sauce spice up with a little chilli powder and serve half of the sauce with the skins and a little sour cream for a quick lunch or tea, and the remaining sauce use for a fun night with tacos and the trimmings.

[Ladyflip]

northernlurker Your potatoes are cheaper! I presume you are where your name indicates and that is probably why?

[ledkr]

When will someone come on this thread and say they feed six for twelve pounds ?
I'm also struggling to keep it under a hundred but we eat well and three of us take packed lunches so effectively that's for four people three meals a day so I take heart from that.

[Ruprekt]

I shop at night and EVERYTHING in my fridge and freezer is reduced.

Milk, cheese, bread, meat, vegetables.

We have some odd concoctions but it is worth it.

Having monkfish tonight that was £29 per kilo down to £4 per kilo and I bought it for £2.

You have to be a bit savvy but I refuse to pay full price.

[Varya]

My DH can get to the local street market and buys the veg/fruit there. Much cheaper than in the major food stores. Downsize portions now, as we used to eat more than we really needed. Friends laugh at me for shopping around and say they choose all they need and don't worry about what it costs. They live on a different planet from most of us!

[colleysmill]

I'm a lidl lover for the majority of things these days.

Someone mentioned up thread about a butcher - if it wasn't for our local butcher I'd probably stop buying meat but he does a cracking deal (400g each of mince, Bacon, sausages, stewing steak and 2 huge chicken breasts) for a tenner. Can't praise it enough.

[colleysmill]

I agree though last year was rubbish for grow your own - our tomatoes did ok and surprisingly.our potatoes but virtually no courgettes (usually loads) and the peas and beans finished really early. We managed one lonely tiddler of a pumpkin :(

Onwards and upwards though!

[careergirl]

the issue with the "horseburgers" though has made me really nervous about buying food and especially cheap meat. Its not so much eating horse its not knowing whats in it
Our farm shop is pricey but you know its been raised on the land and butchered on site - they don't butcher off site and its the peace of mind of knowing what you're buying/eating.

[Virgil]

For those who eat lots of pasta, tesco value penne is 39p for 500g or spaghetti is 37p for 500g. It's honestly absolutely fine. I can't tell the difference between that and the branded stuff.

[HollyBerryBush]

People are food snobs though - I'll rephrase some people are food snobs.

Anyone who shops in M&S or Waitrose needs their noodle probing, quite vigorously. There is plenty of snobbery within MN about Lidl, which always makes me laugh as the billboard outside ours declares it MNs favourite supermarket!

I wander all over, usually at peak yellow label times, I rarely buy full priced meat. Veg/frui/salad always comes from Lidl or the Turkish supermarket opposite. Big Asda for bulk stuff like loo rolls or pasta. I have no idea why I use Morrisons, probably because its the closest! Co-op when Im on a baking splurge!

[MoreBeta]

This might sound esoteric, arcane and nothing to do with ordinary day to day living but the rise in food prices is a very real inflation that affects lower paid people very acutely and is largely unacknowledged by Govt and central bankers (eg Bank of England).

In a panic, central banks printed vast amounts of money after the financial crisis to save the banks and fund the Govt deficits. This fed directly into much higher fuel and basic food commodity prices. It has led to ordinary people in Western countries facing a constantly falling living standard and revolutions in Africa and Middle East.

What central bankers did to save the banks fed into fuel and food price inflation directly but it did not cause wage inflation - hence ordinary people struggle to make ends meet. Fuel and food prices went up while wages contined falling or are static at best.

Rich people who did benefit from holding or trading fiancial assets like shares and bonds and property that went back up in price as a result of central bank action have gone on a huge spending binge buying luxury goods and multi million pound houses in London and other global cities.

It really is tearing society apart but central bankers and Govt officals are tone deaf to this issue because they all directly benefited or are on index linked salaries and pensions.