The great british menu - food poverty... AIBU?

[Bogeyface]

I hate myself for thinking this but, AIBU to think that Lady Whatsername who said in the 90's that the reason poor people couldnt manage on benefits was because they lacked the ability to cook good simple nutritious meals, may have had a point? The way she said it was totally U and she was very sneery, but I cant help thinking that there might be a grain of truth in it.

Of the three families I have just seen in this program I saw what 2 of them ate in a day. one was a mother and daughter who's only meal of the day was a microwave burger each costing £1 each, and the other was a family where the children had fish fingers or nuggets and oven chips, while the parents had tinned veg.

£14 per week that the first family spent is enough for a bag of baking potatoes, some basics pasta, baked beans, passatta, a pack of frozen sausages, a bag of porridge oats, some cheese, some sandwich meat such as Haslet from the deli counter (35p per 100g in my tesco) and milk. The DD would be getting free school meals if I heard correctly about her age and their income. Far healthier, more filling and more than one meal a day!

The second family, again, for the price of nuggets, fish fingers and oven chips they could make a spag bol using basics ingredients that would feed them all well.

RAther than focussing on the cost of food, which is only going to rise, surely it would be better to focus on educating people who eat badly because the food they choose is more expensive than cheaper, healthier alternatives that require a bit of cooking knowledge?

£14 is NOT enough to buy food for a week, but like others I am not sure where the figure of £14 comes from. I realise I should be on the other thrifty ideas thread but I think there are some great debates going on here.

This thread has opened my eyes somewhat, because it is very clear that access to shops which sell reasonably priced food is a huge problem for many people. Purchasing cheap fresh fruit and vegetables is almost impossible unless you have transport and can get to Tesco at 3.30 and 20.30 and buy up all the yellow labels at 10p. Likewise buying in bulk and from budget supermarkets can be difficult for many. Accessing bargains is easy if you have a car and a tankful of petrol and for those of us who are frugal with our petrol we are out and about doing other things and we dont make special journeys.

I buy huge sacks of rice and potatoes and pasta and onions and when my daughter comes to visit I send her away with a bag of each because I dont want her to waste her money buying small packs. If only we could do this for everyone. I havent watched the programme yet but I hope to watch it tomorrow.

It is outrageous that gas and electric are more expensive to those struggling and cheap food and fresh fruit and vegetables are not easily available to those without transport, what can we do to improve things? I hope the government are reading blogs like a girl called jack and threads like this.

I agree with ConferencePear

Wait till Universal Credit comes out and then it won't be enough to even be in work. Oh, no! I can't believe the competitive poverty as a mark of pride.

Owl lady have you used more than 1000 units yet? Did you take a photo of the meter reading with a newspaper next to it?

Agreeing with expat, naturally. Never mind Home Economics, Politics & Economics should be compulsory. If kids don't understand why millionaires with approx £200,000 annual pay are dictating the amount of food they can have, they are unlikely to feel anything's worth the bother.

Owllady Don't even consider how you are going to pay. it's not your debt!

I had this with npower who said I owed £1000 (gas+elec) when I moved into a new property. Fortunately I had taken meter readings myself so knew what they should be charging. It took 9 months to get sorted. I had to write letters every time as phone calls were a waste of time because they contradicted and even denied things they'd said previously. I posted by recorded delivery so that they couldn't deny receiving letters. It was very hard but I was determined I wasn't going to pay someone else';s debt. They paid me in the end £50 off each bill. Don't give up.

I agree expat - we should be organising protests about the division of wealth in this country. The ruling class really are tasking the piss. Also i think it's time a new political party was formed that truly represents ordinary people. In my govt there would be a new law against anyone having a wage of more than £80k pa. Oh and i would repeal the bedroom tax apart from for houses with 5+ bedrooms would be charged 5% extra income tax for each room - yes Cameron, Clegg, Osborne, Miliband I am looking at you.

Maybe some posters on this thread would be interested in The People's Assembly initiative by Owen Jones.

Thanks Garlic. Will be there on 29 Sept in Manchester.

:)

Owllady - have you been to energywatch? Write to the supplier (they have to answer a letter within a set time) and lay out the problem. Tell them if they don't sort it out you will go to energy watch. Take your current reading and put it in the letter. This should show the discrepancy as it will show you as only having used say 5 units of electricity since you moved in which is obviously silly. If you don't get a satisfactory reply send copies of your letter and their letter to energywatch. I used to work at the edf energy call centre and managers used to scale up complaints with a reference to energywatch/ofcom.

"A single potato as a meal? And no salt or pepper or oil? WTF would you do with that to produce a meal. I can't imagine the despair I'd feel if I came in from work and spent 25 mins or so preparing a meal of boiled potato with no seasoning.

The thing about cooking from scratch is that you do need stuff like salt and often long cooking times so as not to produce incredibly bland food. A life of going to quite s lot of effort so that i could eat frozen value mince with some carrot and sweet corn and no seasoning or potato with no seasoning is really quite grim, tbh. If that were the alternative, I'd be buying the microwaveable burgers. At least they'd taste of something."

^ ^
Absolutely Arbitury The lady bountiful types who are so keen to tell the poor people how to cook have no idea what is feels like to be poor EVERY DAY. Its the grind of it all that makes you really want to eat chips, as opposed to a dry potato and a portion of unseasoned value kidney beans EVERY DAY.
I am a bloody good cook, but there have been many times the last few years when my cupboards were bare. Spices all used up, the last tin of sardines eaten on toast for yesterdays tea, and we have been faced with getting through the week on £15.
Even for me, who is practiced at is it's hard, and lets not forget how much money goes on just things like Milk, toilet paper, washing up liquid.
Fruit is a luxury, and as for things like salad? Forget it, it's not happening.
You end up filling the basket (not enough stuff for a trolley)with basics pasta, onions and baking potatoes, and end up throwing a multipack of chocolate bars in there, because the thought of yet another baked potato with crappy basics cheese is just so depressing.
It's the daily grind of poverty that makes people go off the rails, even me, even someone who is mighty resourceful and knows it's not forever.

Oh ,yeah,expat and MP's fucking pay rises...???
I work almost FT, and have only one child, and still struggle.
I wont get a pay rise this year, or next, so yes it sticks in my craw that MP's think they deserve such any rise at all, let alone such a massive one.
I wish we could make them take a pay CUT.

I think George Orwell (as ever) gets it spot on in the Road to Wigan Pier (in 1937):

"The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes--an appalling diet.
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on
brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A
millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an
unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of
the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say
when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to
eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is
always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery
that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the
English-man's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a
temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

Homemade pizza
Spaghetti Bol
Chicken Casserole with rice
Plov (without the cashews)
Sausage and homemade oven chips
Baked potato with beans
Chicken soup (use stock from chicken carcass and leftover chicken) and homemade dumplings (with bread flour leftover from pizza)
Scrambled egg
Veg soup if any stock left
Make your own bread for toast for breakfast

A week of meals for a family of 4, about £25 I reckon although it is really hard to budget like that every week without food getting carby and boring

Having finished watching the program now - I found the end of it hugely depressing.

I think the chefs really meant well, but all those others like Prue Leith and the MPs and supermarket folk saying "well, look, it's SO easy to produce nutritious and amazing food for £1 a head [because these famous and experienced chefs have done it]" was massively unhelpful.

As so many have said - it's MUCH easier to keep food costs down when cooking for large numbers, the chefs were obviously using a certain amount of fuel etc, were the oils and seasonings really included in budget? James was shopping at Waitrose FGS!

The whole 'budget banquet' just felt like, to me, a way of saying - right-o, we've basically solved all the problems shown in the show.

Thanks for the recipe darren!

Why, yes, Three, I do all I can to get these people out of power. I don't find it okay to throw up my hands and think, well, fuck it, we just have to semi-starve and put up with them whilst they live in second homes we pay for out of a pittance and 'debate' on how anyone in this country can eat on £14/week whilst those in office spend that on a fucking hamburger because they had to work late one night.

Interesting reading on the The Peoples Assembly website, I fully support their aims. But what is civil disobedience? Sounds a bit too much like "Rioting" to me......

Bessie123 those meals are a good idea but you need to be able to cook and to be inclined to do so.

I suffer with depression and mental illness. ADs and anti-psychotics are working now luckily so i eat properly although i'm fairly skint.

But once I could hardly make toast, in fact one time I could barely bother to get a glass of water. I lived on cereal bars and still do at times.

Luckily (but sadly) I didn't have children to care for - but what the hell do parents with MH problems do??

To budget and cook decent meals you need to be healthy mentally and physically in the first place I think.

I have become somewhat obsessed with trying to find enough food to feed a family of 4 for £14 a week. How lucky I am to only doing that as an exercise

Apart from the 'menu' I posted upthread, I can't find many things to fit the budget and I can't imagine how people have to survive on same stuff week in week out.

I could do it for 2 weeks if absolutely pressed and the what.......
What a disgrace a rich country like this one has people living in such conditions.

expat, politicians are corrupted and greedy regardless which party they represent.

Well, some might start out all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full to the brim with idealism and world improvement. That soon gets squeezed out of them by the bureaucratic machine that is 'government'.

We should be bloody rioting.

Bogey - Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience is commonly, though not always, defined as being nonviolent resistance. It is one form of civil resistance. In one view (in India, known as ahimsa or satyagraha) it could be said that it is compassion in the form of respectful disagreement.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience

I tend to agree, IfNot, but the People's Assembly is aiming for peaceful protest stuff like standing in the road to block up traffic, people not going in to work, and so on.

If the weather stays hot, will we have riots ... ? Dunno. I'd love to see a mass occupation of the Houses of Parliament.

I remember the days when they used to teach girls children to cook in schools.

We did Chocolate refrigerator cake at primary school.
Secondary school - lesson one was tea and toast, lesson two was coconut pyramids. We progressed to fat-less sponge for a swiss roll, a very nice quiche recipe and bread (made with fresh yeast from the local bakery sourced by the school). And cakes, lots of cakes.

I'm not sure it really helped me cook, I certainly don't think that it was turning out a generation of children who could budget and cook for a family. Helping my parents was what taught me the cooking skills I have.

Was it not a family of 2 that were spending £14 a week on microwave burgers?

I actually do agree that it is possible to feed yourself much nicer/better/healthier food on the same budget. Yes, it would be very 'samey' after a while but not as 'samey' as burgers/nuggets/chips 7 days a week! They can hardly be happy on that!

I also notice that some people are saying about not having the cupboard staples eg salt/pepper/stock/dried herbs/spices etc but if you even bought one thing a week/a fortnight (eg. tesco table salt 29p, stock cubes 15p) then that would gradually build up. Although, I've just had a quick look on some of the supermarket websites and you can buy some jars of pasta sauces etc for less than what it would probably cost to make them. (pasta sauce 39p, chilli con carne sauce 57p) Not ideal but still nicer than burgers/nuggets etc.

Some of the larger bags of rice/pasta are only very slightly more but would last 2/3 times as long so eating pasta an extra night one week to allow for the initial outlay means that the following week you don't have to buy it at all - more money to buy another 'staple'. Special offers on dried goods/jars such as buy one get one free also means you can gradually stock up the cupboard.

I'm not trying to say that this is the nicest way to live or anything but it is possible. Asking 'how would you like it?' doesn't really mean much when most of us are coming from a position of having much more - of course we would find it hard but surely when you are coming from the position of eating microwaveable/nuggets and chips type meals then it is an improvement? Isn't that improvement based on education and having (very) basic cookery skills that would enable you to boil up pasta, cook a bit of meat and add a jar of sauce?

I prefer nuggets and chips to pasta personally... I think a lot of people do!