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?

Yes £150 is high, but then we spend a lot on fruit and veg as we have a mainly vegetarian diet. We also have two (fat) cats. My point was going to be that fresh fruit and veg is very expensive. If you cut on these or only buy very basic fruit, you will be a lot better off. Its a lot cheaper to send your child to school with biscuits and crisps than strawberries and nectarines.

in the one post alfonso you said it was high due to the good quality meat and fish you buy, in the next you state it is high due to all the fruit you need being 'almost' vegetarian.
either way you could budget better if you needed to, £150 is v high.

I dunno alfonso, I'm not convinced, I see kids with families moaning that they cant afford things where kids have cheese strings and fruit shoots. I am not trolling about it, it just annoys me as these types of family clearly wouldn't struggle to buy fruit and veg for the kids if they laid off the coke and cheese strings.

Unless someone has debts or an astronomical mortgage, I just don't see how food poverty can really exist in the uk if people make sensible life choices like thousands of other Britons do

Topsyandturvy:

DH and I are on a decent wage for our area. We receive £30 a week Tax credits. The reason being that we actually spend MORE a week on childcare and commuting than I MAKE in a week.

Yes, in order to actually go to work, I have to spend more than I earn to allow me to do so.

Extortionate childcare costs is where our money goes. It's not even a fancy nursery, DS goes to a local childminder who is competitively priced.

So, even though we essentially earn over the limit for tax credits, we an only earn that much by spending out so much we are allowed some. If I gave up my job (which I don't want to - I like it) we wouldn't be entitled to anything because DH's 21k wage (£1200 a month after tax) is deemed enough to allow us to live.

Topsy-
Rent. Or mortgage.
I could also afford (just) to run a cheapie car, and have a holiday once a year if I got a council house, as the rent would be half what I pay in a private house.
I still qualify for a teeny amount of housing benefit (I work) but in a local council house I wouldn't, even if I only worked three days a week, because rents here are so high.
I worked out that with the lower rent and CT I would be about £180 a month better off.
In addition, housing benefit in my area has been reduced by about £20 a month.
Council tax now has to be paid by non working people as well.
Also, debts, for some people.
I am on a DMP now, but ran into trouble with debts when I lost my job through redundancy. I had no savings, having been a LP for years, with no maintenance, and I was buying food on my credit card.
Travel also costs a lot in some places-I pay £80 a month on bus passes for myself and ds.
Childcare-you can get help with tax credits for childcare, but when you were on them I suspect the percentage you could get was higher (It is much lower now).
I know plenty of couples on low incomes who no longer qualify for any childcare help.
Honestly, with a clean slate, no debts,everything working OK, not having to replace the washing machine, or the fridge, (I will have to get a new washing machine soon aaargh!) we would have around £100 a week after bills for food and clothes/ school trips/savings everything else, which is OK, but as someone working nearly full time, it doesn't feel like enough.
And generally, my income has gone down by approximately 10 % in the last 5 years (in cash terms, not real terms), whereas food, gas, water, travel, school dinners, council tax etc have all gone way up.
HTH

But wouldn't you be better off LadyFlump? It's great that you like your job but surely it doesn't make sense to keep it up if its actually costing you to work?

Has anyone considered the price of gas in all this?

Chunderella - I honestly don't know. I did enquire with them and was told that if I stopped working we would receive nothing and that the child care costs is why we get what we do. But then, I have little to no faith in the tax credits helpline having been told wildly differing things in the past.

I probably would be better of financially if I didn't work, but I need to do it to keep sane. We live in the arse end of nowhere with no public transport, and only one car that DH needs to get to work. I would literally be stuck at home all day everyday with nowhere to take DS, also no pavements, and dangerously windy 60 mph A roads, and we would both go stir crazy. I did go slightly do-lally by the end of maternity leave.

It's ok though, I'm studying for finance exams that will lead to a much better job so there is light at the end of the tunnel for us.

Morning Topsy. Sounds like you were doing well when you qualified for wtc.

but if ladyflump gives up her job now, by the time her children are at school, she will be at a disadvantage in the job market, and have missed out on any promotions, pay rises etc that might be on offer in her present job.....so losing out now is like an investment for the future.

Audrina, not sure what you mean?

We had a salary below the limit and two children? Rent around £750 PCM.

Ladyflump you might get more sense if you check using the online calculator

Sorry just that you were living well, as you said. Car, holiday etc Some people can, as has been pointed out, it depends on your expenses and outgoings. True about rising costs and lowered thresholds for wtc now though.

Burberryqueen, yes we buy high quality chicken for the children and we eat fresh salmon twice a week. I don't need to cut my food budget. I am only mentioning it because I think as a family we eat a healthy diet. i can see how we could cut it down to around £100 and still not suffer, but I think in London if you are to have a decent diet for a family of 4 and maybe have a couple of pets, you do need £80-100. Cheesestrings is of course cheaper than strawberries and knowing how fussy my own children are sometimes its about buying something you know your child will eat and which will fill them up. Its patronising to assume that poor people cannot cook and don't know what a healthy diet is.

Did anyone who is saying it is possible actually watch the same programme as I did? The chefs found it almost impossible to shop with e budgets they were given. It was most difficult for the smaller families or people living on their own because of the expense of shopping in small quantities.
Even when when the chefs could and did stick to the budget in the cook off at the end they had a massive store of basic cooking ingredients to use that wasn't included in the budget such as spices, herbs, olive oil, garlic etc.

Maybe some of the people needed better cooking skills but given that most of them had full time jobs working long hours, it was not always possible for them to spend an entire day shopping for one meal which is what the chefs had to do.

Cooking skills can't make up for dire poverty where there is just not enough money to buy what is required.

The chefs found it nearly impossible because they were doing a one day shop. If you let them shop for a month I don't think they would have had such difficulty. My point though wasn't that it is easy to eat well for £1 a day, because I don't think it is, but that I couldn't think of any situations in which one would only have £1 a day

I don't think advanced cooking skills/a huge amount of free time are required to boil pasta and add a jar of sauce (which, as I pointed out earlier, can be cheaper than making it from scratch yourself) Plenty of people manage to work full time and still cook healthier meals than microwaveable burgers.

It's 26000 for one child

I didn't see the programme but I understand exactly how this happens. My DH works 6 days a week and earns around 17k a year. £3,500 of that goes straight back out on public transport to get to work. The there is gas and electric, rent, council tax, tv license, phone, internet, insurance, blah, blah blah. His salary doesn't even touch that and that's before you buy food, clothes and shoes, haircuts for the kids, etc.

I have less than £50 a week to provide for 7 people, including things like toilet roll, cleaning and laundry stuff and toiletries. it's perfectly doable and different from managing for 2 people on £14, but it is tiring and depressing. Always having to say no is the worst bit. And the sick feeling when you get to Thursday and realise that the kids have finished to bottle of value squash that you bought and that you can't get another one until Monday, or when the peanut butter runs out mid week so you have nothing to put in their sandwiches/toast.

it's all made worse by having a handful of ASD children who can't eat certain things and by having ME and having to eat regularly so that you don't get even sicker.

it's a whole different ball game when you are constantly struggling that to just have to do it for a couple of weeks.

You are bring extremely bonkers and naive topsy - did you watch the programme? It was pointed out at the beginning that the families all had no other areas where they could save money in their personal budgets.

It doesn't really matter why. Personally we would not struggle so much now if we had not git into debt when things were very bad for us financially - the debt has paid off in that we know have much mire coming in - but it's still tough to pay off AND cover all the other irregular bills, eg plumber to deal with sudden massive leak, car needing work to pass mot etc