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?

OhMerGerd - That was an amazing post & summed up what it must be like to live (ha) on such a budget.

Another really brilliant thing about having a seriously tight budget is that supermarket prices are not stable. If you manage to do a shop for £14 one week, there's no guarantee that the same food won't come in a £14.73 the next week. And you really might not be albe to absorb that 73p difference. A couple of pennies here and there don't matter to me, but they can make a big difference on a very low income.

There's also the simple fact that (as many other have said) giving the prices for the cheapest value products in the out of town Tesco you shop at doesn't necessarily reflect what's available to everyone else. If it costs you £4 in bus fare (and multiple buses there and back and some walking in between) to get to the supermarket, that will come out of your food budget. And you can only buy what you can carry, which means that you need to think about the weight of what you buy (tinned food often weighs a lot) and probably have to make more frequent trips than someone with a car. Or you can shop in your local shop, where there are no 40p packets of value pasta etc.

It is very easy to produce a supposedly cheap meal idea or two, and announce that you got your pan cheap in a charity shop (although I bet you didn't add the cost of bus fare to the price, perhaps multiple times because you can never know what will be available in the charity shop at any given time). However, things are rarely as simple as we imagine them to be.

Jojane I've got two teenagers, that wouldn't do two meals.

Jojane- yes my favorite cast iron dish came from a car boot sale for 50 p and I also bought a 25 portion le creuset dish at an auction for £15. RRP was nearly £200.

Old stainless steel pressure cookers make fantastic pans for bulk cooking and jam making and they are usually excellent quality, they can be bought for 20p, car boot sale sales are full of them.

Car boot sales are generally out of town where you need a car to get to them!

I don't think a family can eat healthily on £14.00 per week. It would be mainly bread, rice, pasta and potatoes. That's all carbs. What about good quality protein?

You can get fantastic things from car boot sales but I do find that you generally need, well, a car, to get to them as they're usually in the middle of a field by a dual carriageway.

And it also takes a lot of energy to traipse around a car boot sale (possibly after walking some distance there) trying to find the stuff that you actually need, which may not actually be available in the car boot sale you find yourself at. This is an important consideration when you've got a long way to walk for everything, aren't eating enough and only possess one pair of worn out cheap shoes that cut up your feet. And you have to carry your cast iron pan home too.

I can brag about my bargain find from when I was aimlessly perusing a car boot sale and happen to come across something interesting. It's a different prospect when you have very little money and need to find something specific.

A tuna pasta bake for 5 lasting for two meals with just one can of tuna? That would be a teaspoon of tuna per serving.

A 500g bag of pasta has 6 servings so that's quite tight if you want to get 10 servings even allowing for children's portions

Most of us are just trying to make suggestions about being resourceful, not always practical i know for instance I was chatting to a lady who makes lovely jam, I said I didn't have a maslin pan, she explained to me that she used the bottom part of her pressure cooker, next time I spotted one at a car boot sale I bought one for 20p, yes good cooking can require a well equipped kitchen but it is possible to produce healthy cheap meals on a camping stove or BBQ.

I never underestimate the impact of Surviving on a tiny budget long term but it is important to take on board money saving ideas.

I agree, ohmergerd has it. That's what it's like.

My food shop budget is £25 a week for me, DH and toddler aged DS. We have certainly gone without good numerous times to feed him a decent meal.

We tend to buy ingredients to make meals stretch. For instance, 1kg pack of value mince, value rice, value tomatoes, onions, peppers and value raisins will make us a sort of chilli that with moderately sized portions will last us three days.

I save up all my Tesco vouchers and have a huge luxury (ice cream, biscuits, naice meat, fresh fish etc) shop once a year at Xmas. Managed to save £90 vouchers last year for the shop, was in absolute heaven in the shop!

Thing is though, those at the bottom of the social heap are generally subjected to 'advice' from all quarters about every area of their life. It's all very well saying 'you've got to take account of money saving advice' (even if it comes with some acknowledgement that it might not really take everything into account), but it would be very different being subject to everyone's no doubt well meaning advice.

It's easy to think we know better than others and that our advice is actually useful when we haven't actually lived what others have to put up with. E.g. You'd need a camping stove and gas to produce meals on one, and it would almost certainly cost more than using mains electricity. A barbecue requires fuel and would be a real joy on a freezing, wet November night.

I feel so cross at all the people on this thread with their patronising and boastful lectures on how to eat well on 14 quid a week.

NO-ONE IN THIS COUNTRY SHOULD HAVE £14 A WEEK BUDGET FOR FOOD. IT'S FUCKING SHAMEFUL.

I cried at that bloody programme. They all looked so ill and old beyond their years. We should be storming parliament in outrage. I worked out we (family of 3) spend £150/week on food and household stuff from the supermarket then we eat out every weekend so probably £250/week. I will be cutting right back and supporting my local food bank. And we are not rich by this country's standards of rich but I certainly feel rich now. And yet this government are determined to take money from the poorest while keeping money in the pockets of the rich. It's disgusting and yet we just put up with it because the poor are too bloody downtrodden to protest and the rest of us are brainwashed into thinking stories we read about rich benefit claimants are representative of everyone. Gah.

ohmergerd excellent post. It opened my eyes to what poverty can be like. I was definitely in the "Oh just batch cook and pad out with lentils" camp before reading this thread.

I live in Ireland, but NO DOUBT families live like this here too. I'm contacting my local church as soon as I post this to see where I can help.

encyclogirl i hope your churches are better than the ones round here. It's all middle class helping themselves, attending to get kids into church secondary school, sadly. The vicar don't care about anything other than full pews and the church coffers. I'm sure that's not the case everywhere though.

So many good posts on this thread

Had to laugh about sea salt and olive oil baked potatoes. Lovely, the only way I can eat the horrible things, twice-baked all disguised with lots of butter and cheese. I did it a lot ten years ago but cheese and butter is also waaaaay more expensive now.

And no I don't buy the pre-packed "special" baking potatoes, who does that? Apart from the woman who held us up at the supermarket checkout making the assistant to get the pack changed because one of the potatoes had a bit of dirt on

Audrina - I planted some strawberry plants a few years ago in some baskets in my garden. Took the first few ripe ones into work on Wednesday to share around. One of my colleagues refused to touch them because they had come from my garden (freshly picked and washed that morning) rather than from a supermarket, and goodness only knows what could be on them!

I'm lucky enough to live in the countryside with neighbours who keep livestock and often hand round excess eggs, milk, vegetables and fruit amongst the village. This subsidises our food shop nicely and means we can often have "naice" ingredients for nothing.

Jacket potatoes - mine are not twice baked in a stale way , they are delicious, cooked in the microwave until soft and the skins finished in the oven until golden brown and cripy, yes a spray of olive oil ( M & S olive oil spray reduced from £3.99 to 50p, I have been using it for 2 years.)

We have no gas in our village and to be economical I use a BBQ throughout the summer, I am not suggesting its practical method for everyone but for me it saves fuel, a calor gas cannister came to me via freecycle and a refill lasts me 2 years.

Is it so wrong to share resourceful ideas? FWI worth I prefer to spend less on our household shopping and give generously to the foodbank and no it wasnt me that gave the Maldon sea salt.

I realised with horror a couple of years ago that I spent less on food for just myself, when I lived on my own in the 90's than I was spending to feed a family of 4 in 2010.

I used to buy all the convenience foods and ready meals. Paid no attention to 'price per 100g' type calculations, and just wandered round a huge supermarket once a fortnight choosing food willy nilly. The shame of it is, I used to throw an awful lot out as I had no cooking skills and had never heard of menu planning (thank heavens for mumsnet!! Have been doing that since 2008).

Don't even have a freezer but we are lucky to have a lidl, and a local market a mile away, with an aldi a few miles drive but I go past it a couple of times a week so can call in.

My biggest saving is stopping buying cereal and serving up porridge oats for breakfast, made with just water then the kids add a bit of milk and/or golden syrup/honey etc themselves. Dp and two boys were getting through £15 just on Aldi cereal a week, heaven knows what we'd have spent if it was branded stuff from Tesco!! The porridge is 2 x 59p bags per week from Quality save and its delicious.

We cook most things from scratch and I menu plan. Some nights we have food that is practically free like a bag of pasta with some chopped tomatoes as a sort of sauce. Or beans on toast. But I do that so other nights we can have chicken or prawns.
And yes, till I found mumsnet I would cook a chicken, serve it for one meal and bin the rest. Now we have the meat one day, wings and legs the next, chicken curry and then soup/stock.

(we don't have a freezer btw, things like prawns are eaten on day or purchase and I plan meals around when I will be shopping so it all keeps fresh just in the fridge).

This has probably already been mentioned but most people on a very basic budget are also on prepayment meters.

Turning the hob on for the amount of time it takes to cook a stew or soup is a luxury and at the end if the week when I'm eaking out the last of the credit it would be impossible.

BOLLOCKS you can buy that entire list for £14! LMFAO. Oh, yes, from the Aldi's that are on every corner. Lol. Yes, everyone lives near Aldi, Lidl, ASDA and street markets and if they don't they can just move.

I'm ashamed that we expect the poorest in our society to live on so little. I don't mind so much for the adults even though it's mostly women who have to contend with the problems, but to have our children living like this is a disgrace.
I agree that we should be storming parliament.

One of my colleagues refused to touch them because they had come from my garden (freshly picked and washed that morning) rather than from a supermarket, and goodness only knows what could be on them
that is truly bonkers...