AIBU to ask if you had £50 for a weekly food shop what would you buy?

[FuckingDiet]

This is not my situation and in no way a begging thread. Between now and the run up to Christmas we see a lot of these types of threads so I thought it would be a good idea to put all our advice in one place. That way if anybody is in need everything is in on place.

I will set a challenge of 3dc aged between 2-10 and 2 adults, your meal plan for the week, shopping list and where you would buy it from with a rough total. Lets see which one of us can come up with the best result.

I think it's condescending and patronising to suggest the unwashed poor can forage for food.

speakout you seem overly ready to poo poo anything anyone suggests, may help ease the pressure of living onba tight budget.

Living day in day out counting every penny is fucking exhausting especially when you have dc. I could live on beans on toast but I couldn't watch my dc have to do the same.

So when you are budgeting the good shop, if you have something like garlic pesto in the freeze, you can put 30p pasta on the list, then tick a meal. If you have ramble crumble in the freeze you can buy a 15p tin of custard, and that's pudding for the dc for a couple of nights......

It's all the little things that can help, knowing you have something as pose to nothing.

I think it is a bit distasteful for you to keep harping on, on a thread that is suppose to give ideas to people struggling.

Whether they can/want to use the ideas is their prerogative.

I think, given that this is supposed to be a thread for ideas for stretching a food budget, ALL ideas should be welcomed in the spirit they are offered.

I agree.

£50 is doable and we've done it a few times in the past for a few weeks but admittedly never from a starting from scratch position with absolutely nothing in the way of store cupboard items.

Your 'bucket of blackberries' speakout will make two family sized crumbles which will bulk out a meal and provide a treat (and lots of vitamin C).

In terms of growing your own, I doubt anyone is realistically suggesting that it would be possible or easy to feed a family of five from your back garden, of course it wouldn't. And growing stuff does involve a bit of effort (not much - I am incredibly time poor) and suitable space, but as others have said, it certainly is possible to supplement and add variety with relatively low outlay and little effort. Rhubarb for example is really expensive but for about the price of one pack of 4/5 stems you can buy a crown or a young plant and have a decent sized plant within a year giving you 5 times that every year for many, many years. A pack of 200 perpetual spinach seeds will cost about a quid and would last years. I sowed ten seeds in April and we could have had spinach practically every day for the past four months. Herbs are incredibly expensive in the shops but cost pennies to grow from scratch. That isn't being out of touch, its just going back to what would have been the norm 50 years ago. No, it isn't an overnight solution, but for many people a tight budget will be a long term thing.

I do fear that with the price of food rising people are going to really struggle and I think we need to reassess and look back to how things would have been done in our grandparents' day.

So many mistakes in my post, I just can't be arse to correct

I think it's condescending and patronising to suggest the unwashed poor can forage for food

Eh?

Who is talking about 'the unwashed poor'?

We're talking about stretching a food budget in various ways. People have seasonally foraged for hundreds of years.

Have you got anything positive or helpful to add to the thread, or are you just trying to needle other posters?

I think it's condescending and patronising to suggest the unwashed poor can forage for food

Bizarre. Nobody has said anything of the sort.

speakout are you ir have you been poor yourself?
I grew up in a traditional British working class family, we were very poor at times, my Mum could make a meal out of nothing (and frequently had to).
I don't consider it condescending or patronising in the slightest, to suggest that people might help themselves to a bit of food that grows around us, for free. It's what people around the world do, and always have done. It's just we tend to have forgotten how to do it in this country, what with increasing urbanisation, and increasing availability of cheap, often crap, supermarket food.

When we were really struggling, we used to have stewed blackberries with sugar in as pudding. Crumble though is much nicer. You need treats as well.

Namechange

I agree. I can see if you live in the heart of an ungreen city with no parks/wild areas it would be a bloody pain to search for blackberries/nettles esp when you and DP are working different shifts night/day because you can't afford childcare and any blackberries are covered with diesel. On the other hand rural areas have plenty of people on minimum wage and blackberrying/getting nettles/wild garlic/free apples etc is a good back up as I know. I notice there's a drive to return to gleaning - where you can take wonky veg back home or lots of an unwanted crop before the farmer has to compost it because the supermarket has changed its mind/wants carrot just so/there's a glut. Again only suitable in country areas with transport. But it isn't just middle class people living in naice houses who should benefit from what's free. It's knowing what's there and edible ("Tarquin, put that toadstool down" "it's fly agaric.")

Pasta (dried, around 30p a packet for a value brand).

Spaghetti (as above).

Jacket potatoes.

Beans and/or egg on toast.

Serve the pasta & spaghetti with a tomato sauce. I make mine from tinned chopped tomatoes, a bit of stock, Worcestershire sauce, herbs and maybe some tomato puree. You could of course add some mince if the budget allows.

Whichever fruit and veg is in season (and therefore on the Super 6 at Aldi).

I have had many weeks over the years where I have had to feed the whole family on next to nothing. It's not gourmet eating, but nobody goes to bed hungry either.

I would also buy a couple of packets of value biscuits (pence each) for a little sweet treat.

I remember when I went brambling as a child, in a graveyard. I'd taken a plastic bread bag to put them in. An almighty thunderstorm broke out, so we ran and found shelter, with me clutching my bag to my chest.

I arrived home about an hour later, soaking wet, and presented my mum with a bag full of slightly mushy fruit and the sight of me, in my brown and white check dress, covered in purple splotches.

Still, it's not the done thing for 9 year olds to walk a mile from home, these days, so ruined clothes needn't be factored into the cost of the bramble pie.

I think every 'food shopping on a budget thread' I've ever been on has turned into a debate about blackberries

Growing a fruit tree not so strange as it sounds. In Spring you can get bare root fruit trees from Aldis for around £2.99 the past couple of years. I put in half a dozen two years back, and one tree in particular, in its first year gave me a few lbs of apples. I was quite surprised, as have grown them all my life and never had one crop so well, so fast...

Joffrey I would guess that the objection to planting fruit trees presented as a solution to stretching a small food budget is that planting a dozen trees is not only a long term rather than immediate solution, but more importantly assumes you own a property with a large garden!

We grew up on a very tight budget and a phrase like 'we don't eat puddings / deserts' would have undermined my Mum's economy!

Crumble topping (not the granola and hazelnut sort, the margarine, sugar and flour sort- though butter was relatively much cheaper then than now) and pastry (my mum made it with half lard, half butter) padded out apples into a significant proportion of our calories. For months we ate apples cooked in different ways, baked, stewed, poached, pie, crumble, Eve's pudding, appley bread and butter pudding, steamed apple suet pudding, apple roly poly.... Once we cheered as what we thought was a lemon meringue pie was brought to the table. Only to find she had eked out a couple of egg whites and sugar to make a meringue topping for...... stewed apples!

These apples were gleaned/ donated in carrier bags by people with a glut (from one tree!), windfalls from the overhanging branches of the neighbours tree, and people used to leave boxes outside their house for anyone who wanted them. (Suburbs of a mining town, not Nut-tree On Hill) . We knew that apples came bruised and with worms in them that had to be cut out. Even now I can peel, core and chop a massive pile of apples in a trice!

No-one is saying that all the tips are practical to everyone. Just because fruit trees or blackberry picking doesn't work for everybody doesn't mean that it isn't a valid tip. It will help somebody and some may see that and think 'I'll try that'.

And some of those people may be poor and in rentals. It doesn't automatically preclude them from picking blackberries or growing fruit trees.

I'm constantly baffled by the assumption that any interest in food, eating pulses or foraging is a niche inaccessible middle class activity in the UK. Most other places in Europe and further afield it's something that most people do, with no class/income divide.

I live in an ex council property on the sort of estate was thrown up on green belt after the second world war. It's about half rented and half owned and many properties have very large gardens that back onto green belt and are hence suitable for planting fruit trees. Many properties, both rented and owned (you can tell because all the rented properties got new roofs and windows a few years ago) have fruit trees in their gardens. So anyone round here, and many other similar places, can grow and pick their own fruit.

There seems to be an assumption from some on here that everyone who is poor lives in a mythical world where there are no cheap supermarkets anywhere near and everyone only has access to an overpriced local convenience store that sells zero fresh food and that any discussion on eating on a budget shouldn't include anything outside that world.

While that may be the case for some, it's by no way the norm, so it's not helpful to sit there sniping at tips going 'what if they can't get to Lidl, what if they can't afford the bus, what if the DCs won't eat pulses, what if they can't cook or don't have any pans, what if the butchers and farm shops are the 'naice poncy kind' not the 'cheaper and better than the supermarket kind' etc etc etc because it's a very tired argument and rather insulting to assume that all people with a small food budget have no cooking skills, will only eat beige and chips and are unwilling and incapable of doing anything constructive to help themselves.

Long term tips are just as helpful as short term ones. 'Teach a man to fish' and all that.

Good post Barbara.
On mumsnet I've read the following -
Can't afford a fridge
Can't afford a freezer
Can't afford a cooker
Can't afford a slow cooker
Can't afford knives
Can't afford pans
Can't afford cooking utensils
Haven't got any flat surface that can be used to prepare food
Can't afford clingfilm/sandwich bags to wrap sandwiches in
Have no access to any supermarket or discount shop such as poundland
Don't live in an area that supermarkets will deliver to
Work 60 hours a week in minimum wage jobs and therefore have no time to shop for and prepare food. Furthermore their lives are so crap and depressing that they are forced to eat mars bars and coke instead of any kind of 'real food' to cheer themselves up.
Nobody has any friends, family or neighbours that will help them out.
The word 'desperate' gets used a lot as well.
I mean, come on. People do go through difficult situations at times but the above is a worst case scenario and doesn't bear much connection to reality of life in the UK.

I'm not denying that there will be people living in real poverty e.g. people who are waiting for benefits to come through, people here illegally who can't approach the authorities, people who have fallen between the cracks, families on low wages yet not entitled to benefits. However, in the main, poverty in this country is relative poverty and can't be compared with the plight of people in other countries.

I was born in the 60s. I was lucky enough to be the youngest child and I think my experinces were better than my older siblings but still had enough of actual poverty before there were benefits available. My parents both worked but we were poor and often they struggled to feed and clothe us. The NHS was young. Free school meals came in when I was at school but not around for my brothers and sisters. We went hungry quite a lot and cold very often in winter.

I can remember my mum accidentally dropping some leaf tea into the breakfast porridge but we still had to eat it becasue there was nothing else. Mince when we had it was bulked out with beans. We did grow potatoes but that was latterly when we were older as prior to that we were in a flat with no garden. It got better when the oldest ones were able to do some work to contribute.

Not much family to help as my dad's parents committed suicide when he was a small boy and he ended up in children's homes after his gradparents couldn't afford to feed him. He didn't have a good time in the homes. My Mum was one of 9 (2nd eldest) and her parents didn't keep good health. I'm not saying we didn't have some fantastic times as children as my parents took us out for free activities - long walks to parks for picnic and games, occasional trips in the holidays on the bus to the beach.

I'm not saying that any or all of noeffing's list isn't the reality for some people but it' not the case for the majority of people who would deem themselves "poor".

I'm actually off blackberry picking this afternoon. They'll go really well with the cooking apples someone gave me in a crumble and a healthy snack.

My friend and I walk every week, it's free and doesn't cost a thing and the fun of getting a few free blackberries adds to it this time of year - we live in a built up area but 30 mins walk out you hit the fields and blackberries!!

£50 is our weekly budget for two adults (one sahp, one working), a toddler and a cat. Shop at Aldi (some Tesco products are roughly equivalent in price so occasionally will get a home delivery), buy no brands, have to limit meat and fish.

This week's menu for lunches and dinners, using some products already in the cupboard (e.g. lasagne sheets):
Sunday roast, used leftovers for chicken rice for Monday's dinner
Veg soup and bread for Monday lunch, I took roast leftovers to work
Hummus and dips Tues lunch, I took leftover rice
Lasagne Tues dinner
Leftover lasagne for Weds lunch for DH and toddler, leftover soup for me
Bangers and mash Weds dinner
Leftover sausages in pasta for Thurs lunch
Taglietelle carbonara for dinner
Hummus and dips Fri lunch
Fish and chips Fri dinner

Sure we'll have some leftover bits eg pasta for Saturday before I make it to the shops. For he above I did have lasagne sheets and some taglietelle left.

Nappies and cat stuff is what tips me over the budget plus any luxuries like chocolate. Don't buy booze.

On tighter weeks we have a lot of baked beans, jackets, pasta etc and will go whole week's without meat - maybe just tinned tuna in a pasta bake.

@noeffingidea don’t forget they are also a single mum who is a quad amputee with 7 children who all have additional needs.

Great idea for a thread, anyone could do with saving money this time of year!

aldi and lidle are going to be great for cutting costs but getting what's best from where so they both can be cheaper for various foods so get the best from both supermarkets maybe cleaning products from Aldi and fish/dairy from lidle

places like farmfoods do special offers where you can get vouchers for a few quid off and get some branded foods for cheaper than the main supermarkets and sometimes have car food etc much cheaper than Asda

Hit up Asda Morrisons and Tesco for yellow stickers and freeze what you can

Join pages online for things like "feed your family for £20 a week" they have great cheap recipes and tips on how to use the leftovers into different meals

Would substitute meat with cheaper alternatives like pulses, oats and quorn so you can "stretch" a packet of mince over a couple meals. Pad out chicken curry with a lot of reduced veg or frozen cauliflower type idea as you don't need a whole chicken breast each but then you're filling up with veg rather than rice...

dont buy the pre chopped veg/meat, make what you can from scratch and buy bulk spuds etc when you can afford to

Building up a pantry is a luxury many can't afford but does work out cheaper if you get some bits on offer and you just need to buy the fresh ingredients when they are on offer or reduced

I've made £48.09 at Morrisons. It doesn't include any toiletries, just food, but it also doesn't take into account any offers and assumes no store cupboard. There's probably a lot that could be tweaked to make this more frugal. Not sure it'll score well on the healthy as relies a lot on jars 😬

Breakfasts
5 days porridge (made w/water)
1 day American pancakes (homemade) with peanut butter
1 day scrambled eggs on toast

Lunches
Baked beans on toast
Cheese and sweetcorn omelette
Baked potatoes with cheese/onion
Macaroni cheese (w/fusilli)
Vegetable soup (homemade) and bread
Cheese and salad sandwiches
1 day of leftovers

Dinners
Bean chilli w/rice and wedges
Cottage pie with peas
Pasta w tomato and veg sauce
Sausage and potato casserole
Fish pie with carrots, peas
Vegetable soup (homemade) and rolls
Cauliflower tikka masala with rice

Snacks - fruit, crudités, (peppers, carrots, cucumber), yoghurt

Prices;
1kg porridge oats 75p
Peanut butter 1.30
1.5kg flour 80p
500g sugar 42p
12 eggs 1.77
Butter 1.40
Milk 8 pints £2
Brown bread x2 loaves 72p
Baked beans x3 96p
Sweetcorn tin 35p
Onion 2kg 1.28
Baking potatoes 2.5kg £2
Cheddar 500g 3.88
500g mince beef 2.08
Wholemeal rolls 12 £1
Salad peppers 2x3 pack 1.68
Chopped toms tin 30p
Red kidney beans 30p
Butter beans 38p
Black eye beans 38p
Chilli con carne mix 40p
Easy cook rice 500g 2.32
Maris piper pots 2.5kg £2
Wonky carrots 2kg 70p
Tomato purée 50p
Frozen peas 78p
Fusilli 500g 50p
Celery 2 packs 1.3
Cumberland sausages 8 1.86
Pasta sauce 2 jars 84p
Fish pie mix frozen 400g 3.73
Mixed frozen veg 1.50
Cauliflower x2 1.44
Tikka masala sauce .84
Cucumber .45
Lettuce.46
Wonky apples x10 £1.60
Bananas x10 1.78
Natural yoghurt 1kg 1.34

Oh I meant to say I've priced for lunches to include all 5 people so if anybody is having school meals or whatever then quantities could be reduced