Is food poverty real?

[Leapfrog44]

Provocative title, sorry I know food poverty is real. I'm just not convinced about the extent of it.

I've cooked half a packet of dried chickpeas 50p which we eat fried with garlic, salt and olive oil. They're also delicious with pasta or with potatoes as a curry. Braised Puy lentils (60p) cooked with onions, celery and the bendy carrots left in the fridge.

And to really push the boat out an aubergine stew with onions and tomatoes. The 3 big aubergines cost £1.50. Tomatoes and parsley came from the garden.

I spent an hour cooking today including making a loaf of bread. With some rice or couscous, and some salad, what I've made will feed us for 4 nights.

We have apples too, foraged at the weekend. The windfall ones I cut the bad off and stewed them, the rest are good for eating. There are also elderberries, plums and a few late blackberries dotted around the margins of the city for anyone who can be bothered to go out and pick them.

I know not everyone has a garden but a very small space can be used to grow quite a lot. In pots I grew enough tomatoes, green beans and lettuce to feed us all summer. If I was less lazy or more skint, I'd also seed save, to ensure I can grow them for free next year. Many allotment holders would totally give up some produce in exchange for labour too.

So I guess I'm wondering if the increasing number of people who are in financial dire staits and find themselves needing to use food banks are in fact suffering from a lack of food education as much as lack of money? Our grandparents in the same situation would have cultivated every bit of earth with home grown vegetables and I'm sure would have been more resourceful and more capable of making do on very little.

Obviously there are very vulnerable people without the means to cook or to grow but surely not everyone experiencing 'food poverty' is in this category? I often wonder why at food banks they don't ask if recipients have access to a bit of ground (or a few pots) and give them seeds? Pulses and in season veggies are incredibly cheap and with a few quid you can feed your family really well if you know how to cook them. It's far better to cook a simple vegetable curry or dhal and eat it all week than have to exist on the pot noodles, tinned sludge, sugary cereals and biscuits that they're giving out.

Times are going to get MUCH tougher. Climate change and environmental destruction will soon jeopardise our food security and food banks will not be able to help everyone.

So AIBU? As a society are we actually getting poorer and hungrier or have we just raised a couple of generations lacking general resourcefulness, cooking skills and horticultural know how? Times are tough for increasing numbers but I can't help feeling that many of these people just don't have a clue how to help themselves.

We once had a tenner to do us for three days and were pretty much out of food. Went to Aldi bought a bag of apples for fruit. Bread, milk, pasta, cereal, carrots, peas, crackers and yoghurts. Three days later we got paid and went straight to get grapes, salad stuff, veg, meat ( including, steak, stewing beef and burgers) and got fizzy drinks and chocolate. NOBODY should ever be limited in what they can eat and everybody has the right to be unhealthy some days should they choose. As someone said above, would you want to eat lentils every day?

Cognitive I know that, and I've lived through both.

“I hate lentils, pulses, chickpeas and aubergines”

All these sorts of things can be really tasty as part of nicely-cooked meal- but not on their own.

You need olive oil, rocket, feta, fresh coriander, sun-dried toms, garlic, lemons, yadda yadda yadda to make pulses into the kind of foods people would actually want to eat every day.

Cooking tasty food isn’t cheap, whether it’s based on chickpeas or salmon.

“This is the prime example of hardship usually experienced:
Not being funny but I hate lentils, pulses, chickpeas and aubergines, I would rather not eat if that was all I had.
This poster obviously never had to make a choice to "not eat" as opposed to "eat".”

Is this a pisstake? Why would anyone eat stuff they don’t like? Why wouldn’t they just take the chickpea/ lentil/ aubergine money and buy something they like to eat instead?

Are you seriously suggesting poor people should eat food they don’t like?!?

I’m struggling to take this or the OP seriously. Surely no one thinks like this?!

I'd add we're lucky we got paid three days later, some people don't. I don't know how we'd have faired with more than three days of the exact same food every day

I don't see why it's so controversial to suggest that basic cooking skills have declined and we're apparently doing nothing to help out people who are hungry except giving them shopping bags of processed food and little to support them to gain the skills we all should have.

www.theguardian.com/money/2013/sep/05/home-cooking-decline-low-income-ready-meals

I'm just feeling that our grandparents went through far worse and probably managed far better. In times of increased hunger why is no one growing food any more? We are raising a generation of kids who are whizzes on Instagram but have no idea how to grow things to eat. It's particularly bad for poor kids from the inner city who never even get to visit a garden.

We have been in a very low income and right now we have no income which is why I'm turning to pulses (and pressure cooking them takes 10mins!) and potatoes. I totally know I'm privileged to have a pressure cooker, fuel and a place to cook, as I said in the original post. I'm not talking about people who are really vulnerable or destitute.

It's not poor bashing to suggest that many people are ill-equipped to deal with the increasing levels of poverty and we are doing fuck all about it, particularly in terms of educating the children who are growing up on ready meals. Surely food banks handing out pot noodles are not the answer to feeding the growing number of hungry people? I'd rather my kids learned about allotment gardening, cooking and keeping chickens at school than about shakespeare.

It’s not Contraversial all it’s just wrong, and lazy arrogant thinking

Are you seriously suggesting poor people should eat food they don’t like?!?
If the alternative, as suggested many times on this thread, is starvation and extreme malnourishment? The answer is yes.
Sorry, I cannot take this seriously anymore.

My grandmother had a decent sized garden and since married women with kids didn’t go to work then she had all fucking day to cook and grow veg.

I used to work for Citizens Advice for years and we would give out vouchers for the find bank, food poverty is very real, it's very easy from a position of relative privilege to be judgemental but none of us know what life may throw at us
I have seen people who have had very affluent lives and through no fault of their own been suddenly reliant on benefits and food banks, it's heart breaking and has made me far more aware of how lucky I am
As for them handing out seeds, I've read some utter shite on mumsnet but that has to be the most ignorant thing I've ever read

Cognitive I know that, and I've lived through both.

Me too sadly @PhilomenaButterfly

I haven't read all the thread but you have no idea.
It's not so much those on stable benefits or tax credits on a normal week, it's when something breaks and goes wrong or you have an unexpected change in circumstances.

I had to stop work unexpectedly due to a major medical issue being discovered which required 6 lots of surgery.in a short period. At the worst we had no money for months. One day I got so desperate to eat I mixed flour and water and tried to cook it just to have something to eat.

I didn’t have. A lack of fucking food fucking education.

I had. No. Fucking money. Raiding the kids piggy banks no money. Down the side of the sofa no money. Causing a queue in the self check out with the 2ps and 1ps

Go and spend a few hours in a food bank or night shelter/ soup kitchen first then come back and explain how you are going to equipt these people with the skills

HOW CAN WE GROW FOOD TO EAT IN TOWER BLOCKS WITH NO BALCONYS NO COMMUNAL GARDENS HOW FFS.

@silvercuckoo why on earth would the alternative be starvation or malnutrition? Surely the alternative is just, you know, other food? If you have money for lentils you can afford a loaf of bread, or an Iceland frozen pizza

Come on, you know this. Don’t you?

Oh dear op. Your privilege is showing

• I didn’t have. A lack of fucking food fucking education.

I had. No. Fucking money. Raiding the kids piggy banks no money. Down the side of the sofa no money. Causing a queue in the self check out with the 2ps and 1ps*

This!!! To suggest that people are facing food poverty because they're not educated to cook a meal from scratch is just absurd!
My mum is a genius in the kitchen but even she couldn't magic a gourmet meal out of the pennies she's have to dig from behind the sofa to feed us. And we were lucky it was just the two of us to feed.

Dear god OP, next you'll be wondering why homeless people don't just build their own huts.

Ffs! 🤦🏻‍♀️

@glintandglide there lies part of the problem I guess. This kind of thing is the food that the poor people of Italy, India and the Middle East have traditionally eaten. Those countries all have wonderful food cultures which are based on pretty cheap ingredients that are cooked well. It's a great pleasure to eat lentils and aubergines, it's not some kind of punishment that poor people should be subjected to. I'm not suggesting people eat gruel.

OP where are your brains?!

People live in flats with no garden. If they have one, where is the guarantee that the rent won't increase, they have to move again, leaving the veg they grew for someone else?

You can't be this stupid.

It doesn’t matter what people in India do, if you don’t like lentils you don’t like them. Why would you eat something you don’t like?

If lentils were expensive and goat meat was cheap you wouldn’t be deriding the poor of India for not eating it would you?

As a student for the last 4 years, relying on a bursary that doesn't even cover my rent (I live at my rented home), I haven't had the heating on for 4 years. My daughter bought me reduced bread and I have spent that time having toast and tea (UHT milk). I could not afford to put the oven on regularly and if I did I cooked roast potatoes - the whole bag - which lasted me 4 days. Just potatoes, and gravy if I had any.

Oddly when you are cold you don't want to move and spend more time in bed. I can cook. I do garden. But a lack of resources is not just seeds and ability. It is much more complex than that.

I cannot wait to start getting paid a proper wage regularly.

This princess types have no fucking idea what it's like to struggle yet they come on here to preach and look down on others when they haven't a clue

@Hiphopfrog yes, they also have the warmer climes to grow food all year long and probably have time to stay home and cook. A lot of people who are using food banks are also employed and not only are they cash poor but also time poor.

Do you even know anyone on universal credit?