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.

And I have come across people who did not know how to make a cheese sauce, so bought ready mixes instead.
It is not the answer for dire poverty. But cooking skills does help.

I really worry how people are going to manage if Brexit brings food supply problems and they cannot afford to put any shelf stable food to one side now.

They still won't eat aubergine casserole though. They're fucking kids. I'd rather they had their normal food and were happy and I took the hit than we all ate lentils every single night

Some really weird feelings about very normal foods on this thread. Any thread involving vegetables or pulses goes this way though. No wonder so many kids are being brought up undernourished and/or overweight and fussy with attitudes like this from their parents.

OP, I think it’s definitely true that people lack the skills necessary to be able to create a healthy, sustainable diet for themselves. It’s absolutely possible to eat very well very cheaply if you know how to cook. It’s a myth that homemade food/fruit and veg is more expensive than ready meals and junk. But people don’t know how to turn a bag of lentils, an onion and some spices into a tasty healthy cheap filling dinner, and with the availability of fast food/junk/ready meals there’s no incentive to learn. Being able to make healthy filling nutritious meals in bulk is a hell of a skill to have, one that we should be teaching in schools for those kids whose parents haven’t a clue themselves.

I get sick of watching Documentaries where Women with Tattoos, Nail extensions and a couple of Dogs visit the Food Banks while puffing away on a Fag.

And if I had £1, would I be buying lentils? No, I would want cheap, easy and tasty and that is generally value stuff. Also calories. You get a lot more calories in a pack of value biscuits and some chips than you do in lentils

And can you see why this would be a stupid choice? With a bag of lentils (admittedly also an onion, and some spices) you could easily get 10-15 filling meals with some nutritional value to them, compared to the initially pleasant but short lived enjoyment of spending a pound on biscuits and chips that won’t last very long. If you do realise that and would prefer to spend the pound on junk knowing you’re choosing it over being able to feed yourself for many more meals then totally fair. But it’s a crying shame if someone in that position lacks the education to realise they’re shooting themselves in the foot in the long term making that choice.

Surely budgeting classes are even more crucial when you’ve got ‘nothing’? I never needed to understand how to budget more than when I was extremely poor, even if the best outcome from budgeting at that time would be trying to minimise the amount of debt I was quickly accruing through not being able to make ends meet?

The aubergine stew gave me a good laugh...£1.50 for 3 aubergines. I'd eat them but if I was skint, I wouldn't spend money on aubergines which most children wouldn't want to eat. I'd buy a bag of value oven chips and value nuggets and feed my kids for a few days.

Most children? Really? Why are kids growing up turning their noses up at a bloody normal and tasty vegetable? Breeding fussy eaters who will ‘only eat’ junk and likely end up overweight and/or malnourished is not a good solution.

Seriously where are all of these ‘most children’ who despite being hungry and in food poverty are randomly refusing to eat very standard normal foods?

Value pasta is a better buy as you have to include cost of cooking. Value pasta is eaten by a lot of poor people. Just pasta by itself.

And agree that aubergines are expensive. I do cook with tinned pulses and cook frugally. Aubergines are not cooking frugally. Carrots and potatoes are cooking frugally.

And if I had £1, would I be buying lentils? No, I would want cheap, easy and tasty and that is generally value stuff. Also calories. You get a lot more calories in a pack of value biscuits and some chips than you do in lentils

And can you see why this would be a stupid choice? With a bag of lentils (admittedly also an onion, and some spices) you could easily get 10-15 filling meals with some nutritional value to them, compared to the initially pleasant but short lived enjoyment of spending a pound on biscuits and chips that won’t last very long.

A bag of lentils might cost a pound, but the onion, spices and fuel to make it into 10 palatable meals cost more than a pound. These are good ideas to eat thriftily and have a low food expenditure generally but in time of crisis this is not workable. If someone comes to the foodbank with 2 small children and they haven't eaten for 24 hours I'm not going to give her a bag of lentils. I'm going to give her a packet of biscuits with tea and squash while they are waiting, then pasta and sauce, baked beans, tinned meat and tinned potatoes, tinned green beans; tinned spaghetti with sausages, corned beef, tuna: in fact anything she can heat up in a microwave or cook using just boiling water in 10 mins or less. I love lentils but if we gave them to food bank clients they'd be back the next month having spent up again on the fuel costs of slow cook foods..

Second day in a row another stupid goady fucker post. 'I can't imagine'. Try thinking. Or just fuck off with your lentils and chickpeas and fart yourself into space or something.

You mean those manipulative "documentaries" designed to bring out the worst snobbery in the hard of thinking, Denny? The televisual equivalent of the Daily Mail?

I'm living in food poverty right now. Currently living in Portugal with minimum wage doesn't cover anything, it's all well and good having food to cook, but what if you don't have money to pay for the gas bottle to use the cooker? Everything in my flat is gas. If this is goes i don't have hot water and cannot cook food. Everything you've just detailed would involve using the cooker. I've has some months where the week before pay day I've had pasta for breakfast lunch and tea as it was on offer and was all i could afford to buy that i knew would last me the entire week

you could easily get 10-15 filling meals
And where would you keep these meals if you haven't got a fridge or freezer? Or storage boxes for that matter

It is also why dry toast is so common if you are very poor. Uses hardly any electricity to make.

Yes, the onion oil and spices take it to over a pound, but once you divide that cost by the number of meals it’s pretty clear it’s a much cheaper way to eat. I think I did the sums last time I cooked dhal and it worked out at around 10p per portion. And yes I know people will point out you need the initial couple of quid for the lentils and oil and spices but let’s face it, you’re not likely to get a bag of chips and biscuits anywhere for a quid either. My local chippy is £2+ for a bag and it’s a low cost of living area.

Agree though, that it’s not useful at the moment of crisis when someone is attending a food bank and likely need to eat ASAP. But teaching low cost cooking to people would help them in the lean times before they’re able to get to a food bank or to stretch their income. It was a good move for some food banks to hand out Jack Monroe recipes, I’ve made many of her dishes and they’re really good and extremely cheap (the carrot, kidney bean cumin burgers are 9p each!).

I've not RTFT but I totally agree with you. It is lack of education that in turn makes us less resourceful. I think it would be great to start going back to basics in school and teaching real life skills as well as core subjects. If food sources were compromised I dread to think what most of the U.K. would do...

And where would you keep these meals if you haven't got a fridge or freezer? Or storage boxes for that matter

Surely if you’re trying to feed a hungry family lunch and evening meal they’d get through that within a couple of days anyway? Lentils are fine kept cool at room temperature (and I doubt people in abject poverty are heating their homes to such a level that food is going to spoil immediately) for a couple days.

I appreciate you’re trying to highlight the problems people face, but how about some suggestions that might be practically useful instead of tearing into other people’s? This thread would be so much better redone as a ‘your tips on eating cheaply/feeding the family for a week on £20/low cost meals with minimal fuel usage’ instead of the way it’s gone where people can’t help but try and tear down suggestions with nonstop whataboutery.

Then shar8ng I wouod advise you tomread the full thread and you will learn a lot about living in poverty, incl the fact that not ‘knowing how to grow vegs’ has nothing to do with having no food in the cupboard.

Btw if food sources were compromised you en duo with a WWII situation, rationing books, people growing stuff in their garden and STILL UNABLE to feed themselves just from that.

Though I don't think that a food bank should hand out seeds or anything like that. People in hard times just need easy and convenient food that will store well. Eg - tins.

But generally speaking education in this area would really help.

Very common for families of Indian origin I know who are very poor to eat Dhal as an evening meal.

Turmeric, garlic, cumin, chillies - total cost ££, before you've even bought any food. So Dahl is a complete nonsense. You all remind me of this. thetab.com/uk/2018/09/11/here-is-waitroses-student-essentials-list-and-its-even-more-middle-class-than-youd-expect-80821

And I have come across people who did not know how to make a cheese sauce, so bought ready mixes instead.
Cost of
sauce mix: 50p,
milk 50p
Total for cheese sauce £1
Cost of
cheese (50g), 23p (won't be very cheesy but what can you do?)
milk, 50p,
flour, 5p
butter, 13p
mustard 6p
Total for cheese sauce: 97p.
...this saving of 3p only applies if you have a full storecupboard. If you have to buy a block of cheese, a bag of flour, a jar of mustard that sauce is looking upwards of £3.00

But it does remind me of social workers teaching immigrants in the 60s who were very poor how to cook using traditional British ingredients and meals. It did not go down well.

The trouble is Half that posters on this thread don't want solutions and ideas. They just want more money thrown at the problem.

Food poverty can be caused by getting a job. We had 3 weeks with no income.