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.

andtheresaw I am not talking about this as a saving if you are incredibly poor. I have been there and lived on value pasta and dry toast and baked beans.
But I am now no longer there, but don't have lots of money. At my level where you dont need foodbanks, but don't have lots of money, cooking frugally means we eat better quality food than I would otherwise. So not relevant to OP, but yes cooking skills matter. And I make cheese sauce cheaper than you quoted. You buy extra mature and use less cheese, no mustard and bag of flour that I buy for 19p and use for everything.
Cooking skills help people who are not at foodbank level, but like myself. So I can make a tomato pasta sauce much cheaper than store bought one and takes about 5 minutes.

It’s a shame Nesh. I mean, absolutely, the core problem is why some people have so little money to begin with. I’m a huge advocate of banning zero hour contracts for a start, I’ve never been more miserable, mentally unwell or poor than when I had no choice but to take a job on one of those. There are myriad complex factors. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a valuable discussion to be had about how people can actually survive here and now when they’re doing with very little. People just like to find a way to dismiss any potential advice or solutions. YES, to make dhal you need to buy spices. The common advice is to try plan ahead so for a month, each week you try and buy one spice, yes it’s an extra pound and you may not be able to spare that, but in a month’s time you then have the ingredients to turn basic foods like lentils and pulses into tasty meals, and it’s not like you’re using the entire spice jar in every portion anyway, a little goes a long way.

What’s the alternative? Spend even more money on short fix junk food and then have nothing in the cupboard for later? There’s no escaping that dhal (how have we got so fixated on dhal but anyway) is cheap and healthy and filling. But because it’s not literally free, people criticise it as a suggestion.

So okay: what’s cheaper? That will stretch to several meals? And be not nutritionally void?

@HalfDivided What if you've not got the money to buy the staple ingredients in the first place? Average prices don't count for much if you can't afford the initial outlay.

The trouble is Half that posters on this thread don't want solutions and ideas. They just want more money thrown at the problem.
Actually that is bollocks. As someone who works compressed hours so I can support my family AND help out at the foodbank (including giving cookery lessons) I am just trying to make you understand that it isn't as simple as ;'teach the poor to eat cheaper food'.
There are societal and personal pressures coming to bear which mean by the time people are flagged for help they are not in a position to suddenly switch to eating porridge and dhal.
Almost everyone in this country is 3 pay cheques away from potential homelessness and food poverty. That's 3 pay cheques. That's a car accident, or illness, or redundancy.

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.

More likely that prices would continue to rise, those that can afford it continue as normal (albeit with less spare income) and people that can't are even more screwed.

Times are very different to WW2. People looked out for each other back then, now they just trample over them.

Basically I cook how my mum did. So overall I save maybe a small amount every week, but we eat better quality food than if I did not do this. I don't always do that. My DP is very ill so when I was getting up in the middle of the night, we were eating cheap crap ready made food. I totally understand that in many circumstances you do not have the energy to cook from scratch. But I do think it is a useful skill to have.

I think the myth that everything can be made cheaper from scratch should be debunked actually.
I think if people worked out the actual cost of each meal, they would be shocked. I did it last year and it's a real eye-opener.

Or suggest that they just eat lentils, ffs.

No not everything can be cooked cheaper from scratch. I still buy ready made stuff. Some things can be made cheaper from scratch.
Bread for example is cheaper to buy ready made.

You buy extra mature and use less cheese,
Fair dos. My price was based on 50g of Tesco value brand mature cheddar. They don't do an extra mature in the value range. In Tesco the cheapest extra mature is 6.82/kg if you don't buy the large bulk pack.
If it is twice as cheesy as the mature cheddar and you only use 25g n(that's the volume of a matchbox) it will cost 17p. A significant saving of 7p.

Cheap tinned soup can also be cheaper than made from scratch.
Generally though the more expensive the product, the more likely it is cheaper to make it yourself.

Do you think savings of 7p don't matter?

Times are very different to WW2. People looked out for each other back then, now they just trample over them.

They did back then, too. Rationing coupon corruption was rife, so was crime - BIG time. Huge crime wave during the Blitz during the blackouts. People were malnourished. Malnutrition during the Great Depression and WWII caused a lot of people to get rickets which then caused women in particular problems in childbirth in the late 40s and 50s. It wasn't a good time. I'm amazed so many people think of it as some type of Golden Era when so many people got blown to bits or shot and killed or maimed and semi-starved. It's mind-blowingly stupid. My father was a boy during the Blitz. He remembers well how awful it was.

They think it was a marvellous time because the health of the nation was the best its been. They ignore the amount of people killed including many of my family.

Ground Cumin 49p at Asda. Garlic Salt 70p.

Depends of course where you live. I live in an area with a large Asian population. Prices of spices at ordinary supermarkets is outrageous and they are poorer quality. Where I live you can get smaller quantities for 20 to 30p.

They think it was a marvellous time because the health of the nation was the best its been. They ignore the amount of people killed including many of my family.

My mother once said to me about some film "Oh people are so violent these days". She grew up during the second world war - which I pointed out to her. People look at the past through very distorted lens.

If the health of the nation was at its best it was because the conscription health info was so awful at WW1 the government decided they needed to do something about it in order to have a decent army. There is a lot of dosh talked about the past.

I agree with the poster who said she wasn't wealthy but wasn't at food bank level. I'm the same I suppose. I shop on a tight budget...I have decent cooking skills which really does help me but I totally get it doesn't solve the problems for others necessarily.

Ready made things are sometimes more expensive and sometimes cheaper....I have worked out the cost of many home made things versus ready made. When I'm skint I stop baking...the cost of a homemade Victoria sponge made with the cheapest ingredients still costs more than a shop bought one ditto biscuits and bread.

Yes agree shop bought cakes and biscuits are cheaper. But when I have the money I home bake as they taste nicer. You have to buy pretty expensive cake to get as nice, not the cheap kind.

We don't all live near a supermarket chain and the bus fare to get to one far outweighs any savings which are possibly made, £4 bus fare when you have only £73 jsa is a helluva lot out of your weekly income

Malnutrition during the Great Depression and WWII caused a lot of people to get rickets which then caused women in particular problems in childbirth in the late 40s and 50s

That's not what I understand. We were fitter, healthier, infant mortality declined and people lived longer.

Agree, £4 here for bus fare as well. It really does depend where you live. I have a big advantage living within walking distance to shops selling spices cheaply and cheap stores like Iceland. Most people do not.

There was malnutrition during Depression. During second world war people were healthier in general than before or since. Does not mean rickets never happened.

Do you think savings of 7p don't matter?
Are you being deliberately dim or just deliberately provocative ? I know you are but can't seem to prevent myself responding today for some reason. The block of EXTRA mature cheese is half the size of the one of mature cheese and more expensive overall as the cheese is 160% of the price per kilo. So while the half pint of sauce is 7p cheaper the person in food poverty is £2 worse off overall.

This discussion is one of two parts: the need for better education and the idea that cooking simple inexpensive ingredients well can feed a family for less is obvious. I cook that way myself and over the years my Dc have had music lessons and school residentials as we have never lived to our means. I have run thrifty cooking classes locally. My eldest DC end up cooking for their flatmates at uni because the others spend twice as much or don't know how to do it cheaply.
But: people already in food poverty cannot be helped using these techniques. It is not feasible. You can't pull people back from the edge and expect them to change the habits of a lifetime and re-educate their children's palate's. It just will not work. We ran a soup workshop which wasn't popular. Then we did a drop in lunch where we served the soups (and said how much per portion they cost). The next time we advertised the workshop it was full. You can do this once people aren't in dire need any more . You can offer classes to school children and young people leaving home for the first time. What you can't do, and must not do when people are already at their lowest ebb, is to offer to educate them on how to cook cheaply when they are starving hungry.
I have seen a foodbank client eat raw flour as he was so hungry. Raw pulses would probably kill him.

I have said all along exactly what you are saying. Why are you commenting as if I have not?