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.

I've not asked anyone to bash their heads. Tough if they don't like my comments.

Advanced payments can be claimed.

How much do you pay your childminder Nesh Enough so they arent claiming right?

I agree with the OP. I regularly pick apples from my orchard and pop an apple pie into the Aga. This costs very little. My next door neighbour is a farmer who sometimes gifts me organic lamb. Obviously I know not everyone has a neighbour who raises organic lamb, but non-organic would be fine, surely.

People in the Forces who get the low amount are unmarried and so have accommodation and all food provided. My ex was a squaddie and was much better off than me. I was working full time looking after kids.

@neshoma

Agreed. My night job, there are two Polish girls and one guy. Been here about 2 years. Couldn't speak any English, now fluent. All fantastic people.

They didn't know how our system works, just that with the right effort and attitude, it seems too. It's worked for them, they're certainly not anywhere near the breadline, and they earn minimum wage.

There's a certain amount of people where the situation was unavoidable, I don't deny that for a minute. But there's so many that seem to want to wallow and reject any route that means they have to put themselves out slightly.

I've got a good job. I don't need another to get by comfortably now. But I'm too ambitious, I want to protect myself should anything happen in the future, so I work two jobs and barely sleep for three days every week. I don't make an excuse about, why should I have to "run myself into the ground" or declare I have a child and as a single parent, its impossible to work and pay for childcare, so I can't possibly do a second job.

Point is, I could make a thousand excuses for not doing loads of things in my life. And make them sound perfectly plausible. They're still excuses though.

There's lots of mention of the 5 or so weeks of zero benefits at the beginning of UC. How many posters were still in a situation they would class as poverty once the effects of that delay had been caught up?

"and barely sleep for three days every week"

i hope this doesnt catch up with you health wise with the NHS the way it is.

Oh, that's it, then. It's all going to be so much fun when we crash out with no deal, which is looking increasingly likely. aba, I think the NMW should be just that, for everyone over 18. I can't believe it's extended to 25 here. What a joke. Like I said, even America doesn't do that. It's the same rate for over 18s, NMW is NMW.

You can claim advance payments of universal credit. But they don’t slways authorise them. You also have to pay the back out of your first main payment.

I agree with the OP. I regularly pick apples from my orchard and pop an apple pie into the Aga. This costs very little. My next door neighbour is a farmer who sometimes gifts me organic lamb. Obviously I know not everyone has a neighbour who raises organic lamb, but non-organic would be fine, surely.
I hope this comment is a joke!

If poverty was so easily solved then why are millions of children living in households below the breadline?

Do people actually think that they’ve got the magic solution and these millions of households just aren’t making the effort

Fuck

Me

MrBeans I think that one was a joke, worryingly the others aren't

Was the dead deer in jam jars a joke or something we were meant to believe because I thought it was hilarious

PortiaCastis

Not a joke, (as per the photo) that is how we store meat without a freezer.

She posted a picture of the jam jar, I think that one is real

My first . Unbelievably ignorant post...

People do can meat, smoke and can fish. Yes in glass jars. However a pressure canner is very expensive, takes time and money.

I've just never ever seen two deers being carted home and butchered

I think @RedneckStumpy little bed in the US. Canning meat in jars is perfectly normal and ordinary.
Importing pressure canners is an expensive business and not really an option for anyone who has no budget .
I imported one because I managed to save for it. It's brilliant but that is a different conversation.
Venison is more and more available in the UK. That is also a different conversation.
But obviously canning is not an option for anyone really struggling here in the UK.

"Little bed" - I mean lives in

Polish people leave their country and come over to find work. But there's no way some British person on benefits will do a bit of ironing!

Except you seem to have missed the bit about it being fraud to earn that money without declaring it to DWP, and you get your benefits docked in return when you do report it. That's apart from the earlier points about just how many people want/can afford someone else to do their ironing for them, and having to have the equipment, space and availability of power to do said ironing.

I was also thinking about the foraging comments above, and foraging for apples. I don't know of many wild apple trees around apart from a few crab apples, so presumably you were "foraging" in someone's orchard which classes as theft - even if it WAS on the ground (hint; some farmers feed livestock such as poultry and pigs on windfall fruit, so they are being deprived of a valuable resource).

I think the problem here is you are conflating two different issues. I agree with you that all of us should be learning step by step to be more self-reliant with food. I agree we need more community gardens and allotment space to grow food. We need to rely less on imported goods, rely less on massive chain supermarkets. Things are changing and we need to start becoming more resourceful, specially our children as they will be the worst hit.
But you are directing this specifically at people who need to use food banks. It comes across as sanctimonious, yes.
I see your intentions are good but as others have suggested, you perhaps haven't had much contact with people who use food banks. In an ideal world we would all have access to growing space, and space in which to store harvested goods, we'd have community kitchens and community spirit. This not being the case, the poor get to live on tinned food. It is not out of a lack of effort, but terrible circumstances.

At one stage the woman who does my nails had to claim benefits through no fault of her own and told me she was going to have to stop as she wasn't allowed to earn any money.

I tried every way I could think of to make it possible for her to continue, eg no money changing Hans but filling her car up or buying her groceries instead. She was too frightened of sanctions or a fraud conviction to entertain anything I suggested.

Eventually I just had to go elsewhere for the three months or so it took her to get back on her feet. This is what people live with. Remember it when suggesting bright ideas for people on benefits to get some extra money. As has been pointed out ad nauseum, it's fraud.

I have a few questions, genuinely.
Where are all these people who have no kitchen, no cooking equipment, no stores whatsoever, no money for gas or electric, no money for food or transport or sanitary towels or anything really.
There must be an awful lot of them, because they have an awful lot of supporters fighting on their behalf on thread, regardless of whether they want the pps' rather patronising support or not.
Time and time again, extreme individual whataboutery crops up, yet when someone not toeing the line comes up with equally fabricated situations, they are shouted down.
Ok, there is a six-week wait to get UC. I can appreciate that must be a nightmare. But what was happening before the UC transfer? I don't know anyone either on NMW or benefits whose house is without cooking equipment, a small storecupboard or power. Serious question: If the vast majority can manage, is it not reasonable to ask why others can't?
Please don't call me names - I just happen to question things rather than be swept away by a tide of misguided virtue signallers.

So basically it’s a win win for the government if people are afraid to work in the gig economy.

cathf the people you are questioning whether or not they exist, well they are probably everywhere. Your neighbour? Someone who works in your work or in the shop you go to? Teenagers at school, students at college and uni. Mums who don't work or can't because they can't find jobs that fit in with childcare. Basically anyone. Who may not wish to advertise the fact they can't afford to eat or can't afford to buy sanitary protection.