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.

Food banks are very often used at a time of crisis - so for example someone fleeing domestic violence with just the clothes on their back, or someone who's lost their job and is in the 5 week wait before Universal Credit kicks in, or in one example I was given by a food bank volunteer one parent of young children died suddenly, the other parent understandably had to take a lot of time off work, and after funeral expenses (and the fact that the late parent had been the one receiving child benefit and tax credits and it takes time to transfer them) there was just more month than money left. So you'd need to know you were going to experience a crisis at least a couple of months in advance to get your tomato crop at just the right time.

If you read the guidance food banks publish on what to give them, they often note that many of their users have cooking facilities that range from limited to none. If you're living in a B&B or (as someone above has said) in your car, you don't have the facilities to soak chickpeas or cook stews or bake a loaf of bread. Council flats don't come with white goods either - you have to save for your own unless you're lucky enough to have a local charity that can help, and if you've just fled an abusive partner or you've been living on the streets you have a whole list of stuff you need to save up for.

Gardening and cooking from scratch are also very time consuming if you're one of the many people who suffer from in-work poverty, working full time and still struggling to make ends meet.

I'll also note that a brief lean period where you use up all the odds and ends of spices and so on from the back of the cupboard is very very different both practically and psychologically from being totally, unremittingly skint with no end in sight.

I'm sorry to pile on as I think you mean well, but I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the problem.

• There's alsorts of issues at play here OP, while you eat quite cheaply, you sound quite 'time rich'

Travelling 90 minutes either way on buses across a city at the end of a ten hour work day, plus the overtime you might pick up on your day off doesn't leave loads of time for foraging for apples on the outskirts of the city.

It's really unfair to people in that situation to isolate the one variable, as though the rest of their life has no impact on the choices they make*

All of this!

OP, get yourself down to the local food bank volunteering. Listen to the real plight so many people find themselves in - through no fault of their own - and then come back on here and give us your insights.

At the moment you sound, at best, naive, at worst an absolute ignorant twat.

I have never experienced food poverty and I thank my lucky stars for this. I Can also cook well from scratch and know how to make food stretch but I would never question if food poverty is real. Your lack of awareness and understanding is staggering and offensive.

@Hiphopfrog never came back to her thread because she's away filing her story for the Mail. 👩🏻‍🍳

Oh my lordy lord !

Where do you plant your veg when your housing situation is unstable? How do you get soil, tubs, bamboo sticks?

How do you soak your chickpeas for 24 hours if you don't have proper kitchen equipment? Or a shared kitchen? Or no kitchen at all? Or one infested with vermin?

When do you find the time to learn and to meal plan if you're a single mum working 2 jobs just to keep the wolf from the door?

How do you cook if you're experiencing fuel poverty?

You don't. You cook the least time consuming, safe (ie you won't fuck it up or risk the kids not eating), fuel efficient food you can find.

That's poverty.

Someone mentioned Orwell earlier. Here is the quote, which I think is true and just as relevant, sadly, today as it was eighty years ago:

“Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.”

Oh and you foraged for apples

If I tried that, i wonder how much the train fare would be?

Dear OP

Please fuck off.

But just before you do, please stick your aubergIne stew up your arse.

Thanks

I’ll just add another fuck off. Just in case you missed the first one.

If you can be a goady fucker, I can too.

I stopped reading at olive oil. when we were skint 2 working adults 2 children, we were luckly enough to have house and garden. But after bills We had next to nothing, I made sure we all ate, but going out and buying olive oil? not.a.chance. when prioritising food on a ridiculous tight budget for years olive oil just doesn't come into it I'm afraid.

I've read all sorts of smug fuckwittery about poverty and how poor people are just not doing it right or they'd be fine, but this really takes the biscuit.
My days of scrabbling about on the shore to find anything edible are past thankfully, but I've been there (had to gather driftwood to cook the bastard winkles I found). I've been poor enough to have had no shoes for over 6 months, only a pair of slippers with holes in. That's why I volunteer at a food bank, because I think the biggest help after the actual food is giving someone the knowledge that they are not less than more fortunate people and that they are not alone. There were no food banks here back when I would have needed one, but being sneered at and patronised by someone like the OP would have destroyed me.

I hope that anyone reading this who is struggling sees the many helpful and sympathetic posters who do not judge them or dismiss their problems are being caused by a lack of fucking chickpeas. OP I think that you've been foraging too close to the motorway and all those exhaust fumes have affected your brain.

I love lentils & dhal & aubergines - but - they don't love me & to be frank many people would find this combination indigestible. Some people don't even have access to full cooking facilities or have to share. Some people have multiple social, emotional, mental health or learning difficulties & many have little access to fresh vegetables. Some have a variety of food intolerances or allergies. all of which means that it isn't as straightforward as you assume. many of the poorest have been forced to live in areas that don't have transport to shops or any facilities that support healthy living or food.

my DC wouldn't eat. DD will only eat chickpeas as houmous.

This is a joke, or?

YABU. VVU. How many hours does it take to cook chickpeas from dried? And how much does that cost? And why do you assume that people in poverty are time rich? You need to spend less time cooking and get out more and educate yourself. Next you'll be telling us all how cheap baking potatoes are.
Flaunting frugality when it is a lifestyle choice is rather crass.

Having a good work ethic, knowing how to cook from scratch, make preserves, raise animals and grow things didn't stop Americans from starving during the great depression so I don't know what you're going on about OP.

People with very little money and children to feed will need to provide something that they can be sure the kids will eat. That's unlikely to be chickpeas.

Stick your aubergine stew up your arse made me LOL

Why don’t you go and volunteer with vulnerable people OP and put these questions to them? Bloody hell, what planet do you inhabit?

And actually there's now't wrong with a pot noodle. Started my own thread yesterday on the amazing things. Shame I can't plant my own pot noodle seeds in my garden ! ..Imagine..a pot noodle tree ! ...

What do you suggest I cook with £0.00 and an onion?

George Orwell dealt with this point of view very well in The Road to Wigan Pier - back in 1937. Can't believe it is still going.

Of course food poverty is real. Some people are genuinely struggling. It is blinkered and deluded to think otherwise.

There is also, however, a significant group of people who can evidently afford to drink, can afford to smoke and can afford to buy electronic gadgets but claim to be unable to afford to fed themselves and their children properly. It is naive and deluded to think otherwise.

Oh lord. I like a nice cooking day myself but i don't usually feel qualified afterward to go on the net thinking I can solve UK food poverty.

Cringing for you OP.

Clearly there's a goady fucker tree in someone's garden

Growing veg for most people is a relatively expensive hobby, not a viable means of feeding a family.

Can I urge you all to see if there is a Community Fridge in your area - whether you need a free source of perishable food, or whether you could help out. I volunteer for two hours a week, collecting mainly fruit, veg and milk from supermarkets that would otherwise be thrown out and delivering it to the fridge where anyone who needs it can help themselves. Food banks can only provide non-perishables.