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 stopped reading at olive oil. You should carry on it's a scream !

I will ask again if healthy food is cheaper why arent the residents of nursing homes and residential places eating like Kings

I would much rather have a pot noodle tree than a pot of fucking chick peas.

No Alles, it's true. She's one of those DC who'd rather go hungry than eat something she doesn't like. She won't eat anything with chickpeas in unless they're blended to a pulp. She loves houmous, so I'm assuming it's a texture thing.

There are lots of accounts online of food bank users, or food bank volunteers. It might be worth seeking them out to find out more about how people really live.

As Pp have pointed out, the reality is a different thing. Yes you can get lentils/chickpeas et al for cheap, but if you have a family with kids to feed and you don’t have time to cook a curry from scratch, then a frozen pizza is going to be more filling and quicker than a lentil stew. And if you get a 2 for 1 deal that’s 2 meals.

It’s really hard out there for people on the poverty line. I suggest you read up more before making sweeping statements. Also look at stories of people who have had their benefits slashed or sanctioned, and the choices they make.

Jack Monroe has previously written about selling baby shoes to buy food, and unscrewing the bulbs to save money on the energy bill.

Have you ever had to cook for a family on a Baby Belling OP? One of those mini-ovens that you can plug into a normal socket.

I did so for a period last year. I had always considered myself to have quite a bit of empathy, but this was a real eye-opener in terms of understanding the barriers that someone living in a bed-sit or B&B might face.

Firstly, you can't use the hob and rings at the same time. Think of all the recipes that cuts out...The power from a normal socket is not sufficient, so the dial only lets you select one or the other. Secondly, it takes a while to heat up and the cooking times are a lot longer.

Thirdly, the whole thing is smaller. You can't put a vast vat of stew on to batch cook because the ring isn't big enough. A large pan would hang over the edges and be a hazard. I would be really hesitant to cook a whole chicken in there, as I would worry about that it would not cook through. Standard baking tins do not fit.

Thankfully I was only doing it while my new kitchen was installed. But now I completely understood why someone living in a B&B might pop out to the fried chicken shop rather than try to cook for their children on that in a small space.

YABVU here have an artisanal quinoa based

Also when I was single and really poor I lived on pulses and really cheap food like pig trotters. Many kids will not eat this kind of food.

op

Come back when you have gone without daily meals so that you can feed your children every day, 3 times a day.

Perhaps the OP could open a soup (or fried chickpea) kitchen? Would be more helpful than a sanctimonious post like this one.

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.

Feeling that you are unable to feed yourself and your kids "properly" and food poverty are two very very different things.

I am amazed that in 2018, there are people that are this unclear on what the definition of the word poverty actually means.

It's not broke, it's not living pay check to pay check, it's not lack of knowing how to cook or how to make food stretch or whatever other smug nonsense people want to dress it up as. It is literally being faced with the reality of sending your kids to bed hungry. It's sending your kids to school being grateful if they're on free school meals and knowing you yourself won't eat a damn thing until dinner time, and that's if you can scare up enough money to put together a meal anyways. It's the most horrible, guilt inducting, get wrenching thing in the world being a parent that feels like you're failing your kids.

It's not making a choice between gadgets and cigarettes over nutritious food. Poverty means that they choice is taken completely away from you.

This thread is fucking awful.

Food poverty tends to go hand in hand with fuel poverty as well We have also had fuel banks for a while now.

Op with respect most of the people that are in food poverty don’t have the means to cook in batch, the knowledge to of how to cook using the ingredients in your first post, don’t have a garden in a tower block. They are barely able to understand how to pay their bills let alone grow plants from seed.

Why not go & offer help in a food kitchen for a few evenings & then have a re- think on how might best help them

Aubergines are actually quite expensive!

Food poverty is real.

Op I'm excellent at the type of cooking you describe above. I can make something out of the odds and ends and can cook pulses like no bodies business. I'm intelligent, very well educated and almost obsessively interested in food.

Last month I had to decide if I could afford the reduced loaf of bread in Asda or not. We've been living off just under a pound a day per person for 18 months and that includes loo roll etc. Making you're own loaf is not cheaper than the 20p reduced loaf in Asda. No matter how you do it.

The daily minutiae of decision making over food. No i couldn't make a curry with the chickpeas because a)my kids hate them having eaten them a lot recently and b) i ran out of cumin, coriander, turmeric and garlic powder ages ago. Someone who has to think twice about that loaf isn't even going to consider a jar of cumin.
How much elec do I have? enough to cook the chickpeas or make felafel again? But can't afford anything to go with them e.g. hummus. As for the herbs to go in them well that certainly isn't happening.

We've survived because we live by an extremely cheap veg market and have been lucky enough that my parents have given us just enough to survive on. And like I said I'm pretty obsessed with food, it's my hobby if you like.

Today i cried for over an hour because finally, finally there was some let up in the unremitting shit.
I celebrated by getting the kids yoghurt for dessert.

And we aren't the most hard up by any stretch of the imagination.
You've been given plenty of reasons why it's real. Being good with chickpeas has nothing to do with food poverty.

I'm genuinely glad for you that you have clearly not experienced it but it is real. It's a real problem and it's soul destroyingly difficult even for someone who can work lentil miracles.

Also period poverty is real. Even the cheapo pads at 55p aren't always an option

Majority of us have never and will never experience true poverty. True poverty is not not having change for the bus everyday. Or only having crackers for dinner everyday. That is not poverty. That is modern uk version of 'my life is so hard'

The modern first worlds version of 'I have a hard life' is when we don't have extra money left after the bills... or we can't afford luxuries..

There's people in the world who cannot even dream of having OUR basics never mind luxuries ....

We are lucky to have a roof to sleep under at night. Whether that is home, hotel, B and B, emergency accommodation.

Just chiming in to agree with everyone else. Food poverty is not only real, it’s cripplingly depressing.

It’s the only thing I’ve experienced in my life that’s made me truly question if I could carry on. I’m an incredibly happy and optimistic person, but not being able to eat is devastating. And it’s made a thousand times worse if not only can you not feed yourself, but you can’t feed your children.

There are so many circumstances which cause even people who were brought up being taught to cook and be resourceful to be completely unable to manage - the two most frequent I have experienced myself is not being able to travel to get to a supermarket where things are reasonably priced, or not having the funds to buy budget friendly amounts of things. It’s absolutely horrible having to buy the tiniest bottle of cooking oil, knowing that if you had 50p more for the bigger one it would actually see you through the month, but you simply don’t have it.

Nothing is ever stocked up, there are no contingencies, and very little to make well seasoned and comforting meals - and that’s when you end up buying convenience foods, because all you want at the end of a long day is to eat something tasty and comforting. Not yet another pack of 30p boiled pasta and 30p chopped tomatoes.

FWIW I can eat very cheaply and be happy if I have to - but I will tell you that there is a world of difference between a nice simple pasta sauce with a soffrito softened in olive oil, with basil, garlic, onion, oregano and salt, and having to bung a tin of value tomatoes into your pasta because you’re too scared to hang out in the kitchen of your temporary accommodation shared house, as well as not having any of the other nice bits anyway.

Please widen your outlook on life and try to empathise and understand that people in these situations are just people like you who have fallen on very hard times, as well as people who have real disadvantages.

I read the OP with interest. Whereas she doesn't feel convinced about the extent of food poverty, I was embarrassingly unaware.

Reading this thread is bloody awful. I had no idea. And I can confidently say none of my friends would either.

I could feed myself and DS on thirty quid a week. The idiotic assumption I've always made, is I can't understand that if someone always earns a minimum wage, or lives on benefits (so all their housing is covered) how can you possibly not have thirty quid a week left over for food.

This thread shows me categorically that this is not only possible, but fucking common, and I actually feel like a really small human being right now. How does this go so unpublicised?

I donate loads at Christmas, toys, food, thinking, it's fine all year, just a bit tight over the festive period, so here's a Christmas dinner for 6 and a sack full of toys. And how stupid that seems now.

What do you donate to food banks? Anything? Long life products? Is that the best way to contribute?

Genuinely disgraced at my state of unawareness.

" 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."

Man on Universal Credit TOLD by Job Centre to get a smartphone to search for a job. Also was told it HAD to be an iphone.

inews.co.uk/news/uk/universal-credit-jobcentre-dwp-smartphone/

Sheltered life = narrow vision. I taught in a part of Derby where 70%of the families were unemployed. Most of the children had never seen meat until school meals. None of them ever got breakfast. And that school meal plus a drink & a bit of toast when they got home was usually it.

Courtney don't be ashamed for not knowing. There are many areas of life where we don't really get it until we've experienced it.
If you want to help a good start is to find a food bank near you and ask what they need. They know what is realistic for the people who use them.

It's sending your kids to school being grateful if they're on free school meals and knowing you yourself won't eat a damn thing until dinner time, and that's if you can scare up enough money to put together a meal anyways.
But isn't everyone below a certain income in the UK entitled to child benefit? I checked online, £20 a week is certainly not a fortune, but I am pretty sure it is enough to ensure that the said child does not starve. I lived on £20 / week for the total weekly shop (student days) not so long ago.

@Courtney555 Hey, don't beat yourself up. Noone can know everything.

Taken from our local food bank page:

WHAT’S IN A FOOD PARCEL?
Our foodbank provides three days of nutritionally balanced, non-perishable food.

The Trussell Trust has worked with nutritionists to ensure food parcels contains sufficient nutrition for at least three days worth of healthy, balanced meals for individuals and families.

A TYPICAL FOOD PARCEL INCLUDES:
Breakfast cereals
Soup
Pasta
Rice
Pasta sauce
Tinned beans
Tinned meat
Tinned vegetables
Tinned fruit
Tea or coffee
Sugar
Biscuits
Snacks

Hi Jamie O 👋

Courtney555 if you can stretch to a couple of the more “complete” tinned foods like those all day breakfast cans, ravioli, chilli con carne etc those are long life and really nice for people who can’t cook. I think you can also donate microwave packets of rice which would be useful, and biscuits which are a nice treat if you have children. Hot dogs as well :)