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.

The op is a post and run goady fuck.

'Give seeds to the poor'

Fuck me sideways. I've heard it all now 😂

silvercuckoo it’s clear you know very little about this topic, perhaps take this opportunity to educate yourself rather than make ignorant statements

She's probably choked on her aubergine stew.

Never ever using real milk in pies and pasta bake. Always always using powdered.

Cheap rubber cheese. Cheap choc chip cookies. Biscuit barrel biscuits at 90p.

Lidl and the walk home. Carrying the groceries. In the rain. God it was the loneliest hardest trudge ever.

The OP doesn’t have to worry about her gas bill though her house runs on all the methane she produces heating all those lentils 💩

What do your kids do for the 2-3 months you’re waiting for the seeds to grow?

Not being funny but I hate lentils, pulses, chickpeas and aubergines, I would rather not eat if that was all I had. Why should the poor have to eat like this, you will be saying they should have gruel next.

Eating the lentils not heating them

YABU about bread making and growing veg.

YANBU about lentils. They are healthy and delicious. I’m mixed race and I find a lot of white people are snobby about “ethnic” food but it’s a cheap way to feed a lot of people. Obviously I understand some poor people are living in terrible accommodation without cooking facilities, but not all. People could also benefit from looking to developing countries for other ways of saving eg baby pottying to save on nappies.

Really simple one.

My knife blunted. I couldn’t afford a sharpener or a steel.

*ODFO
*
This.

Op lit the touchpaper and ran I see!

It is quite a ridiculous statement as I am originally from a bottom-of-the-barrel third world country, and I actually saw and felt hunger, real hunger, first hand. But you obviously know better . This UK poverty fashion really puzzles me.

Where you're from and what you've seen is completely irrelevant if you've elevated yourself to a point where you can look down on people that are experiencing a type of poverty that you don't recognise. Poverty is not a one size fits all circumstance and it is beyond offensive to draw comparisons. Tell the child that doesn't know if the lights will be on when they get home from school to suck it up because it's not as bad as the third world poverty you see on fucking oxfam adverts. Your arrogance is astonishing.

I still put more kidney beans than the recipe says in a chilli con carne.

I still do eggy bread and cooking bacon and frittata.

But I can because I have enough money for electric and a cooker that works and the money to have herbs and spices

Home made Lentil soup and home made Melba toasts with cheese is one of my favourite dinners. But it takes ages to make uses a lot of ingredients and it’s electric heavy.

it’s clear you know very little about this topic, perhaps take this opportunity to educate yourself rather than make ignorant statements
I am constantly educating myself. All people I know who claim to be "struggling" are not struggling, really.

This is the prime example of hardship usually experienced:
Not being funny but I hate lentils, pulses, chickpeas and aubergines, I would rather not eat if that was all I had.
This poster obviously never had to make a choice to "not eat" as opposed to "eat".

You are going to feed your family for four nights on a loaf of bread, some cous cous and a salad? Righto. Just keep stepping, op.

That bloody chicken been mentioned yet?

Where you're from and what you've seen is completely irrelevant if you've elevated yourself to a point where you can look down on people that are experiencing a type of poverty that you don't recognise.
Ah, ok. Good night to you.

I am constantly educating myself.

Obviously not hard enough

Some of my family in Southern Europe /ME were brought up on beans and pea soups - admittedly they described as poor. But it was nutritious and they didn’t have much choice.
However the difference is they also had excellent weather and a garden for growing vegetables.
So being poor under these circumstances is very very different!

The council already don't pay all our rent. Now they won't pay the increase. So now DH can only give me £80 a week. Out of that I have to pay £18 a week dinner money, because our council says WTC is enough to cover school meals. Compulsory school meals at my DC's school. Over the past few weeks I've had to buy school shoes because DD's feet have grown, trainers because DS2 broke his, a swimming costume for school.

Struggling and poverty are not the same thing!!! Why is that so bloody hard to grasp???

silvercuckoo im afraid you don’t have the authority to judge who is and isn’t struggling. It’s very arrogant to believe otherwise.