To ask what you can actually cook for 30p/meal?

[Porcupineintherough]

Following on from the comments by MP Lee Anderson I was wondering what I could actually make for 30p/head. I'm a pretty good thrifty cook but all I could come up with were:

beans on toast (budget brands)
tinned tomatoes on toast (budget brands)
tinned mushrooms on toast (budget brands)
egg on toast
cheese on toast (ditto)
some kind of veggie stew/sauces w red lentils (if cooking for more than one) to eat w pasta
stir fry noodles w a few shreds of veg
bowl of basics cereal

I'm not counting things like baked potatoes where the ingredients are cheap but the energy costs to cook them are high.

So what am I missing? What skills and recipes are this food bank teaching? Wild foraging? Poaching? Shop-lifting 101?

I'd like a MN Q&A with the MP in question where he shares his 30p recipes.

I really think you'd struggle to make much for 30p, that met the daily calorie requirements of an adult anyway, And yes, I know we are a nation of over weight people, but 3 meals of things on toast won't be the solution to that.

Same!!!

and not ‘oh if you buy a these 8 ingredients for £5 each then you can make 100 portions which are technically 30p each but you need the £40 to start with and by the time you’ve made a few servings most of it has gone off’

I looked this up. The 30p meals suggested are basically main meals of lentils,carrot and curry powder to make soup or curry with which you can have rice. Porridge and a banana for breakfast. You can cook porridge cheaply in the microwave in a few minutes but I can't come up with a very low fuel way to cook lentils or rice.

The menu would be incredibly depressing and lacking in nutrients! Just had a look online at the cheapest options…

Manky sausages (20 for £1)
Mince is 24p for 50g, plus a quarter of a tin of toms is 6p 😂 what a delightful meal!
Chicken drumsticks are 25p each with homemade chips maybe 🤷🏼‍♀️
20p instant noodles with an egg and veg

30p a head is pretty much impossible

Rice and tinned tomatoes. Used to have this as a student when I had no money. Not very exciting but better than nothing if you are hungry. If you happen to have some curry powder you can enliven the tomatoes a bit.

Does this mean he only needs 30p in expenses per meal?

Typo! Drumsticks are 20p!

I'd like his weekly menu planner. I think would be hard, nutritionally lacking?

Some Bread just plain.

Maybe he’ll write a cook book, he’s obviously better at it than us!

Is his shopping bill a £1 a day 😂 what a cunt.

1. His comments were very much taken out of context. He was bemoaning that people aren't taught these things, rather than being an out of touch twat.

1. Before the boring "what about his expenses" trope comes out, most expenses fund an MP's office and staffing costs. If he's claiming for a meal while working then of course he can't buy something for 30p and funnily enough there isn't cooking equipment in each office on the parliamentary estate.

Rice, if you put it in boiling water, wrap it in a blanket and leave it an hour, then heat it back it up and it'll be perfect.

And if you soak lentils overnight you can cook them in about 10minutes - they don't taste as good but they'll do.

I know the above from camping!

It's 30p per person

How insensitive and obtuse! 30p isn’t enough for much more than cheap toast or microwaved spuds.You can’t raise kids on nowt but bloody toast and spuds.

Maybe some soups e.g whatever is on offer in lidl/aldi - they do things like bag of carrots and parsnips for 29p so could mix those with passata or potatoes or curry powder for Spicy parsnip soup to get 2-3 portions for about 60p?

I suppose with the baked potatoes you can make them in a microwave although they obvs aren't as nice, or if you put about 12 in when the oven is already on for something else? Then freeze and microwave? With cheap cheese would come in at under 30p.

Greek yoghurt and self raising flour (about 1.70 in total) has made me about 20 naans or 30 flatbreads so with daal a good few meals

Porridge? Egg fried rice with peas?

The point is you probably can make some limited meals for that amount. Whether you have all the additional ingredients available to make them palatable, plus the means to cook them in an affordable way, are able (physically and financially) to travel to a cheap supermarket to buy the cheapest ingredients or are reliant on the local corner shop, and if eating those meals long term provide enough nutritional content, plus how fucking miserable it is to always worry about every penny, were not considered by the MP!

You can cook anything you like for 30p a meal. You just stick anything above the 30p on your expenses.

It’s really easy to come up with filling 30p meals if you work from big bags of rice, pasta, potato, lentils…

So arseholes like him can smugly point to those.

But that’s a one off meal, which doesn’t consider a nutritional balance at all.

It's true that people aren't taught to cook meals at school any more although when I did Domestic Science it was only for girls and boys need to cook too. However, this has nothing to do with the need for foodbanks - that is about poverty.

Yep.

Obviously, 30p meals are ridiculous.

Does this mean he only needs 30p in expenses per meal?

Exactly! See how they like it in the Houses of Commons restaurants..
No more £400 a month food allowance

It's possible but fucking miserable trying to think of ideas. In Aldi you could get 4 baking potatoes for 40p ish and two tins of beans for 60p ish. So you could do 4 baked spuds and half a tin of beans for around 25p each for a family of 4. That leaves 5p for a little bit of grated cheese maybe? Although the spuds take a lot of energy to bake so it's probably a bad example of a meal.

Plus what about the cupboard basics to start with like oil, salt, pepper, herbs, spices.. ie.. the stuff that makes a meal tasty and interesting to cook.

Utter nonsense to suggest he's been misquoted. He hasn't at all.

His belief that it's possible to live long term on a healthy diet with a budget of 30p is utterly laughable, especially given that an average oven now costs about 10p an hour to run.

It's 30p per person not per meal!