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?

FAQs but portion size - as I originally asked? One adult, one child? Any veg is better than nothing, of course, but ... Not green veg every day. Very little wholemeal (it's unfair that that usually costs more). And perhaps not enough fruit? And fish or equivalent - fish fingers really don't contain much? And nuts/good oils?
As I said, I'm NOT being critical. Your list is impressive. I'm just trying to show that it costs more than 30p per meal to meet government intake guidelines.

@Hospedia I totally agree. I can easily live on very cheap meals and I sometimes do because I dont have to worry about what's in my cupboards and I know I will have the cash next month/ week for more varied foods. It's easy to live off beans, pasta and rice when your well stocked on cupboard essentials and know you can spend £40 on a takeaway for the kids on payday.

I dont need to live on 30p a meal, but possibly could because I buy the 10kg bags of rice in Costco. My Costco shop is always near £200 so you need that £200 up front to buy the 20kg of rice, 5 litres of washing liquid and 5 litres of fabric conditioner to get it down to Penny's per use.

You are either 1. Ridiculous 2. Mrs Anderson 3. Not concerned about the cost of living rises as they don't affect you 4. All of the above.

Pasta with tomatoes and spinach.
Pesto pasta
Veg fried rice

The conservatives have been in power for 12 years , why haven't they put old style ' home economics' or ' cooking from scratch on a budget 'on the curriculum as its so important?
How to cook decent food on 1.20 a week?
Or provide schools with the Ingredients to teach these skills?
. Won't hold my breath.

2.10 a week sorry , 30p x 7 days

@SoManyTshirts baked potatoes freeze really well and only take 4-5 mins in the microwave to reheat . So if you had your oven on put some spuds in then freeze them .

I can't work everything out at 30p a meal, but I use Thrifty Lesley's website. She has thrifty meals, but also meal plans for about £15 a week (for 2 people, so £7.50 a person a week). There are about a dozen week plans. Each are nutritionally balanced, and focus on a few star ingredients each week (cream cheese, bacon, lentils).

They do take a little while with the food prep, because it's all made from scratch, but I try to have one week every 4-6 weeks, when I follow a meal plan. As I'm vegetarian, but DH and the children are not, I alter a couple of recipes for me, but the £15 food list is a brilliant start point.

They are brilliant!

www.thriftylesley.com/thrifty-lesley-meal-plans/

Many of the plans are for 2 people, however they translate well into 2 adults and 2 children.

And, of course, I understand that I am in a privileged position being able to choose to do this.
However, if it helps anyone who hasn't heard of Lesley before, then good.

His comments in the Commons

"As I was saying, the hon. Member for St Helens North made some great comments about food banks. My invitation is to every Opposition Member: come to Ashfield, work with me for a day in my local food bank and see the brilliant scheme we have in place. When people come for a food parcel now, they have to register for a budgeting course and a cooking course. We show them how to cook cheap and nutritious meals on a budget; we can make a meal for about 30p a day, and this is cooking from scratch

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, as he makes a great point. Indeed, it is exactly my point, so I invite him personally to come to Ashfield to look at how our food bank works. He will see at first hand that there is not this massive use for food banks in this country. We have generation after generation who cannot cook properly—they cannot cook a meal from scratch—and they cannot budget. The challenge is there. I make that offer to anybody. Opposition Members are sitting there with glazed expressions on their faces, looking at me as though I have landed from a different planet. They should come to Ashfield, next week or the week after, and come to a real food bank that is making a real difference to people’s lives"

So basically - he seems to be saying that they show people how to cook cheap and nutritious meals from scratch for 30p a day.

He thinks there are people who can't cook, who can't cook a meal from scratch and who don't know how to budget.

Maybe there are people who can't cook or budget - but 30p a day? Really?

Spinach?! A pound a bag that wilts to a couple of tablespoons?

This is an interesting read:-

link.news.inews.co.uk/view/61092901b57d1c40145768a0ghj5z.ab2/78e3043a

So you really think his mammy and his granny were giving him 30p meals, all wholesome and nutritious and super??

Maybe his meals did cost 30p back in the day but someone should tell him that was 50 years ago.

I'm all for cheap, wholesome and nutritious meals. I just don't believe they are possible at that price on anything like a sustainable basis. No matter how good a cook you are.

Exactly. I believe you could make nutritious meals consistently for around £1-£1.50 a head, but 30p? No way.

I think this is a reasonably balanced meal plan - it's by no means perfect (value brands too high in sugar; no fruit and not enough veg) but it wouldn't cause actual deficiencies.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OUCtI8m59jle4Ht4AOZH8FQ_wAYd-pBusPKzO4vTOew/edit?usp=sharing

I got good at cooking cheaply when for a thankfully short but horrible period of time my rent was a few pounds higher than my income. I had a rapidly depleting £100 overdraft. What you can't cost is the massive stress of constantly doing mental arithmetic over it. And the BOREDOM - as per this plan, I would let myself have one 'nice' meal on a Sunday and I would be looking forward to it by Tuesday morning. And as @scottishnames says, it doesn't meet government guidelines (not that most people eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day and 2 portions of oily fish a week, even if they can afford it - but if we are to be given these guidelines they should be achievable). So I am by no means an advocate for 30p meals or for this MP, but I think it is probably feasible to keep body and soul together without actually falling into deficiency. A low bar, admittedly.

I hadn’t thought of that - I don’t have a freezer. Through preference, but I imagine people on the breadline with prepayment meters wouldn’t be able to run them if they were likely to self-disconnect from time to time.

I think it is fair to say, that most of us on MN are able to cook cheaply and we will even come in on the budget of 30p for some of them.

The bigger issue is though, WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OUR CHILDREN with these cheap food items? Not all cheap food is nutritious, high in fibre or free of harmful chemicals (from preservatives to pesticides). And a lot of it is just pumped full of water, fillers and pretty tasteless.

Not something anyone should have to endure long term ...

I expect the government might say those are guidelines for fruit, veg, protein and so on, not some nanny state mandate. No don't mention Solyent Green, that note for the Ministers was put on the back burner until the September price cap rise.

I'm sure everyone who's in need of a food bank has all the space, time, fuel money and kitchen equipment necessary to be able to cook 30p per head meals on a regular basis.

Perhaps it's to encourage ambition and striving. It might not be possible for someone to achieve but they should try. And in the trying, that might filter down generationally to improving their circumstances. If Sir? Norman Tebbit were around, the food bank might be supplying cycling lessons.

I can cook a pasta dish for four that'd come to under 30p each. Cook onion lightly in microwave so no oil. Then mix in cans of tomatoes and kidney beans - add pepper, dried chilli or dried herbs and cook, 200g cooked pasta. All ingredients low cost tins Tescos or Lidl. It just happens to cost that, but having to think about the cheapest way to do every meal and trying to get sufficient nutrition must be awful.

50g each cooked pasta is a really small portion. That can’t be a suitable main meal? It’s probably only around 200 calories in total.

@ifonly4 aside from @PurpleDaisies calorie point though it's possible 1/4 of kidney beans might make this an adequate meal for an adult, are you sure about Lidl's prices for tomato, kidney beans and pasta and an onion. Could be wrong but will those four ingredients come in for less than £1.20? I do take your point about the boring-ness and can see you are not endorsing 'Lee for 30p's. My first post was a pasta, passata and grate of cheddar suggestion. Could be wrong and Lidl prices from a year ago would have come in below £1.20 but do they still?