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 grew up in the 50s, healthy appetite and I liked most things. I have a sibling who is very close in age (think less than 12 months difference) and they were very fussy, wouldn't eat most of what we had. I'd tuck into a lovely roast and they'd just have the meat with a slice of bread, wouldn't eat cooked veg, stew or most things really.

I then had 4 children, 2 of the eat anything variety, one went through a fussy phase as a young child after being ill, it was like they had lost the habit of eating and one who would have happily have starved themself to death, was on the verge of being admitted to hospital as a 5 year old as so underweight. The doctor's advice? If she will only eat chocolate give her chocolate, just get some weight on her and we will deal with the issues when she is a healthy weight.

So I agree, some children will starve themself, I suppose in Victorian times they would have just said they failed to thrive or they went into a decline or something but I think it has probably always happened.

Because you know they'll eat it.

This process you're assuming will happen for those DC without SEN, medical conditions and the like (a rather large minority!) is by no means a guarantee. Even assuming it does happen, you don't know how long it might take and how much time and energy you don't have that might be sapped from you in the process, and that can't be used for anything else.

It's an interesting discussion going on in the last few posts about human psychology and food as well. I find it's very common for people to assume if people are hungry enough they'll eat anything, and no doubt that happens often, but we don't actually have good data about the prevalence, do we? Environments where there's not a lot of food choice often go hand in hand with quite high infant mortality rates. Would there be a reliable mechanism for identifying those who just don't take to what's available, and who end up ill or worse due to failure to thrive? I have a friend with a DC who has significant SEN and a lot of food refusal, and we've talked before about what would've happened/does happen to DC like hers in very hand to mouth societies.

Egg, chips and beans, home made chips, value beans, eggs are 1.20 for 15 in Farmfoods, doesn't factor in the oil to fry or energy though..

Retraining tastebuds can take a very long time and doing it when it means a child might have nothing to eat at all feels pretty cruel.

Didn’t mention it before because there are MN posters who roll their eyes at the mention of SEN, but one of mine is an extremely restricted eater (overseen by an OT and dietician). He varies in what he will eat but currently it’s one brand of chicken nuggets which has to be accompanied by mayonnaise. If this isn’t available he just won’t eat. I don’t know if he would give in and eat eventually if that wasn’t available because, oddly enough, I’ve never tried to put him through that to find out.

30p per portion is less than what I spend to feed the cat!
And she just eats standard cat food from the supermarket.

Fine as a one off (but as you say, a lot more expensive once you think about oil and fuel for cooking chips), but for optimum health we should be eating plenty of green leafy vegetables and a good range of other veg of different colours/types, and whatever fruit/seeds/nuts/wholegrains/pulses we can get, alongside animal protein for those that eat it. We need fat in our diet for the essential fatty acids, which are vital for the brain to function. We need fibre for the healthy functioning of the digestive system. All the super cheap meals of white pasta or rice and tinned tomatoes people have been suggesting are not going to be very nutritious with no oil, little fibre and no protein to speak of, not to mention extremely bland in flavour.

As many have pointed out, it's incredibly short-sighted for the government to just shrug their shoulders and ignore the long-term health problems that could people on lower incomes, and especially growing children, from having a poor diet because they can't afford to feed themselves properly. Children won't do as well at school as they could, which has a knock on effect on the economy later, and the health care costs will be considerable. Almost as if our present government either doesn't grasp any of this because the people at the top are short-sighted, incompetent and not very bright, or they don't care, perhaps because they expect the NHS not to be around to have to pick up the tab, or all of the foregoing.

I totally agree, eating healthily costs more than 30p pp, it can be done as a one off, cholesterol high heart attack on a plate but not sustainable at all x

Potatoes, soup, bread, rice,

Leftovers

Leftovers from what? I have lots of leftovers because I'm in the fortunate position of not being on a tight budget and I usually cook more than we can eat at one meal specifically so we have something for another meal. As spelled out many times on this thread, people on a very tight food budget (a) haven't got the cash to buy a lot of food at one time, (b) may not have suitable places to store cooked food and (c) have to think long and hard about fuel costs, so aren't going to be cooking a big stew that will stretch to two or more meals.

THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN COOK FOR 30P THAT COMPLIES WITH GOVT HEALTHY EATING GUIDELINES ..............................................
NOTHING !!!!

I understand that he was simply explaining that the food bank in his constituency teaches cooking on a budget and that he had participated. Sounds like a good thing in general to me

Do you know what he actually said?

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.
I will end now, because Opposition Members are not listening; these are a generation of MPs who never listen. The bad news is that this Labour party is out of control and out of touch, but , thankfully, it is out of power. That is me done, Mr Deputy Speaker.

So this seems to imply that:

a) People who come to the food bank HAVE to register for a budgeting and cookery course (which seems a bit patronising)
b) He thinks there are generation after generation who can't cook from scratch and who can't budget
c) He claims that they can 'make a meal for 30p a day' - so is that 1 meal a day at 30p or 30p on food a day?
d) He doesn't think there is a need for food banks - presumably because of the above - he thinks people can't cook from scratch, don't know how to make cheap foods

Maybe there are some people who can't cook from scratch, who can't budget and who don't know how to make cheap meals.

I wonder how some people would had to go to a food bank had to register for a budgeting and cookery course? I have never had to go to a food bank - but I suspect that for many, it's a last option and they don't do it lightly without looking at how they can economise and cook cheaply.

That's why Jack Monroe's recipes seem good - she's been there and understands. Maybe Lee Anderson has got experience - but he has fuck all empathy.

For baking your own bread you need to have enough gas/electricity for the oven as well. Considering I can buy a sliced loaf for 45p I don't think baking bread is going to save much money, it will taste nicer but if you are on 30p a day I think baking a loaf is going to be a luxury.

So true

I do know how to make bread but arthritis doesn't mix well with kneading, I have recently got a bread maker, strong white flour is £1 for 1.5 Kg so that's three loaves, but there is a cost to running the beadmaker.

If I could do it by hand then there is the issue of where to leave it to rise, you need somewhere warm, not easy if you don't have the heating on.

You could do no knead, super slow rises I guess. But that requires lots of planning and coordination. Poverty is stressful, so your mental resources for that may well be seriously depleted.

Yes. As an experienced baker, I am aware that you can make very nice wholemeal bread from a dough that's mixed, not kneaded, and a slow rise in a cool place, but you still need to bake the bread at a high temperature. You need access to yeast unless you're going in for sourdough which from what I can make out is a substantial undertaking. You need the price of a bag of wholemeal flour. You need some sort of loaf tin or baking sheet. But above all you need the confidence and knowledge to have a go at this and the assurance that your family will eat the end result and it won't all be wasted. So much easier in every way to buy a yellow stickered loaf of sliced white.

I went through a phase of using a lidded casserole dish to bake "no kneed" bread. I'm guessing that having the oven on at 220 degrees for 40 minutes and lining it with greaseproof paper took the cost up to well over £1.

It never lasted long because the family pounced on it (and of course you need to have a lidded heavy casserole dish in the first place).

The rate we're going, foodbanks will have to set up community ovens!

Apparently only a story because the nasty BBC has broadcast rubbish. He gives £1000s and he's doubling down on R4.

Twat currently being interviewed on Broadcasting House. He doesn't strike me as the sharpest knife in the drawer. Much use of 'you lot' to indicate the mainstream media, who are all misrepresenting him, of course.

Definitely.

‘bake your own bread poor people’ is a laughably awful suggestion for SO many reasons.

Same with ‘grow your own veg in your garden/allotment’. So many assumptions in there that just don’t pan out in reality.

Back in the days when people generally did bake their own bread, I think bakers did operate community ovens.

I'm not sure he's said it in the interview or if it's been reported but it seems he's taking one for the team to publicise an important issue knowing the BBC and similar will misrepresent his legitimate views, bless his coal-dusted working class cotton socks. A hero, though perhaps more of a Classic (in the Greco sense) one than he realises?

The government, delivering changes to create a more communitarian society than those Top Down statist Labour scallywags will do. Food banks then ovens then communitarian living. David Cameron's big society in action.

Buy yellow sticker reduced price food
Eat same day or put in freezer to use at another time

Same with food from Olio or Too Good To Go food waste apps

.... if you have a freezer.

RTFT.

That would all still cost more than 30p a day and is not sustainable physically or mentally.

... If you have electricity