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?

Good luck getting a loaf of bread in the freezer shelf of an under-counter fridge freezer.

It’s costs 3p to boil the kettle for a cup of tea so if energy is part of the 30p then I don’t think there is any hot meal you can make for that cost.

Is that you Mrs Anderson?

Seems too well written and not confrontational enough to be written by Lee and his 30p.

like most of the posters I could make many meals that only cost 30p a head. However I would not like to live like that day in day out. And would 3 cheap fish fingers and chips really feed a teenager?

Thing about yellow sticker food is that you need to be able to be opportunistic.

You don’t have the flexibility to adapt your 30p budget around what just happens to be yellow stickered. Or the mental energy.

Then there’s the stress of it all. You need to be there at the right time. You may need to be a bit pushy to get near the reduced food to get what you need.

you need the bus fare to pick up your too good to go - and you don’t know what you’re getting. Are you going to take the risk that it’s something the kids won’t eat?

It’s much easier to save money when you have a nice comfy cushion. The reality if poverty is grim and unrelenting.

Following. Most of my budget meal costings per person under 75p are largely lacking in nutrition. Wholesome HM meals incur huge energy costs - eg. HM veg soup, veg casseroles and jacket potatoes.

I think that MP is a bit thick if he doesn't realise 30p at the cost of malnutrition for hundreds of thousands struggling working families, and the subsequent strain on the NHS as a result, is unreasonable. I am poor and I know how to cook and to budget, but those two factors together or apart are not a panacea for the cost of living crisis. He's severely shortsighted in thinking so.

YANBU, OP

Dahl
Anything from the reduced trolley, when it's 10p
Rice and tinned anything cheap.
The last fish left in the fishmongers on a Saturday afternoon
What's left veg-wise at the market stall before it closed.

Nope, you need also to have TIME to get cheap food.

And luck.

Are you really going to be gambling on the reduced trolley and the last fish on a Saturday afternoon on a 30p a head budget?

Perhaps they'd like poor people to eat cat food?

30p cat food? Your cat must be less fussy than mine

Big sack of potatoes
Big sack of onions
Other veg fresh end of market time, frozen or tinned
Bread yellow sticker

Big bag of potatoes.
Big bag of onions.
Big bag of rice.
Cheap carbs box ticked several times. Bugger, what else will tick the big bag of carbs box again...
Big bag of pasta....
Big bag of wheat flour, let's get baking if they have an oven. and money for fuel.
Big bag of corn - popcorn for weekends or tortillas?
Lets go further afield geographically...
millet and sorghum - need to check to make sure not too much nutritional value, don't want the poor thinking or rioting.
Big bag of humility for Lee and his 30p and well-wishers - nope, empty big bag of empathy, even with £80k plus £200k or expenses and any salaries for family members. If there are family members on the staff I wonder if they're on NMW and topped up with UC are are benefits just for 'that sort'?

No silly, it’s only the peasants who are expected to eat for 30p a meal 😆 He just gets to preach about it 🤔

OK. Woman on the breadline. Two small kids.

big bags of potatoes and onions. Where is she sourcing that? How is she getting that back to her pokey flat?

then she’s off to the market. Is there even one in the town she lives in?

She’s got to time it right though because she’s there to catch the stuff that’s cheap because it’s going to be thrown out. So it won’t last. It’s got to be eaten today. So it’s a regular trip.

shes also got to time it so she catches the yellow stickered bread in the supermarket. That’s not going to last either, so it needs to be eaten. She’s got a tiny undercounter fridge so it’s not going in the freezer. Nor is anything batch cooked or similar.

It all sounds so bloody simple doesn’t it?

Then she’s tripping over bags of potatoes and onions in her tiny flat all the time too.

Sadly where I shop, there are many more people of all ages following the sticker staff late in the day while trying not to look embarrassed - if this is difficult to picture for the anempathic then try to image a gang of MPs or young hacks of a particular party following an editor of the Daily Mail, Telegraph or Times offering a column for bright young things likely to be useful in a few years or decades or an overseas oligarch with an altruistic 'interest' in UK politics.

Wonder how much those big bags weigh? Let's hope she is fit enough to carry them back from the bus stop. And not disabled - is disability positively correlated with poverty? still if she's that strong, she could get a job on a farm. But wait, many people on benefits are working and on low wages. Best ignore that as that might cause dissonance with the feckless lazy poor trope that works well with the audience.

Just pop down to a local farm and pick up a 25kg bag of potatoes. It’s very cost effective.

Exactly. Eating cheaply is easy, you just need to have time to go round all the shops looking for the best deals, and pop to the market every week for your fresh veg, and hover around your supermarket of choice at the right time in the evening to get the good stuff with the yellow stickers.

In between trips to all the supermarkets you just need a few hours to tend your garden or allotment so that you can enjoy delicious home-grown veg that only costs you pennies to plant.

Then it’s just a couple of hours a day to make all the homemade bread and chutneys and batch-cook for the lovely big chest freezer you keep in the garage. Oh and don’t forget how much you can save on your energy bills if you get an Aga installed too!

That’s all you have to do and then you too can eat for pennies like everyone did in the good old days!

Basically those who can eat for 30p a day are those who can afford not to work.

@FirewomanSam indeed though I don't think every PP saying go to farm shops with possibly non-existent cars or cars that don't require fuel because presumably some poor already have PHEV with solar panels and a battery or live on a bus route where the bus runs for free and stops near the poor person's house and also stops near a city-centre farm?, buy and store large, heavy quantities of carbohydrates, repeatedly trawl supermarkets using said transport for yellow stickers and have contingency to feed families if no suitable stickered food is available and so on are anempathic, nor that they all don't have a clue, nor that they might be posting for disingenous reasons. It may be one or more of such posters are genuinely is trying to make helpful suggestions for those people genuinely looking for cooking advice about how to what you can cook for 30p and don't need to look in a mirror.

Though it may be those posters will come up with some recipes to feed the staff more cheaply rather than an enhanced concept of what poverty is like for some of their fellow citizens.

Yes! Why didn't I think of that?! That's it, that's the answer to poverty.

I assumed the poster was being facetious.

I was definitely not serious. A farm visit. 25kg of potatoes. Storing 25kg of potatoes. Presumably eating (microwaved) baked potatoes til you lose the will to live.

That said, there’s loads of similarly daft advice on the thread.