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?

Yorkshire puddings are a complete and fully nutritious meal especially when consumed in conjunction with food. The unambitious poor are just being typically unambitious for their Yorkshire puddings. If left in the Sun, they will rise and cook just as well as in a hot energy-consuming oven, probably.

If you're on a water meter, even a glass of water isn't free!

Are the poor people being silly for being hungry, for not bulking out their meals with useless carbs that still can't be cooked for 30p, for not being ambitious and inventing nutritious meals that can be cooked for less than 30p or for being poor?

Yorkshire puddings are an atypical peasant food, just like all the foods I listed from eastern Europe. Cornish pasties were another peasant food. Soups etc.
I feel people are presenting excuses and obstacles to try to justify anti-tory sentiment.
If Labour were to get in power at 6 pm tonight, people still wouldn't be able to cook. Brits have lost the skills.🙄

Our household income is quite healthy however we still eat these foods, simply because they represent great value for money and taste bloody nice.

We don't sit and eat Wagyu every night washed down with a glass or 2 of Chateau Lafite Rothschild 2018.

Some very sweeping generalisations there. Where's your evidence that 'Brits have lost the skills'? I don't think my family and friends are all that unusual, and I would say most of us are reasonably good cooks.

I cook lots of cheap meals, the meals I grew up with and that got me through 20% inflation in the 1970s. It still doesn't mean a sustained diet of 30p a day is healthy and it still doesn't mean yorkshire puddings are free. Mine are a thing of beauty and are loved by my children and grandchildren but they aren't free.

I'm teaching my GS to cook for when he's off to uni next year. He's getting to the stage where he can look at a recipe and say, "OK I could substitute this for that." So I think he's doing well and his yorkshire puddings on Sunday weren't half bad.

I can cook, I studied it, however, my opinion is British food is poor.
Look at the suggestions for beans on toast, or fish fingers, people think Ragu was invented by Dolmio (Mars inc), etc.😂

Brits aren't very well known for flair, a Mediterranean salad or an Eastern European salad blows ours away.
I'd not take it personally, Brits travel to experience cultures and other food. I visited my extremely poor DP's mums and was blown away by the variety of food on offer all from the ground, all eaten without a knife and fork too.

Well done to both of you! That's such an important skill, and I suppose it comes with practice and experience. A lot of people lack confidence about what goes with what, and how recipes can be adapted and still work. When I look at recipes online, I always look at the comments to see if anybody's actually made it and can confirm it's a good recipe. Very often I see people asking if they can use white sugar instead of brown, or if they can still make something that specifies half a teaspoon of cinnamon because they only have a quarter teaspoon left in the jar, or similar.

We are really enjoying it, I don't know why I waited so long to do it as I always cooked with my gran. The first time he looked at a menu and suggested swapping one of the ingredients I thought yes he's got it and come along way from the first session when he wanted me to define exactly what a pinch of salt was defined as, not sure if he wanted me to weigh it or count the grains. It has been such a pleasure to watch him develop.

I'll go one further and do free food.

Pick mushrooms (make sure they're safe), get wild garlic and wild rocket etc and then use cheap pasta/bread/rice and cook that.

Same for blackberries - use with cheap yogurt etc.

Omelettes and things based around these are cheap depending on price of eggs or if you have chickens.

How many people trying to make meals for 30p a head are likely to have chickens?

There are many people who can’t just have any cheap thing available for health reasons. Coeliac’s, people with colitis, IBS etc. I have a health condition that would flare up and could leave me disabled in 15 years if I eat processed foods, sugar, ‘white’ foods such as white bread, white pasta or white rice, potatoes etc. The long term cost of me not being able to work has to be weighed up against the cost of a comparatively expensive diet.

Food banks don’t generally have dark rye bread, oily fish, nuts and seeds, blueberries etc etc. Gluten free stuff for those who are allergic are so expensive. A lot of typically cheap, British food makes people unwell. It’s extra hard for families who have specific dietary needs.

It's not free though is it if you need to buy the yoghurt and bread or pasta.

If you live in an urban area, wild garlic and mushrooms won't be plentiful unless you travel there

Keeping chickens and going blackberrying to save money on food… either there is some killer parody going on here or you’ve all completely lost the plot.

Sue Townsend parodies this sort of thing in 'The Queen and I'. The Queen, having been sent to live in a council house in Leicester by a newly elected Republican party, remembers her nanny boiling up bones for nutritious soup (or something like that). However by the time she's caught the bus in the rain, trekked from the bus stop to the shops, queued up to cash her giro, and been around the expensive little local shop (no car to get to the big supermarket) she's too knackered to cook anyway and eats a load of cheap white bread and value jam.

I know I've still got covid brain but honestly I'm not sure who is being serious and who is just sending the whole thing up. Maybe we are in some new comedy skit no one has told us about.

I for one are sick of the anti-Tory excuses and obstacles. And I'm sick of those foodbank chancers Lee rightfully focused on. And those Labour scallywag brambles, not providing year-round free blackberries.

Still the blackberries might be useful in the Autumn when the next price cap changes and heating demand increases.

Suggestions about picking wild mushrooms and berries are actually very poor advice.
Very few people will have the knowledge to identify what is edible and what might make you very ill or even kill you.
Wild mushrooms of any description are not exactly abundant in most inner city areas anyway

but it shows how lucky the poor are. Blackberries can cost £3 in Waitrose and the poor can get them for free. The affluent might pay thousands to lose weight at spas and the lucky poor can just follow some of the recipes on here. Or be chancers at Lee's foodbank then spend the money they save on drugs, drink, cigarettes, sky and McDonalds, perhaps not in that order.

There are a handful of posters, not Zilla who has tripped into parody, who really get a kick out of the idea that people will forage for food to outrun food inflation.

There was an entire thread in this vein months ago with people seemed to have some romantic notion of picking through nature for tidbits to supplement meals and seemed genuinely excited about the thought of other people joing their hobby. Discussion moved on to all the wonderful things people were growing in their gardens.

I mean, fucking hell, where do you even go with that? There wasn't a modicum of shame that what they were talking about was desperate hungry people scavenging for food.

And people juggling several jobs or working and bringing up children aren't likely to have the time to go picking mushrooms and blackberries

Even if they did it wouldn't exactly be a balanced diet. I grew up in the 50s and times could be hard, I was a young mum in the 70s and inflation made life very hard but I can't believe we are in this state in the 21st century and that so many people seem to think it is fine.

And despite what some people claim, growing your own isn't the answer either

I have an allotment - the rent alone is £54 a year.
I manage to grow a reasonable amount of stuff. But I am far from being self sufficient. Its taken a few years to work out what grows well in my soil, last year very late frost all but wrecked my spuds, the badger got to the sweetcorn before I did, the fox dug up my carrots and the squirells got my hazel nuts. You arent guaranteed any crops.