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?

Some points.

The price of cheap foodstuffs has increased dramatically in the last decade. These are a bigger proportion of poorer people's income, so they are disproportionately affected by this compared to richer people.

Some examples:

cookingonabootstrap.com/2018/02/19/mixed-bean-goulash-31p-vg-v-df-gf/
cookingonabootstrap.com/2018/02/19/carrot-cumin-kidney-bean-burger-17p-was-9p-vg-v-df/
cookingonabootstrap.com/2018/02/20/sausage-bean-casserole-60p-was-48p-df-gf/

There's also the "poverty premium" - the fact that life is just more expensive as a poorer person.
www.turn2us.org.uk/About-Us/News/What-is-the-poverty-premium

Lots of evidence and estimates out there on this. In 2016, Bristol university estimated the premium at £490 per year. With the current crisis it's probably way more now.

Like others on this thread have said, the basic point is that wages and benefits aren't high enough for people to afford the necessities of life - food, fuel, a safe and suitable home.

Finally, for those saying "this should be the parents' responsibility", this is how poverty passes down through generations. Cash-strapped parents are less likely to have been taught this themselves, more likely to be working multiple jobs and have no time, less likely to be able to afford ingredients and fuel etc. to teach their kids to cook. This is why we pay taxes towards the state school system - so that everyone gets a fair chance to learn.

If this MP is really vexed about this then he needs to be lobbying for i. higher benefits ii. more funding for schools

My jaw's dropped so far open I'm in danger of dislocation. Forage for mushrooms and blackberries, keep chickens!

Or, here's an idea: everybody pays the tax they owe, employers and multinationals commit to paying fair prices/wages, and through a combination of employment on a decent wage topped up when necessary with benefits and eventually replaced by a pension, everybody gets enough money to pay for accommodation and food of a good standard, utilities and the other essentials of life, with a bit left over for the things that aren't essential but make life worth living, like a modest holiday and an occasional trip to the cinema.

I have lovely fond memories of going blackberrying on the local common as a kid. We used to help my mum make a summer pudding or boil up some jam with all the blackberries we’d found.

Surely, SURELY though people can see that while going blackberry picking and then enjoying some berries for desert after your dinner is a lovely family activity, that is very different to going blackberry picking because it’s the only way you can afford to eat?

Maybe we need a grans' army going into schools to teach cooking. I've volunteered for years at local schools usually doing reading but I've also helped with art or craft projects. I'd be much better with cooking than I am with art, as my art teacher put on a school report "Ancient couldn't draw a straight line with the aid of a ruler." Harsh but true.

Indian vegetarian meals can be made for £2–£3 for a family of 4. Using frozen veg, tomatoes, onions and lentils.
subzi, dal, rice and roti - staple diet in India

But still not 30p.

I honestly cannot understand why they refuse to increase benefits. Am I being dense?

So the Bank of England need to increase base rate inflation to - well, basically induce more joblessness so that the pool of unemployed will increase and wages will decrease/ stagnate so that one major arm of inflation will...deflate, bringing goods and service back under the gold standard of 2% inflation?

Meanwhile the Treasury must be raking in the money because the tax receipts are...inflated?

So poverty and joblessness is part of the solution but what we intend to do with the poor and the jobless is to infer it's their own fault that they are poor and unemployed and cannot make 30p meals. Is that right?

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g rich people always think they’d be better at being poor than the poor are. They have these romantic ideas that they’d live off the land and keep chickens and bake their own bread, and save money by chopping down their own firewood and knitting their own clothes and whatnot. Not scouring the yellow stickers at the supermarket after working a double shift, oh no, that’s just what you do when you don’t know how to be poor properly.

I do think a lot of Brits (and particularly men) can't/don't bother with much cooking and eat far too many MaccyDs, Greggs pasties etc- however the idea you can magic up tasty and nutritionally balanced meals day after dat at 30p per person is clearly ludicrous. Even a 2 egg omelette served with nothing is around 85p .

It's not always benefits that are the issue- plenty of non benefit recipients struggle as much as those on benefits-it's housing costs , housing support that doesn't cover full rent costs, previous debt - high utilities, childcare costs when you have very young children-- fuel costs /travel costs to get to work - it's all kinds of things- not just an issue because of low benefits.

Considering that some MN'ers can make a chicken last 6 meals for 8 people each time, probably quite a lot.

How many people who aren't in receipt of benefits are going to the food bank? Not being goady. I just have no idea - I assumed it was the majority but that might be my own ignorance.

@FourTeaFallOut

Yes I wonder this too. I hear accusations of people ‘misusing’ food banks, but from what I know, you can’t just roll up to one and get handouts. You need a referral from a job centre or social worker or similar and that wouldn’t happen without good reason, I.e benefit sanctions / delays or real poverty so it stands to reason most would be in receipt of benefits.

Yes the poor doing poverty wrong and won't listen just because they've had some practice. They should listen to richer people who can deploy their generalised intelligence to tell them how to do poverty better. If they won't listen then they probably don't deserve help.

And every reasonable person would agree with the Chancellor that the government can't completely insulate everyone from price rises. It might be unfair if they did something and if they did it too early and before the next election. Still if they obviate price rises for passports then that will help all the foodbank users who plan on going long haul.

I for one would welcome more suggestions for recipes that in fact cost more than 30p to source and cook or don't have enough calories or nutrients unless they are served on a plate of food.

😂

Oh yes that would be useful.

Laughing (grimly) at the foraging mushrooms suggestion. Glad there was a passing reference to making sure they're safe, but seriously, did that person have any idea how long it skilled foraging for mushrooms is?

www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2018/11/poisonous-mushrooms/

Take a look at this. The death caps look staggeringly innocuous for example.

Plenty of working people are in receipt of benefits. Plenty of people with jobs are using food banks but they also get benefits.

yes, why are there are still serious discussions about solutions which are not this??

I know it's not the point of the thread but I did too good to go from morrisons, got 3 heads of broccoli (labelled 20p each) two bags of oranges (labelled 50p each) and 2 packs of hot cross buns (labelled £1) for £3.50, saving 10p in all 🙄all due to go out of date the next day, I boiled and pureed the broccoli to add to baby's food, probably could have done something with the oranges but just ate them over 2 days and the hot cross buns had mould on them by then morning so I didn't fancy eating.

I just costed up one of my favourite soups which I thought was fairly cheap to make.

Assuming you had none of the ingredients in stock it would cost £4.87 to buy them all. However some things, like stock cubes, you have to buy more than one of.

So I costed up the cost of actual amounts used to. It came to £2.70, which is 67p per portion.
Google tells me the hob costs between 25p-50p for an hour, so for the 30-40 minutes it takes you're looking at 12.5p-33p in electricity. Let's average that at 20p
Plus you need to boil the kettle which costs about 12p apparently.

So 4 portions of healthy soup costs £3.02

However, while its both healthy and delicious you couldn't live on it!

All prices based on Asda and not including oil as it was out of stock so I have no idea how much it costs!

Also costed might not be a word. The more I look at it the more I'm not sure.

Every reasonable person would agree with the Chancellor that the government cannot completely insulate everyone from all the effects of inflation so we should wait, perhaps until 2024, there'll be purdah just before the election so they'll have some spare time to do some things and the future is much more predictable? It's like the government cannot protect everyone from all criminality so we don't need a police force. Actually if they are going to stray into lookign into historic offences then that might not be a bad idea.

I genuinely don't understand this. Perhaps I was living in a bubble for the first 30 years of my life, but I was under the impression that until the 1980s if you had a job you could expect to be earning enough to live on, and even a single wage would be enough to support a whole household - say one working parent, one non-working parent, child/children. And then the unions were emasculated, union membership plummeted, multinationals flexed their muscles and ignored what sovereign nations' governments wanted them to do, and suddenly the solution in the UK was instead of forcing employers to pay a living wage and putting limits on the cost of housing, food and utiliities to ensure they were affordable, suddenly we were topping up an inadequate wage with benefits. And here we are now. Why we aren't all out on the streets about this passes my understanding.