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?

My mum was brought up Red Cross feeding station poor (ie starving) for the first few years of her life. Flour boiled in water w saccharine, and cod liver oil once a week. The reason for this was the war - they were too poor to afford food - not that my gran lacked the skills to cook economically.

My mum learnt to cook economically - veg and lentils all the way. She taught me the same skill set. In turn, I will teach my sons to cook cheaply and economically and healthily. However, I will not teach them how to prepare meals for 30p/head because it simply isn't sustainable. Better that I teach them to support themselves, legally or otherwise, to put food on the table. That's something else my mum learnt from her mother, along with cooking skills.

And God help us that we've come to this.

Well I think he's right in saying that lots of people don't know how to cook or budget for food.
This should be a part of the national curriculum. My dd has her first cooking practical next week and has been given a list of ingredients to make some biscuits, all things that have to be brought specifically rather than stuff that most people have in the cupboard.
They should be teaching the kids how to make nutritious and cheap food, not bloody biscuits that it's cheaper to buy ready made!

Let alone change his own bedding or clean his own toilet. Ironic that he will be telling the person doing it that they should be able to live for less..

@Doubleraspberry they don't all have houses/flats. Some stay in hotels with no cooking facilities/fridge. That MP claims for hotels.

@Hospedia

Wage and benefits should be at a high enough level that people can afford to fucking eat and its a scandal that they're not.

Hoo bloody rah.

30p per meal as a single person would be £6.30 a week and would be pretty much impossible. 30p per person for, say us, a family of 7, is probably doable. That's almost £45 a week.

But that's their choice. Again, a choice that means they can't cook cheaply for themselves. Just like the choices they are criticising others for making. Plenty of hotels in London with kitchenettes they could use too.

until somebody provides me with a costed menu plan for a week that doesn’t rely heavily on economies of scale, and ticks each food group, I do not believe 30p per meal is ever realistic.

Plenty of people get angry when MPs stay in flats in London and say they should be in hotels. And then when they stay in hotels people get angry with that too!

This would be genius! I mean has anyone actually told this dinosaur how much a pint of milk costs these days?

When I do a weekly shop for meals I've planned for me and DP on a strict budget it comes to £40 - £45 a week, which works out about a £1 a head per meal. It does the job nutritionally, but doesnt include any treats like fruit, soft drinks, deserts etc. Its only possible to make it interesting because I have a lot of herbs, spices etc.

If I wanted to cut that back to the bare minimum to offer enough calories and nutritional content, I could get it down to £35, which would come at at 83p per person for day.

It would be possible to cut that back further, but it would be very lacking in Vegetables and protein so wouldn't be healthy long term. I don't think it's possible to get a balanced diet on 30p per person per day.

They should live in house shares with their fellow MPs.

Well quite.

I have costed things up and I calculate that for ds when he starts uni I will need to do him an initial shop for around £40 to get him started off which will include a bag of pasta, a bag of rice, a bag of frozen veg and other basics. From them on he should be able to live on around £30 per week or £4 per day.

Yes. One of my favourite books, with some memorable images in it - another being a son that looks in on his elderly mum each week, checks her cupboard and sees it well stocked, though it's revealed that the tins and packets are actually empty, which through pride, she doesn't want him to find out.

There was a TV 'short' I remember seeing quite a while ago with a TV 'how to' with an MP (actor) making something very close to these points (people can't cook and budget) and giving a demonstration on how to use a box from a food bank, ending up cutting open the tea bags to 'tea smoke' something with a gas flame on a cooker. A young person comes through the door of a bedsit carrying a box from a food bank, and lights, microwave, toaster (the only equipment), and all power out because of being unable to afford the bill.

That is a v good point. Why should the taxpayer buy MPs dinner at £30 a head when they can just stay in an airbnb / hotel with kitchenette and make themselves some tasty home made cooking for only 30p?

This one 😂😂😂

My vegetable soup, but not sure if it's exactly 30p per portion. I would say less than 50p for sure. We have two bowls each (me and husband) for two days from 5L pot. I put frozen cauliflower, carrots, peas, potatoes sprouts and lentils or chickpeas. Plus some spices and olive oil. Cooking it costs me more than 30p with current gas prices.

Not annoyed, just pointing out that it's a choice. An MP can spend £190 per night in a hotel, plus £25 per day subsistence. Or claim up to around 25k a year in rent plus subsistence (in addition to their base salaries).

I'm not someone who thinks that MPs shouldn't have financial support for having to spend a lot of time away from home. Anything else would result in the situation we used to have, of only rich people being able to afford to do it. But as things stand, none of them are in a position where they are needing to budget 30p a head for food for their families, and the MP speaking out has made a choice that while in London he will live in a hotel and therefore be spending far more on food than he would be in a flat.

Some of them do.

30p is ridiculous, maybe achievable in a ultra-bulk professional cooking environment, say schools or prisons. Or something that is going to lead to malnourishment, like a few own-brand sausages with mashed potatoes or pasta.

However, at 50p / portion I do have some ideas, and not all of them are a disaster, including reaching 5 a day norm. But as PPs said, it does require some bulk buying upfront, which can be a problem in itself.

His point makes no sense, because if he wants people to learn to cook properly, that usually by definition involves combining several different ingredients. Which you just can’t buy for 30p a day.

All the budget suggestions here involve basically two or three ingredients. Something on toast or something with rice/pasta. Even to make a daal, as some suggested, you would normally need more than just lentils on their own. Putting a tin of something on toast isn’t something you need to ‘learn to cook’ in order to be able
to do, so what is his point?

But whether or not someone can technically survive on 30p a day isn’t the point is it, really? Nobody should have to and I find it so appalling that we’re even discussing it.

They can't claim £25 in subsistence in London.

They can ONLY claim that if not in constituency or London- on parliamentary business. Which is rare- so hardly any claim it.

Bag of lentils £1
Tin tomatoes 30p
Bag of spaghetti 20p
seasoning packet 30p

Meals: 20 spagbols

Rough guide, comes out at 10p/meal.

Add in a veg and some accompaniments like marmite, gravy, stocks, and you have a gourmet meal. Get the 30p bars of dark chocolate to transform a chilli con carne.

I bulk order spices and stuff from Amazon. Big bags of soy chunks and cashews when they are on offer.

Keep adding to your stock, spice, pasta, dried pulses cupboard and you have a cupboard from which you can basically make batch meals for nothing just buy one vegetable and use it a few different ways, batch up, freeze, and eat cheaply. Continue to eat cheaply until you've built up a really decent pantry then you will find you can shop extremely cheaply from there on out.

Totally out-of-touch-with-life-in-the-real-world MP makes ludicrous statement and we are surprised?

What a dickhead.

What do you think he should do, drive 3 hours back to Nottinghamshire every night?