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?

Somewhat missing the point though if that’s how people are making ends meet bloody dire situation wouldn’t you say ?

It’s a good point that trying to have a balanced or varied diet becomes impossible. I could make one big batch of macaroni cheese to eat all week, for every lunch and dinner. And have toast for breakfast. That would be pretty cheap and I’d take advantage of economies of scale.

But it’s not a good diet, is it?

Is it 30p for the whole meal or 30p per person? I’m vegetarian and there’s 7 of us, I think I could easily make a meal for £2.10 BUT (and it is a very big but) we already have cupboard staples in to make this work such as seasoning, herbs etc which many won’t have. Lots of people don’t own pots or utensils either which makes things even more complicated. It’s easy for me to suggest a lentil vegetable curry for example but useless if the person doesn’t have a working hob, pots, mixing spoon etc.

*noborisno · 12/05/2022 14:07
Bag of lentils £1

Tin tomatoes 30p

Bag of spaghetti 20p

seasoning packet 30p

Meals: 20 spagbols

Rough guide, comes out at 10p/meal.*

This is sarcasm, right?!

One tin of tomatoes and one bag of spaghetti between TWENTY portions??

Even if it was a large 800g tin and a 1kg pack of spaghetti it wouldn’t possibly feed 20 unless they were toddlers.

Why aren't we getting loads of TV chef shows about 30p meals?

So much this.

Just look on threads here at the advice given to people on how to budget

"Buy in bulk": great if you have the means to transport it, somewhere to store it, and a way to cook it

"Go to a budget supermarket": fantastic idea in theory but I know my nearest budget supermarket (an Aldi) is a £6.40 bus ride away plus £3.20 for any children with me and I'd then I'd be limited in what I could buy as I'd have to also carry it and transport it back on the bus

"Shop online so you can stick to a list/budget": also great in theory but most shops have a £40 minimum spend, you also need a debit card

"Make a huge pot of soup/sauce/curry and portion it out over the week": sigh. a, you need a weeks worth of ingredients, see above for this and b, you need fuel to cook it, and c, you need somewhere to store it and d, there is a mental toll to the monotony of eating the same boring, basic, cheap meal over and over all week long

"Use lentils instead of meat": they take a lot of cooking and if you don't like them or the DC don't like them, that's a lot of waste. If you have £1 and it's a choice between a bag of lentils that they might eat and a bag of 24 nuggets that they will definitely eat, which are you going to choose?

There are so many barriers in the way and telling people that they should just cook these amazing 30p a head meals shows a total lack of understanding about what these are.

I should also add the uni I work at recently did a fully costed, nutritional meal plan for 1 student for their 3 meals a day exercise that was done as a project by the nutritionist students and academics. It was based on asda pricing (as that is local to the halls) and the cheapest weeks, fully nutritional meals came out at 19.89. That is for one student, for one week. Yes scales of economy means you could scale this up and it wouldn't cost double the amount for a family but it still isn't 30p a meal.

They're not inaccurate, I was on Asda doing my online shop so priced as I went. If you believe they are wrong then do feel free to cost them out yourself.

If I had to meal plan for a week on £6.30... Probably would look something like that, was more or less my diet as a student (I was able to stretch to £10 or even £15 though sometimes!)

2 kg pasta - £0.92, 20 sausages - £1, 1 kg rice - £0.45, 15 eggs - £1.21 4 tins of tomatoes - £1.20 Carrots 0.5kg - £0.25 Onions 0.5kg - £0.4 Peas or broccoli 0.5kg (frozen)- £0.4

Allocation to oils, spices, salt, tea budget - £0.47 left over.

Meets the calorie requirement, and more or less nutritious, but exceptionally boring. All value range / own brand items, checked prices at ASDA.

I can't even begin to imagine why on earth he would say this! It is a disgrace and for the next year, he should live on 30p a meal and let us know how he gets on. We can follow it live.

It is a real kick in the balls for struggling families. What he doesn't seem to realise is some families do not even have 30p for dinner....and are going without. I am really annoyed with him, poverty is not a high stakes challenge.

Another point often overlooked is if you are going to buy a 20 kg bag of spuds because that’s the cheapest option and allows you to keep the price of a meal, let’s assume the jacket potato with a handful of cheese is a meal, it’s a sidedish actually, but anyway you’ve now invested your entire budget in one item, where most people would be able to store a 20 kg bag of spuds I do not know ?

And the chances of the entire bag being rotten is not out of the question along with the possibility of having to throw at least half away before you reach the bottom of the bag because they’ve just quite simply been stored in a warehouse at subzero temperatures for the last two years and the minute they are defrosted up to room temperature the whole lot fall apart that’s what usually happens to me with a 2 kg bag .

5th wealthiest country in the world too... and this is what people are resorting to.

I agree about the cost of transport. An acquaintance went to buy a microwave and had to pay for a taxi to get home. if only she'd asked for a lift - far too nice to even think of it

Hospedia's shopping list sounds great to me, not boring at all

And that will do 3 meals a day for 7 days would it?

Dirt, with a bit of nettle garnish, all available on the side of the road/your garden 😊

Yes. Not very diverse or enjoyable, but as a bare minimum for one person to sustain themselves.

Quick way to make sure that no one with young kids wants to be an MP.

And security for all MPs living in one place would cost a fortune. Far more than their accommodation costs now. They'd need 24hr policing because everyone would know where they lived. (Like parliament)

Living in separate places means no need for armed guards because no one knows where they are.

I tried living off £1 a day for all food and drink a couple of years ago. It was possible then- but nutritionally crap. Don't think it would be possible now.

Carrot and coriander soup is the one meal u can think of where I could do a portion that cheap. Very nice ..but don't think I would want to live on it. If I added bread to go with soup it would take it over the 30p mark so hardly a solution for even an occasional meal as not very satisfying for a main meal without the bread 🤔

all this allocating amounts to salt and oil etc is all well and good.

but in practice, you’ve got £6.30 a week to spend on food. Salt works out as less than a penny per meal. But then you run out and the next tub of salt is a sizeable portion of that week’s budget.

when you are that poor, you are living week to week. You’re not sitting on reserves to buy the occasional items. If you need oil, you need to buy it with that week’s budget. It doesn’t matter that it will last you a month. Practically it just means you don’t have that money to spend on the actual food. So your 30p a meal budget plummets.

Policy wise, this is all very short sighted anyway. All that happens is that the costs to the NHS down the line of nutritionally poor diets go up.

Except to actually go to the shops to get that food costs money, and it costs money to store and cook food.

So you don't even have £6.30 to start with. More like £4.

When my sons were at school they did "Bachelor survival" the Head said they wouldn't do cookery or sewing so they renamed it. He said they all needed it before they set of for university. It was a grammar school and they majority went to university.

I've just looked on the Asda website and Asda's own free range eggs (the cheapest) are 15.4p each and also only have 66 calories each.

You can get 250g of mushrooms for 50p, how many are you allowed?

Smart Price cheese is £4.42 per Kg, a 25g portion would be 11p.

When I was a skint single mum on benefits I used to make huge vats of chickpea curry. At the time you could buy 4 tins of tomatoes or chickpeas for £1 from the world food aisle in Tesco and £1 for a jar of curry paste and a few pennies for an onion. It used to cost me £1 to make a huge pot which would do me a few meals and let me buy my child a variety of food.

I looked today and chickpeas are 45p, tomatoes are 30p, about 10p for an onion and the curry paste is now £2 (I would use 1/4 of a jar) so my same curry would now cost £1.35, if you stretched that to 2 portions it would be 67p each.

I lost loads of weight eating like that and feel sick just thinking about chickpeas now.

I don't understand the fixation that schools should be teaching kids to cook alongside all the other multitude of responsibilities handed over to teachers
At what point to parents become responsible?
My dd missed the food tech part of dt because of covid but that part was always seen as a relaxed part of the syllabus. She's learning to cook at home with me, in the same way as I did from my parents, same with her brothers, they help in the kitchen at home, pick up skills and learn how to cook.