To think that cooking from scratch is becoming more and more unsustainable?

[AlternativePerspective]

I have always cooked from scratch, and I will be the first to admit that cooking from scratch has always been more expensive than buying e.g. jar sauces etc. However as things currently stand food prices are going up so much that cooking from scratch is becoming more and more unsustainable for many people who are struggling to make ends meet.

And in an era where we’re being told to live healthily, to cut out additives where possible, and to use the healthiest ingredients, while this has always been hard to sustain, right now for many it’s unsustainable from a financial perspective, and people are going to be forced to eat jar sauces, ready meals and various other foods with additives they didn’t want or need.

I’ve just cancelled my milkman because I can no longer justify spending the money, and it’s going to take a lot before I will ever eat ready meals or cook from a jar. But compromises are going to have to be made, and in many instances for some people, it’s not going to be possible to compromise.

Even if you bake, you only use a small amount of flour, sugar, butter etc

well sure but you still need to buy those ingredients in the amounts they’re sold in not the amounts you might use at any one time. When I was a single mum of 3, working three jobs I didn’t have the money to pay for a block of butter and certainly didn’t have the time to cook/bake anything.

@blackheartsgirl exactly. You've just said succinctly what I have been waffling about.
Clearly there's no comparison between homemade and bought macaroni cheese, pasta sauce, lemon cake and any of the other goodies people have offered up as examples of how much better homemade food is.
We all agree.
BUT bought is cheaper, it really is, in most cases, if your only criteria is to feed your family for as little as possible.
To be honest, I don't think a lot of people on here have a clue.

@Katypp for the purpose of this thread (I've obviously got nothing better to do today)

Cost of our home made cake
Eggs 46p
Flour 8.4p (from a 1.5kg bag)
Sugar 7.8p (granulated at 65p for a kg)
Butter £1.26
Lemon 34p

The cake weighs around 720g at £2.22

The one from the supermarket weighs 320g and costs £1.45

Home made works out cheaper though I haven't added the energy cost.

Do you serve your cake by the weight @charles? Most people would serve it by the slice.

My oven is about 50p an hour at the moment.

And you can't buy those ingredients in those quantities so if you're on weekly pay (low pay) you'd need to spend the £1.45 on your cake once a week rather than £10 or whatever upfront for the ingredients for 4

Obviously lots of people can afford the upfront cost but if you can't, it's not cheaper

There are quite a lot of slowcook cake recipes doing the rounds which saves a lot on energy if you can afford the upfront cost of ingredients

@Katypp of course I don't. I weighed the cake so I could get a comparative cost.

Or change how you make it? cookingonabootstrap.com/2018/03/20/salad-bag-pesto-9p-vg-v-df-gf/

That's one of the things that I find so interesting about this issue. It seems to be a uniquely British attitude to consider home cooking 'aspirational'.

I think that post-war it was seen as a good thing to have more than you needed and not to have to slave over a hot stove like your mother did, and convenience food started to come along when women were increasingly going out to work.

Then the improvement in British food came along and suddenly we all sloshing hitherto-unused olive oil over artisan pasta or watching Big Name Chefs on glossy TV programmes presenting langoustine wrapped in truffles or some such as "a simple mid-week supper". Food prices fell, in real terms, and many could all eat relatively luxuriously all the time so it often meant that home cooking was something "special", either because of the ingredients/techniques you were using or because it wasn't something you did very often due to the affordability of alternatives. Even if you couldn't afford the more expensive stuff, cheap ready meals and takeaways were easily available. Convenience and variety was king which meant that skills like meal planning, using up leftovers, budgeting and even basic cooking ability not only went out the window but were seen as poor relations. And we didn't need to focus too much on the costs of the food we were buying - get it on BOGOF and chuck it out if you don't need it. It's cheap, who cares?

But now prices are rising and the wheels are coming off our previous ways of eating. I don't think we'll all be eating gruel with an extra helping at Christmas if we're lucky, but maybe there will be a reset along the lines of meat being the exception rather than eaten at every meal, less junk food with its empty calories and re-learning how to eat on a budget.

A poor quality cake made with utter crap is cheap.

I still find it cheaper to bake one from scratch. Bags of flour, sugar etc will do several cakes, not one. I bake things while I have something for dinner in the oven anyway. Fuel costs will start trickling through to the costs of baked goods in shops soon.

It’s definitely cheaper to make most things of your comparing like to like ingredients

Homemade pizza:
1kg organic pizza 00 flour - £1.30
1 tin tomatoes -70p
mozzarella- 60p each (2.40)
fresh yeast-30p
garlic/ salt/ oregano (pence, green herbs from garden)

less £5 to make x4 large 14 inch mozzarella pizzas - ie £1.20 ish per pizza. You can make cheaper using basic non organic flour or cheaper tomatoes. And can add any other toppings to use up odd bits from the fridge.

We don’t have huge freezer space, but if we make something we often just eat for 2 days in a row. Such as sausage and lentil casserole, means easy to just reheat when busy.

Cooking from scratch doesn’t have to mean time and batch cooking or whatever either. Something like an omelette is cooking from scratch and fast

@charles11, so if your cake was twice the size (not twice the weight) of the shop cake, you are right, yours is cheaper. So you would need to get eg 12 slices out of your cake but only 6 out of the shop cake.
If your cake was the same size but just denser (as home-made cakes tend to be) your cake would yield the same number of slices, so be twice the price per slice.
That's what I am getting at, no need for pass agg faces.

@Caspianberg Tesco Hearty Food pizza 66p. so two would be £1.32. Pizza Express £5, so two for £10.
Clearly the PE pizza would be superior in every way to the 66p one - or you would hope so - so in this case, yes your home-made one would be cheaper.
But I think it's already been established that home-made is better, healthier, more wholesome, more interesting etc than shop-bought budget food.
If, as was said up thread, you've only got a couple of quid on your electricity meter, the 66p pizza would be cheaper than any pizza using inferior ingredients to yours you could make at home.

@Katypp It was a genuinely confused face, not passive aggressive as I didn't know what you were getting at.
The supermarket cake says it serves 8 and I cut mine into 10 generous pieces (traybake)

I think if you are used to cooking from scratch a lot, you probably dont spend much time looking at ready made stuff- particularly the economy bottom shelf/top shelf stuff to notice the really cheap things.
i can get a tin of custard for 35p. I have never made custard. its egg, milk and vanilla isnt it? Is it really less than 35p . I have my own chickens so i dont buy eggs.

The thing is that we're used to having the 'best' of different cuisines - heavy on meat, cheese, the expensive things, rather than their being a tiny part of a dish designed to stretch those ingredients out into a meal, and rarely the accompanying vegetables; we're also looking at buying in ingredients especially for one particular meal, rather than buying something that goes into multiple dishes over the course of days/weeks.

People who genuinely lived in the poverty that brought about the meals we tend to see in the shops weren't eating like we expect to every day. We have the celebratory meals, the expensive, time consuming ones, huge amounts of expensive/desirable/perishable ingredients rather than the cheaper ones. And the strongly flavoured items were mostly due to needing to a) preserve things when they were in season and b) make the cheapest ingredients taste of something so it wasn't quite so bland every single day.

Yes, cooking from scratch as a privileged person in the UK with the expectation of having what has been sold to them as 'good food' is going to be expensive and we aren't even looking at the extortionate price of being celiac here but cooking from scratch in the way the original recipes were created isn't out of reach.

Well I only admire it from afar because I'm a vegetarian but even if he dropped the pancetta (for context, I mentioned it costs more than a jar of branded bolognese), the beef mince also costs more than a jar, as does the pork mince. Even the celery is 47p because you can't buy it by the stick.

He gets 8-10 servings out of it but if you're broke the jars are much more affordable.

Onion- 10p ish
Carrot- 10p ish
Celery- 47p
Milk- roughly 20-30p (1/3-1/2 a litre)- Sainsburys semi
Pancetta- £2.60- standard Sainsburys
Beef mince- £3.10- as above
Pork mince- £2.25- as above
Tomatoes- 90p (we only use Mutti )
Tomato paste- £1.20 (Mutti again)
Bay leaf- 70p fresh or £1.20 for Fudco dried in the Indian aisle (we have a tree in the garden)
Nutmeg- 85p
3 hours cooking-no idea of cost

So £12 for someone who hasn't cooked it before and doesn't have the nutmeg or bay leaf. Or they could buy 6 jars of M&S bolognese sauce (£1.95, serves 2) for the same price. I deliberately chose M&S rather than the cheapest I could find because I'm aware we buy more expensive ingredients.

@Charles11 So let's assume your cake would cut into 12 less generous slices, at 18.5p per slice. Or stick with your 10 slices for 22p per slice.
Either way, it's more expensive than the shop cake at nearly 17p per slice, is it not?
I'm sure yours is far nicer, but my point stands I think

But that's a ridiculously expensive bolognese @starlingdarling? It doesn't say anything other than your DH makes an expensive bolognese

A cheap homemade bolognese for 4
Onion: 10 p (85p/kg)
Carrot 10p (29p/kg)
Celery: 10p (47p for a whole pack)
Beef mince 1.89 (500g)
Tomatoes 56p (2 x tins at 28p)
Spaghetti 20p (500g)
Tomato paste 10p (30p for a tube)
Garlic 10p (80p for 3 bulbs)

Plus some mixed herbs so maybe 5p (£1 for 30g)

Celery, carrots and onions are all relatively long lasting veg and likely to be used again

That's £3.26 for 6 or so. You can add smoked bacon for 1.25 or additional herbs for more money but as a basic that's a cheap bolognese. Can cook in the slow cooker

I don't really understand the point of your recipe because your options aren't mutti tomatoes or jar sauce. Like yes you can make a fancy bolognese which costs a lot of money, but that's not your only option for home cooking. People just keep posting expensive recipes to prove home cooking is expensive and I'm not sure if it's to show off? Even comparing to your m&s jar sauce you still need to add the mince, veg and pasta to the sauce so its a bit of a pointless comparison.

@Carrotten The M&S jar includes meat, and at £1.95 is two-thirds of the price of your cheap bolognaise. I'm not sure how it would stretch, but if you were scrimping, you could probably make it feed six if you had to.

@Katypp my confusion remains.
The supermarket cake claims to be 8 servings but that works out at 40g a serving (18p a serving). Pretty small.
If I divided mine into 40g servings, I'd get 18 slices (12p a serving)

@Katypp only serves 2 though and no pasta? My recipe serves 6?

I mean if we're serving 1/3 portions of sauce my recipe could serve 18 😂

I can’t believe this thread.

People comparing home made food using good
ingredients (butter, free range eggs, nice toppings etc) vs ready meals which of course will use lower quality ingredients, have added water etc.
Same for dishes with meat or fish, you do realize the cheap ready made ones are using the lowest quality and also way less than you would put
in if you were cooking.

So yes, eating rubbish is cheaper than eating healthy.

Also, I really wonder what percentage of the population really can’t afford 1kg of flour or sugar. By « really can’t afford » I mean they only buy essentials, no alcohol or treats or soda, supermarket own brand, only seasonal fruit and veg, etc.
I’m sure a small percentage are in this case, but reading this thread you would think the majority of the British population is struggling to afford a basic bag of flour and putting the oven on for 30mins.

@Charles11 It sounds like @Katypp ‘s point is that a slice of the shop bought cake is cheaper than a slice of your (denser and delicious sounding) cake. Completely ignoring the fact that you’ll likely eat a second slice of the first one because you won’t be full after one, which you won’t do with the dense home made one.
Or that you’ll cut smaller slices with a dense cake than with a lighter one.