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.

Oh, I hate this 'poor people only want to eat rubbish and are not interested in food that's not beige' argument. How insulting.

Plus how come it's assumed that people are able to run the oven for 20 minutes to cook nuggets and chips, but couldn't possibly use the hob to make omelettes or something like spaghetti carbonara or tuna and tomato pasta, both of which are classic 'peasant food' recipes, ie cheap, don't need fancy ingredients, a lot of cooking, or a freezer to store the beige and chips in the first place.

@BarbaraofSeville I didn't say they (WE, actually) want to eat like that. I was talking about that specific meal in response to a list below. When your kids want chicken nuggets it's cheaper to buy them frozen than it is to make them from scratch.

PP started talking about how in frozen nuggets there's only 58% chicken so fresh is better, which it is. But you need to fill the plate and as someone has since said... you can't make fresh chicken double in size.

You can blend your chicken thigh with other stuff to make a nugget at home -it ends up with a texture more like a bought nugget. it doesnt have to be pure chicken breast in breadcrumbs. I havent worked out the cost.

I think people end up buying nuggets and chips because a lot of the smaller shops that serve areas with poor transport dont have very nice fresh stuff. Our shop does an eat for £5 which gives you 12 fish fingers, bag of peas, bag of chips, 2 cod bits and a tub of ice cream.but its fresh food is very overpriced and limp.

Well said @BarbaraofSeville
My DGM had 6 chn and very little money. Being Irish immigrants, in the 1940s,50s they lived on simple foods and meals involving potatoes, eggs, cheap cuts of meat and simple vegetables. There was no fruit bowl but a treat might be an apple crumble on Sunday. My DM remembers her dad bringing home a Mars bar once on pay day and cutting it into 6 pieces for them all.
They were all healthy chn who grew up into slim adults.

Some are just not understanding the economy of scale point about either the lemon cake example or the Ragu.
The slices of lemon cake are not comparable, best guess is a whole supermarket cake would have to be eaten to have a similar meal value as 1 or 2 slices of cake. I remember grandma's biscuits were far more filling than a packet of custard creams. So 1 biscuit= a full packet.
More filling-last longer.
Plus the ragu is meant to coat the pasta not lather it nor be placed on top like a cow plat fgs. The meat is to add FLAVOUR, to the sauce, so you really don't need much.
And please don't get me started on those god-awful, triangular meal deal sandwiches.
The point is.
Foreign food isn't posh, it's peasant food from another country based on the available resources and was used to feed dozens of people in large families. And mass-produced processed food is pish.
The end.

@Onionpatch I actually never thought of blending the chicken up. although i have no blender, and couldn't afford to buy one. But yes i concede that could eek the chicken out to make the price more comparable with frozen nuggets.

Being Irish immigrants, in the 1940s,50s they lived on simple foods and meals involving potatoes, eggs, cheap cuts of meat and simple vegetables.

Everybody ate like that in the 1940s and early 1950s. Food was rationed.

@etulosba Was it? Didn’t know that.🙄

We're all having nuggets tonight.
2 frozen breasts, 1 egg, spices, flour, breadcrumbs, 2 carrots grated, beetroot grated, a dash of mayonnaise and salad cream, and a couple of garlic cloves for an Eastern European salad. No chips or bread.

The nuggets are far more filling and superior to the shop-bought bags.

Back to the op, why do people serve lasagne with chips or a jacket potato, that's adding a dense card with a dense carb?😂

Yanbu. It's a lie that coking from scratch is cheaper. One of my kids had a couple of allergies when she was small, so I had to cook everything we ate from scratch, until we managed to see a dietician who was able to recommend a load of precooked and processed 'safe' foods.

It was appallingly expensive to cook from scratch! Not to mention time consuming (luckily I was on maternity leave. This would not have been sustainable alongside a full time job. Despite the fact that I would batch cook and try and make meals that had a lot of the same key ingredients.

Another thing that people don't factor in is storage. And shopping time. We have a small house with a tiny fridge and freezer, so we really can't store much. Cooking from scratch also uses fresh ingredients, which go out of date sooner..if you don't live near a supermarket, this is a problem!

@NumberCurtains you can cook from scratch using tinned or frozen food and veg.

YABU OP

You need to look at like for like. It's insane to compare home made cake with £1 Cadbury brownies like someone did upthread.

Cooking from scratch will be often cheaper if you know what to make.

Also most recipies in blogs, TV, etc are full of superflous expensive ingredients for the sake of clicks and to make them seem more interesting or exotic. If you are skilled and know what you are doing, you can easily leave out or replace them without significantly affecting the flavour (or even sometimes appearance)

I think what we're seeing on this thread is that it probably is sustainable to cook cheaply from scratch if you have transport or local budget supermarkets, money to fill a larder with spices etc, storage for batch cooking, electronic goods (slowcooker, blender etc). no allergies. And don't want anything particularly exotic.

Otherwise it's a trade off - I like a bit of variety so i'd rather have a shop bought £1.59 jambalaya every now and again rather than another bowl of stew that i managed to make for 78p

Jam sandwich to fill up kids is no more unhealthy than cake. And scones if baking use less oven time and fat than cake. Drop scones and crepes need no oven time. Keep cake in cake tins it will last longer. And if making pastry - use half butter and half lard - you won't taste it, imo get better pastry, and good for jam tarts, custard tarts and quiche - which is a great cheap tea, using up bits of bacon and oven space when you have any. Cake keeping if simple is cheapest, a batter of 8 oz each of Flour, eggs, fat (half butter and Marg) - can be turned into a lemon drizzle, or chocolate cake, banana cake or whatever, you can split the batter and make different types at once. The bigger the cake the longer the baking time, so use paper cases rather than make a big cake. Also cous cous hasn't been mentioned I think - boil the kettle, and pour into cous cous which has had a stock cube chilli powder and cumin mixed through. Use this instead of rice to save the gas. I'm getting old in the tooth - my gran was a cook, my granda a baker and I'm full of useless info which I hope might be handy to some.

You do need time and access to ingredients but you don't need extra gadgets or a larder full of spices to cook from scratch.
You can perk up lots of dishes with a teaspoon of dried mixed herbs or make a curry with some curry powder. You'd need some salt too and maybe pepper.
A lot of flavour comes from the vegetables and the ingredients you use.
I think it's more satisfying to eat freshly made nourishing meals so you're fuller for longer and don't need to snack as much (whether you want to is a different matter)

thanks @auldcraw i forget about cous cous and the fact you can make it with such little energy is fantastic. mine like it with just a vegetable stock cube

We make jam from picking ripe fruit growing in the woods and other areas.
Water, sugar, boil, done.

You don't need a lot of equipment, the local heart foundation has loads of gadgets for naff all. Some groups on social media are giving stuff away.

Some basic utensils and some pans and you're away. Dp's family back home doesn't even use cutlery.😂
When I met Dp she had this crazily sharp knife from back home. That cut and organized everything. Brilliant.

I think I’d prioritise an oven/hob over a TV or iPad. I also think food and nutrition and budgeting should be compulsory at secondary school to GCsE standard. It’s so fundamentally important as it impacts every other aspect of our lives.

Hmm... not sure on that one @Benjispruce4. You can cook with a kettle if you have to but you can't entertain kids with an oven and they can't do their homework on it.

i'm being deliberately goady because we aren't there (yet!) having to make decisions like that but people in our community actually do.

we do have a great facebook group that helps with whitegoods but another problem is pride. many won't access the help because of that

Not everything was rationed, fruit and veg were not for a start. Whether you could get hold of any fruit is another matter, you were mostly limited to what was seasonal and grown in the UK.

I'm nt sure if offal was rationed, if it was it was still fairly cheap

Another thing not everyone realises is that rationed food still had to be paid for and during the war prices did go up.

This is a 1942 ration for an adult who wasn't working in a mine or agriculture and wasn't pregnant.

Bacon & Ham 4 oz
Other meat value of 1 shilling and 2 pence (equivalent to 2 chops)
Butter 2 oz
Cheese 2 oz
Margarine 4 oz
Cooking fat 4 oz
Milk 3 pints
Sugar 8 oz
Preserves 1 lb every 2 months
Tea 2 oz
Eggs 1 fresh egg (plus allowance of dried egg)
Sweets 12 oz every 4 weeks

@40andlols if you can only entertain your kids with a tv and iPad, it’s time for a rethink!

That's just it. Cut it in bite size pieces and put in breadcrumbs and you don't need more chicken than the frozen kind. Because it is as filling.

Skinless and boneless chicken thighs are tastier than breast and they used to be cheaper. Not so much now I don't think.

Chicken on the bone - legs and thighs are very cheap. Cook them in a tray and have a couple with your meal with some rice/potatoes and veg/salad and it is tasty, nutritious and cheap. Take the meat out of the remaining chicken and use for other dishes or sandwiches. Use the bone to make a really tasty stock for delicious chicken soup - with veg, or noodles or vermicelli or chickpeas etc.

I make a lot of delicious and cheap meals from scratch but I know how to cook. I can make delicious gyoza and okonomiyaki with a few cheap ingredients - cabbage and carrots and flour mainly.

I toast bread that is going hard and rub with garlic and add top with half a grated tomato that is going past its best and a little oil, salt and pepper.

I make delicious potato salads very cheaply. Coleslaw is super cheap and easy yet I see it a lot for sale for upwards of £1 for a small pot.

You can make very tasty quesadillas with some sweet potato, spring onion and cheese.

These are just examples. So I think the issue is more lack of knowledge and practice than cost.

They're teenagers @Benjispruce4. we do a fair amount of walking, and one of them does yoga with me, the other reads quite a lot. but if you have tips for entertaining teenagers without electronics and no money for clubs you should start a thread because that advice would be golden!

I don't understand why sugar was rationed if people were allowed that much.
That's like a family going through a bag a week . What on earth were they doing with it all?

I bake quite a lot but probably only buy a bag every couple of months or so if that.

They made all of their desserts/baking etc from scratch They used it in tea etc. It was used for preserves. When you're only getting a few ounces of meat a week you need to fill up with something. And hardly anyone was obese.

If you buy one bag of sugar a few times a year you definitely do not bake "quite a lot".