"Just add beans, pulses and lentils"

[Hagrod]

I am sick of hearing this advice given when food poverty is being discussed!

"Just add beans, pulses and lentils to all your meals, they will give you the protein you need to spread expensive meat and fish further [ad infinitum]."

Like many other people, I do not have packets of beans, pulses and lentils nestled at the back of my cupboards just waiting for the day I am so starving I need to add them to a bowl of soup. I would have to go out and buy them, I assume they are not given away for free.

I just think it's such a cliched piece of advice that has been meted out to 'the peasants' for decades now and I wish they'd stop it.

It’s not just the advice which is sound advice on how to bill out a dish to make it go further. It does seem to me though that it is a bit like, “Just tell the plebs to pad out their meals, that will shut them up”. As someone said much earlier in the posts it isn’t solving the cost of living crisis padding out a few meals isn’t going help a lot of people meet their mortgage/rent, energy bills etc. Unless in amongst the pulses you find some magic beans…..

I bought some Green lentils the other day for this very reason. So we have some in to make food stretch. I'm doing liver tonight. So will be using up any bits of veg I need to use before a big shop. I will add some lentils to bulk it out so we get 3 meals out of it instead of two.

Just to add lentils to replace mince in a pie if you can't get out to the shops are delicious. So they are handy to have in as well as pasta rice and tinned food. Oh and storing food in the freezer.

Dried pulses are very cheap calories that store for ages.

The point being yes you buy them, but a ruddy great bag costs a fraction of the cost for the same calorie value of meat.

Yeah this is how I do it.

I don't like the 50/50 mince and lentils a lot of MN seem to favour, I'd rather just have dhal or soup. But I don't notice the difference if I add enough lentils to make 5 portions into 6. The trick also works on other meat stew type dishes. Over the course of a year, getting a couple of extra meat meals a week for a fraction of the price adds up.

This is how I was taught by my extremely working class family, incidentally. We were stretching the meat well before it was fashionable!

Yes I appreciate that hence caveat. More for a family trying to reduce meat consumption.

People are coming from different knowledge bases. Some may not know that beans, pulses etc can be used to bulk out a meal so it's helpful for some people. No piece of advice is applicable to everyone, but it's surprising how little some people know about nutrition and savvy shopping.

I just think it's such a cliched piece of advice that has been meted out to 'the peasants' for decades now and I wish they'd stop it.

Fine.

Add caviar, wagyu beef, iberico ham, white truffles and matsutake mushrooms.

That better?

I am not.. yet, but yeah it was a stretch - however when I added up what our oven was costing us daily, vs the airfryer, it made sense to get it now whilst its 'a stretch' and not wait til prices go up and up.. and its 'impossible'.

It isn't the solution for everyone but for us, its a good option and an example of acting now to save money later.

Nor do my children, but they've been eating lentils in bolognaise-type sauce with beef mince for years.

www.lavenderandlovage.com/2013/09/a-hearty-52-diet-recipe-for-autumn-butter-bean-chorizo-stew-with-tomatoes.html
I like this butter bean stew, the very small amount of chorizo does lift it. We often add pepper and usually serve with rice

@GladysGladioli it's nothing to do with class and eating preferences, it's about not understanding poverty. As a pp pointed out, if you are in poverty it's very unlikely you will be making lamb curries and chill con carnes where you can 'just add lentils' to pad out the meat. To make cheap meals from scratch you need the know-how to start off with, before you factor in cooking facilities, gas/electric, spices and seasoning etc.
It's a bit like those who claim that giving up avo toast will get you on the property ladder.
Middle class is perhaps the wrong term, I mean those who aren't actually in poverty.

Stretching the meat - and I mainly use mince - is for families like mine. Generally okay but need to be careful with money.
In real food poverty, you do not buy meat to cook with. The meat you have is out of tins from food banks. You do not make a homemade soup that costs 40p to 50p to cook plus ingredients when you can buy a tin of soup for 45p - even a tin of mushroom soup is 55p in Marks and Spencers.

This is a much more sensible argument than the OPs lentils aren't free you have to buy them effort.

We do need easy access to knowledge about cheap nutritious food, and padding things out with lentils falls into that category. But we also need structural change too. The one doesn't replace the other.

It's valid advice if you're in the league of stretching out home-cooked food to make more portions.

It's not valid advice if you're in the league of using as little energy as possible to create food that will sate hunger as cheaply as possible.

This Jamie Oliver recipe for mushroom and lentil bolognese is really good, if anybody wants to try a meat-free bolognese with plenty of flavour. It's great with brown lentils if you haven't got puy. I often just eat a bowl of it with bread rather than serve with pasta. It's got loads of flavour even without the basil and parmesan, if you want to minimise cost.

www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pasta-recipes/mushroom-lentil-pappardelle-bolognese/

It's good advice for someone who knows how to cook with them and what to add to reduce flatulance. A pinch of fennel seeds ( for example)
And if you plan ahead then most dry lentils can be soaked for a couple of hours or even over night to reduce cooking time.
Look up any Indian cook on you tube, there's a multitude of recipes.

Yes exactly

This. A tin of lentils is massively cheaper than the equivalent amount of beef mince to bulk out a bolognese or cottage pie.

Yes, you have to buy it, but it's about a tenth of the price.

Thank you for sharing that looks lovely

Cheap, tasty and nutritious. And there are a lot of ways of consuming them, so I'm sure most will find tasty ways of eating them.

This kind of advice is simplistic, utterly unwanted and unhelpful.

But surely a person can say that of any advice. And the next person might think 'that's for that, I find it helpful'.

The advice police give me a pain in my arse.

@asi9 That recipe is too expensive for me!

That’s what I do and I like it. Black beans are currently my particular favourite. Even my meat and two veg DH was happy with a bolognaise I made with 250g mince and loads of lentils and (black) beans for 5 people for 2 days. In the old days I would have made it with 1kg of mince so I think it’s a good change.

You can soak them overnight. Which is also a pain, granted.

@StrychnineInTheSandwiches The reason people get upset is because people who have obviously never been poor seem to like giving useless advice to poor people. Because they have never been properly poor, the advice they give is pretty useless.