to think it's impossible to feed a family of four for a week for £10

[horseyhorsey17]

On one of the forums where journalists look for case studies recently there was a call from one of the right-wing tabloids for 'savvy' mums who are able to feed a family of four for £10 a week. This got a few people's backs up (including mine) as I see this as normalising poverty - and the only way anyone can feed a family of four for a week is by using food banks. This isn't 'savvy', it's desperate - I have friends who run a food bank and the bank is on its knees and might actually have to close due to the massive pressure of increased demand, so it's immoral to normalise their use.

I also Googled a few of those 'I feed my family for a tenner/£20 a week' type articles and they're all highly disingenous, the portions are tiny (would at a stretch feed two adults and two babies but not two adults and two hungry teens), were really only one meal a day, poor nutrition and didn't include snacks or drinks. TBH I spend more than a tenner a week on food for my pets - as they don't just get the cheapest food out there as I care about their health - and that isn't weird or profligate. It boggles my mind that people think actual humans can be fed healthily for less than that.

Am I wrong? Can it be done without resorting to food banks/begging for food on local forums (something I am also seeing a lot now)? Is it OK to describe this as 'savvy' rather than a sign of the poverty that's now endemic in the fifth richest economy in the world?

@HairsprayBabe

That's a pretty good go at it. Far better than my offering:

Porridge

Veg soup

(Similar in other words)

Then I'd opt for rice, lentils, medium curry powder, onions which covers 3 days

Chopped tomatoes, garlic and lentils and pasta, 2 days

Mixed bean chilli (can mixed beans, sachet chilli mix lidl) plus the rice remaining days.

Not at the shops so can't exactly price but it will come in close, anything left to be spent on veg

The use of the word savvy is the worst aspect IMO.

It implies that people who cant do the impossible ie feed a family of 4 on £10 a week are just stupid, rather than dirt poor.

Bastard right wing

How old are your kids @3WildOnes and how many calories per person are you allowing? I've just sat down and worked through your list and I'm not seeing 3 meals per day for 4 people.

back in 2006 when I was a single parent on benefits, I had to feed myself and dd on £20 a week. Now it would be a really, really boring diet, but is it possible? well maybe, if your dc got free school meals as well. Value brands only, a 700g box of brandflakes is about 90p in aldi and would serve 14 portions, loaf of bread 50p, tin of baked beans 20p, bag of pasta 30p. no snacks, no fruit (veg is cheaper though). very dull. but you want die from starvation or malnutrition

That really doesn't look like it would feed 4 people for a whole week.

And being pedantic, there's no sugar (or similar) for the yeast to act on in the bread. That's just at first glance so I'm sure it's not the only thing missing.

Where are you getting tangerines from at this time of the year?

Is that an infamous MN chicken on there?!

We spend £30 a week on just the fruit at veg. It’s incredibly expensive now.

I just price checked one of her recipes, every item was more expensive except the pasta which was a few pence cheaper. Then I looked at the date of the article, October 2022 so not surprising the prices have increased. Don't thinks he could do it for £10 now.

@gogomoto I was very poor for a long time

Aldi don't sell dried lentils, or I can't find the price online and the difficulty with a curry/chilli ect is you need extra flavours to turn it into that the packet mixes are good for that though and you can always split them over two meals to make them last.

The sausage rolls were a bit of a random choice but they were a cheap form of protein, you can get a frozen bag of 20 sausages from Aldi for £1.50 so I could have sacrificed the milk to go for those instead of the rolls.

I'm veggie these days but its funny that it can actually be cheaper to eat meat over veg in some situations, 20 sausages would last me a lot longer than 3 tins of chickpeas for less money. Its "only" 15p but 15p is massive at this level of budgeting.

When I shared a student house with friends 30 years ago we each put £10 in the food kitty and did a weekly shop at Asda and meal planned and ate together. We ate basic but healthy food. However, we each bought our own lunches at the University each day so our budgets only covered 16 meals a week.

How anyone thinks it's possible to feed 4 people on £10 a week now is crazy.

I've never worked out how many calories we are eating! I have three kids but two younger who don't eat much and a teenage boy.

We would be eating porridge with whole milk & jam & bananas, or beans or eggs on toast for breakfast.
Peanut butter & jam or egg Mayo sandwiches for lunch.
For dinners it would be jacket potatoes with beans and cheese and a side of Broccoli for two nights.
Veg curry for two nights
Home made pizzas with left over chicken on top.
A veg chilli
And a roast.
The bread flour will make a few loaves and pizza dough.
I'm not saying it is the most exciting but it is fairly healthy and filling.

When me and my boyfriend moved in together 20 years ago we were skint so has a food budget of £30 a week. It was doable to feed two people three meals a day seven days a week. Back then a pack of 20% mince cost 90p in Morrisons. It's now 5x that at least

@gogomoto the other thing is that the week after if this was ongoing I would still have stock cubes, pasta and potentially some other bits and bobs left so I could start adding in different packet mixes and pulses etc to very slowly start giving myself a "store cupboard"

As people have said, you need a store cupboard. Yes dhal is cheap, but the small amounts of turmeric, cumin etc per portion might be pennies, but you need to buy the spices in advance, like chilli powder and dried herbs for other things. So you need all those bought in advance. Just a tip, if you live near an Asian convenience store/corner shop, at the back there is normally a spice display with packets much cheaper than those supermarket jars, but we still wouldn't be in £10 territory. Cooking with pulses is cheap but the cheapest way to do it is with dried beans and pulses not tinned-this might keep food costs down but they need longish cooking times, so spending on fuel.

Some of these articles I read on this subject mention growing things from cuttings or seeds. Yes, it would be lovely and cheap to grow vegetables from courgette and tomato seeds and herb cuttings but you need-

A garden (a balcony at a pinch I suppose)
Skill at gardening-I'm probably being bitter as I could kill a nettle!
Luck-no unexpected frosts/rainstorms/drought

Also some mention foraging. I love foraging. We had two weeks of lovely big bowls of blackberries for dessert. I also pick mushrooms, elderberries, wild garlic, and know which plants can be used in place of spinach or salad leaves. But-

I live in an area where there is woodland, towpaths and hedges where I can find these things. I might struggle if I was in an inner city tower block estate.

You need knowledge, particularly with things like mushrooms.

It's seasonal-fine if you have a big freezer but if not you will struggle in Jan/Feb.

Absolutely agree op.

I think the point of my post was lost!!!

You can’t “feed” a family on this. You can not starve on £10 a week. My point was it’s not doable, it’s not aspirational, it’s below even bare minimum standards and the list was the closest I could get to ‘meals’ for £10 for a week.

Tbf I was getting off the train as I was finishing my post so I don’t think I concluded strongly 😂 but I wasn’t saying “look of course you can do it”, I was saying “you could buy food, but only enough to barely survive”.

Without wanting to defend this tabloid, the poorest people in the world living on the side of the road have store cupboards. A "masala dabba"as it's called in India: a box with 10 different spices in it, often only a tiny bit but can be kept for months. I don't understand the resistance to that here. Yes, you need to buy in advance. That's what everyone across the world does.

Not starving to death isn't a the bar anyone should be aiming for
Completely agree, @YourNameGoesHere makes a very good point.

Having families survive on a tenner a week is not something to be encouraged, it's disgraceful and a disaster waiting to happen health wise.

Can you please set out the meal plan for four people based on this list?

Its fetishisation of thrift from people who have never lived in poverty.

See my other posts, I think I made my point poorly. My point was it’s not doable, you wouldn’t “starve” but you’re not really fed. My last sentence literally says being proper fed on £10 is impossible.

@Snittle I don't know I gave it a good go, it wouldn't be the most amazing food but there is fruit and veg and protein in my meal list I agree it shouldn't be encouraged or celebrated but it is possible

I thought you’d missed a 0 off. Struggling to do a food shop for under £100 tbh.

wasn’t one of those ‘feed your family for super cheap’ things done by a politician based on using a commercial kitchen and batch cooking like 100 meals.
a o technically yes but you would have to buy £100s worth of ingredients, have a commercial kitchen and ginormous freezer space. Not possible sorry x