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?

Utterly impossible, and I am both very good at cooking and budgeting.

I was pretty pleased to only spend about £30 this week for two pescatarian adults, but I have a very well-stocked pantry and freezer, so that was only on fresh fruit and veg, dairy, bread and fresh proteins (tofu / fish). I also haven't counted feeding two cats in that sum!

If I had to buy the rest of the ingredients (pulses, pasta / rice, stock, preserves, herbs and spices etc) required to turn those into actual food, it would have been considerably more expensive.

The privilege of 'economy of scale' (having the money and space to buy and store the basics in the first place) is often wildly overlooked in these stupid articles.

There was a thread this time last year, might have been the year before, when posters were getting quite excited that the cost of living crisis would mean more people would be joining their hobby of foraging. Seriously. Without an ounce of shame.

I get your point but this isnt even though for one person let alone four.

You wont starve to death - that week. You would long term.

Starving is defined as having less than 70% of your maintenance calories.
People would starve on these diets suggested, slowly but surely.

Some people do get very excited about this sort of thing. I remember a long-ago thread where someone was enthusing about her habit of gathering wild blackberries and saying the poor could do it and live like kings..

It's good to have a hobby that gets you out in the open air but as a long-term plan for doing anything more than merely existing in misery it was seriously lacking.

I think it's worth noting that many people don't have access to shops like Aldi or Lidl. Where I live, there are a couple of small co-ops and some small independent supermarkets, but no discount or budget options. I do, admittedly, live in a very remote area, but many people in rural areas must find similar problems. So even if it were possible to buy magically affordable healthy ingredients, it probably won't be possible within a realistic travelling distance for a significant number of people.

Public transport has been reduced to almost nothing in many areas (here there is one bus a day each way, and you have to book it the day before!). So it isn't just a case of hopping on a bus. Here, there is nowhere to go in any case, except by ferry (which might or might not be running/safe).

1.5kg of pasta for 21 meals is not enough calories for one 8 year old

Obviously

Forgot to say you could also use the lard and any spare bread to make croutons for the soup
The key to not starving is calories, that is why the lard is key in my shopping list
just 10g of lard is nearly 100 calories
You could also bake the apples chopped up at the start of the week in the lard and use as a topping on your porridge rather than having it raw and grated
Its not a menu I would be enthusiastic about but its not a bad meal plan for the cost.
Give me £15 instead and I could do a much better job!

I agree with OP - it's unrealistic and unfair and downright dangerous. It normalises malnutition, especially for single parents and growing children and all low-income household.

And it's simply not true to say that people in the past all lived on very poor diets. The workhouse diet posted above is eye-opening (so much more nutritious and calorie-dense than the 'savvy mums' poverty-fantasy meals and the 'survival' supermarket shopping lists.) Even medieval peasants had healtheir diets than those. Scientists have analysed food residues from medieval remains: "The findings demonstrated that stews (or pottages) of meat (beef and mutton) and vegetables such as cabbage and leek, were the mainstay of the medieval peasant diet.
The research also showed that dairy products, likely the ‘green [=fresh curd] cheeses’ known to be eaten by the peasantry, also played an important role in their diet..."
source: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/may/medieval-peasant-diet.html

Farm labourers were often provided with food (up to 5lb/2kg wholemeal bread every day, and weak ale/cider to drink). Chaucer's epitome of a poor widow kept a few chickens for eggs, and had a pet sheep that she probably would have got a little cupful or milk from, at least in spring and summer.

Peasants also gathered wild nuts and berries and herbs, and went poaching for wild creatures such as rabbits.

Sorry for typos in the above - more haste less speed....

Like Jack Monroe.

I'm only talking about dinners for £5 not the whole day's worth of food. Right now it is just DH, me and DS who's one but the following make dinners for 2 adults 'fresh' and 2 adults frozen + at least 1 baby portion:

Chicken and mushroom vol au vonts
Chicken stir fry/ fried rice/ stick chicken/ parm/ 'cottage pie'
Bacon, broccoli, mushroom mac n cheese
Beef pie/ stew/ red wine/ stir fry
Mince - bolognaise/ cottage pie/ dirty rice/ meatloaf/ meatballs

I do break those prices down as a portion of herbs/ pastry/ spuds/ pasta what ever because yes I have to buy the whole bag but I don't throw it out after. I do use it all.

We also don't have any expensive dietary requirements, I have a coeliac niece and her stuff is expensive and a type 1 diabetic mum she can't go too carb heavy

I do other more expensive dinners too. But just saying that some dinners can very much so be done for a fiver

I think though, if I had to feed our family of 5 for one week on £12.50 (equivalent), I could do it.

But not long term. It would definitely be a very boring and not brilliantly healthy diet. And one that at the end of a week we would be more than ready to move on from.

And that's part of the problem. Someone who has the money can do it as a challenge, and say "hey, look I'm terribly excited that I managed to feed our family for a week on £10" and sound very enthusiastic about how everyone loved it.
But it's not sustainable for longer. It's playing at being poor, rather than actually living it.
It's pretty insulting to pretend that choosing to do it for a week is anything like having to do it week after week with no reason to suppose that at any point you won't have to.

And it's also not taking into account the little extra ingredients in the cupboard which I would have (just put a few spices in type thing, or even tomato ketchup) and the week where the children need new shoes and the budget goes down from £10 to nothing.

I spend more than £10 just on bread and milk for 3 of us so not a chance we could survive to feed all of us on that.

@nameXname thanks for the tip off about green cheese. It was throwing the daily calories too high when I used cheddar, but with cottage cheese the workhouse spread sheets have sensible calories.

Apart from food banks for immediate help with food, are there any places which can help people budget? £10 a week for food is not realistic. Why would anyone waste their time even trying to plan a menu with a tenner. Surely there are better ways to help people ?
Why is there only £10 a week available? I’d be looking at that before I’d be advising anyone to eat for £10 a week.
Can more hours be worked? Share childcare with a friend /family to enable someone to work more?
Cancel tv license? ( I wouldn’t care if someone who couldn’t afford to pay it watched tv anyway !!)
Help to apply for sickness benefits.
Free school meals for children in the family.

I fed myself, healthily, for £10 a week at uni in 2015. It was really tight and only do-able as I had no energy costs (student halls) so could bake snacks and cook from scratch.

No way I could do that now, and definitely not for more than one person.

You don't understand why people living in the UK won't accept grinding poverty? The argument is there for not educating the population, I suppose.
Exist on that diet and we are going to go back to heart attacks at 50, heart disease, blocked arteries and diabetes etc. No doubt by that time the DWP will be able to block benefits because we'll get blaimed for our lifestyle and the healthcare won't be there. But we'll be doing better than people living on the side of the road in Pakistan. In Nigeria a vote winner was being able to buy the ingredients for just one meal, so at least after a day's work, you could eat, that isn't something we should be aspiring to either. They have an advantage in that they can cook outside on a wood burning fire. We aren't coping with the health of our nation as it is, come February, we'll have no hospital beds etc again.

I have a 5yo and a teenager. I spend more than £10per week on milk alone. YANBU OP, they're talking shit.

No, thats not what I said. I made it VERY clear that £10 per week is a ridiculous budget. But these threads always degenerate into "I can't cook X or why because I dont have the spices!" I don;t get why most people in the UK can't buy spices or store cupboard essentials. The rest of the world does, and they are poorer.

The blackberry season is less than a month long - late August to mid Sept- so how did she think people were meant to 'live like kings' for the other 11 and a half months? Also, you'd need a good freezer to be a successful forager. And I quite enjoy a bit of foraging but I know a man who lives 'off-grid' and grows/forages most of his own food and even he spends more than a tenner a week on top-up food supplies.

I buy more than £10 of fruit a week !

Because British cooking isn't typically very spicy. It's bland and stodgy, and that's how most people eat. This forum is very middle class so a lot of people on here would have a spice cupboard, but if you're choosing between heating or garam massala, most poorer Brits will opt for the former.

Maybe it's time to change the way people eat then. From the bottom up. It's a more diverse country than it used to be. It's not just the posh middle class who eat spices. It's also many poor POC. Less of Nigella, more of Nadiya Hussain.

WOC here. Although I hate that phrase.
I have a cupboard full of spices and our family is at the poorer end, although not this starvation level.
For £10 a week I would feed my family cooked dried pulses with spices. No veg or fruit, there isn't enough money for that. So lentils with spices, cooked dried chickpeas with spices.healthier than a British poverty level diet, but you would have to eat a lot of pulses to get enough calories. It is still an absolute poverty diet.
Absolute poverty is the level below which you can eat a nutritionally adequate diet.