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?

Sorry to harp on about the distant past, but English cooking long ago was not bland. Posh medievals/Tudors had a taste for spices imported from Asia and North Africa; poor medievals/Tudors used a lot of herbs (grown in garden plots and gathered from the wild) and also dried seeds such as fennel, dill, poppy. They were often mocked for smelling of garlic. They enjoyed salted and smoked food, too.

So did the Vikings - recipe for one-pot Viking pottage here : https://wildclassroom.co.uk/vikings/

Bland English food seems to be a relatively recent trend, perhaps caused by the industrialisation of food production for growing 19th cent urban populations plus also perhaps rationing during 20th cent wars.

I don't know why people mock others who like blackberry picking. We used to do this every year growing up and my mum would freeze them for pies. We used to go to "pick your own" on farms which I don't think they do any more and pick our own strawberries and plums and other fruit and my mum would bottle the plums for the winter and make plum jam etc.

Where I live now there used to be an orchard nearby years ago on a farm which is not in use any more and they have now built houses on some of the land. There are still cherry trees, cobnut trees, apple trees, damson trees, chestnut trees growing but the only people you ever see out picking from them are from the Asian community.

I was really shocked when I was eating a cherry that I had picked and a young British man told me that they might be poisonous. He didn't even know they were cherries.

Excellent post!

We grow tomatoes and currently have a glut of them but.....

The pots require compost (or the cost of grow bags)

They don't need just water they need feed which costs

When you get them you get a lot in a short time And you cannot guarantee having what you need at perfect ripeness on a particular day. This week a lot have suddenly ripened due to the sunny weather.

I'm going to make baked stuffed tomatoes tomorrow for the freezer and a tomato sauce as we have a lot at the moment. Whilst probably nicer, I doubt it will be very much cheaper than a cheap supermarket variety once made.

Who / where are all the people living on £10 a week for 4 people ? I mean I know benefits aren’t generous but they’re enough for a roof and food? And if they are enough for a very basic standard of living how come there’s only £10 left for food. It’s more complicated than not having enough money left to buy food. How do you help people who don’t know how to / don’t want to help themselves??

Competitive poverty. Great innit?

Who / where are all the people living on £10 a week for 4 people ? I mean I know benefits aren’t generous but they’re enough for a roof and food? And if they are enough for a very basic standard of living how come there’s only £10 left for food. It’s more complicated than not having enough money left to buy food. How do you help people who don’t know how to / don’t want to help themselves??

🙄

They don't exist beyond Poverty Tourist's very comfortable imaginations.🙄

You could do it and not starve I agree - as a one off it might work, because you could use thing from your “store cupboard”, like flour, oil, salt, tomato purée, stock cubes etc. And you’d probably have some tins in the cupboard to use up.

But eventually you’d need to replace all of the cupboard basics and so couldn’t consistently do this.

And I agree it wouldn’t be healthy.

It does normalise poverty as you say, OP

Benefits aren't enough for a house and food. Especially not in 2023.

I'm on a higher rate than most people because I have a disability and my rent is significantly cheaper than most too. I also have a really economically sound house. I've missed meals most days in the last few months.

I think it went up about £7 a month this year. In real terms, I needed at least another £100 a month just so I would be vaguely in the same position as a couple of years ago. As it is, I'm so used to going hungry that I couldn't even finish a full meal at this point.

Yeah not a chance … the dog and Guinea pig food costs me £20 a week… don’t see how anyone could feed 4 on a tenner.

I think you could buy enough to fend off starvation, but it would be extremely dull and repetitive - bread, pasta, spuds, tinned tomatoes.
Reduced veg from supermarket.

People have lived like this since time began and no doubt will always be some who are reduced to it.

Remember your local Gurdwara will feed anyone who turns up on their designated days, no questions asked, no judgement.

What?! That is absolute rubbish. I shop at Lidl and my weekly shop for a family of 5 costs about 200, which sounds a lot—it IS a lot—until you divide it up and realise that it works out to about 5.75/person/day, which isn’t particularly insane really for a varied diet of fresh foods like fruit, vegetables, milk, cheese, meat, etc. £10/week is just 35p/person/day. Unless you are surviving on a diet of beans and rice, I have no idea how you could feed a family of four on that amount (in the UK, anyway).

That wouldn't last 4 people a week though, would it?

Let's say cornflakes and milk for breakfast, I haven't worked out the portions but for 28 breakfasts they'd be tiny.

Then lunches, per person per day, bread (not sure how many slices 2 loaves would make) + jam + margarine (4 days) or 1/4 tin of beans (3 days).

Then dinner, every day per person about 50g pasta plus a spoonful of tinned tomatoes.

Perhaps you wouldn't literally starve but you'd feel like you were.

It's pretty pointless, really, as one size doesn't fit all. But our recent budgeting has had to be really strict, and this is how far i got with a tenner (one adult and three teenagers) and I already had things like garlic, herbs, oil and spices:
Bacon pasta (2 days) £2.80
Egg, chips and beans (2 days) £3.70
Tuna and cream cheese pasta (1 day) £1.80
Porridge made with half water half milk £1 (estimated as i already had the oats and quite a bit of milk)
39p loaf and 70p pack of value cup a soups using left over cream cheese (2 days)
But that's only evening meals and breakfast with maybe 2 days of lunch.
Unless we're now expected to subsist on porridge?
Grim 😪

I cook regularly with spices and know how much it costs to replace an empty jar.
Have you considered that spices are considerably cheaper in other countries (especially the countries that grow them and sell them to us for profit) and that families are close-knit, often live multi-generationally, cook similar food (as recipes are passed down) and club together to buy a set between them, spreading the cost? I think it's the family support and collaboration that would facilitate this as a workable option (along with perhaps a deep fear of how to use spices properly amongst some people in England).

Having said that, I did manage to feed 3 of us on €10 for a week once last year. It involved 5 days of chili and rice for dinner and 4 days of dhal bhat for lunch, and I don't eat breakfast (I think the rest of the week was a mix of spag bol with lentils instead of mince, and couscous with lemon juice which was dismal). Carrots are cheap, we added carrots to everything and the toddler (at the time) snacked on carrot sticks.

It was our rock bottom moment that precipitated us leaving rural Ireland and coming to England for work/money and it was a very upsetting realisation that we couldn't stay in the place we loved and called home. It's doable but very monotonous, wouldn't work long term, and I'd never want to do it again. I don't think I've actually cooked chili again since that week. I wouldn't have wanted to try to stretch that to 4 people. And prices have gone up since 2022.

Have you actually seen her meals? Some kidney bean and pineapple curry came in at 200cals a portion and a fish pie at 300, definitely not enough for a main meal.

I was following her at the time and she did her £20 shop and next day had steak and raspberries which she had not bought because using stuff from her storecupboard and freezer was allowed!

Not unless it's just pasta or potatoes all week.
I could feed our family of 4 (10 years ago) for £20 a week that was for 2 adults and 2 small children under 7 and didn't include wash stuff or cleaning products. Food was mainly a roast chicken, sausage and mash, tuna pasta that type of thing.
I think £10 would mean the family is getting very little protein and vegetables, so must be carb based diet which is terrible and not sustainable for a healthy life.
My family of 5 costs £30 a week in fruit and vegetables alone and we don't even eat organic.

Entirely effing impossible IMO. I religiously shop at Aldi and I cook from scratch Monday to Friday. As we are trying to lose a few pounds at the moment I am cooking a healthy, balanced meals (consisting of 4 portions) for 2 adults, and we then have this for tea Monday and Tuesday, then something else Wed/ Thurs, and I repeat this process for lunches.. so basically batch cooking the week away. Even then I am often using spices or random things like honey or mustard and so on from ‘the cupboard’. There is very little waste. This costs me anywhere between £40 - £50 a week, and bearing in mind this is only Monday to Friday as we like to have treats on the weekend/ go out. Plus we have baby formula on top too.

I wasn't trying to shop cheaply but this was £42 and I was "fuck is that it?"
Yes the protein puddings aren't cheap but they were on offer so I got a few
I'm sure people will say well you could have got this cheaper instead etc, yes I could but I'm just showing I'm hardly buying anything that's extravagant as such
(The paper bag is a red pepper and it was a top up shop)

obviously everyone in the thread is right and nobody should have to do this/it’s near impossible but can I just say this is quite impressive? I liked the inventiveness of the sausage rolls!

It would take a lot of creativity and a serious mind for detail to be able to live this way I think, so hats off to you who clearly can do it. I don’t know if I could!

I’ve been following the wonderful Lorna who has a fb page called feed your family for £20 a week for a couple of years now. Back then the meal plans all came in at £20 with only a limited store cupboard needed on top.

Over the past year or so she’s posted about how it’s impossible to hit that budget even with shopping between different shops for the cheapest prices. She does have some ‘emergency meal plans’ on her website which she says aren’t the best nutritionally but are there for filling hungry tummies in desperate times.

You're not wrong and these sort of articles owners reports enrage me. It takes no account of a health condition: coeliac disease for example- have you seen how much gluten free bread costs and how tiny the loaves are? But even more annoying is assuming that poor people have a freezer, many don't even have proper cookers. You try feeding people decent grub on a minute budget when you only have a kettle and a microwave and you can't use the fridge because someone will steal your supplies.

are you serious? Last time I saw NH she was making butter from cream and baking fruit soda bread ready for when the kids got up. That cost more than a tenner a week. It had butter milk and all sorts of expensive shit in it