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?

For £20 I would buy additionally:
Cheese to go onto the bakes, a packet of budget sausage rolls to stretch the lunch, apples, raisins, plain yogurt, more potatoes, tea bags and a packet of biscuits

Being super picky - but you have two tins of potatoes in your meal plan and only one costed out! Do you reckon it's better to buy tins rather than a big bag of 'wonky' spuds (which would be my preference if I was on a super-tight budget)?

@horseyhorsey17 that's the full price for both tins they are 38p each :)

and a bag of "wonky" spuds at Aldi is £1.15 so I would have to drop something else off to afford it - they do 4 bakers for 65p so that could be a good option and then free up another 35p of the budget for something else.

*15p typo

Thats surely not going to enough food for 4 people. You'd have to drop the veggies and proteins for more cheap carbs or there'll be some very hungry tummies.

@Oliotya its for two adults and two children an adult portion of porridge is 40g, an adult portion of uncooked rice is 50-75g, an adult portion of uncooked pasta is 100g, an adult portion of cooked potato's is about 120g - the portions would not be huge but there is enough.

But that’s based on having lunch at home. What about packed lunches for four people?

@HairsprayBabe you shop is a valiant effort but it gives our little family less than half of their daily calories. Sure they'd manage it for a week but not for long.

Your list comes to 22,075.85 cals or 3,153.7 cals a day and we know our imaginary family needs about 7,000cals a day.

I would take the soup in a Tupper wear - even an empty plastic bottle would do if you had nothing, and even the worst minimum wage jobs I had had a spot to heat up lunches.
If your weekly budget is only £15 I would imagine your children receive free school meals anyway but I didn't take that into consideration.
You could also make more flatbreads from the flour to have with the soup or any of the other meals if you wanted.

Of course you can't. Nothing like! Even if everyone exists on porridge cooked with water, poundstore noodles and carrots picked up from the gutter after the market stall has come down, you still couldn't manage to feed four people on about 37p each a day. I hate anyone who says you can because they clearly have never tried.

Even GirlCalledJack spent £10 a week two decades ago on one small adult and one young child and she was deified for managing that.

@Itisyourturntowashthebath You are right, it is actually closer to 25000 but it is still too low,

a bag of flour is the cheapest calorie per penny - you would need to buy about 8 bags to get you close enough to the calories for the week. That would leave you with £4.48 to get everything else you needed to make "meals" for the week

for £10 I would probably buy the flour, sausages, two (three if i could find the extra 2p) tins of beans, carrots, onions and oats

For £15 I would buy 8 bags of flour, lard, sausages, more veg to make soup, jam

I would make as many flat breads and pancakes as possible from the flatbreads and create whatever meals I could around that.

And it would be utterly miserable - but my original list didn't have much joy in it either.

I am going to try this to see how many days we last but we are only two, not four. I don't know how to scale it down. Cutting it in half to £5 isn't right because it won't take into account economies of scale. We are an adult and a teenager. I have herbs and spices and oil which is obviously cheating.

Wow wish I could do this. My food shop is £130 a week minimum and I then do a top up fruit shop on Thursdays and then buy dinners at the weekend!

Very similar conclusions here @HairsprayBabe basic carbs and fat are the only way to get near the calorie requirements.

If anyone is up for feeding their family:
seven bags of flour
two packs of lard
a bag of oats
a jar of jam
one pack of frozen sausages
a bag of peanuts
you will have your calories for a tenner.

Meanwhile back in the real world, this thread has been the source of inspiration for renewing my Word and Excel skills. Access would have to be next to optimise getting some basic nutrients for minimum cost, honestly forget the tenner.
Plus discovering that workhouses used one Ox head (plus veg, barley and peas) to make soup for 100 men or 120 women has been fascinating.

@Itisyourturntowashthebath Jam and lard flatbread anyone 🙁

Also yes I have cracked out the spreadsheets too

We are about £90-100 a week for shopping for four, which does include nappies/some treats/cleaning stuff as well as breakfast/lunch/dinners, which I think is pretty good really. I think if I was really, really struggling for money I could probably get it down to £65ish a week with an acceptable diet in terms of nutrients and calories but 0 snacks, treats, 'nice' things. Any lower and I think we would be seriously compromising on nutrition/calories as well as just ability to offer children a varied diet with lots of different and new tastes.

Ah so essentially we have to eat like we are in a Dickens novel?!

even making everything from scratch and even buying the most basic ingredients - for just one person - that's just not possible. probably need more than that per day per person

Would be like tortillas. Not unpleasant in itself. It's the lack of variety that makes it so miserable.

Yep a Dickens set after 1834 and before 1897, for those years were regulated by a JRM type crew.

Our 1901 work house provided much better food
Sunday is below

Ignore what is going on there with the tsp of sugar, dyslexia strikes again

Yorkshire puddings with jam is meant to be nice. Could be an alternative?

This is my final go, it meets the energy requirements, has some vegetables, protein and a very small amount of variation, no nappies, cleaning stuff or drinks

Lard x2 £1
Plain flour x 4 £2.78
Self raising flour x 3 £2.07
oats 90p
Carrots 1kg 50p
Onions 1kg 55p
Jam 39p
20 frozen sausages £1.50
White vinegar 29p

Breakfast porridge and jam probably half a teaspoon per person

Lunch a thin soup with carrots and onion, 1 of the sausages thickened with flour
Make one big pot then serve every day for lunch for the week served with bread either soda bread, American style biscuits, mini "loaves" or flatbread if anyone wants the bread recipes I can link them, to make it stretch it is also possible to make noodles from water and flour to add these to the soup.

Dinners
The majority of what is on the plate will be bread, bread should also be in the middle of the table for anyone who is still hungry. With 19 sausages available there is just over 2 and a half sausages for 4 people per day. Gravy is to be made by using any cooking juices from the sausages onion and water thickened with flour. Before making the soup you would need to ensure you have at least 5 carrots and 5 onions left for the rest of the week and divide them evenly between the meals.

Irish soda bread using the self raising flour, vinegar, onion gravy with 2 chopped sausages through it

American style biscuits and gravy with sausages using the cooking juices from the sausages and plain flour to make gravy, defrost the sausages cut them in half and squash them flat before cooking - 1 sausage per adult 1/2 a sausage per child

Hot water crust pastry sausage rolls defrost 3 sausages, de skin split in half and roll into thinner sausages to stretch using the lard to make the pastry with baked onion rings - you could fry them in lard and reuse the lard for another recipe

Meatballs and gravy, make the meatballs from the sausages by defrosting 3 sausages cutting into 4 and rolling into balls served with flatbread

Stew with dumplings slice 2 sausages as thinly as possible before cooking to ensure a good spread of ingredients, serve with soda bread as well as dumplings

Sausages with noodles use 2 sausages sliced thinly, use flour and water to make the noodles before rolling thin, slicing and boiling like fresh pasta, this can either be eaten in a broth with the vegetables and sausage or drained. Serve with bread

Savory suet pudding with the remaining lard and sausages, onion gravy

Bread in any form (and any remaining jam) to be eaten whenever

This is a shocking menu, it has things on it from the work house, the deep American south, we all know where those recipes came from, and food my grandfather used to eat in poverty in Ireland as a child when he didn't have SHOES the fact that a meal plan for 4 in 2023 is being lauded by the media as purely "savvy" is rancid.

This is poverty, abject poverty.

Nope! Your income is taken into account for free school meals but not your outgoings. If your mortgage and bills go up, you don’t suddenly get an increase in government handouts.