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?

Sure. It’s easy. All you have to do is spend a couple of million on a property with sufficient land / infrastructure for vegetables, fruit, chickens, a cow or two for milk and a few meat animals (pigs or sheep).

Then live off your other millions in the bank since caring for the land / animals is a full time job.

Simples!

😂😂touché

I've never actually read any of her recipes or her blog/books but did see some of the hoo-hah about her on Twitter recently - the stuff about opening a can with a hammer and then about how she's claimed all sorts of stuff about herself that may or may not be true. She seems to be an, um, interesting character but perhaps one who doesn't have the closest of relationships with reality.

It’s impossible. Are they including breakfast and lunch or is it just dinners? Even just dinners would be nigh on impossible unless you’re just eating potatoes and carrots and a minuscule portion of protein all week.

the fuel, pans and skills is such a good point.
I worked with a group a few years younger. None of them had cooking lessons at school. None were taught by parents as they either didn’t want the mess or couldn’t cook themselves.

I’ve always said when mine go off to Uni I’m going to buy them all the herbs, spices, stock cubes etc to send them away with.
the pinch of this, pinch of that makes it edible are expensive to buy but last ages.

Like a few other posters are school dinners come in above £10 a week. There is a massive difference between a one-off cheap week assuming you still have stuff in a freezer, butter etc and trying to claim you could live off £10 a week in the long-term. If push came to shove, we could probably do a week for £10 by using up our freezer supplies etc but it is nonsense to suggest families could do that healthily over a longer time frame.

The brief that I saw said to feed a family of four for a week - it didn't specify how many meals (but you'd take that to be all meals, right) or the ages of the family.

General consensus on here is that it really is impossible without using food banks or other free/uber cheap food schemes.

She posts five meals a week which feed a family of four, with leftovers for lunch to get them through the working/school week. For example, from September 27 to October 1, she posted five meals – which come to a total of just £8.89.
https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/25/mum-shares-recipes-online-to-feed-your-family-for-just-10-a-week-17630339/

This one reckons you can do lunch and dinner for less than a tenner.

Technically you probably could but it would barely count as food, and for the long term you’d surely get poorly and malnourished. For £10 stretching to four people, you’d need to eat the very cheapest porridge everyday for bfast, and instant ramen noodles/low quality sandwiches for lunch, and something very low nutrient for dinner, maybe rice/potatoes with a stew of not much substance. Personally, I’d have an upset stomach and a cold very quickly!

@BloodyHellKen but they are all kind of interlinked. One of the biggies is private rents- many people are using money that should be going towards food on topping up the amount needed to pay private rent because their are no price controls on it- so unless you live in an area with very cheap private rent you are stuffed. Take for example my friend here in Bath (and she's a local born and bred) - she can't work lots of hours as can't get child in nursery just yet- her very modest 2 bed flat is £320 a month over her allowance , she does work some hours but the amount she gets rapidly goes on topping up her rent and bills . Hence she is very budget tight on food - even if she moved to a cheaper area around here say 5 miles away there is only £100 in it and the allowance is less!! The lack of affordable housing is having a huge knock on effect in areas like food buying. Many comfortably off people with low or no mortgages have no idea of this total ticking time bomb for people not in the same position as themselves.

Don't overlook the other advantages of this set up.

Your child could be mortgage free by 20 by building a tiny house on your land, what an achievement, so superior in life.

Even looking at the first pasta recipe - what she claims are eight portions, I think would be small portions for four hungry adults. Maybe these are good recipes if you all need to also lose a load of weight.

6 of us in our family ,5 adults and a teen ..food is our biggest expense,it’s an absolute nightmare

I spent less than £10 last week to feed 6 of us. However, I grew all the vegetables, hatched the ducks and the quail and raised the sheep that we ate (not a whole sheep, not even with 3 teenagers!). So yes, as a pp has said, it's easy to do if you just provide yourself with a farm and the time to run it, plus a large freezer to store produce and meat. My farm/croft only takes up 5 or 6 hours a day because it's tiny, but if I'm not working then I'm doing some sort of farm work (by hand, because I can't afford machinery).

I strongly suspect that most families trying to live on so little would become ill quite quickly. Not to mention getting in trouble with the authorities when someone reported how little they were feeding their children (although I suspect that in a lot of families the parents would be eating almost nothing in order to make sure the children had more).

Hahahahaha! Peak Mumsnet achieved!

Crikeyalmighty - I agree that high rent costs are a huge problem and need to be addressed.

But as an nation we do need to lose a load of weight to be in optimum health, so smaller portion sizes are good so long as they were nutritionally adequate, even if it makes us feel a bit uncomfortable to look at/think about.

True - athough neither myself nor my kids are overweight and we would baulk at the size of those portions. No good if you do a load of sport and need the cals. Also, I think it would be heading down a dangerously slippery slope to suggest that it's good that food is becoming unaffordable for many because people are too fat anyway.

You can barely blink or fart without spending a tenner these days. £10 to feed a family of 4 is a hilarious joke surely.

Is your point that a family of four should need more than 7,500 kcal, or less? Because assuming a heterosexual couple, your own figures show one man and one woman need 4,500 kcal. This leaves 1,500 kcal each for two children. This may well be insufficient.

According to the NHS, children aged 7-10 need between 1,530 and 2,032 kcal per day. Another site reckons adolescent boys might need 2,800 kcal per day, and girls 2,200 kcal.

So, a family of four might need >10,000 kcal per day depending on the age and sex of the children.

I think £50 is probably the realistic minimum for a frugal but nutritional food shop to cover 4 for a week.

I know many have to manage with less but I think that is probably where I would place the poverty line at in Britain today.

I would still find that hard if that had to include everything. It is when I am tired and need something easy or quick on £50 per week there is no room for that. You would need to plan/ cook/ use leftovers. All what we should be doing but it's bloody hard work.

She claims you can split a 250g pack of mince into 8 portions! Would the mince even be visible in those portions?

To be honest I'd struggle to feed four people for a week for £10 even at this end of the year when the garden is producing like crazy! I'm fortunate enough to be able to grow a significant proportion of our fruit and veg.

I've not had to buy any fruit or veg for over six weeks now but yet our food bill is still over £80 for two weeks for two people!

Like a few other posters are school dinners come in above £10 a week.

Like others our school lunch is £3.10 per day so over £15 per week but that includes the cost of staff to prepare meals and supervise. They’re definitely not spending £3/day on ingredients/food so it’s not a reasonable comparison. I send my kids to school with a hot meal in a food flask - costs around £10 per week for two including fruit and a snack, and the food is infinitely more nutritious.

I couldn’t feed us all dinner for £10 a week though.

Sorry if it wasn’t clear - I was agreeing with you!

It’s not aspirational, it’s not feed your family, it’s “don’t die of starvation for £10”!