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?

Lee Anderson? didn't know you were a MN regular

And, like you, op. The whole thrust of these articles in which families are fed on pennies is to suggest that, with enough ingenuity, then poor people could just pull up their bootstraps and outrun the cost of living crisis and quit whinging.

And say, if you could cobble together food like this, you had the additional time to soak beans and grown herbs and find your local niche supermarket in walking distance and walk to three different supermarket to grab bargains .. then they would be running stories on these hordes of nutritionally deficient kids who are smaller and weaker than some European counterpart and suggest you need to try a bit harder and get your shit in order.

It's rude.

I saw one of these 'savvy mums' do this on instagram, and one evening meal was chicken burgers, she used four bread roll and two chicken breasts and a bit of pesto! so they had 1 bread roll and half a chicken breast as their main meal - for most that isn't enough food for a meal anyway, but its not exactly nutritious is it??

It's not that bad other than lacking in veg. And at least she used actual chicken rather than cheap reformed chicken.
Carbs in the roll, protein in chicken, and tiny amount of veg in pesto.

Depending on the age of kids half a breast is probably fine.

Totally right

Fucking enraging

@Sugarfree23 they are teens 14/15ish, and her and her husband had the same, we are looking 350/400 calories for an evening meal - it is that bad! they had nothing else at all, nothing on the side.

I bet they had a proper dinner once the camera was turned off.

100% agree!

Most likely.

Honestly anyone actually living like this day to day is not blogging it and splashing it on social media. They are probably too blooming exhausted and hungry to think about sharing their 'savvy' meals. The ones posting such meals or recipes are not the ones living below the breadline doing this out of necessity not for likes.

@DiscoBeat I would rather live on porridge with a chopped banana and beans on toast for a week than any of these weird tasteless concoctions many come up with. I actually like these

Jack Monroe is a Tory dream.

Quite, it's just larping poverty.

Nope it’s not possible. Well it might be almost possible if you have sufficient funds to buy in bulk everything. So not possible at all if you are stuck in the poverty premium trap of buying only enough when you have the money.

YANBU

its impossible and often assumes you already have stuff in, or counts a part tin, so doesn’t count the full cost etc

Jack Monroe et al also don’t help with this belief either

It’s ridiculous. When I was a student 20 years ago I spent about £10 a week on food and lived off jacket potatoes and cheese on toast!! How you can possibly manage for a whole family on £10 a week is beyond me! My kids are only primary age and they eat basically adult portions!

Of course it's impossible. I know someone who does it once a year, for charity (Mary's meals). They do it at £10 per person per week, 2 adults and 2 teens. It raises a lot of money in sponsorship, but it's a real task, mostly living on cheap pasta, lentils, the cheapest eggs and veg and yellow sticker stuff. By the end of the week they are all hungry.

I think £10 a week would be difficult for 1 adult let alone a family. Maybe if you lived on small portions of porridge, bread and beans but be awful. I've had vitamin deficiencies and felt so rough it effected my ability to function and can cause longer term health issues.

Those helpful budget articles piss me off as it's often used to suggest people are just wasteful idiots so deserve to struggle, like that MP Lee Anderson's chef meal it's all to justify not increasing Gov budgets and normalisation of food banks and people going hungry.

I had a stint on benefits and it was really difficult because cheapest method for nutritious meals is to buy in bulk and batch cook but even if I could afford to buy all the ingredients I'd worry about blowing my budget on food in one go as didn't have anything spare to save so if something else cropped up to pay that week I'd be screwed. Then you've difficulty of getting it home if dont have a car (online you've minimum order) and extra storage/cookingfuel costs . I was lucky that the housing element covered most of my rent at the time. Borrowing money is also more expensive and difficult when your poor

I mean, bread & jam, beans on toast and pasta with tinned tomatoes. If this is deemed acceptable for the inhabitants of one of the top 10 largest economies in the world…. we should be rioting in the streets.

I don’t think you can actually get that for £10 anymore. And work out the portion sizes per person per day. 1.2 litres of milk a day is less than 50ml per person per day. 2 tins of chopped tomatoes is 28g per person per day.

id be very interested in seeing the cost to fulfill basic nutritional requirements each day. £10 a week is probably enough for gruel breakfast lunch and dinner but very low nutrition and inadequate calories!

id agree it’s all set up to invalidate the very basic requirements of normal people.

Of course. My intention wasn't to boast, or to imply that more people could do what I do. Most can't (and I'm not sure that I would if I could afford not to!). My actual outlay was less than £10 last week, but I will have paid for vaccines, feed (this is minimal because I grow a lot of that too) and various repairs around the place at other times.

We are very fortunate that we are able to do these things in order to keep our heads above water. I never forget that, and we do share our produce with other families who are less fortunate.

OP I'm not sure we are the fifth-richest economy in the world any more. We had the fifth-largest economy in 2020 but I thought that we'd been overtaken by France and possibly by India.

And when economists look beyond the size of an economy and use measures of purchasing power to estimate how "rich" the individuals in a particular country are (like looking at GDP per person and the actual cost of living to compare living standards) we're usually around 30th in the world. Ireland and most of Northern and Western Europe are way ahead of us.

So in terms of purchasing power, the poorest 10% in the UK have disposable incomes that are more than 20% lower than their French counterparts. And that's a figure from last year. Inflation is far lower in France so it may be worse now.

But however you measure it we're still a wealthy country and shouldn't be normalising survival rations. YANBU.

The only way I’ve ever seen these really low budgets work is when they bulk buy somewhere like Costco and meal prep and freeze a lot of food ahead of time.

But you have to have enough space to store all the food, have bags and containers to portion the meal prep and you have to outlay the whole budget ahead of time - so you buy three months worth of food - buying the big cheaper bulk buy bags of flour, staples etc and then the budget works out at 10-20 a week.

You’ve also got to have the time to manage all the bulk buy stuff so nothing goes off and have a family who can and will eat the planned stuff for three months with no room for anything spontaneous.

But it’s not possible if you literally have just a tenner and try to make it last a week.

Sorry hit the wrong button! No it's not possible unless using community food hubs and free food apps.

My mum has done the food waste and poverty challenge a few times to highlight food poverty - she lost weight had headaches and was exhausted!

Fun tip: You can change your vote if you jit the wrong button, just click on the other option.

I suspect like your mum found it wouldn't take long for some major health issues to arise if this was attempted long term.

Just ignore the stupidity

I was at university in mid 1980s. We had a kitty to cover ALL food (3 meals a day type thing), and had a rota to cook communally as we figured it’d keep costs down, and each of us only cooked every 6 days.

even back then we EACH put £7.50 into the kitty per week.
we had to shop really carefully to make it cover everything - in those days there were way less ready meals available anyway and we had a local market we’d visit at end of day to get cheap veg etc. we’d buy a full sack of potatoes etc as it was cheaper and the lads we shared with would go through a fair amount of potatoes . We bought cheap cuts of meat, including offal. And like most people who do grocery shopping that £7.50 had to cover household items like loo roll, washing up liquid, washing powder.

£7.50 EACH. And we were bloody proud we managed 21 meals each on that . Other mates spent more than that, and I’d paid more than that while in halls in first year- we had a canteen in those days, no individual kitchens. and that was mass catering and not very nice at times.

That was 40 years ago now. In todays terms that would equate to £32.84 (a quick google), and that still feels the “tight” budget it was then. But doable with careful shopping. And not having to be completely denied living healthily with interesting, varied and tasty meals. When my kids went to uni around 10 years ago we budgeted £45 per week for groceries and an alcohol allowance

whoever the dick heads are stating you can feed a family of four on £10 for a week is, they’re talking absolute shite . That approx £33 per person, would equate to £132 on average for a family of 4 per week. To cover breakfast, lunch, dinner and household stuff. That seems achievable to get decent home cooked meals, that are interesting, varied and something to look forward to eating.

And never mind that to even achieve the £10 a week , you’ve also got to be able to afford fuel bills or even have a kitchen you can cook in and store the cheap food in to make it last where it’s not going to be contaminated or used by someone else in your communal kitchen.. That’s a massive assumption these days.

The £10 a smart arses never show an 8 week rolling menu with varied, balanced, fresh food. Nor do they include all the other grocery items that they’re banking on magically appearing like washing up liquid, dish cloths, shampoo, loo roll . They show a couple of meals- normally pasta based and tomato sauce, and then just multiply that through. Would they be happy eating the same meal over and over just because it’s cheap?

No, it's not. Unless you are the kind of person who hangs round supermarkets for hours to get heavily discounted food, and there's less of that now anyway. Might be possible if you were a family of veggies, but cheap meat is slurry and the animal welfare implications are horrific.