To be horrified at the price of food

[Thorts]

Single pepper, now 60p - everywhere.
Apple juice - 99p everywhere for the cheap stuff

How are people supposed to eat fresh fruit and veg daily (and the right amount) with these prices?

If you were to look at processed food however; pack of ham 20p, custard creams 20p, garlic bread 35p.

You could get two of all the processed items mentioned for less price than one pepper and one carton of 1L value Apple juice.

Surely something needs to be done?

I eat it on porridge. I take any I'm offered! It only needs 10% of its weight in sugar and its so quick to cook down and pop in the fridge.

My DH just chews the raw stick.... 😂
Also, freezes well for future use

It works with basil. Definitely not with coriander.

And if you make pesto the basil is buggered anyway unless you've got a whole patch of it in the garden in summer.

The veg that we find hardest to shift is the unfamiliar - eg celeriac needs a recipe attached for most people to take a punt.

Many unfamiliar veg can be subbed for familiar veg so maybe just let people know what it's similar to? I grate celeriac into bolognese in place of celery.

Cucumber is ridiculous now and tiny!

She said 1980s, not 1950s.

Lol at the person who complained fruit and veg is too expensive and is buying fresh raspberries in March.

I know people with chickens. They have them as pets and the eggs are a bonus.

Over the last few years they have had to keep them in their coops due to bird flu for months at a time. Luckily as they are pets their coops are a reasonable size unlike the people I knew who kept chickens when I was a child.

I'm in Vancouver, Canada. I paid $6.79 for 250g lactose-free butter this evening and I needed 3. Over $20 for a cup and a half of butter, fgs! Price has gone up 80 cents per in the past few weeks. Gas was $1.68/litre a month ago and was $2.03/litre a few days ago. The major grocery chains have made record profits beginning during the covid period. I follow the Australian news and it's the same there.

@shearwater2 ' Oh British rhubarb is in season. Woo fucking hoo.' 😂

Try cooking it with garlic, as a vegetable to go with pork.

I'm making rhubarb & ginger jam this morning. As you say, I have a ton of it.

For meals where I used to eat meat I now substitute beans or lentils and they taste just as nice. I am not a vetarian, but am heading that way.

the price is nearly everything is extortionate

There is currently a serious drought going on in Spain, much underreported in this country, so yields are lower.

Lol you can tell you've never been in there.

Heron Foods sell the exact same brands as the big supermarkets.

The reason they end up in Heron is that they either have close to expiry promotions/competitions, they are the last stocks of old packaging, or they are flavours/varieties that were trialled and the big players decided they didn't have space for them.

That was the basic premise of Heron's discounted stock. You can't think "I need X brand of Y product, I'll go to Heron" because they might not stock it. Or they had it last month, but not now.

They branched out into basic grocery items later. Milk, tinned stuff etc.

Brilliant place.

Is it only branded items though? Would a branded item there be cheaper than a supermarket brand?

My family would kill me. Everyone hates it except me. And I don't like it enough to eat it in the quantity it always provides.

I don't have a Heron foods near me, but I've looked on the website and there's only one coffee for example and it's £6! I buy supermarket gold 200g for £2.50.

No Heron Stores here but their site says that they have offers in store that aren’t shown online.

I'm wondering if it's all branded stuff though? So cheaper than branded in the supermarket but more expensive than the supermarket brand. Would there be gold 200g coffee for less than £2.50 for example?

same in greece also, exactly as you say. and the supermarkets were anyway a mafia cartel before the last few years…

What does a pepper cost to produce? How much profit should the producer make? Or do you think things should just be priced to suit you regardless of production costs? Why don’t you grow your own peppers if it’s so cheap?

Another worth considering is EU subsidies for farmers, something that have been massively reduced (and ended for good by 2027) due to of Brexit. This will have effected food prices too.

It's going to be a bad year. Our local vegetable farmers are saying the ground is too saturated to plant out.

I find it amusing that the OP is moaning about the price of bell peppers.

She has clearly not grown them otherwise she would fully be aware they are out of season in the UK so the only way to grow them is under glass.

As electricity prices have increased loads of producers who use greenhouses around Europe including the UK have shut up shop. This means peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers have all greatly increased in price particularly when they are out of season in Northern Europe. This has been reported in the media since the war in Ukraine. (This is without including the drought in southern Europe so there are restrictions on the number of tomatoes being exported.)

Incidentally as someone who eats bell peppers, and has grown them in the past, there was a period in November when they were cheaper if you bought them in bulk. I don't remember what country they came from though. Likewise avocados are always cheaper and much larger around Christmas.

If I go to the supermarket or the market asparagus, carrots, potatoes, spring greens, spring onions, and grapes are cheaper than normal. (Asparagus was cheaper this time last year as it was in season and there was a glut of it.) There as strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and bell peppers are more expensive.

You shouldn't be horrified at the price of food because in general people spend a really low percentage of their income on it, compared to most of the rest of the world.

You should be worried that as a nation an increasingly large proportion of people know absolutely nothing about food. They don't know what it is, where it comes from or what to do with it. They can't help themselves stay healthy on a tight budget because they lack the knowledge and skills to do so.

To be honest I find it sad that people have been brainwashed into believing that 60p for a pepper in March is somehow bad, yet they are willing to spend considerably more on other items.

I'm not judging anyone and understand that it's the politics of those who have it all, and will never have been without, who have enabled this change over decades, without foreseeing, or probably caring about the consequences to people's health.