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?

Suggest away but I’m not taking your advice.

I agree that rising food prices are a real concern for many but 60p for a pepper is not excessive and I eat a lot of peppers and regularly paid more than that for an individual pepper two years ago.

sadly, this. also it's more expensive to make a cake for example so more tempting to buy.

I'm pretty sure if it's 'higher welfare' it'll be between £15-20 per kilo. Waitrose currently have a third off, though. Duchy lamb stays at £20/k.

Food has been cheap in the UK for the last 30ish years. Compare the percentage of household income spent on food in eg 1980 to today. Why do you think you deserve to keep more of your wages but those growing and producing your food should have less??

I think that even a few years ago you could buy, say, out of season veg and even though you’d be paying more it was affordable for many more people. Whereas now post Brexit, post Covid and in the midst of at least two major international conflicts which affect food supply- you can’t.

Yes, the margins on actual food are tiny. It can't cost less. High taxes on ultra processed food-like-shit ringfenced to subsidise actual food could work?

Apple juice is not fresh fruit.

It’s crazy how fast food prices have risen. When my youngest was little and money was tight, 10 years ago, I could feed 2 adults and a toddler with £25 for a week. Healthy, from scratch meals. Now it’s £70 in Aldi plus extras from Asda. And I still end up skipping lunch or having toast during the week.

Where’s the 20 p ham from 😂😂
sorry know it’s not the point !

I manage to feed 3-4 including formula and for around 420 a month which I’m not sure is much more than I used to pay but I did change the way I shopped and changed brands and where I shopped.

Where’s the 20 p ham from 😂😂
sorry know it’s not the point !

The reduced/yellow stickered section apparently.

Can’t you get kg of carrots for 60p and swedes are cheap and onions. Peppers are out of season!

I took advantage of the 15p veg today, amazing, big bags of potatoes , carrots, Swede, all 15p. Have made a mountain of mash which I’ll freeze, a vat of spicy carrot and lentil soup , again freeze and portion up …happy days.
Am not usually so organised but 15p is great and I enjoyed listening to a podcast while I prepped the veg.

Not really true.

British supermarkets have always had some of the highest profit margins in Europe. If they’re squeezing producers it’s only for their own benefit, not the consumer’s.

clearly the answer to the obesity crisis is to subsidise fruit veg and meat etc and increase tax on upfs make it cheaper to be healthy than to have a cheap crappie pizza for £1

Have you heard of the cost of living crisis? People aren’t upset about food costs because it means they can’t afford a new Gucci handbag. They’re upset because they can’t afford to feed their families.

Everything has become more expensive, not just food. That 1980s family were spending less in housing , transport, energy.

Raising animals well is not cheap - and because sheep cannot be factory farmed, lamb will never be priced as low as e.g. pork, which comes from pigs who live in confinement. I’m a Londoner, but one who left for a handful of years to live in rural Scotland. It gave me a huge appreciation for farmers and land management, and understanding of cheap meat being great for the consumer but driving producers into the ground.

It’s a shame that people would rather make their snide and sarcastic comments than engage with the problem of supermarket price gouging which has been increasing since the start of Covid. That’s why things don’t improve in this country. It reminds me of ‘at home, I wish I had a goat like my neighbour. In England, I wish my neighbour’s goat would die.’

And it wasn't even 20p then, apparently.

Exaggeration never helped anyone's argument. The '20p Lee' comparison I made earlier alluded to this - he exaggerated how cheap food is. OP is somewhat over-exaggerating a couple of things - which yeah, shouldn't really matter, so what? - but also analytically downplaying how fisheries and farming operate and those industries' and communities' real-life food production costs, and the damaging role of the economics of supermarket chains.

That’s not the standard price, that must have been organic or premium or something. I mean, they have some chicken there that are about £18 a bird, but that’s not what you have to pay.

Food has been far too cheap for too long. There are still bargains to be had if you have the freezer space and shop well. Just this week I've bought loads of veg for 15p and a few different joints of meat that are half price. I cut the meat joints up into smaller portions so it'll last us ages. Carrots are always crazy cheap. Apple juice isn't really all that good for you and I'm sure you could get a bag of apples for a similar price.

The world has changed enormously since the 1980s. The countries which we in the West used to rely on back then to grow food cheaply and to produce goods cheaply have since developed significantly. The people there will no longer settle for slave wages and shit working and housing conditions. They want to eat the foods they grow and consume the goods they produce. Greater global demand equals higher global prices. Holding up the past as an example of when life was apparently better disregards the hundreds of millions of people who made our lives better but now want their own lives to be better.

This, plus why the fuck would anyone expect to pay so little for produce? Someone grew and reared and animal, packaged and delivered it to you.

That is exceptionally cheap.

but you must be aware that minimum wage has increased significantly compared to a few years ago. From £8.36 for someone aged 21 in 2021 it goes up to £11.42 from April. As has electricity and gas. All of which are needed to get the food from where it's grown to the shop. So how do you think this will be managed other than increasing the price?

If you think fresh food is expensive here, you'd faint at the prices in much of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, lots of Europe, particularly Iceland....!

The best way to get cheaper food would be to eat locally and seasonally. But that would involve workers labouring (incredibly hard) on british farms for minimum wage. Would you be happy to do this? Or for your DC? If not then you have to accept the costs charged by those that do grow and organise our food!

In some ways I don't mind, it makes me think about what I'm buying. Encourages me to buy seasonal, or frozen. To add things like pulses to our diet as it's cheaper.
We've been eating food that's too cheap for far too long and it's affecting our waistlines and the planet.
No, I'm not evangelical about it, but we should all be more aware of our actions.

Food historically has been extremely cheap in the UK for the last 30-40 years. Food is still cheap in the UK, its only expensive if you choose to buy expensive items. For meat eaters chicken legs are very cheap, turkey breast, frozen white fish and salmon. Fruit and veg are cheap unless you’re buying cherries and asparagus. Frozen veg is very cheap, including frozen peppers.

I don’t think I’ve ever paid as little as 60p for a pepper, peppers are growers that require intensive care and on top of that they grow slowly, it takes around 12 weeks for a pepper to be fit to be harvested.