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?

Asda Essentials 'cooking peppers' are about 32p each if you buy the bag. They're the smaller wonky ones that didn't make the grade to be sold separately or in the 3-packs. They freeze ok.

I like buying wonky veg.

People are focusing on the wrong thing completely. The only reason people struggle to afford an extra £30 on their weekly shop is because they’re paying an extra £200 on their rent/mortgage.
Food is still a tiny proportion of our income compared to what it was in the past and people who produce/transport food also have increased costs that they need to cover so of course food prices will increase

Frozen peppers are cheaper.

Just eat less meat. I find meat is what bumps up the bills.

Food is still cheaper here than in many other places. Part of the problem are the chronically depressed salaries. Here top 10% earner is £66k, in US it’s $167k, $125k in Canada. It’s ridiculous, purchasing power has fallen so much here and Brits on average are poorer.

The salaries here are so low compared to other countries. They're so low that 2 people working full time often still need top up benefits. It's ridiculous.

I'm an online picker and people can still afford to buy alcohol like there's no tomorrow.

It's probably cheaper than peppers
Tho pricier than ham

Yes food has gone up in price, but if you want farmers to continue to grow food then we have to pay more for it.

We also have to be more intentional making sure we are not throwing away food, at lot people buy to much food and end up not using it.

Why shouldn't peppers be 60p? What do you know about growing them?
🙄
(I have an allotment. I know about the conditions they need.)

A 20p packet of ham = 50% Trotter and 50% Sawdust. 😱

Remember that horse meat scandal about 10 years ago.....? Boak.

I’m not even going to deny though there was some things that just never tasted the same after it was discovered 😩

I paid £2.25 for a pomegranate today. I needed it for a specific recipe. I felt like I’d time travelled fifty years into the future…

Veg isn't too badly priced. I can get quite a lot for £10. Fruit is a bit more but meat and fish have really rocketed.
I prefer to bake cakes and biscuits at home. They do work out more expensive but I can make a nice traybake for around £2.50 - 3.00 using butter and cheaper if I use oil like for a carrot cake.
It's much better and more satisfying.

Yes, food took up a much larger amount of the household budget in the 70’s. But, once we joined the (then) Common Market, and home freezers came in, then prices dropped.

We have now left the EU, by majority vote, so prices have increased.

This is because it's the end of the leek-growing season and so anything available is more expensive. Ditto red peppers, which will be cheaper in the summer but now have to be produced in heated greenhouses.

This is actually one of the most difficult/ expensive times of the year for fruit and veg. Last summer/ autumn's crop is over and it'll be a couple of months before this year's becomes available. Buy frozen fruit and veg for a few weeks. In August and September when peppers and tomatoes and courgettes are cheaper, make sauces and freeze or bottle if you can. Grow some stuff in your garden if you have one.

For now it's roasted squash, roots (parsnips, carrots, swede, beets), sweet potato and so on.

Know not everyone can do this but if you have the space, grow your own.

we grow peppers, tomatoes, asparagus, potatoes, leeks, spring onions, garlic, onions, various salad items plus fruit. DH harvests and chops the peppers up and freezes so in winter we can use for things like fajitas. He makes a bunch of tomato sauce and freezes so we use on pasta all throughout winter and so on.

if you have any room/time it is worth it (it’s also a hobby to keep him out of my hair).

but I agree, prices are through the roof and it is worrying

I read the other day that food inflation is the lowest it's been in 2 years. The last two years I have really noticed the increased prices though!!

But I have 17 to cater to for lunch tomorrow and I've done it for about £50. That includes a big leg of lamb, two big packs of chicken thighs, tomatoes, potatoes, peas, asparagus, fine beans, new potatoes, some decent feta, and loads of cheese and tomato flatbreads. I got some frozen party food bits for starters and I've made a chocolate cake for after. That's less than £3 each and I'm actually pretty shocked I could do it that cheaply as it's a pretty luxurious meal for a lot of people.

I think it's does pay to be choosy about what you're buying. A punnet of strawberries now would be really expensive (and tasteless), but in the height of the season my greengrocer is doing them for £1.50 a punnet and they're beautiful.

Food in U.K. supermarkets had become ridiculously & unsustainably cheap, eg £2.49 for a whole chicken, so an adjustment to more realistic pricing was long overdue. Much of this was driven by exploitative poverty wages for workers in food supply chains which was itself driven by a limitless supply of cheap migrant labour while we were in the EU.
Supermarkets & their suppliers now have to compete for workers, and the minimum wage has increased substantially so wage costs have risen sharply across the sector which is inevitably reflected in prices. Is that really such a bad thing?
The era of ultra cheap food also allowed questionable spending priorities to become normalised in the U.K. People are happy to spend hundreds of pounds a month on the latest mobile phones, beauty treatments, throwaway fashion ‘hauls’, cups of coffee, nights out, deliveroo, Sky, Netflix, Spotify etc etc but they resent spending more than a fiver on a chicken to feed their families. 🤷🏻‍♀️

My OH insists on steak at least once a week and will only eat a particular type of fillet steak that costs £25 a portion. So my idea of what food should cost is completely skewed.

Not sure where you're buying a pack of ham for 20p though other than 1980. It's a least £2 a pack.

Two years ago the minimum wage, which most people involved in producing those peppers, was £2 per hour less than it is now. It absolutely boggles my mind how people don’t understand that increased costs to produce something equals increased cost to the consumer.

A couple of years ago a cucumber was 40p and now it's 90p. It's ridiculous

I think there's quite a lot of ingenuity on display here, coupled with some rather smug attitudes. Or else people are wealthier than they care to admit. I totally understand what you're saying OP and anyone who's done a stint in a customer facing public services role where you're working with clients who literally have nothing to their name, will definitely agree with you. The price of food is ridiculous. No it's not cheaper to be veggie or cut meat from your diet or insert a thousand other unviable alternatives. When you're a family on the bread line do you head for the Iceland £1 freezer deals or a lettuce for 75p and an onion for 25p? You won't get much of a meal with option 2 whereas the Iceland deal will keep your kids well fed although admittedly isn't the healthiest option. It's a shitty choice, but an awful lot of people are living this way. decrying that the price of fresh food is actually too low and it's ' not fair on the poor farmers ' is an extremely arrogant stance and one which I wouldn't dare have the gumption to repeat to families who are really suffering right now.

And many of those suffering families will be the people who pick, pack, process and produce our vegetables and other foods. Do you think that most of the people working in factories and in the fields are earning a comfortable wage and aren’t affected by the cost of living? They’re struggling too.

And I’m well aware of the issues behind food and fuel poverty. I used to refer process food bank referrals and I agree that rising food prices are a very real and serious problem for many but low paid workers and growers who produce and process food are not the enemy.

When you're a family on the bread line do you head for the Iceland £1 freezer deals or a lettuce for 75p and an onion for 25p?

I think when you’re a family on the breadline, and you don’t know how to cook, or don’t have the energy, or the electricity/gas, and you’re trying to buy food your kids will reliably eat, because if they don’t there’s nothing else, and you don’t have a choice of supermarkets, and can’t shop around.

If it were purely a financial choice it’s cheaper to make soups and veggie chilli than an Iceland nuggets and chips deal, and you’ll get more food for your money, but it’s not purely financial - it’s all the ways poverty limits and undermines people.

I buy frozen veg and tinned beans, it’s the (gasp, scary) UPF food I get in for my autistic son that’s more expensive in my food shop! I wonder if more people will go plant based as meat prices seem to be going up so much, I suppose that would be a silver lining of this shite cost of living crisis.