Someone I knew worked with the council to help people with less cook more effectively and make simple nutritional meals for less. She felt despair as the general feel was why bother when you can get it in a packet. The reality is the low budgets don’t stretch to ready made pizza or ready made meals. However with large bags of lentils, onions and spices you can make Dahl for weeks. Cooking from scratch is cheaper if you have time but it does not take much. Im lucky as my mother spent her childhood starving during the end of the war in Italy and generally if you come originally from peasant stock you have the ability to cook for not much money etc. with so much larger bags of pulses, rice etc in larger supermarkets there is no real need to starve.Any peasant descent person knows how to make a great nutritious soup with 3 carrots, one onion,2 leeks, cabbage 2 tins of tomatoes, 2 tins of of cannellini beans and stock that can feed them for 2 - 3 evening meals with some bread or individual bread rolls. Life won’t be great but it’s not exactly the work house era of the 1920’s - my dad was born in one of those. He had 7 schools by the age of 14 when he left to work as a delivery boy in Liptons on a bike. They fled from rent to rent to avoid paying when he was a child. My mother lived on dug out roots and general foraging in end war Italy even as a child I recall her foraging nettles and making soup ( good for iron). She knew her fungi etc. As a child although we were affluent I had my share of nettles soup, peculiar green soups etc. Nothing was wasted, the bones from the Sunday roast were used to make a risotto on Monday, left over meat was put in a stew. even the fat from the frying pan was re used. Sometimes it smelt gross.
My mother also used ‘used’ cooking fat for face cream and had amazing unlined face.
The last time I visited my family in Italy 2 years ago, the first meal I had was mushroom pasta made from mushrooms foraged freely from the hillside. It’s a different way of thinking
Also as someone around in the 1970s people did starve and I recall someone crying outside the shops saying ‘ I have not got enough money to feed my kids’ it was Christmas Eve. There are lots of programmes on you tube about poverty in the 1960 and 1970’s. However it does not fit the narrative that likes to envisage poverty arising from the Thatcher era onwards. People probably just kept it hidden. Houses were often unheated with ice on the inside etc. My parents once had to burn a piece of furniture as they had no heat. To make matters worse, when my dad was in the army they automatically docked his pay to support his alcoholic dad and mum - yes that system of having pay docked to support parents existed in the 1950s.
So saying, the huge gulf between extraordinarily rich and poor is obscene and needs to be looked at.
OP has not explained their weekly budget.
Real poverty in the 1960 there was no tv, no fridge, no phone, no car. Even middle class families did not have cars in the 1970 or 1980s. My school friend got married in 1983 and her parents had to hire a normal car for the wedding. She never had a phone. She felt ashamed and embarrassed by it all . I recall visiting someone’s grandparents in the 1980s and they stil used a mangle to wring out clothes.
I was privileged and lucky as my parents worked hard to give me a great life but so saying my mother even refused to buy medicine and would strip bark off a willow tree etc and give me this gross green gunk. My childhood was unusual but even now I can feed myself for very little funds. Even though we were wealthy by the time I was about 10 my parents made me wear my older brother’s old trousers/ jumpers when I was about 5 or 7 when aged 14 onwards I raided my mother’s clothes or charity shops, This was long before it was trendy to do so. From an early age I learnt to hang around supermarkets at certain times to get the marked down food or the bargain veg to quickly cook into something nutritious that would last. When I went to university my dad gave me less than the full grant ( I did consider disowning my parents to get a full grant as it was desperate) so I had to work continuously even working at my faculty ball ( we got free food and got to see all the ents). I ring him once when a student and said ‘ I have £1 to last me 3 days and 3 old potatoes and a can of tomatoes. ‘ He responded ‘That will make life interesting for you ‘ and put down the phone.’ (1983) The room I had in the flat we rented was condemned by the council it had one external wall only onto the road, built as an extension in the 1970s and was so cold the cooking oil I had froze. We had running damp and mould.
Even now, I don’t eat meat and actually find beans, lentils and other pulses really nutritious,
I just wanted to explain as many of you have never experienced things like that.