£800 pm on groceries for a family

[popsickle555]

recently had a conversation with my DM (lighthearted) but I explained our weekly shop is now around £200 for a family of 2 adults and two teenage children during summer school holidays. She said she thought me ‘overspending’.

Anyway here’s what we spend:

£150 ish weekly shop (has to be weekly during the holidays as they eat so much)
£50 on top up shops fruit and veg and occasional extras eg wash powder and such things. This also includes cat food (1 cat on cheap food).

this includes lunches for me and DH (wfh) and also packed lunch stuff for DC’s who have been on a drama camp.

AIBU to think it’s actually quite hard to eat reasonably well (I do cook most days and I am buying decent ish ingredients but also plenty of ‘basic’ range options) for less than this sort of price now for 4 full portion people eating 3 meals a day? We hardly ever eat out unless on holiday.

For reference my DM hardly eats a lot now she’s older and when she does it’s really simple and generally quite boring stuff eg omelette, jacket potato etc. My DH and DCs needs more protein than that as are all very active.

I just came away feeling like I’m wasting money but genuinely can’t see how I can do it for much less without really scrimping on ingredients and protein.

If you actually read my post, nowhere did I say that all older people voted for Brexit. So your post is pretty pointless - just platitudes really, rather than engaging with the issue.

It’s amazing how far people in his thread will go to try to argue that the food price inflation since 2020 isn’t caused by Brexit. How expensive food is in other countries is a red herring, since they are paying with a different currency and in a different tax and financial system than ours. Unless you’re earning in the local currency, you’re not getting a good picture of how expensive something is if you just compare how expensive something is on holiday in the supermarket. Because you’re essentially paying in money you’ve earned in pounds, when the exchange rate is very poor for us. (Remember way back when the exchange rate with the Euro and the dollar were in our favour? Yeah, not for well more than a decade now.)

The real issue is the inflationary price increases. It’s not been normal in recent UK history for food prices to increase dramatically by 30-40% in the space of 4/5 years, has it? Not all food price inflation is caused by Brexit, as I said upthread. But for us in the U.K., Brexit is the main driver of the overall commodity price inflation we’ve seen since 2020. Part of that is our worse credit rating and weaker currency than before Brexit. Part of it is the increased admin, paperwork and costs; part of it is labour shortages in this country. Lots of aspects to Brexit that have caused this. But the fact remains: people voted for it in all its total fantasy folly, and they should own the economic consequences.

Don’t do this, OP.

Domestic cats who don’t hunt can’t live on ‘plain’ human food like dogs can, they need the added vitamins and minerals (most importantly Taurine) in cat foods to survive. Boiled chicken and white rice can be good for short periods if they’ve come down with something like D&V though.

I read that before this was known the lifespan of pet cats was 18 months - 2 years and that Taurine deficiency is a terrible way to go.

Have you been to Canada? At least for Ontario prices there are worse!

We easily go through £800 a month. Easily. Sometimes more like £1k. 2 adults, 2 kids, 1 dog

We try to buy organic "dirty dozen" and milk and eggs, but I don't stretch to organic meat as the cost makes my eyes water

We try to buy a variety of fresh fruit and veg and make sure everyone gets their 5-7 a day

Fish / seafood at least once a week

I also try to buy no or low UPF ....Olive oil rather than seed oils

I have a chocolate addiction and the price of that has skyrocketed. 3 bars of Tony's is another £12 a week. Obviously not an essential, but my one vice and I ain't giving it up

A daiiry allergy means oat milk and soya yoghurts for 1 child

No booze

We rarely get takeaways

We easily spend £10 a week on berries alone as we all eat lots.

I know we could cut down, but I'd prioritise quality food over things like beauty products, new clothes, or evenings out

I'd recommend the Snoop app as it showed me that what I thought was a £150 weekly shop was much more when I added in mine and DH's coffees, lunches out and trips to the corner shop and petrol station

Doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. My household is 1 adult and 1 bottomless pit teen. I spend £80-100 on a weeks shopping (including toiletries & cleaning products), if I could afford to it would be very easy to spend more than this, I have to meal plan carefully each week to stay in budget and I often don’t eat breakfast or lunch.

Where's that shopping list ?!

I can't fathom spending 1k a month on food when rent/mortgage + bills is so expensive, are people and probably quite rightly prioritising healthy food over savings/cars/holidays? Because I earn a very good wage and I can't imagine having that much spare money every month to spend 1k on food.

I'm in the USA so my specific numbers will be useless but yes, shopping has gone up a great deal here as well, though the reasons are different for most products. (A few, like the big increases in costs for chocolate and olive oil, are due to global pricing.)

The fact is that prices have gone up and your DM doesn't realise and she also probably doesn't remember what it's like to feed teens. For the person who cluelessly suggested eating only 2 meals, an active teenage boy needs over 3000 kcal a day (more if they're massively into sport). They are bottomless pits. I have teens myself and really if I didn't cook job lots of food from scratch I don't know how we'd manage!

Also, please don't suggest feeding cats human food. It is possible to make from scratch cat food, but it requires supplementation. And if you're starting with human quality ingredients it winds up being much more expensive than buying commercial food.

We're two adults and three teens, and spend around the same. Sometimes more, sometimes less - but we get a staff discount at Tesco so we save around £30 a week that way.

Your mum is out of touch.

You shouldn’t feel bad and nothing wrong with own brands.

It really isn’t. You need to look at local salaries and costs/taxation regimes/housing and so on. Housing costs relative to salaries in North America are much lower than here, and salaries are higher. Processed and junk food in North America costs much less than here; some fresh food prices are higher, but by no means all (meat in the US is much cheaper, for example). They may be complaining about the price of eggs, but overall food is still cheaper on average compared to incomes than either here or in the EU.

If you think that the cost of living generally in the U.K. is better than either the EU or in North America then you’re clearly living in a fantasy land! Anyone I know who’s visited here from the EU in recent years is horrified at how expensive, downtrodden, dirty and generally scruffy and broken the UK has become in the last decade compared to just about any EU country.

Anyway, I think I’ll leave you to the fantasy world in which we’ve got it so great in the U.K., as if just keeping on saying it will ensure we haven’t noticed the difference in our living standards compared to even five or ten years ago.

2 adults, 2 primary age kids and we spend around 8-900 pm I’d say. I’d say three big deliveries of £250ish plus occasional extras/top ups is fairly standard.

6yo DS has a very restricted diet so that makes life slightly more complicated as he has a separate meal at each mealtime. And DH needs about a million calories a day to survive (very slim, athletic man who does endurance sport and works a very active job).

In experience grandparents generation have no reasonable idea of what anything costs where kids are involved. One reason that I think the country is in the mess it's in

Large parts of our food inflation is down to increased costs of import, red tape and admin as a direct result of Brexit, including currency devaluation of the pound relative to the Euro. Many of these increased costs act like tariffs so of course are passed on to the consumer and throughout the economy. The damage is not just to imports, but more generally throughout the food production industry in labour shortages and costs, a slump in exports and poor trading conditions. This was very clear before Brexit; and to be honest, I’m amazed that anyone’s still trying to defend it, when economically it’s clearly been and is an ongoing disaster.

You can’t just compare prices in another country without looking at salaries and other living costs/taxation in that currency. Salaries are much higher in the US, for example — you do know this, don’t you? And it simply isn’t true that their food is more expensive. American processed food and food produced within the US is actually very cheap compared to here. It might be getting less so, but that is down to a variety of other factors.

Sadly, I'm old enough to have voted to join the common market, as it then was in 1975 when the UK was in an even worse state than it is now. We were known as 'The poor man of Europe' then and we're not much better now. Brexit was a stupid and pointless mistake and the ramifications will continue to haunt us for decades to come.

i did our weekly shopping for this week coming for 2 adults, 1 teenager, and 1 8yo. including catfood (14 tins) and a few toiletries (toilet roll,shower gel, kitchen roll, wash pods) for a grand total of £65.

granted the kids are back to school this week so i dont have to deal with school lunches but ive never spent more than £100 a week for all 4 of us.

we dont eat too badly either, cooking from scratch every evening

this week we have
sweet chilli salmon couscous and green beans (salmon from last weeks shopping)
chicken and cheese quesadillas w sweet pot fries
paneer butter masala w rice and naans
chicken and chorizo pasta w garlic bread
teriyaki beef noodles with gyozas
buttermilk fish burgers w chips

maybe once every 2 months we will spend another 100 at on buying a few essentials like rice, pasta, large bottle sauces, and a few bits from the local Asian supermarket

This is all a total farrago (maybe I should say a Farage!) of nonsense. Living costs are not remotely higher in the US — and just saying that shows you have zero knowledge of this topic. So much of Brexit was down to people spouting off about stuff they knew nothing about and had no understanding of.

Brexit voters like you are directly responsible for the inflation in food costs this thread is all about. No amount of poorly written and poorly spelt faux-economics nonsense waffle like the stuff in your post above makes any difference to that.

Absolute fact-free nonsense direct from the propagandist Facebook groups of the gullible right wing. You’re completely wrong, I’m afraid.

£960 here. 2 adults. 4 kids. Doesn't include pet foods