Aibu to be annoyed the food shop disappears so quickly

[toadstool32]

It drives me insane. Food shop arrives and within a day most cupboard snacks / fruit has been eaten. I’ve spoken to everyone on numerous occasions about making things last. Family of 5 plus a dog, spending anywhere between £100-£130 a week. How do you make things last?! (Obviously not fresh stuff with dates but the constant snacking).

edited to add: school lunches and snacks are all provided by school. I get lunch at work too. So this is just home food.

Where are you shopping that’s it’s £6 for 4 chicken thighs? Try Lidl or Aldi. I suspect a vegetarian diet is is the cheapest.

You dont need fruit and home made bread is cheaper

Did you bulk out any mince dishes with veg and lentils or legumes?

Did you buy chicken thigh with bone in and skin on, a kg of it and freeze what you didnt use?
A 1.1kg pack of chicken quarters in asda is £2.73

Did you save the juices and fat from cooking the chicken to make a soup later?

Use barley or other really bulky grains which are cheaper than rice?

Cheap veg like parsnip, swede, cabbages?

The list is endless of how you can manage that.

In fact just checking more on Asdas site, they have 20% fat mince, frozen 600g for about a fiver but you can buy 3 for just under a tenner. They have lower fat options but personally I like a lot of fat because I use it for other things and I like the flavour

that would be 1.8kg of mince. Assuming each person has 200g per serving, thats 9 meals for 10 quid for the meat element. Personally I would do around 100g per person and bulk out with lentils meaning I could get 18 main meals out of that tenner.

You do need the freezer space though

I would rather wither up and die than to never eat fruit again 🙈 or frozen mince actually. I’m a bad person clearly.

People have their preferences and thats fine, but you stated that a diet for that money wouldnt be nutritious, that simply isnt true. It would be far far more nutritious than many of the diets set out here. I chose mince as an example because people seem to want to include meat, I dont personally eat mince that much

A fresh comparison then would come in slightly more expensive if you used the fresh pork and beef mince, higher fat which I would prefer, its 750g for £4.88 so for just under a tenner you get 1500g of mince, not quite as good value as the frozen, I could still get 15 main meals out of that.

The point is, there is absolutely no need to spend what some people are quoting on here for fresh healthy varied foods for a family, with lots of enjoyment and nutrition.

We’re similar to soupy. Breakfast is always porridge oats (£2/week organic with jam £3), maybe a box of cereal with milk at the weekend (£4). One dinner will be roast chicken (£7) with rice or potatoes (£2) and veg like carrot and cucumber sticks (£2) but that will last at least one more meal as a soup (£0), DH will often manage a third meal out of it too. Then an omelette (£3 approx for eggs and cheese), jacket potatoes with toppings (maybe a fiver?), tuna mayo (£4), one oily fish meal like salmon (£8) fresh or frozen. One night of pizzas, usually homemade £3 or shop bought (£10). We’re at £45 so far. After that it might be homemade schnitzel or falafel (£5-10), and realistically we eat out once a week but if not I made cheeseburgers or wraps at home, with chips (£10) or 1kg of chicken thighs (£4). The remainder of our food spend is snacks (popping corn, bourbons, satsumas, apples, “3 for £5” strawberries from Morrisons, “2 for £4” grapes from Morrisons, bread, and the ham/pate DH likes - most places have it at 3 for £8. Block of cheddar. Misc veg like carrots, peppers, toms, cucumber, maybe corn. DH also got a cheese subscription for his birthday so there’s good cheese in the house a lot of the time. At a push £90 a week, usually less.

Family of two adults, primary DC with big appetite and two preschoolers.

We’re not trying to be careful with the food shop but it has settled down like this and feels reasonable.

We're not eating meat. Hth.

Cheapest sources of protein (I'm vegetarian not vegan) are eggs, pulses and (I know this from back in the day when I was pescatarian) tinned fish.

What is pissing me off immensely right now is my DCs' attitude towards fruit- especially that of my teenager. We've had an incredibly tight month due to going on holiday coinciding with work drying up, but it's September- we are rolling in fruit here. Pears and figs from our trees, damsons and apples from the allotment trees, blackberries everywhere....DS1 knows we're on a very tight budget right now, but is moaning I'm not buying the regular packs of frozen berries (he'll hoover up a couple a week, often making himself a brimming bowl with muesli and yogurt that he'll leave half of on the side in the morning 😡). DS2 and I have been out blackberry picking so there's been plenty of stewed blackberry and apple that DS1 has eaten the bulk of, but he won't go out and pick any blackberries himself, or chop up and stew any of the massive pile of apples sitting on the kitchen table right now. And God forbid he actually eat an apple or pear without added sugar 🙄.

If that was the only food available then I'm sure you'd eat it. Billions eat/ate worse in refugee/concentration camps.

I buy a certain amount and it's to last once it's gone it's gone . I do however have a 15yo that is greedy and will eat way more than his share of the treats if given the chance so we have a small fridge that locks and I keep the other kids share of yoghurts etc in there and crisps are hidden in my bedroom .
One night he came down and ate 3 tins of fruit , 6 of them rolled pancakes in packets, 3 bags of crisps and 2 yoghurts and several ice creams while we were asleep i was livid when I realised the next day, it was just pure greed and I have 4 other children to feed for the month aswell so now things get locked away .

Buy some cheaper snacks and also make cheap easy snacks like flapjacks(really easy with a cheap bag of supermarket oats) cheap own brand biscuits, encourage the children to have chocolate spread or something on toast as a snack rather than chocolate bars. There’s lots of ideas online. It’s hard trying to feed a family at the moment, so expensive.

That’s bad and greedy!

My teenage son was always enormously hungry. He ended up being 6'4" tall, and a lot of that he at around this age.

So I made sure there was always extra food, but it had to be filling, and not biscuits etc.
He often came downstairs and cooked something at 10 pm before bed because he was hungry. And he ate 3 meals a day and that included 2 large bowls of cereal for breakfast (6 weetabix) and a large healthy dinner.

Cheap frozen pizzas were his thing, and bacon sandwiches. I encouraged him to eat carbs and protein, to fill him up, not just bisuits and sweet stuff. He was also allowed to eat left overs from the fridge too.

I remember my brother being the same, he effectively ate 4 meals a day for about 3 years. He is also very tall, and grew 7 inches in one year as a teen.
I do think sometimes teens are greedy, but I do think that sometimes they are genuinely hungry as they are growing so fast.

Both my brother and ds were stick-insect thin until they stopped growing.

@Overwhelmedandunderfed How are people eating fresh, nutritious meals for £70 a week?

I couldn't do it easily for £70 without compromising on quality of meat and veg and massively budgeting, I think. I could probably do it for around £85-90 without really having to think too much about it.

I suspect other people eat more exciting/nutritious meals, which pushes the price up, but I could do the following without really budgeting too much:

• Pizza and salad - quite often we cheat with ready-made pizza dough (£4), buy a bag of grated mozzarella (£2.50), passata (65p), a bit of ham (£1) and a sliced pepper (65p). Bagged salad around £1.50.
• Toad in the hole, potatoes and veggies - the batter is just flour, eggs and milk, then sausages for around £2.50, a few potatoes, a couple of carrots and frozen peas (80p?).
• Chicken, roast potatoes and veggies - around £10-15 for a good quality chicken, then potatoes and veggies around £2 on top.
• Spaghetti bolognese - mince (around £4), pepper (65p), onions (20p), garlic (55p, though we normally have one in), stock cube (around 25p), tin of chopped tomatoes (50p), spaghetti (75p).
• Jacket potatoes with cheese/fillings and sweetcorn - potatoes (£1), cheddar grated (around £2 to do enough), baked beans (£1), tuna (65p).
• Chicken stir fry - chicken thighs (£7), noodles (£3), carrot, spring onions, peas (£3), a bit of soy sauce, oil and a few spices (£1).
• Fish fingers (£5), fries (£1) and peas (40p?). (£6.40).

Breakfast is toast (£2.60 for 2 loaves) with peanut butter (£7.50 for 1kg, does a couple of weeks) or cereal (£3) with milk (we get through 3 big ones a week, so £4.95 of milk), and fruit (banana/apple, probably £1 a day if we each have a whole one). Pancakes with strawberries and whipped cream at the weekend (around £5-6).

We do spend more on our shop (around £140-150), but that includes snacks, treats, alcohol and household stuff.

Country is a joke when we have mothers asking how they can cut back on fruit/veg for their kids because it’s unaffordable

DS1 knows we're on a very tight budget right now, but is moaning I'm not buying the regular packs of frozen berries (he'll hoover up a couple a week, often making himself a brimming bowl with muesli and yogurt that he'll leave half of on the side in the morning 😡). DS2 and I have been out blackberry picking so there's been plenty of stewed blackberry and apple that DS1 has eaten the bulk of, but he won't go out and pick any blackberries himself, or chop up and stew any of the massive pile of apples sitting on the kitchen table right now.
He needs a kick up the arse and a lesson in respecting who pays the bills and in not wasting good food.

I can do 7 breakfast and 7 dinners for myself, my 14 year old and my 12 year old for around £40/45 a week if we do fully vegetarian. I cannot do it if we have meat; it really bumps the price up. So we have a mix usually. But then it bumps up again from buying things like fruit and ice cream etc, but those aren’t essentially and I can get snacks down to £10 a week with the right choices.

Yeah, but he ate his siblings' treat food. He could easily have made himself a sandwich or a bowl of pasta.

I come down hard on DS1 if he eats the stuff I've saved for treats (ie the salted caramel spread from France) lest he become the kind of man you read about on here who eats the food set aside for his kids' lunch boxes.

Not cut back. Buy more for the same price by making different choices. She is buying fruit which is expensive for small portions. She can buy cheaper fruit and get much bigger amounts.

Theres 3 of us eating 3 squares and snacks at home here and we spend more than that per week.
We get through a punnet of fruit / large can / frezzer stewed fruits, 1 banana and a large pot of greek yoghurt pretty much daily. 2 packs of rice cakes. On average 2 bags of crisps. On average 10 snack bars.

I think you are under-buying snack. Is that instead of or as well as dessert? The fruit and yoghurt is dessert in our house so much less snack would be needed if there was some alternative after tea.

You are completely right. He's a tricky one though....very hard work, immune to being reasoned with. There won't be any packets of frozen berries for him any time soon, but he'll be telling all and sundry how ludicrous and petty I'm being 🙄. The sooner he's earning his own money and running his own home the better.

It is a lot though when it’s a 3rd of peoples wages

Frozen isn’t isn’t too bad

I tried the 5% from Iceland and actually really nice and breaks down/cooks well

think was was 3 for £10

I can’t do fatty mince tho. The 20% may be cheap but it’s rank and chewy

Budgeting isn't a new concept. 😅

Growing up the majority of our fruit and veg was bought from the market, that was much cheaper than the supermarkets. I don’t think I’ve ever bought fruit and veg from a market as an adult. I have no idea if the prices are still better or what the shelf life is like.