AIBU to be annoyed at this suggestion that £50 per week for food for 4 is realistic?

[MageQueen]

This article about feeding a family of four on £50 per week has annoyed me a lot. https://www.thetimes.com/money/family-finances/article/we-earn-six-figures-but-feed-our-family-of-four-for-50-a-week-fx8w5t9lw

If you can't see the piece, here's a picture of her shopping list.

I mean, the piece is about how a family on more than 100k might still struggle which is fine, although I'm sure some people would take exception to it, but if they're going to profile a family that are a good example and doing a complicated job of managing, surely pick one whose food bill bears some resemblance to reality? That would feed our family of four for about 3-4 days. Tops.

I get that there's a whole narrative about people who seem to earn well but dont' feel rich. Hell, I'm ONE of those people. But this just feels so ridiculously stupid it has irrationally infuriated me! (And don't even get me started on the weekly cleaner and nanny for a SAHM who is skimping, supposedly, on food....).

They’re just fancy crisps! And a sharing bag, not individual packs for snacks or lunches.

I see dinners plus a few breakfasts and some items that you’d add to other (missing) things to perhaps make a lunch or two, or make into snacks. No way is that feeding a family of four seven dinners!

My favourite entries on the shopping list are the fresh cut basil and parsley. Out of £50, £1.20 is on essentially garnish.

Well, herbs are lovely but hardly high in nutrition. There's always some kind of erratic flapdoodle of this nature in these budget shopping/recipe articles that gives them away.

This , I spend £80 on me and £80 on my 2 dogs
( Butternut box )

literally nobody needs to spend £80 on dogs a week

Before Covid I think I did manage to feed four of us for around £50 a week on average, maybe a little more but not much.

Since then though, no chance. Partly due to the cost of a food shop going up and partly due to the fact that my dc are older therefore have bigger appetites. I probably spend close to £100 a week when you include little top up shops through the week, some weeks more if I need to restock loo roll or the freezer, cleaning products, random cupboard ingredients etc.

It’s all well and good doing it for £50 for one week, although that doesn’t look like a full weeks worth of meals to me. But keeping it that low week in, week out and also keeping everyone happy, is another story altogether.

*Sorry, £1.02 on fresh herbs but still.

But they are among those feeling the squeeze from a punitive tax system, inflated housing costs and rising prices

The 'squeeze' being their own ridiculous mortgage 🙄

Sharetoken for the article here:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/93ce52ec-fae7-403e-bb44-0be9226b9445?shareToken=aa3970a5c327457d9675b67da156ce16&ver=article

She can spend what she likes on them 💁

This reminds me of those "how I bought a house as a single person in my 20s " articles that do the rounds every so often and every single one of them involves parents footing the bill one way or another.

This family must be using up.stocks from the freezer and larder. No way is that a full weekly shop.

Agree this is not a weekly shop for a family of four.

Sorry AND the nanny AND the cleaner.

Fuck the fuck off 😅

To be fair it isn't just the mortgage. It is also the fact that Emily is a SAHM and then they have the cleaner, nanny and nursery costs which would save them at least £200 or so each week.

Saved £1000 when she would usually be down to her last £5.
😅😅

The shopping list is useless since it doesn't list quantity/amount for most items. Many of the prices look unrealistically low, but it's possible they're tiny amounts.

That works out less than £2 per person, per day. I’m frugal, but not that frugal clearly.

What's everyone eating for breakfast? A loaf of sourdough and some breakfast muffins are not a week of breakfasts. Especially if some of the bread is for lunch. I get the kids are eating at nursery/ school for lunch but surely they still need breakfast or a small dinner?

Why is she spending so much on childcare if she is a SAHM? What does she do on those days? I am so confused.

What are they having for breakfast? It's not egg on toast (unless they take turns having breakfast) it's not cereal or porridge (none on there, and not enough milk), it's not yoghurt..

They must be having school lunches/food at work, skipping breakfast.

I reckon I could get dinners and snacks out of that - although by the weekend it would be slim pickings - and that's for 3 of us.

Me neither (I could in an emergency, but no where near a balanced or sustainable long-term diet). Rural place so smaller (and more expensive) supermarket and food intolerences so I can't eat whatever's cheap/in-season and bulk up meals with veg, beans and pulses.

12 meatballs for a family of 4! And it's obviously a Mumsnet chicken that will stretch to meals for a week. Very clearly that is not a week's food shop.

Yeah £50 a week doesn’t count if everyone is having school dinners and/or buying lunch out the house.

Plus the thing about food poverty which I doubt counts here is not having store cupboard staples. I don’t believe for one second that’s all 4 people ate in a week, and that they didn’t also have a cupboard full of breakfast cereal, bought milk every other day in the corner shop, had bags of pasta/rice, etc already in the house.

I like the idea of taking turns to have breakfast.

We are just two adults (albeit it one who is pretty much constantly training for a marathon so is a human pacman) and we spend between £70 and £100 a week. That does include cleaning stuff and a rotating list of store cupboard and freezer top ups.

I cook from scratch most of the time, use mostly seasonal fruit and veg and we eat a lot of fish and yellow sticker meat but are not overly careful with the budget.

We also buy bread separately (a large sourdough loaf and six bagels a week), and we get lunch out at least two to three times a week and probably eat out in the evening once a fortnight or more. So in no way our total food bill.