Eating healthy is too expensive

[ByLoudSeal]

Big shop just cost £150. I don’t buy organic, and I will go for own brand if the taste/quality is fine. Includes fresh veg, tinned fruit, meat, eggs, milk, bread, a box of cereal, tinned meals, healthy snacks, toilet roll, fabric softener, disinfectant spray and washing up sponges, It won’t even last the full week and is unsustainable

Where are you shopping? I do 90% at Aldi, 10% at Tesco. My trick is to eat half a chicken breast/ salmon a meal. 1 packet of two breast/ equivalent lasts two weeks. It is really expensive even at Aldi for 1 adult, 1 child. Fill fuel tank and supermarket shop is around £150 a week, it is a lot. We eat it all. I make my own cakes/ puddings. Freeze lots too. I use clubcard to get all the discounts and rewards - not using a clubcard is senseless imo.

One packet of two chicken breasts lasts 2 weeks?!

Yes I just eat half a chicken breast twice a week and half a salmon portion twice a week. I eat half a packet of prawns on Saturday and battered cod for Sunday lunch because it’s summer. It’s with lots of fresh produce as well. I just don’t need so very much protein, it’s too much - I’m only small.

OK that wouldn't be enough for me or my family.

Exactly, and this is why I don’t think people should compare food bills! I ate lunch with a friend at work this week and she had a tiny pasta salad that I’m sure a 3 year old would ask for more……I almost felt embarrassed by the size of my lunch but I’d run 5 miles before work that day and she’d been dropped off and picked up practically door to door and she does very little, if any, vigorous exercise at all. Meanwhile, I run, walk and gym pretty much every day and so does my bf
so we eat a lot to keep us going! And anyone with active teenage boys stands no chance reducing their food bills, they’re like hollow pits, nothing fills them up!

Yeah. If we have chicken breasts we'd eat 4 in one meal, but there's a lot of us and we are all very active.

Chicken thighs are a fraction of the price of breast. Taking the bone out is a faff but the meat comes off easily once cooked. They are lovely done in slow cooker or air fryer.

You can also get them boneless and skinless – that's a lot more expensive than bone-in (even allowing for the bone weight) but still much cheaper than breast.

I draw the line at incest, even in washable clothes.

I couldn't follow that either?

No probably don’t follow me.. we are all different.. I find a whole chicken breast too much and I bulk out with other high protein items such as chickpeas to make it work ..

switching to Aldi and Lidl’s should help with costs and having a strict shopping list to avoid wastage is an obvious hack too

I meant follow as in understnd , Thanks

I don't think this is always true anymore- I shop online at Tesco and have noticed that a bug pack of skinless chicken breasts works out cheaper per KG than skinless thighs. I suspect it's a bit like lamb shanks many years ago - hailed as a cheap and tasty cut of expensive meat and then became so popular they got almost as expensivr as the other cuts. So now i think so many people switched to thighs as a cheap chicken cut that supermarkets have upped price.

Bone in/skin on thighs and legs still a cheaper option though.

I buy a 2 pack of chicken breast and cut them into 4. I eat chicken twice a week so naturally it lasts a fortnight. I only buy the free range stuff so, it’s very filling!

If you expect to eat meat numerous times a week, accept you need to pay for it.

Tinned fruit is expensive. All those snacks are expensive.

I think you spend an awful lot. I shop in a mixture of Tesco and Lidl and don't spend as much as you. However, I also buy bulk online of flour and porridge oats. There are currently 5 of us at home at the moment - 2 X adults, 1 x 16, 1 x 14 and 1 x 11 DC. We cook from scratch and meals are generally planned. DC do sort themselves out for breakfast and sometimes lunch. We don't really snack and I don't buy snacks. If they want a snack they can have greek yoghurt, fruit and honey.

Breakfasts - porridge, Weetabix, eggs on toast
Lunches - toasties, pasta salad, eggs on toast, sandwiches, bread and cheese
Dinners this week are:
lamb kofta with homemade flatbreads, coleslaw and salad
roast chicken, roasted new potatoes, broccoli and green beans
Pasta with leftover chicken (recipe from BBC good food)
Homemade tomato soup and bread
Pasta with prosciutto ham.
Freezer dinner - chips, fish fingers and peas.

Things that help - make our own bread, be really organised, bulk meat dishes with grated carrot, onion, celery etc and then make sure there is enough for two lots so one can go in the freezer. It can be really dull though!

There have been a study recently in the uk ( sorry about to go to work not google ) that show that a healthy calorie is about three times the cost of an unhealthy one

I can easily believe this.

I found older relatives cooking for one or two for decades with diminishing appetites are aghast at family shopping bills and amounts of food eaten.

We keep ours down with bulk buying flour and using freezers a lot. We eat less fruit than before - and we've found fresh it keeps less well - but struggle to get our youngest veg intake up. Also find if you cook a meal that now teens once kids won't eat - you aren't saving money - so I think family meals are harder than cooking for couple.

However we do eat less well than we once did due to rising costs - even with us doing fair bit of cooking.

This is just a suggestion, maybe try frozen fruit, vegetables and meat. You'll get a lot of vegetables and healthy food for a good price. Frozen vegetables is better because all the vitamins and minerals are still in the vegetables because it doesn't go off.

Maybe try it for a month, see how you get on.

I agree it needs some thought, but it is easily doable if you're happy to eat some simple meals.

I spend max £100 per week for a family of four, normally shopping at Tesco but sometimes Lidl or Morrisons (luckily we have lots of supermarket options locally.)

Cleaning stuff.....we don't use washing up sponges, I have reusable microfibre cloths that I do all cleaning and washing up with (colour coded for kitchen, bathroom etc as I don't like the thought of washing dishes with the bathroom cleaning cloth 🤣) plus a long handled silicone scrubbing brush that I've had for years for cleaning bottles, scrubbing pans etc. Some initial outlay but once bought you don't need to repurchase.

Cleaning sprays I make my own multipurpose spray that I put in an old spray bottle. Big squirt of lemon juice into the bottle (I use those squeezy bottles of concentrated lemon juice as they're cheap), tsp of bicarbonate of soda, squirt of washing up liquid and topped up with water then given a shake. That is cleaner for kitchens, bathrooms etc. You can use white vinegar instead of lemon juice and some essential oil to mask the vinegar smell.

For hard floors I use concentrated disinfectant topped up with water to mop.

I stopped using fabric softener years ago so that is another thing I don't buy.

The above is really for environmental reasons and to cut plastic waste but it's got the added benefit of being cheap too.

Food, meals are simple. We only have meat twice a week or so and use lots of tinned pulses, frozen fruit and frozen veg.

Breakfast is normally porridge or weetabix. Sometimes toast, sometimes fruit and yoghurt. Porridge in particular is really cheap and you can add frozen fruit rather than fresh to keep the cost down.

Lunches are soup, sandwiches or baked potatoes. Piece of fruit on the side. A cheese and tomato sandwich plus an apple is very cheap, as is a baked potato with beans.

Dinners are omelettes with veg, egg and beans on toast, chickpea curry, egg and beans on toast, veggie pasta, vegetable risotto, three bean chilli etc. Frozen veg in curries, risottos etc is absolutely fine. I'll stick some frozen onions, peas, sweetcorn etc in with the pasta. Or fry mushrooms (really cheap) and stir in pasta and some cream cheese.

Snacks and puddings for DDs are fruit (cheaper ones like apples, pears, plums and satsumas) or yoghurt. I buy the big tubs of plain yoghurt and add honey. I buy a packet of biscuits once a week for sweet snacks. Their packed lunches for school are normally ham, cheese, tuna, hummus or egg sandwich or a pasta salad. Plus a piece of fruit (normally an apple, pear or banana), some vegetable sticks like sliced cucumber, pepper or carrot and a biscuit. Costs about £1.50 per portion at an absolute max.

If you don't have lots of freezer space, I would focus on frozen fruit and vegetables and focus on batch cooking things that you can keep in the fridge. E.g often I'll do a double portion of veggie chilli one night and serve it with rice and then keep the second half of the chilli in the fridge and serve it on jacket potatoes the next day. Or make meatballs in tomato sauce and have them with pasta one day and in part baked baguettes the next day.

I agree with you frozen fruit and vegetables are far more healthier and cheaper.

Did no one else pick up on the husband having 5, yes! 5 eggs a day for breakfast? Clearly he had no intention of cutting down! That is just pure greed.

It’s not you that is the problem. It’s the cost of living that is the problem.
where do you shop though - that can make a bit of a difference to your total bill.
its very frustrating isn’t it.

Yes the double portion thing is the way to go. Everything can start tasting the same though and similar texture too. I suppose its worth think ing of a few little ways to introduce taste and texture and visuals to something like meatballs.

I think people underestimate the impact of where you live too.

I'm in Wolverhampton, there isn't a lot of money in a lot of areas, the council are trying to have a community shop or pantry or a surplus supermarket shop in every ward. That's about 20 places.

But they are all run by volunteers so are not open as long as supermarkets. One only opens on a Saturday so not ideal if you are working.

My local one is fantastic. They take referrals as a foodbank and have a policy of making at least one fairly substantial meal for referees.

On a Friday they put together '£5 boxes' and advertise them on Facebook. A box might contain a joint of meat, potatoes, an option of veg and usually gravy granules.

It's that magic Mumsnet chicken again