What is going on with food prices??

[londongirl12]

A 500g packet of mince in Aldi is now over £5!! What on earth is going on???

If you can afford a smartphone, you can buy a second hand spade and trowel for less than £5...

But you are a defeatist, so yeah don't bother, just sit on her arse moaning about the cost of food on your expensive device whilst munching on your processed shite

And don't forget to go and campaign! You have plenty of time on your hands after working overtime just to make ends meet, getting kids to and back from school, cooking, cleaning, helping with homework etc etc. Why are you not campaigning for allotments indeed??

I live alone and I am struggling on my salary, especially as rent is over £1k a month!!! Unfortunately where I live, we don't have a Lidl or Aldi nearby, so its the Co-Op or Tesco mainly.

I shop online as I find I'm not swayed by things I don't need by going instore. I've also started batch cooking. I bought some lovely freezer pots from Amazon, and this week I have made a spag bol and frozen 2 servings in the freezer, and last night I made a chicken curry and did the same.

Whereas when I first moved into my house I was getting a food delivery once every 10 days as I have limited freezer space, I am now trying to eek it out to once every 18 days or so but trying to be much more savvy with food. I just go into the Co-Op once a week to buy fresh milk and salad. I will cook some breaded chicken in the airfryer and have it with chips / beans one day and pop it in a wrap with salad the next. If I have some sandwich meat in the fridge that's near its use by, I will have it on a salad with some garlic bread. I try not to waste anything these days.

You could have emailed your MP in the time it took you to type that.

Absolutely! And if you also add up the time spent on it, I could get a part time job that would more than over my entire shopping bill.
Not to mention the occasions the allotments were broken into and people stole the food that everyone had spent ages growing.

My GP told me cough mixture is a waste of time. It might make you feel a bit better but so would a warm drink and a paracetamol. If also feel better knowing I hadn't wasted £9.

I’ll actually try this tomorrow!
Good thinking x

I put my name down for an allotment in 2018 and I’m still waiting…

And I'm very skeptical that growing your own will mean significant savings. Lots of fruit and veg is still relatively reasonable when compared with other products. Carrots and potatoes are cheap still. I buy a big bag of potatoes every two weeks for less than £2. I'm not sure the initial investment and labour is really going to be worth it. Am I really going to yield that many potatoes if I grow my own?My food bill is massive but the fruit and veg isn't really the issue. Yes if you're buying organic berries it will be a lot.

Nonsense.
Once you have the initial outlay it costs very little

Save food scraps for compost-use no dig to maintain your soil
Use everywhere, egg shells keep the snails and slugs at bay
Companion planting
Recycle pots-wash and use,again
Most garden centres you can pick up outside for free.

Seeds-save from this year's tomatoes, beans, peas, sunflowers, sweet peas, cucumber etc

I actually agree with this.

I had a veggie patch which was quite large. After purchasing the seeds, all the tending I had to do, all the water I had to use, all the worrying I did over winds and my beloved tomato plants .... I barely had much veg to show for it. The carrots got flies, the cabbages were eaten, the brussels sprouts barely did anything and the tomatoes got blight.

I did get to eat some of the produce, but I'm sure I spent way more than I ate.

Also, going back to allotments, I have a retired family member who grows vegetables in his (large) garden. His vegetable garden is about the size of an allotment (and a lot more secure as it is inside his fenced / gated property). He also grows fruit. It takes hours of effort and yields enough for sides / toppings (e.g. stewed fruit on cereal) for 30 or 40 meals total.

Allotments are not going to solve the food crisis. They are great exercise and the fruit / veg may be healthier than shop alternatives but counting labour, they aren’t any cheaper.

Yeah mince is now more expensive than chicken! Well if you buy the 5% fat one. Was mince not previously considered a cheap meat!
Someone mentioned steak pie 😧 need a bank loan for one of them now 😂

All that takes time and patience and money. not to mention protecting precious crops from the bastards that are slugs! Not everyone is able to do this.

@SoggyArse gardening and a veg patch is great, but it doesn't happen overnight - we grow loads at home have done for years, and absolutely on the cheap - but it takes time and that won't help anyone with their food shopping bill tomorrow will it? Unless you have jacks magic beans hidden somewhere.

If a family is getting by fine then someone has a disabling accident or loses their job how will - you should grow things so you can harvest in 10+ weeks minimum help them with their immediate needs. It is a pointless what-about solution that only serves to make you feel smug - rather than a real answer to the issue.

Not to mention that amateur growers have a much higher failure rate, last year I had buckets of tomatoes, this year barely 5 - if I banked on our veg patch to support our food bill my family would suffer.

The drought this year has seriously reduced yields of all manner of essential crops. Everything from wheat to even grass growth is down by massive amounts. I feed my horses haylage, which is a grass-based product. My feed merchant has none - that is not ‘not much of it and it’s expensive,’ but none of the right type at all for my horses. He says the weather this summer and the poor grass growth meant it was not possible to make it. So I have to find alternatives for the winter. I have been feeding haylage through the summer too for the first time in my 45 years of horse ownership, as the grass just did not grow this year. Land which was flooded and saturated after last winter was late to begin grass growth, and then the heatwaves burnt off any new growth leaving fields brown and bare.

Now cows eat the same stuff as horses - grass in summer, and silage (a grass based product) and grain in winter. They are bedded in barns over the winter on straw. As I’ve mentioned above, the grass did not grow well, and neither did the wheat (from which both grain and straw are derived.) Feed merchants and suppliers are shipping it in from Scotland to England, or even from Europe, but the haulage costs are huge. Haulage requires fuel, and fuel is expensive because of wars in the Middle East. And in Europe, the single biggest grower of wheat is Ukraine. And they are not exporting as much as they used to these days.

So it’s all well and good demanding that the government ‘do something’ about prices, but unless they have the power to cancel extremes of rain in winter and sun in summer and to bring about lasting world peace, the costs are just going to keep going up.

We have a small veg patch but this year we extended it and we’ve had so much lovely food from there. I had a mad thought last week that I may well get rid of all the flower beds and stick veg in there too! Would save a fortune.

Try butter
2023 Kerrygold 250g £2-2.10
2024 went up to £2.50-2.60
Last month £2.60+ but now 200g
That's over 50% inflation (£8/kg to £13/kg)
Ornua (Kerrygold's owner) is a cooperative of Irish farms and dairies using exclusively grass-fed cows, so the suspicion is that they are raising the price of their butter, which costs little more to produce today than it did in 2022, to cover their costs in other areas of their farms (feed and fuel)

Or Wispas (actually, all Cadbury's chocolate)
2022 went from £2.50 per 10 pack to £3 per 9 pack
Today £3.75 per 7 pack
A rise of over 100% (25p each to 54p)

Yet Galaxy has only had a modest rise in the same period - £1.04 per 4 pack to £1.18, around 13% over 3 years, so it's nothing to do with ingredient costs

Seriously? The UK is in real sh*t if cucumbers are not affordable.

I grow some of my own and I absolutely recommend it for the physical and mental health benefits and enjoyment, but I'm also a bit sceptical about it making a massive difference to overall costs. It takes a lot of time and knowledge to create and maintain a kitchen garden of edible plants that crop all year and feed a family. And while you can indeed do a surprising amount with a small space, realistically you do need quite a lot if your goal really is to be totally self sufficient for fruit and veg. Raised beds and fertilisers aren't a waste of time and money either. Various crops won't grow in the wrong soil (good luck growing root veg in clay) and raised beds let you control the soil type and also reduce bending and kneeling if those are a problem. You also have to allow for some crops failing even if you do everything right. Weather and pests are sometimes beyond your control.

Edited for typo.

Price of mince is crazy!! £7.80 for 750g in Sainsbury's and £9.50 for 1kg. What on earth!!

If you’d like to come to my home and force feed soups and casseroles to my child, feel free to try. Cucumber and broccolis and strawberries are some of the very few healthy foods she will eat.

£8 in Lidl last week

Food prices have risen 5.1% it's been saying on the news this week.

The other thing to remember about growing vegetables, is your carrots come into season at the same time as commercial crops - ie when carrots are at their cheapest. So when comparing costs you can’t compare the cost of homegrown carrots to the average cost of carrots, you have to compare it to their cheapest cost throughout the year.