Free fruit and veg for toddlers/

[Hulababy]

linknews.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3492939.stm\free vouchers{} for fruit and veggies for low income familes. What do you think?

sorry herc!

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back to fruit and veg, then, and the joys of reduced price food at Sainsburys. I too lurk around the reduced section. I work 5 mins away from a Sainburys and pop in 3 or 4 times a week. Our meals are planned around what's on the reduced shelves - I love their ready prepared salads and other vegatables - when they're half price that is! I never knew you got credited money for reduced bogofs. Thanks for the info.

back to fruit and veg, then, and the joys of reduced price food at Sainsburys. I too lurk around the reduced section. I work 5 mins away from a Sainburys and pop in 3 or 4 times a week. Our meals are planned around what's on the reduced shelves - I love their ready prepared salads and other vegatables - when they're half price that is! I never knew you got credited money for reduced bogofs. Thanks for the info.

Oh, you do, tigermoth,it's wonderful - works v well with things like sausages on BOGOF, say they're £1.99 each and you get 2 for £1.99 so it knocks off 1.99 for each 2; if they get reduced to 99p each you make 1p on the deal, and if they get reduced beyond that it's all profit!

When our store first opened the stocking levels (ie levels of stock, not tights!) were completely mad and the manager kept reducing things by about 75% to get rid and then the computer would knock lots more off, I don't think we ever ended up giving people money at the end of the transaction instead of them paying but it came close a few times!

janh, as an insider can you tell me, when something fresh has been marked down 2 times say, for how many hours is it still deemed fresh and saleable? or does the time limit very much depend on the particular item? I'll look at a quiche say, originally £1.49, down first to 99p then down to 49p, and wonder if that means it's only got an hour to go before it's deemed unsaleable - and if so, whether I've seen it in its last saleable minute?

I think free fruit and veg is a wonderful idea. My dd gets free fruit at school breaktime with a drink of milk (hurray!) I find fruit/veg off the market is quite cheap. I cant understand why the government think low income families cant cook proper meals - I actually find the opposite true. We cook some really cheap good for you dinners. Why doesnt someone start another thread?

it depends on the display/sell by dates. some items have to be sold 2-3 days b4 its use by date (eggs are one of these items), tinned items will also be reduced if they have a short shelf life (less than a month usually). with sausgaes/quiches etc, just check the use by date not the sell by date and also if it can be frozen as this keeps it in 'life' longer. veggies and salads depends on how u like your food really. tatties will keep longer than the dates most of the time if stored correctly, as will carrots for example. apples usually keep for ages, bananas depends on how riope u like them, most stored prefer to sell then when they are grteen as opposed to yellow. prepared salad bags dont keep very well, but seperate salad items will keep better (lettuce, tomatoes, onions etc).
its a case of rial and error a lot of the time. with freah items that cant be frozen (cream cakes, some ready meals etc,) it best to use them within 24hrs.

I don't think that the lack of cooking skills is a problem in any one group of people. I think that there are lots of people in the UK who cannot put together a balanced meal. Some are rich and some are poor. But if poorer people do eat preprepared food, the cost hits them hardest.

You only have to look at some peoples shopping to realise that large numbers of people eat only preprepared food

i try my best to make my own meals, but hubby loves prepared stuff, i find it ll a bit plasticy a lot of time and just leave him to it. tho he will scoff down my roast dinners and curries. he hates vegs, is worse than the kids a lot of time so i use the fresh veggie stock to make the gravy so he gets some of it. i have also grated some carrots and cauli up finely once and put it in a shepherds pie and he ate it. hahahaha.

No hmb you are right - lack of cooking skills in my generation is completely across income/class lines. But people with higher incomes often will tend to eat higher quality processed food (M&S, the upmarket supermarket organic range or eat out)rather than lower cost and quality.

prufock I think you are about the same age as me (26) and I am able to cook. I wonder whether it is more to do with whether your Mother taught you to cook or not. I agree Home Ec classes at school were rubbish, althought they did teach me how to make a good spag bol! My Mum was a cook though so all our dinners were homemade, she also taught me and my sister how to cook too. Wondering whether it is more to with family teaching than school. My dh's family used to live off frozen rubbish and the spag bol he had ever tasted when he met me was out of a tin!

Then again my kids love turkey ham So I am going off subject now...

prufock that wasnt aimed at you and whther you cook or not btw! just read my message back and it looks like I am saying you cant cook and makes me sound spag bol obsessed

tigermoth, misdee is right about the dates. Actually I'm not an insider any more (good!) but I know there is an actual schedule for reductions - different percentages depending on how many hours there are before the shop shuts (not before the stuff turns toxic!) However the level of reductions also seems to depend on the individual doing the marking down - some people seem to behave as if it's their own money they're giving away and they'll only knock 10p off at noon! The thing is that anything not sold at the end of its life has to be recorded as a wastage, so actually selling it (even for a tiny fraction of its original price) looks better on the store records. (Managers worry about this. They have meetings every day with the dept. leaders and the figures are noted. Sometimes they'll discover a whole box of something that only has a short time to live - or else they'll have a huge delivery of something that they never asked for - this leads to "manager's specials" at silly prices!)

Some chilled products have a (2) in the box for sell by date and those have to be marked down 2 days before - I think it's sell by, not use by...anyway the use by date is the one to go by. And if you don't want it today stick it straight in the freezer and it'll be fine.

I learned to cook to impress a guy once...
He didn;t deserve it but I am sure it helped me bag one that did - he's still here

My mum was an excellent cook, but I am self taught. There is a simple everyday useful cookbook from NZ called the Edmonds cookbook, it tells you basics how to peel, prepare, cook all fruits and veges, how to preserve, bake and main meals
It is a very very good book, all kids off to uni are given one to keep them fed.

I agree with hmb, prufrock and fio - the not being able to cook appears across income groups and is quite prevalent. I can cook - nothing fancy but like fio2 a spag bol from scratch, shepherd's pie, casseroles, stir frys, that sort of thing but a lot of my friends can't and seem quite impressed that I can. I always cook double and freeze half whenever possible as a means to producing my own fast food. I think that there is also the point that more families have two working parents now so more money/less time.

I do not expect DS to learn to cook at school but will make sure he does at home - unlike his father unfortunately. In a few years I'm hoping he'll be like Tigermoth's DS and able to turn his hand to a few things.

Influenced by this thread I have sent dh to market today to buy lots of fruit and veg including a butternut squash as am curious to cook it.

normally buy such stuff from tescos

Oh I can cook - and so can my 21 month old dd - she helped make a lovely wild mushroom rissotto last night.
But I had the opportunity to make cakes with my Mum from a very early age as she had spells as SAHM. And more importantly than teaching me to cook she endowed me with a love of good quality food - we went to nice restuarants at least once a week, had lots of foriegn holidays where I was encouraged to eat local food and had friends from a huge number of different cultures. (Playgroup once sent me home with a note asking my mother not to put so much garlic in her food as I smelt!) That wide range of experiences is where I think some (not all by any means) but some kids from lower income families miss out.

Slightly off-topic but vaguely relevant; anyone else use those bags from Lakeland for storing veg ? They have some sort of coating which stops stuff going off so fast.

I don't work for them, and to be honest was completely cynical until I tried them but peppers, brocolli, prepared salads, beansprouts etc keep for over a week without going squigy or mis-coloured. They cost about £5 for 20 & you have to use a separate bag for each type of veg but they can be re-used - I've saved a fortune by not chucking stuff out.

This is all very weird, but I'd love to know where all these convenient jobs are that miraculously disappear during the school holidays and reappear during term time and allow you to earn more than £5 per hour. It's not the benefits system that's scandalous, it's low wages. For the average person to come off benefits, they would have to earn around the 20K mark to make it worthwhile. How many term-time-only jobs pay that? Benefits are supposed to keep you just above the poverty line. Low, part-time incomes don't get you anywhere near that. If you come off benefits and the job doesn't work out, you have to wait quite a few months before going back on. What are you supposed to feed your kids on in the meantime? I'm lucky enough not to be in this position myself, but I have friends who are, so I can see what it's like.

There's an awful lot of IM ALRIGHT JACKism going on in the world in general atm, imo.

Prufrock I can cook as well but did not have your experiences as a child because we were a low income family. So I still make some of the things my Mum did, like stew and dumplings, but instead of using the cheapest stewing steak I use braising steak because I can afford it. I think my Mum who was mainly SAH but did some cleaning as we got older instilled in me the idea that it was normal to cook. Whereas my MIL who was mainly SAH but was a dinnerlady as her kids got older (so similar experience really) did not instill it in DH unfortunately. DH is quite snobby about ready meals and our friends living on them and how much cheaper our shopping bill is (all true) but is also quite happy for me to plan and organise and cook. Sorry private rant there!

Hi again,
btw my hubby is lovely just more interested in Sport than the pooter although I bought him typing for dummies cd rom-he's a lawyer and I thought touch typing would come in useful - and he's totally hooked.
On the topic of cooking and our mums, mine did everything for me. I even had a cup of tea the instant I came in from school. We didn't have much money and lots of home cooking was done by her but she didn't show me how to. I'm now a decent cook but self taught, though I've just started a cookery course with my mates.
It'd be great if there were more basic cookery classes at community centres etc. but I suppose it's lack of facilities that stops this. Mind u, comprehensive schools could open there cookery classrooms perhaps on an evening?

They did a free "cooking for babies and children" course at our local community centre while I was pregnant. They even gave away free blenders to try and encourage parents to make their own rather than buy jars and tins.

I have no idea how successful it was as I was at work while it was on and had to rely on books and articles for recipes to use myself. Before that I couldn't really cook, school home economics lessons put me off trying - or rather the teachers did.

we never had much money growing up but i found that to be a good thing because it taught me how to make something out of nothing and i learned quiet quickly when i moved out never to waste good food like left over veg in the pan because there was always another meal there somewhere if your were willing to try and its funny my mother tried to teach me how to cook for years but i ould never get the hang of it i moved out and not to blow my own trmpet im not a half bad cook now and i never waste food that was in a sauce pan thats useualy the babys dinner tommorow or i dont cook so much up i used jars for the baby in the beggining because i was scared of giving him the wrong food and making him bad but my mother said how did women cope when jars never around which was right realy
and paula i know where your coming from with your home ec teacher the last day of school i had to politely tell her that she couldnt cook to save her life and she should got back to college
well i have managed to cautmy shopping bill own a bit doing all this but if they do give out the fruit and veg tokens for the kids that will be great because im sick of having to compare the price of different fruits to make sure i got enough if i havent i put something back and get the fruit or veg instead plus does this include frozen veg because i heared there supposed to be fresher