Sainsburys and Jamie Olivers Feed your Family for £5 Chat Thread

I picked up the cards and when I read the back the £5 is for buying all the items.

So even though they are only using 3 hands for a peas they have included the whole price of a bag of peas and not pro-rated it.

So these meals do cost less than £5 to prepare. Just need to read the small print on the back of the cards.

Yours


Calley

As soon as I saw Jamie advocating feeding a family of 4 on a budget of £5 I thought...well I already do (my family is of 2 though, so I spend less).

It's good he is saying 'stick to a budget' and eat healthy but it makes you wonder how much a non-OS or non-budgetting family of 4 is spending on a meal!

Maybe it's just Sainsbury's prices? I could do the meal a lot cheaper at another supermarket.

Well, I have to applaud the effort. Sure, there is a cynical side to the whole thing - it's aimed at promoting a business after all.

I'm firmly in the target audience for this. I work long hours, and shop for convenience a lot of the time. I often spend £10/day simply on food for myself. It's appalling: not just the waste of money, but the waste in general. And the effect on my waistline has been dramatic these last 2-3 years. The thing is, I'm not one of those guys that is incapable of boiling an egg. I'm fairly competent in the kitchen. But circumstances have led me to where I am today, and for a while now, I have been making changes to redress the balance. That's how I discovered this place.

The thing is, after a while, you start forgetting how to do things. You forget that there are other foods in the supermarket that aren't in the ready meal section. OK, exaggerating a bit, but I'm sure there are plenty of people that simply cannot do anything beyond open packets and microwave stuff. Either because they have never known anything else, or because they have lost the skills after years of rampant consumerism.

I think sometimes people think cooking from scratch is really expensive and difficult, but as we know, it doesn't HAVE to be expensive (or difficult!). I think if someone picks up a card and decides to have a go, spending £5 on ingredients for spag bol, rather than buying 4 individual ready meals, surely that HAS to be a good thing...?

Though I do think it is definitely a very clever marketing campaign by Sainsburys rather than them desperately wanting to improve our eating habits!

Yes I agree, BARGAINHUNTER!

If I hadn't done Domestic Science at school I would have gone under financially, because I would never have been able to create delicious meals out of basic ingredients and feed my family on a tight budget of £5 a day.