It's getting tough out there. Feeling the pinch?

Wraithlady

I think she was more highlighting to make her point - pasta is, after all, a basic foodstuff.

Yes, you can get 20p pasta - but only at certain German-owned supermarkets and if the nearest one to you is 5 miles away, then it's not really much use. You used to get it at Sains & Tesc - ok it wasn't a gourmet experience, but it was cheap and filling - but now, the cheapest pasta is 70p. Which, if you're scraping for pennies, is a heck of an increase

TheAble

Wraithlady said:

I think she was more highlighting to make her point - pasta is, after all, a basic foodstuff.

Yes, you can get 20p pasta - but only at certain German-owned supermarkets and if the nearest one to you is 5 miles away, then it's not really much use. You used to get it at Sains & Tesc - ok it wasn't a gourmet experience, but it was cheap and filling - but now, the cheapest pasta is 70p. Which, if you're scraping for pennies, is a heck of an increase

It's 70p at Asda, specifically. Tesco and Sainsbury's still sell it for 20p. And they still sell 45p rice, and baked beans at £1 for four cans. 

I just thought the story was a bit sensationalist. You're not forced to buy it at one particular supermarket. And ok - you may not have transport, but Tesco will still deliver to you for £3, which isn't bad when weighed up against the cost of petrol and running a car.

KxMx

TheAble said:

Wraithlady said:

I think she was more highlighting to make her point - pasta is, after all, a basic foodstuff.

Yes, you can get 20p pasta - but only at certain German-owned supermarkets and if the nearest one to you is 5 miles away, then it's not really much use. You used to get it at Sains & Tesc - ok it wasn't a gourmet experience, but it was cheap and filling - but now, the cheapest pasta is 70p. Which, if you're scraping for pennies, is a heck of an increase

It's 70p at Asda, specifically. Tesco and Sainsbury's still sell it for 20p. And they still sell 45p rice, and baked beans at £1 for four cans. 

I just thought the story was a bit sensationalist. You're not forced to buy it at one particular supermarket. And ok - you may not have transport, but Tesco will still deliver to you for £3, which isn't bad when weighed up against the cost of petrol and running a car.

Tesco have an order threshold of £40.
If your shop is between £25 (minimum basket cost) and £39 that means another charge of £4 on top of £3 delivery.

Not everyone has a car either and a single person household without may well find both a £40 order threshold and a £7 delivery fee for a smaller order, unaffordable. 

euronorris

Yes, I think it's easy to forget that some people rely on using the shop/supermarket that they can walk to and from, as they don't drive and walking is free. Bus fare isn't in the budget, so a £3 delivery fee wouldn't be either. Not to mention that if you're spending £3 on delivery that far outstrips the saving your making on one bag of 20p pasta.

London_1

I think back at time to when rationing was king and things were bought by availability . NOTHING was ever wasted or binned, my late Mum would be horrified by the amount of food thrown away today. Perhaps its time for a TV series or cooking programmes ,maybe run by Ms Monroe, to show people how to make the most of what we have in our cupboard, instead of the fancy cookery programmes shown on TV at the moment It would be a hit with many cash-strapped Mums I bet. I have never seen the point of cookery programes that use expensive ingredients as is it just egotist chefs showing off their skills ?.
The majority of recipes you couldn't get an average child to eat anyway  Teach people how to make the most of basic foodstuff that they can afford to buy, not stuff that is above and beyond tha majority of hard up peoples lives .

I have been cooking and feeding myself and then my family for over 60 years and have learned a good few ways to extend my food and consequently my purse when times are tough .
I lived through the times of rationing, post war austerity, the dreadful days of the 1970s when the mortgage rates hit 16% and the electricity blackouts when you only had three hours at a time to cook food for your family
(I made a 'hay box' from my childrens toy box and used pillows and a duvet in it)
its surprising how you can adapt, and this present high inflation will be a great time to reinvent your way of living, by perhaps not buying and throwing away food ,or just thinking how you can make it streetch a bit further.
 I know it won't be easy for many people having grown up in the land of take-away and instant gratification when it comes to food ,but it really is the case today for returning to some older ways of managing
Not relying on the supermarkets to provide this instant food all the time

 I am a great avocate of cooking from scratch, and with the internet and YouTube its possible to find almost anything you want with a few clicks.
I look at stuff in the supermarket and think hmm I could make that myself for half the price and get twice the quantity. I think the more expensive stuff I saw yesterdays in Dobbies food department was one of those fancy fish pies Charlie something,  priced at £8.50 !!! its white fish in cheese sauce with mashed spuds on top,cost to make if bought and cooked yourself about £1.50 at most and twice the amount ! 

So OK maybe there are some who can't manage to cook very easily and the one pound frozen meals fro Iceland is Ok and very useful (my DDs ma-in-law is 85 and loves them) but if you are in reasonable health and able, cooking is just a case of research .

I grew up without the internet to help, today its possible to find out how to do things with just a quick google search. I am a single widowed pensioner who manages to live reasonabley well on my income

I don't have any extra private pension (my late husbands one went over the side with Robert Maxwell off his yacht )so I too live on a restricted income ,but by golly am I a carefull shopper when it comes to food stuff.

I shopped twice in January and only bought essential and basic stuff and I am slowly working down my freezer and using up surplus stuff in my cupboards. I have a food budget of £60.00 per month and had around £11 to roll over into Februarys food budget, so for February I will have around £71.00 to last me 28 days. its more than doable and I will eat a cooked meal every evening and cereal or porridge for breakfast and soups and cheese and craskers or an omellete or some small snack for lunch

I don't eat 5 or 7 portions of fruit a day its really nor necessary I will eat at least two portions of veg and maybe two of fruit and I am quite healthy and haven't seen a Doctor for over two years. I have frozen blackberries picked for free in my freezer. I have a good few frozen bags of home made soup in the freezer as well I use every scrap of food I get and either cook and eat it or cook and freeze it for another day I make my own cakes and biscuits and find that I can make almost anything edible with the help of my herbs and spices even the blandest food perks up a bit  

Energy is foremost on people minds at the moment I know, but agaain thinking back we never had CH or double glazing in the 1950s and we survived to better times as hopefully we all will this time.

So sit and think this morning what you can make that will extend your food .Even if its only a saucepan of soup. A 40p bag of carrots will make, with a few herbs and spices and that odd couple of sprouting spuds in the spud bag a good two litres of spicy carrot soup for pennies to feed at least 8 people with some crusty bread, rather than the tin of soup from the shop at 75-80p that will only feed one person.

See what you can come up with today thats a new recipe of something you have never tried to make. Why spend £3.00 on a quiche when, make a bit of pastry,line a tin,bake it 'blind' for ten minutes, and fill with odds and ends from the fridge, a sausage cooked and sliced up,a quarter of and onion diced up, a few herbs .fill the case with a couple of beaten eggs and pop the bits in, finish off with a tomato sliced thinly across the top and bung in the oven. this is delicious with a few chips and maybe a tin of beans as a side dish or cold with some salad. be inventive

I chuck almost anything into a quiche (it was called bacon and egg pie when I was little ) Cooking bacon from the supermarket is your friend, you can cook the odd shaped bit to a crisp and in a bacon sandwich you won't know any difference, the fat you drain off ito a dish to use to make fried bread, cut a hole in the middle of the fried bread when cooking and throw an egg into it Kids would love a 'dragons eye ball' as my kids called it for breakfast .
Its thinking outside the box as is said, give it a go, you never know you may come up with something else

JackieO xx

dp1

Good advice as usual Jackie O x

Siebrie

We are both on a slightly above average income, but we, too, are starting to feel the pinch here in Belgium. Our standard g&e payment was €130/month, and will go up to €230/month from March! That's the cheapest rate we could find. We haven't signed the new contract yet, hoping prices will dip for a few days soon, and we will lock in at a slightly lower price.

We have started working at the office more, to keep temps at home lower. I'm all alone in the office (there's only 3 of us in the whole company ), and husband asks when his colleagues are all at the office and then goes the days they aren't there.

When at home, I'm wearing a thick vest, longsleeve, really thick sweater, slipper boots to keep my ankles warm, thick socks, long trousers, sometimes leggings underneath. Husband is wearing his jogging suit, dds are wearing onesies or oodies; our sofas have thick fleece blankets.

I work at the kitchen table and the tiled floor can be cold, so I put a thick piece of cardboard under my feet, and wrap a thick fleece blanket around by legs and waist. I have put a garden chair cushion in my chair to prevent drafts on my lower back from the window behind me. I drink a lot of warm ginger tea

We receive something called 'meal vouchers' for every day we work, for husband it's €6/day, for me it's €8. We can buy food with these vouchers (any food, from discount supermarkets to high end restaurant). Lately, we were getting a bit lax with using these to buy food, and would pay from our normal account. No more! It should be plenty for the 4 of us, including filling the pantry and some extras.

t14cy_t

Jackie O for prime minister i think, so glad to have you back to muster the troops. xxxxx

-taff

TheAble said:

It's 70p at Asda, specifically. Tesco and Sainsbury's still sell it for 20p. And they still sell 45p rice, and baked beans at £1 for four cans. 

I just thought the story was a bit sensationalist. You're not forced to buy it at one particular supermarket. And ok - you may not have transport, but Tesco will still deliver to you for £3, which isn't bad when weighed up against the cost of petrol and running a car.

A bit sensationalist? I don't think that you get that people are really struggling with money.

If you have a twenty piund budget for food, what do you expect to happen? Someone will say, well, I won't eat for a week so I can order 40 quids worth of food. I won't put 3 pound on the key meter so i can pay for delivery if I want less...

Thanks to media demonsiation, people seem to be under the impression that poor people deserve to be poor and just pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and rushing out to get some work will cure it.

No-one wants to be so poor they have to use food banks. And if you are using a food bank,there's the prevailing idea that you're using one because you're spedning all your money on booze and fags...where did this idea come from? Did poor people say, well, I'm going to spend my money on fripperies and expect someone else to feed me. Or is it because the gap between the rich and the poor is at an all time high?

Honestly, it really gets my goat when people assume their lifestyle is the norm, that people 'may not be able to afford a car'. People may not be able to afford a bloody bus fare, let alone a car. No one, absolutely no-one, chooses to be so poor that they cannot eat.

Flugelhorn

you are so right @-taff - I am far from being hard up (2 healthy public sector pensions and we have never liked foreign travel / eating out etc) but the huge increases in costs - especially food-  are  becoming noticeable. My kids are in their first post Uni jobs (more or less minimum wage) , neither could afford to live where they are on what they earn if I didn't pay the rents for them - must be really worrying for many at present, can remember my parents getting very concerned re all costs in the 70s and real worries when an unexpected bill came in or the old jalopy packed up and Dad couldn't fix it himself