Is a healthy diet more expensive?

ampersand

OAP, necessarily lean, clean, green and mean here, with this vile government, but it's my preferred way of living regardless.

As a longtime kiwi expat with French links, upbringing and much life experience has shaped and helped.  Breaking in native bush in the early 50s with first clear+plant crop of potatoes is well-remembered.  Parents built in Ngaio, out of Wellington, after the war.  Many returning soldiers did this on blocks of government land, given for the purpose, around the North Island especially.   We were partly under canvas at times - the norm during the process and great for self-reliance and lateral thinking, for solutions and alternatives.  4 or 5 families would often help each other through the stages.  Everyone established and cultivated an acre, or bigger, gardens for fruit, veg, various livestock.   My younger rellies still do, 4 generations on, while working full-time.

Realised today that I have 2 freezers full of h-g produce and quality rtc meat etc. so 'emptying freezers' is now mantra+challenge.
Should easily see me through to Christmas.  From today, the daily orange+apple, dairy, eggs(from hens I know), occasional baking ingredients are all I'll buy until then.  Keen yellow sticker spotter. Make own bread, adapt/flavour it with allsorts+use-ups.

Also do hefty boozy cakes and rumtopfs for fundraisers.  No junk or processed food - not my thing - and have acquired a decent cellar over the years. 

Shopping is spread between Waitrose, MrT and Food Warehouse Tuesdays, for their over 60s 10% reductions on everything.  Living rurally means making every litre of fuel count.  Distant park+ride with buspass sometimes works.

Living alone (since loss of X over 20 years ago)enables much of the above, which I understand.  I doubt it would or could work for families nowadays.  

Nonnadiluca

Interesting thread. I shop weekly with DD; we do Aldi, lidl and Tesco as they're really close together and we can get the best prices or things we prefer from wherever. They're a family of 2 adults and 2 teenage boys aka bottomless pits! We have 2 medium sized dogs and they have a small dog and a cat. DD spends near enough double what I do, which seems logical until you dig down a bit. Volume wise, I buy about 1/4 of what she does. There are things she buys every week which I never buy: fresh flowers, wine, beer, cola, lemonade, breakfast cereals, biscuits, crisps, popcorn, strawberries and blueberries all year round. frozen pizzas . If you take those items off I spend way more than half. We both buy a fair bit of fruit and veg, she buys loads of fruit . She has 3 omnivores who have meat 3 or 4 times a week. I don't eat meat, DH has it once or twice a week either free range chicken or sausages. DD doesn't buy ready meals as she cooks from scratch like me. Looking at this, I'm not sure why I spend so much: almost all of my shopping is ingredients, we make bread and pizza, one butternut squash will form the main part of 3 meals for instance, we have one egg based meal a week - frittata, omelette, vegetable tart. Looking at all that, I don't know what conclusion I've reached other than I seem to spend more than I should. I'll blame the dogs!! 

ampersand

Salut, Nonnadiluca -
If I'm in what is known as Town of Gown as opposed to Town of Horse - easy guessing for those in the Fens:-) - I often check aldi+lidl, also close together.  Aldi net drawstring produce bags@25p, are outstanding value.  Excellent multi-uses.  I buy 10 or 20 at a time.  Can't switch sewing machine on for that!

Nonnadiluca

I have literally dozens of net drawstring bags that I made from old net curtains about 5  or 6 years ago, still going strong! It's good to see that supermarkets are now selling them cheaply; every plastic bag not used is one less in landfill.

kboss2010

Wraithlady said:

annieb64 said:

Having spent a few days away from home staying with family and eating a diet of processed food and refined carbs I know that I would hate to eat like that for any length of time.I feel tired and bloated. 

Slightly unrelated, but OH and I spent a long weekend at an event where the catering was limited to, effectively, burgers and chips. 

Neither of us are particularly veg-obsessed, but at the hotel afterwards (it was a 6-hour drive home otherwise), we had a simple meal of chicken with 'seasonal veg' and we not only wolfed down the veg, we ate every scrap of the salad garnish (usually picked at if touched at all)  and had 2 extra portions of broccoli.

But, it's my opinion that people are sold on an idea of 'healthy eating' which is one of 'superfoods' and fads, so obviously these are more expensive (BBC Good Food magazine, last year, didn't seem to have any recipes which didn't involve miso or kimchi - both expensive and not-widely-found ingredients)

It's interesting that one of the arguments used (outside this forum, I hasten to add) to shut down debate is the 'oh well, not every one can cook/has access to good shops/has the facilities to cook' as though that trumps everything - the implication is 'so lets not even try to make things better, and we definitely won't start to ask why these barriers exist and what we can do to change things'

Miso isn’t expensive if you buy the large bags from the Chinese supermarkets. I add it to all kinds of sauces for the umami flavour & a bag that’s about 4 jars-worth was about £3.

kboss2010

It can be cheaper but it also requires significant effort, time, prep which many people don’t have the time, strength or energy for, never mind the ability to cook, the equipment or the money for bills. 

I can make a really tasty red lentil & veg lasagna from scratch fairly cheaply, for example, but it takes time and you have to know how to add layers of flavour to make it taste good.

My plan for cutting down on food bills is to empty the freezer & batch cook several weeks’ worth of dinners to freeze in portions but, again, that requires a chunk of money at one time & a freezer to store it all even if the basic ingredients are fairly cheap.

I often do what most old style money-savers do of bulking out mince dishes with red lentils, beans of all kinds and leftover veg (you can use oats in mince & gravy dishes too but I’ve never tried that).

I make my own sauces:

Tomato:
 A cheap tin or two of plum tomatoes
tomato paste
miso paste (buy it in bags from the Chinese supermarkets, it’s the same price as a small supermarket jar for 4x that amount)
A beef stock cube
A spoon of sugar or a grated carrot

and then I add red lentils/grated & chopped veg & beans as required - courgette, aubergine, carrot & squash all work well and kidney, baked and butter beans all make for tasty bulk.

Curry: A basic curry sauce is just a blend of spices added to a dish with water/stock, a bit of ghee/oil & sometimes things like almonds, cream, or coconut milk. The basic spices are:

Cumin
Coriander
Garam Masala
Turmeric
Garlic
Ginger
Chilli powder

and that’s a base for every British-style Indian curry. Buying these in bulk at the Asian supermarkets is also a big money-saver.

We buy loads of garlic bulbs twice a year (usually when I see it reduced at Aldi), peel it, chuck it in a blender with a tiny bit of water and freeze in ice cube trays then decant the cubes into a freezer bag. Same with ginger. It’s cheaper than a jar and saves chopping garlic every time you need it.

But, again, all of this requires planning, prep, space, a decent sized freezer, chunks of money to bulk-buy, time, energy etc so not doable to all.

I grew up with a chronically ill parent whose energy went on working full-time. She was too exhausted to cook so we lived on ready meals until I taught myself to cook in my teens. 

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing either. A bowl of instant ramen/packet noodles with added peanut butter, a dash of soy sauce & sesame oil with a handful of diced peppers, frozen peas and shredded chicken takes the same time to cook as the bowl of noodles on its own.

People do the best they can with the resources, knowledge & skills they have. 
 

zaxdog

One thing I am doing today is slow cooking a gammon joint. Once cooled it will go into the freezer (sliced and into zip lock bags). MUCH cheaper than buying sliced ham for Mr Z's pieces. He works away one day a week and we do my Highland Clearances Commute once a week so I like him to have a nice lunch. 

Breakfast of pineappple, orange, guava and turmeric smoothie (1/3 of a 99p special offer bottle in Farmfoods)

Lunch will be a lentil & carrot soup. Will have with some YS seeded bread and will be big bowls to keep us full until about 6pm

Treat dinner for Saturday night will be a £1.79 Aldi vegetarian Indian snack pack and about half of a bag of skinny fries.

Snacks will be: easy peelers & home toasted peanuts

Fairly healthy, cheap and tasty  

applepad

Aldi food shop this afternoon, want to buy some packets of nuts and seeds for healthy snacks and breakfast, muesli, granola and bars.
Plan to buy a few packets a week and grow my store cupboard, we have a Home Bargins next door to Aldi, anyone know which shop is likely to be cheaper ?
Im going to buy the Aldi organic oats as a base, and add from there.

YoungBlueEyes

I don't know if there's a major price difference tbh. I buy packs of Aldi nuts and packs of raisins+cranberries, and I stock up when they're on offer. One thing I would say is consider your storage - nuts can oxidise and go rancid (like wot butter does, for the same reason) if they're not kept somewhere cool.

Frugalista

Longwalker said:

If you have an instant pot or slow cooker, HM yoghurt, greek/skyr style costs pennies, takes no prep, just milk, starter, stir, leave to ferment overnight, strain if needed ( I like mine thick enough to stand a spoon in ) and voila - I use UHT skimmed - 3 litres at 65p per litre and end up with between 1.5 to 2kg yoghurt 

 Found a lovely recipe for granola which uses soaked liquidised dates and cinnamon for sweetening, along with the oats I just chucked in what I had - sunflower seed, flax etc - makes a lovely topper to the yoghurt

@Longwalker, would you possibly post your recipes/method for the yoghurt and granola, please.  Thanks in advance.