Can't afford to eat healthy food...

Perhaps what is needed is providing families without transport with this sort of information, thereby enabling them.

A few doors from me live two elderly sisters who find it increasingly difficult to carry shopping home on foot. I have no car either, so I shop online for the heavy bulky stuff. I have told offered to place an order for them, or add their things to my order, but they won't - partly they are fiercely independent, partly they like to see what they are buying, and partly they are petrified of all the horror stories they hear about the internet!

People who really do not want to do something, whether it is cooking, or finding a way to use the local supermarket, put more effort into avoiding doing these things than the effort required to do the activity in the first place.

Spot on Monica !

Quite so MOnica!

....and we collude with them by being kind and understanding and excusing them.

I went vegan 5 years ago at the age of 58. I did it because I felt very bad about what happens to animals to turn them into food, and didn't want to participate in that. It is such a healthful lifestyle that I am amazed. People tell me all the time that 'they couldn't afford to be vegan' - which is nonsense. It is only expensive if you decide to go down the road of meat replacements and ready meals, none of which you need.

I think the problem is more that people do not know how to cook - or think they can't - or are too lazy to make the effort. Lentils, beans, cereals, grains and nuts , fresh vegetables and fruit make for a very wholesome diet, high in protein, fibre and vitamins, and low in saturated fat and refined sugars. I buy very few processed foods at all - it's a mistake to think it is cheap to buy biscuits, cakes, confectionery, ice cream and so on - these are foodstuffs that nobody needs, and also the kinds of things that set up cravings if you do eat some. If you have access to the internet there are loads of blogs and recipes for inexpensive meals, vegan or not, so - apart from people who are truly destitute and relying on food banks, I think the 'I can't afford to' mantra is often merely a whinge from people who 'can't be bothered'.

The NHS is overburdened with its caseload, and sadly many people receiving medications and procedures are there because of bad diet. So many ills could be avoided if people were more careful about their nutrition. The World Health Organisation declared, 2 or 3 years back, that all processed meats were carcinogenic and probably all red meat was too. There are several articles linking the consumption of dairy products to breast, ovarian and prostate cancer and that diets high in animal protein are implicated in colon cancer. Diabetes, heart diseases, stroke and osteoarthritis seem to be diseases of the Western style diet too.

What I am reading recently about the state of the oceans also leads me to believe that fish can't be any kind of 'healthy' food either, since we seem to use the sea as a dumping ground for toxic waste, plastic and all kinds of garbage - what the tiny sea creatures on the bottom ingest, gets into the bigger creatures who eat them and so on upwards. I've also read that vegetables and fruit in far greater quantities than most people choose to eat them, are very effective immune system boosters, protecting against a range of disorders.

Intermittent fasting is reckoned to be a good thing too - this is where you eat all you want in an 8 hour period and then nothing for 16 hours except liquids with no calories, such as water, black tea or coffee - so, for example, eat between 12 noon until 8 pm and then nothing more until 12 noon the next day. You will certainly save money if you eat less - no doubt about it. Many people in the world don't have the luxury of 3 meals a day, and many people in developed countries not only eat way too much, mostly of the wrong sort of food for optimum health, but also spend money on useless, trivial, inessential items. Anyone who has their own computer or smartphone really should not be saying they 'can't afford' to eat this way or that way - clearly they simply have a problem with managing their finances sensibly!

Don't you need a credit card for on line shopping and if you are in financial straits would you be given one? I think smart phones are a necessity nowadays if you are looking for work and wifi is expensive. It may be free in coffee shops and on buses but coffee is expensive and so are busfares.

I think mine must have been the last generation to regularly be given a cooked breakfast. Since then breakfast seems to have degenerated from a bowl of cereal to a packet of crisps and a fizzy drink on the way to school. Not only have a lot ofpeople never learned to cook at home, but some are without cooking facilities in b&b s

When I was in nursing school, a group of students did a presentation on childhood obesity and they did an experiment. They took I think $20 (about 12 GBP) Canadian to the grocery store and bought $10 worth of healthy food and $10 worth of junk food. They got more actual food with the healthy food, but more calories with the junk food.

charity shops are awash with cookery books, most selling for a pound or two.
M0nica our local charity shop mentioned to me that they don't want any more cookery books as they can't even sell them for a couple of pence!

This is the point. If you cannot cook, it is really easy and cheap to buy a basic cookery book. I have looked at cookery books in several local charity shops this week, when looking for something else and they all had cookery books and they were really very cheap.

Most TV cookery programmes make cooking seem like a competitive art form, involving hours spent doing fancy things with expensive ingredients and specialist utensils, instead of a daily chuck-it-in-heat-it-up-and-eat-it exercise. People who have never seen food prepared and cooked casually at home are put off by the apparent amount of expertise needed.

After the exciting contests the few programmes showing basic cookery with no elaborate concoctions to admire are boring in comparison.

Elegran I completely agree with you. I have long thought that modern cookery programmes with their constant competitions and food as art approach would terrify any non-cook. I never watch them. Even the new programme looking at family cooks is a competition to find who is the best family cook. What we need is a programmes showing real families in different circumstances showing how they juggle children, work and everything else and provide good nutricious food for their families, without a professional tv chef commenting on their cooking methods and recipes.

There is almost too much information out there. Can’t remember what food I was talking about the other day but I heard myself telling my husband that whatever it was is now good for us.
No wonder some people give up.

Monica Cooking has been turned into something trtendy and complicated, which has its own rules and needs a kitchen full od gadgets and years of training.

It is as though the suggestion of walking to the corner shop for a newspaper instead of always taking the car were greeted with horror and "But I'd have to buy spiked shoes and lycra shorts and one of those water bottles with a tube to drink without stopping, and who would I get to follow me with the support car and the oxygen mask?"

Snobbery again on gransnet. Whenever I visit always think of W.I and the Tory party! Vegetables and fruit are expensive For a family especially if you’re supposed to have your five a day if you are in your 60’s you probably saw your mum cook all the time, and whoever said lasagne was cheap bust be buying the worst quality meat without any thought to animal welfare! Cheese ( decent) isnt cheap and if you are poor,with children and working long hours where do you find the time to make meals from scratch. AND OP said she was only now on tightest budget!well imagine what it would be like if you were a single mum who has lived her WHOLE life like this without what you migt call regular treats. Social care is ignored by this government because they hate the idea of the ‘ big society ‘ they favour the small society where its all about the individual. Moans about dil here and moans about mil on mumsnet and having a moan about those who have not and jealousy about those who have on MN, And always checkimg with your peers AIBU. Whatever happened to the free thinking empowered woman we were fighting for the right to become in the past. Not impressed. !Show some compassion instead of superior sneering ‘I can do it so why cant those”. mentality is mean spirited. Well perhaps all they have ever known is lack. If gransnet and mumsnet are real portayal we want to put out there of women , then God help us!

Elegra. Well said. At keast yiu are showing some thoughtfulness not lik MOnica

Thank you, coco, but don't lam into Monica. She talks sense too.

ELEGRAN. You mean like saying we enable them if we show understanding ! A policy writer for the nasty party I think!

Better or worse quality meat has very little to do with either price or animal welfare and a lot to do with which cut you buy. The ones that cook quickly - the steaks and braising cuts and the chops and cutlets - are popular, so they are the most expensive. The ones that take long slow cooking are not so popular, so they are cheaper, and hardly anyone wants offal. However the nutritional value of all of them is the same.

Our mothers and grandmothers bought liver and kidneys and other offal and made tasty meals out of them They bought cheap cuts like chuck and spalebone and cooked them slowly in stews and casseroles, with plenty of potatoes and carrots and onions (these are not expensive vegetables) We did the same. We and our mothers and grandmothers were no less busy as housewives, mothers and wage-earners,our familes were just as hungry, and we had fewer household machines and short-cuts to help us.

The less posh cuts of meat and the UK-grown vegetables are still the best value. What has changed in a generation that has made cooking simple nourishing meals an oldfashioned skill ,and cookery as a whole a dying art to be practiced only by TV personalities and trendy restaurateurs?

Is it the shelves full of convenience foods, seducing shoppers into spending money on meals instead of spending their time and skill? Is it foreign holidays, giving people a taste for food they don't have recipes for? Is it the death of genuine cookery classes in schools, replaced by "food technology" and choosing the topping for your pizza?

Cost is not the main thing. The gas or electricity used to make a big stew which would last a family for two days is probably less than the cost of buying the same amount of ready-made food.

Agree Baggs.

What we need is a programmes showing real families in different circumstances showing how they juggle children, work and everything else and provide good nutricious food for their families, without a professional tv chef commenting on their cooking methods and recipes.
A very good point M0nica

Whenever I visit always think of W.I
The WI is open to all and there are many groups with younger members. I am not a member but, funnily enough, I was chatting to someone I just met today who is a member and we were talking about this. She said that members of her WI were asked to go to a centre not far away to try to teach young mums (and dads too) how to cook simple, cheap and nutritious meals for their families - but gave up in the end because the general consensus was that 'it's easier to go to the chippie'.

And I don't know what 'Tory' has to do with it .
She was a down-to-earth Northern woman, a retired nurse.

Cost is not the main thing. The gas or electricity used to make a big stew which would last a family for two days is probably less than the cost of buying the same amount of ready-made food.
Throwing it all into a slow cooker is an extremely economical use of fuel.

Vegetables are expensive! What a load of rubbish.