Can't afford to eat healthy food...

I can’t stand all the judgemental posts on here. This is largely a matter of education...and I think there is a lot of class snobbery going on. You may be able to think of wonderful things to do with oats and lentils, but a lot of people just do not know where to start. Plus the cost of electricity. Meters running out, are a huge worry to some people. I tad more empathy might be nice from some posters.

Pearl barley, lentils, spuds, cabbage, carrots, onions, some cheap minced meat. Typical ingredients to make a nourishing stew to feed a lot of people cheaply.

On a scout leader training weekend once there were people who didn't know how to begin chopping an onion. Why is that even a thing? It's pathetic.

The problem with judgment is that we condemn people based on a tiny snapshot of their daily life, and it is usually used as a way to make ourselves feel better. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a forum ‘AIBU to be ashemaed of myself because this person does a better job at ......... than me’. Instead we jump on things that we can criticise, and try to shame others.

So you saw a toddler have some crisps. What else has he eaten that day? Could it possibly be that he has a weekly treat after the supermarket?

Do you honesty think mothers (apparently the children’s fathers are not accountable) love their children less than we did? Of course not, they’re doing their best, just as we did. Maybe their methods are different, but the world is different.

I sometimes really feel for the current generation of mums, they don’t seem to be able move without judgement.

But people that poor are a very small proportion of the population. The huge rise in obesity is not the result of just 10% of the population having bad eating habits it is the results of 80% or more having bad eating patterns.

It is nice and easy to talk about 'the poor' and thus distance ourselves from the problem. The problem is actually us. How many of us are overweight and inactive? How many of us, our children, GC, friends and family members are overweight and have poor eating patterns?

Obesity is a problem that we have to address in our own lives, not just see it as a problem of 'the poor'

Pearl barley isn't expensive and never has been. It has always been a food of the poor.

I find that both interesting and shocking, inish. Interesting because I wonder how true it is and how well it has actually been researched, if at all; shocking because, well, I am not poor but I can't afford to eat takeaways. When I was poorer I couldn't either. The cooker heated the kitchen (which had no other heating) as well as cooking cheap food.

Not all mothers are as perfect as the mother’s posting on this thread , you are so judgemental it’s upsetting . Many mothers haven’t heard of peal barley, don’t give free range chicken a thought because their mothers didn’t. Junk food isn’t something which has become a problem overnight .

Now we get Jamie Oliver and Hugh Thingy on tv sorting out the obesity problem. It has become a class thing ,

Sorry if I have upset some X

I did hear somewhere that poorer people can't afford to put the oven on to cook something from scratch. They can buy takeaway food already hot.

I do think cookery education is very important you would be surprised at the number of people who can’t cook even a basic meal? it’s true that there are online videos but I think people need help to access them. A lot of the clients we see are on benefits and don’t have WiFi so struggle just using top up mobiles. In addition there is the wider issue of helping people maximise their income, many of the very poorest get the worst most expensive energy tariffs etc and many are living in poorly maintained private rented accommodation which eats up their heating budget.
When I was at school we learned cookery but it was a ridiculous subject! All I ever learned was sweet making ie scones or biscuits whereas the food I really loved growing up as now were the spicy curries, middle eastern fare and Italian meals of my parental and grand parental homes. I was very lucky that my mother and grandmother were excellent cooks and we had Indian friends who my mother used to do their tax returns for (she was an accountant) for free and in return they came to us or vice Versa every Friday and cooked proper Indian meals together, it’s one of the delights of my childhood?
My own 3 DD are fantastic cooks and all my SIL are foodies too so I see my DGC growing up as they all did with a wide variety of healthy food.
For a period when my children were tiny and DH was ill we were on a tiny budget but I used to walk all over town looking for best value fruit and veg, bought stuff from health food shops carefully and was a limited supermarket user. We always managed decent healthy vegetarian meals, breakfast of fresh fruit and toast and a reasonable amount of carefully regulated snacks. But as I said I had been given the benefit of a cooking family which others have lacked
I always imagine how it would be for a young mum stuck in a tiny poorly maintained flat trying to feed her child on the minute amounts that the DWP allows her AND not having had any education in cooking! If you grow up being fed a frozen Pizza or nuggets and chips and had never seen anyone choose chop and prepare vegetables or put together a meal how can you be expected to do this?
In our area a community group called “Community Stuff” offers free or cheap ( £5 for a 6 week course) of cookery lessons for families (all coming to cook together) for older people living alone and for the adult males who often seem not to have been taught to cook anything by parents and maybe after a divorce are left living on micro meals and takeaways?

I agree with most of what has been said, but (apologies if it's already been said and I missed it in my scim-reading of much of the thread) i feel I need to throw into the discussion the fact that many of the long-term poor probably have to think twice before using the cooker - they are likely to have been put on on the most expensive energy tariffs there are! And that is assuming that they even have a cooker, (or fridge or freezer), as a large proportion of social rented housing is not let with white goods.

Yes, it is still possible to eat reasonably cheaply and healthily without those things, but it might not be quite as easy it first seems.

Yes, it does irritate me when people try to imply that healthy eating HAS to mean things like salmon steaks, organic chicken breasts and blueberries.

I think the problem is often that people who are used to eating a lot of relatively cheap junk food, don't actually like veggies much, if at all, don't know how to make cheap meals from scratch, and maybe even aren't prepared to do a lot of peeling/chopping up - not uncommon regardless of money.

I used to have a comfortably off (largely non cooking) colleague who asked me for a recipe for a particular soup - she complained afterwards that her arm had ached from all the chopping! All it had involved was one large onion, a few carrots and a couple of sticks of celery.

Having been exceedingly broke in the past - thankfully a long time ago - I know I could feed me and Dh healthily on very little if I had to. It would involve a lot of cheaper, seasonal veg, lentils and pearl barley, etc., the cheapest cheese and eggs, and probably the odd chicken, of which every scrap would be used. Chicken and eggs would have to be non free range, of course - I haven't bought non free range for ages - but needs must.

At one point in the very broke past we were practically living on very substantial seasonal-veg soups, with bread and the cheapest cheese. My Dh still loves this sort of soup and I still make it a lot in winter.

My post was simply to refute the argument that people give of not being able to AFFORD healthy stuff. Not WANTING to eat it, preferring junk food

I think that is the crux of the matter too. Convenience foods have swamped the market. Iceland ready meals are cheap and for some it's become too much effort to cook with fresh ingredients from scratch. People use remote controls for the TV, they use microwaves or delivery services for food.

I saw a mother open a six pack of crisps in the supermarket the other day and give them to her toddler, sitting in the trolley. I felt so sad. She could have got an eight pack of easy peel little oranges for the same amount and peeled one for her child, and provided her from an early age with a bit of nutritional education and given her the experience of tasty fresh fruit. Instead the little girl got salt and fat. I kept my little ones happy on shopping trips with grapes and bananas. The maternal instinct to nourish little ones seems very lacking. I want to scream when I see toddlers in pushchairs eating bags of Haribo.

It's neglect - of advice and health. .

And people can afford to eat too much because food is a lot cheaper, relatively speaking, than it has been historically and there is a good deal more of it available even to poor people in developed countries.

I'm not convinced that what people eat is the cause of obesity. I think it is how much that is the problem.

From a newspaper article today:

"a leading dietician said that the concept of junk food was simply a middle-class insult for poor people’s diets. Catherine Collins, a registered NHS dietician, argued that “nutriprejudice” was behind efforts to clamp down on the advertising and promotion of unhealthy foods."

Collins also maintains that "many high-end products contained just as much fat, salt and sugar as confectionery or burgers. For example, some Duchy Originals biscuits contain more fat, sugar and calories per 100g than a Mars bar."

I like her attitude and I like the term "nutriprejudice". Food snobbery in other words.

For families that are truly on the breadline, of course they buy as cheaply as possible. But once again I refer people to Jack Monroe's blog on how she fed herself and her son on £10 a week. Not everyone are as inventive or as determined as her, but it shows what is possible.

More importantly the majority of families are not on the extreme breadline. Most people have to budget but you only have to see the range and price of foods in any supermarket, or look at what goes into people's trolleys, to know that there are plenty of people buying quite expensive ready meals, vast quantities of canned and bottled drinks, biscuits and sweets. Then there are the High Streets full of coffee shops and eateries (rarely low price take aways) and you only have to see the number of families in them to realise that the vast majority of families in this country can afford to eat healthily.

And, yes, I have no problems about being judgemental about many people. It is not being judgemental and far too prepared to patronise those poor things who are not able to work out how to feed their families properly that has contributed to the current situation of obesity and poor nutrition.

Well said, SpanielNanny, I think education is a significant factor. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up but my mum, in that post war sort of way, could make a good healthy meal out of next to nothing. Like your son I learned nothing useful about cooking at school and never cooked at home as a child. As an adult I did draw on my experience of food as a child, even though I’d stubbornly never ask advice from my mother, and in time I learned to make good food out of very little. My own children are all good cooks and can make meals from scratch without a huge reliance on convenience foods and so it goes on. Criticising low income families is an easy option and won’t change established patterns but education can empower people to make wiser choices in all sorts for ways. There will always be some who fit the stereotype of the lazy parent who sits in the sofa ordering yet another takeaway but it’s not always the case. There are many more who try to do the best for their children.

So now we have schools teaching a level of English grammar for SATS that most of us never had to learn, with stressed 11 year olds worrying about subordinating conjunctives. Meanwhile the media is full doom and gloom about an obesity epidemic, an NHS that’s struggling to stay afloat and a social care system that’s flawed. Now maths was never my best subject but it seems to me that something doesn’t add up. Education, education, education has to be the way to go in my book!

Whilst I absolutely agree that it is possible to eat healthy on a tight budget, I’m not convinced that this judgemental attitude is the way to solve the problem.

I also do believe that education is an issue. My son did ‘cookery’ at school, and made the most bizzare and useless collection of things, in no way did it set him up for life. I was working single mum for much of his childhood, cooking together wasn’t really an option. He has had to teach himself. Dil is a good cook, but again as vegetarian has taught herself. She and my ds now have a varied and healthy diet. I am also in awe of how she has weaned by dgs, he has been offered foods that I would never have thought of.

I also think it’s unhelpful to pretend there isn’t a issue with the price of healthy food. If you visit Asda’s online shop, the cheapest chicken you can buy is £2.39. Very reasonable. However for only £2.22 you can buy a frozen pizza, oven chips and a tin of baked beans. For families who are truly, truly on the bread line, that is an entire meal. A tin of mackerel is 59p and serves two, but a bag of 20 chicken nuggets that could serve four or five is 79p. Those, oven chips and another tin of beans is a meal for £2.07. Better than feed a family for £5 if you are properly struggling.

I do agree that money is sometimes used as an excuse, but there is a much deeper issue here.

Oh I completely agree with that! It's why I'm currently weaning 9mo DD on a bit of whatever I eat, apart from all the chocolate. But it's a cycle I see quite a lot in the families I know, and my own family. I grew up in a family where chicken nuggets etc were very common kids meals, and I didn't have things like lasagne or enchiladas (not that fancy I know, but they were to me!) until I cooked for myself, so I'm conscious of trying to get out of that habit before it starts. I do think there needs to be a massive overhaul on the education of diets in schools and in foods offered for school meals. My health visitor was particularly good in asking me to come for a chat with her before weaning, but I know not all are so good.

I think it is a question of how children are fed from the time they are weaned. If you suddenly start feeding them mackerel and lentils when they are used to chicken nuggets, you will have problems, but if their first food is dahl or some other pureed lentil recipe they will eat it. Lets face it billions of Indian children have happily been eating lentils for 1000's of years.

Why people think eating cheaply means lentils I do not know. What about rice, potatoes, pasta, home-made pizza. All can be the basis of enjoyable meal with out a dried bean or lentil ever being involved.

I never bought baby food. I just pureed and froze whatever I was cooking for DH and I and DS first tasted curry at 10 months and it has been his favourite food ever since. The food he hated was fish fingers and baked beans.

I think part of the problem for younger families is that a lot of children may refuse things like lentils or mackerel so if they spend money on that it may just ended up wasted. Whereas a bag of 60 chicken nuggets from Iceland may be less healthy, but at least they know it'll be eaten, there's no waste and the kids won't be moaning that they're hungry later when the parents have nothing to feed them. I see this a fair bit in my extended family, they would rather be sure kids have eaten than risk wasting food and therefore wasting money.

Lazigirl- i'm not disputing for one second the joy, sugar rush etc of unhealthy foods- I can eat 4 Wispa bars straight off, given the chance! My post was simply to refute the argument that people give of not being able to AFFORD healthy stuff. Not WANTING to eat it, preferring junk food, comfort eating to combat stress is a totally separate issue. But I hear the former argument far more than the latter!!

Sorry Lazigirl I disagree with you profoundly. It is so easy and quick to make cheap tasty food - and without even using one lentil. I think the time has come when the pendulum has to start swinging back a bit and we must stop making excuses for people all the time and start expecting them to make some effort to help themselves.

Look at Jack Monroe's blog. [cookingonabootstrap.com/category/blog/] She has been there (living in dire poverty) done it - and made a good living on it since! But she shows that good food does come cheap.

I was in that position when my first marriage broke up so I do have some understanding. Having to survive on the pittance I got certainly concentrated my mind on managing this budget and ensure my girl and I were fed. Frequently not eating so that she could. A pizza or similar was most definitely a treat which I could never afford, but you are right sometimes you have to do it and make other sacrifices.

As a child growing up I was one of 8 children and my widowed mother had to raise and feed us all on an extremely limited income, and even though her cooking skills were limited we made it. Treats when they came were from generous people outside the family. Looking back she was totally amazing, feeding, clothing and keeping a roof over our heads even if we didn't realise it at the time.

I feel so guilty every time I chuck food away because I've wasted it.

Don’t you mean £5?