Too poor to eat properly

My ex-brother in law by marriage used to feed the 6 kids they had (at the time) and they never received anything fresh- it was whatever he could heat for 25 minutes in an oven. When two of the boys came to stay with me for a mini break they had never seen the brown, lumpy stuff called mince before. they also did not recognise a chicken leg-unbelievable.

When I went to visit I would be given a pie for lunch and a sausage roll for supper- yuk, neither healthy nor appetising.

Must admit that I haven’t read through all the messages yet so apologies if this has been covered, but, ‘though I feel very sorry for those who are genuinely poor, I wonder just how many of them have the latest phones and gadgets. If I can’t afford something I don’t buy it and that goes for things like Sky, Smart Phone, holidays etc., yes these things do make life more pleasant, but you should ‘cut your suit according to your cloth’. There I’ve said my piece.

sarah are you suggesting the big food manufactures make the own brand/private label food? I used to work for the biggest food company and they didn't make any of these products. Don't know about others though.

When my mother left my father she had two jobs to keep my sister and me. We were pretty poor. Probably none of the food we ate would pass muster today but we were fine on it. We had things like:-

-a Vesta curry for one between three
-two fish fingers each and some beans
-fried mackerel which was cheap
-pork belly, cheap and fatty

and so on. My cousins whose mother lived on benefits in a council house used to have fish and chips and it was a measure of how much poorer we were that mum couldn't afford them.

My mother, though, worked, paid her own rent and none of us would think of taking the entitlements she could have claimed like free school meals. A certain self respect saw us through without losing our cheerfulness and optimism.

What changed things for us was that my sister and I did reasonably well at school and we became teachers. I had a brilliant cookery teacher at school and learned to make nice meals with the ingredients mum could afford.

Looking back, though, mum smoked and drank (one of her jobs was in a pub) and I reckon she could have bought a Ferrari with what she spent on them over the years.

I don't have sky and haven't had a holiday for ten years.
Phone, yes, because I had it before my current poverty, but mostly because it is needed to access the benefit system most of the time.
If you phone up, you are often given a recorded message telling you to go to www... then you're cut off.

And I neither drink nor smoke.

Also remember that a lot of flats don't have a gas point in the kitchen, and when they do, gas cookers are more expensive than electric to buy and fit. So many people on lower incomes are stuck with electric cookers - the price of cooking a meal from typical cheap cuts etc is quite high on electric. Meals you can throw in the microwave can be a lot cheaper overall, and most supermarkets do a very cheap range of ready meals, that are comparable in cost to buying ingredients.

I am not sure growing your own veg is that economically helpful. Perhaps it is my poor gardening skills. Buying veg from markets especially at the end of the day can be cheap.

There are several issues that contribute to this situation. Not only people on UC but people on zero hour contracts, and others on very low wages. Some people have to choose between eating and heating, and this is the case in many young people as well as older people. Food banks can only provide so much food for people who qualify. You have to have a referral for it, and are given limited amounts of food per visit. There will always be people who are better at budgeting than others, but even so, with the best will in the world if you have little or not much food in the cupboard you are obviously going to struggle and and get into difficulties.
I have also seen various TV programmes (ie) Jamie Oliver in a town in Yorkshire trying to show people how to cook healthily and cheaply instead of living of takeaways, and also read Jack Monroe's book from our library, in which she documents her struggle and how she came up with the recipes she did to simply survive.
Someone above has mentioned a school in Morecambe, well two schools there also provide laundry facilities for some of the parents who are desperately struggling, to allow them to bring their children's uniforms in and wash them, as they have not the money to top up their pre- payment meters and wash them at home.
I was born and brought up in the north and we knew a lot of poverty, even though our parents were taught to cook basics there was not always the money for the ingredients and had to be very inventive and creative to put meals on the table. We had gas meters and electric meters - one took shillings the other pennies. I can remember then, some neighbours lending each other small amounts of money to put in the meters and giving it back on payday. Lending cups of sugar etc was not unheard of then either. I think it is a lot harder these days because living standards as such have risen over the generations, also not so much community spirit as back then when people did seem to be more neighbourly and help each other out.

Three years ago 6 colleagues and myself took the £1 challenge, to feed yourself including drinks for just £30 per month. It was not easy but we all did it. We had porridge made with water and just a splash of milk or value bread toast for breakfast. We all shopped late just before supermarket closed to pick up bargain meals. If no bargains then we ate cheese toasty. I blended cheap tin of tomatoes with a few lentils and dried herbs and ate as a pasta sauce and stretched it to two days meal. I lost 3 lb and money we were sponsored for and saved on usual food shop went to food bank. I feel sorry for small children who's parents may not be able to stretch food due to depression, addiction or lack of skills. I really wish government would just give all school children a free hot meal regardless of their age. If we leave EU some of the money saved should be used to guarantee this.

Agree completely with nonanan2. And couldn't disagree more with eazybee - we have moved on since our grandmothers (1900s) were looking after families, we have undergone what we call a technological revolution, and we have rampant globalisation - the idea that young people live lives that have any comparison with those of our grandparents (over a century ago) is just nonsense.
People who work unsocial hours cannot just switch their cooking responsibilities to another time of day, by working unsocial hours their body rhythms are changed and they're actually more tired. Young people in London don't own their own homes, let alone cabbage patches where they can 'grow their own' even if they had time. Life for millions of young Londoners is unrecognisable to people in their 60s+ who live in the provinces. And this is a huge problem because people who have never spent hours commuting, had to live in flats with shared cooking resources, and paid exorbitant rents to do so, have no idea of how bad life can be and it's all so easy to brand such people as lazy. Good proverb about walking a mile in my moccasins before you criticise - those who use food banks have no alternative and until there is a real appreciation in this country by people who have it all, of how those who have nothing survive, we'll never get to a situation where we can eradicate the need for food banks. Sure, Domestic Science and Home Economics on the school curriculum is important, but national politics are the root of this problem.

I don't see that as much of a challenge, but its good that a food bank benefited.
Ongoing poverty is a challenge, with or without addiction and other issues.

You cant cook anything from scratch if you have no money coming in,
I am sure people just dont believe that many are actually left without money altogether,
It really annoys me when people start going on about parents cant afford to feed their children or themselves
This UC is a cruel benefit, one of my sons gets all his food from a food bank, and has had no money since November
There has been some mix up with UC and ESA both say the other one has paid him, its disgusting he hasnt even been offered an emergency payment
I have also been helping him out with money for his gas and electric meters
The trouble is its 6 benefits in one, so if you dont get paid for one thing you lose it all

That has happened to someone I know, who, incidentally works 45 hours a week.
Because there is a mix up due to her workplace not providing proof, everything has been stopped and it has been assumed that until proved otherwise, she owes rent, council tax, payment to the nursery going back years.
She has been living on 34 pounds a week since last October.

Actually, her workplace did provide proof, which the dwp lost.
So, she has her workplace angry at all the extra admin they're having to do, couldn't pay a parking fine, which built up to a ridiculous amount, found her car had been clamped due to the debt.. and so on.
She has two little children too..

Sounds as if God forbid we might be going back to the really old days when women had many children, most of whom died at birth or later from malnourishment or various childhood diseases.
Very depressing, what can we do?

I think It would be a start if people could accept that its not only lazy people who know poverty.
Often its those who are trying very hard to make a living..
Doesn't seem very likely that will happen anytime soon, it seems, sadly.

In the '50's I remember it costing 1 old penny in the gas meter and a shilling in the electric meter.

What is the definition of poverty? Is it not having enough food to eat or not being able to own a mobile phone or go on holiday. I often think about the nurse who was in the audience of a debate, who said she had to use foodbanks but actually had a car and could go on nice holidays!
My neighbour turned 60 a couple of years ago and instead of having gifts he asked for cash. He used this money to buy food to take to a food bank. As he was htaking in his donations a young lady came in, with (what he called) a fancy pushchair and talking on her phone. She stopped talking on her phone while she handed over a piece of paper to one of the volunteers and said she was meeting a friend and would be back in a couple of hours. My neighbour saw that the piece of paper was actually a shopping list. He said to one of the volunteers that he thought people would get a staple box of food and was told no, they tried to give them what they asked for! To be fair, I said there wasn’t much point giving them something they wouldn’t use. He then said that as he was driving home he saw her and another woman heading into a coffee shop! Is she in poverty because she can afford to visit a coffee shop? I couldn’t when my children were young, but I didn’t think I was in poverty! I could also feed my family on less than a 1/2pound of mince and a chicken fed 6 of us for 2 days, as well as making the stock for a pot of soup. When we got married we had a small black and white tv, that only had one channel that worked, so you had to retune it every time we wanted to watch a different channel!
Perhaps what was the norm for many in my generation is poverty for this generation!
Back to my neighbour, he has said he will never give to a foodbank again! I suspect that he has told a significant number of others about his experience as well.

School holidays can be a real financial burden, as the breakfast clubs and free school meals aren’t there to help. If you’re managing on a shoe string it doesn’t take much to really cause hardship, because you have no money for emergencies.

Of course it’s easy and healthy to eke out meals using plenty of vegetables. Unless you go for the exotic or out of season vegetables are very cheap too.

But, I once sat in an Obesity Forum, and what became clear was that many of those living on these depressed estates are more likely to have an off licence and a betting shop nearby than one offering a decent range of fresh vegetables.

The most that was on offer were mini supermarkets with a few carrots, onions and potatoes. Not even a good range of frozen veg. as their small freezers tended to stock pizzas, ice cream, and other processed foods instead.

We ran cookery classes for parents and children that were well attended, but this lack of fresh ingreduents was constantly thrown up as the main problem. A mum at home with a pre-school child or children, others to drop off at school and pick up, and without a car, will have to rely on public transport. This means there is a limit to how much she can carry back on a bus and cope with a child(ren)

One way we tackled this was to organise a twice weekly delivery from eg Tesco.com where several people got together and put in a large order to be delivered to one of their houses. It took much organisational skills putting the orders together, divying up the food and the cost, etc.

It’s ok to point out that people can eat cheap healthy meals but they need better access to a reliable supply

New housing can be as bad for no shops and not much transport, they assume car ownership. Yes, it’s possible to walk, but not always with heavy shopping and a toddler.

On threads like this, as on the thread about homelessness, you’ll always get the odd (hopefully) poster who will know someone who knew someone who cheated the system.

This will be held up as an example of how Food Banks or giving charity to those on the streets, is A Very Bad Thing To Do, because they are cheats and liars and abusing the system.

These posters often hold very right-wing views and condemn those who think otherwise as ‘liberal lefties’.

Just saying......

Gma29 thank you fir reading my post and understanding my point. Actually I was talking about some of the ‘sink estates’ I worked with in the north west eg Litherland and Bootle.

But you’ve made me think. There’s a new, very middle class, housing estate just gone up not far from me, about a mile away and further out of town. There’s exactky the same kind of mini supermarket I mentioned, a Chinese, a coffee shop, a chemist and an estate agent office. So no betting shop or off licence.

On this estate there are pockets of ‘affordable housing’ as part of the planning application being granted but I think 20 years on, this problem will still exists for those living in the cheaper homes.

MissAdventure Butter has never been cheap and you were lucky to get it during rationing. A far more nutritious, and cheaper than butter, would have been to buy a tin of sardines either in oil or tomato sauce, mashed down to make sandwiches for your daughter. Tinned sardines were around when I was a child during rationing. Money meant nothing if what you wanted to buy wasn't obtainable.