Food Prices

[diamond lil]

Really noticing the cost of food going up hourly. Have dug out my old WW1 and WW2 cookbooks, think it's time to plant more veg to pad out meat dishes. For a person who is surrounded by bloody sheep - and lambs who wriggle through the fence and munch in my back garden - I can only afford lamb at xmas!!

[Plymtom]

Indeed food and fuel, and who does it hit hardest?

[Brambles]

Yep, food has gone up quite a bit, I expected it to after Brexit. I think it's a combo of the pound losing value and racketeers, big business and anyone else taking advantage of the situation to pile on a penny or 5. Unilever and Marmite have already been exposed for it by Tesco. Trouble is it's the people that have to deal with it. Having a veg garden makes more and more sense.

[jansman]

Yes , prices are firming up a bit. The firm I am working for at the moment specialises in restaurant meat supply. We deal mainly in imported meat, and even that is moving up.

Makes me glad we keep a good stash of food. We are in the position to buy stuff on sale now, and not until. We tend to shop with Asda, and we have noticed that their own brand tinned tomatoes have not been available for a couple of weeks. I won't read anything into it, but it's ok for now as we do keep at least 50 cans on hand.

[diamond lil]

On Sunday morning I spent £50 in Aldi!! What happened to the days when you could get a week's food in there for 30 quid ?!

[unsure]

we have noticed as well , things you pick up week to week are creaping up , rice has gone up 5p per kilo bag . other basics any were between a penny a to as much as 15p per item .

[jansman]

I think we have all spotted a pattern. Diamond lil is digging out her cookbooks, and I reckon that's a positive thing to do. Obviously we all eat differently, both variety and quantity. One way I found to cut costs was to cut waste.

I tend to do the bulk of the cooking and have got portion sizes down to a fine art. There's no waste and nobody goes hungry. For instance, pasta. One of my handfuls per person and one for the pot. Spaghetti, 250 gram ( 1/2 a pack)three people is loads, and leaves enough for daughter for lunch day after at work.
Rice. A half pint mug full is plenty for three. Half a mug for two as my Wife doesn't eat as I do! You get the idea.

[jaffab]

We (wife and I) do a lot of bulk buying at our local Cash & Carry (Booker in our case, other stores are available) - if you have one in your area, may be worth looking into.
Most C&C need some form of Company ID to join (other than Macro, who pretty much allow anybody) - if you work for a company and they have some letter headed stationary, this will generally do.

We buy all our hard goods (fabric conditioner, toilet roll, kitchen roll, washing powder, dishwasher tablets, etc) from there, and all our meet from there. We generally save about 30-40% compared to buying the equivalent at our local Sainsburys.

Now, everything comes in big sizes - so you need space to store it all. For instance, we buy bog rolls in 64's, and our dishwasher tablets come in boxes of 120s (the smallest they do). Also, when looking at the prices, you have to remember to add VAT on most of the items.

For meat, we invested in a vacuum sealer - when we buy meat, we then have to spend a good 2-3 hours bagging everything up into smaller vacuum bags, and these then get stored in a freezer in the garage. But this has many advantages:

1) Less waste. 15kg of mince comes in a big plastic bag - so no supermarket plastic dishes etc
2) We can adjust the serving sizes down. For instance, the perfect size for a two meal mince (spaghetti, pasta, etc) size for us is are 375g. So we get more meals than using the full 500g that supermarkets portion it up to
3) We normally have 2-3 months of mince, chicken breasts, chicken thighs (for curries), diced lamb, diced beef in the freezer

As I say, a lot of work when we do a bag it up session - but a great cost saving. And yes, the hard goods are the exact same goods as we would buy in our normally supermarket, and meat is the exact same quality (a little better sometimes).

[diamond lil]

I get most of my meat in Costco, along with teabags, stock cubes, laundry stuff, and olive oil. Agree Jansman, we never throw food out in this house. Never any leftovers either.

[jansman]

I get most of my meat in Costco, along with teabags, stock cubes, laundry stuff, and olive oil. Agree Jansman, we never throw food out in this house. Never any leftovers either.

Here's another one.Spuds are cheap - most years.Around here we can get a 25 kg sack from Greg the Farmer up the road for six quid.A few years ago though,after a bad harvest they were eleven Pounds! So instead of peeling em with a knife, use one of those veg peeler thingies that take off a thin layer at a time.Mind you,all our peelings get boiled ,mashed and fed to the fowls and rabbits. Bangs weight on the bunnies in double quick time!