As budgets are squeezed and families cut back on buying food, good old-fashioned home economics can sweeten the austerity pill.
But even in Britain, we are enduring leaner times with no end in sight. The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) this week reported that household expenditure is down, with money spent on groceries and eating out significantly reduced. Last year, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated that 5.8 million Britons are living in ''deep poverty”. Now charities claim that some of these poorest families are experiencing food shortages on a scale not seen since wartime rationing.
Meanwhile, Defra statistics show the price of meat has risen by 26 per cent since 2007, bread, cheese, eggs and milk by 27 per cent, and butter by a massive 40 per cent – driven by the spiralling cost of oil and poor harvests.
And it’s not just the poorest who are tightening belts. Such is the appetite for bargains even among the well-heeled, that Primark is to open a concession in the Selfridges department store, and cheaper supermarkets, such as Lidl, Aldi and Morrisons, are attracting a new breed of customer, one more used to the aisles of Waitrose or the taste of premium lines.
It is not since the 1970s, when food prices began to fall in real terms – a trend which lasted until 2008 – that it has been so important for families to be equipped with practical economic skills. I don’t like the Nanny State but I believe there is a case for reinstating a Second World War- style “Ministry of Food”. The original, headed by Lord Woolton, provided valuable information on home economics, while a young RAF pilot’s wife, Marguerite Patten, was employed to give cookery lessons to housewives.
It gives me no pleasure to reveal that I was ahead of the game on this. In 2004, I began writing a cookery book that showed how to buy fresh, high-quality food on a budget. I was persuaded to write The New English Kitchen by my husband, a former newspaper business editor. “It’s all going to go belly up – you’ll see,” he warned, post 1997, in the bumper years of growth.
But I had my own motivation. Having reported on farming, fishing and food industry matters from the mid-1990s, I was all too aware of the inconsistency between clear (and costly) problems with maintaining a cheap food supply – BSE, diminishing fish stocks and
E.coli outbreaks – and blind, rampant consumerism. It would inevitably implode – and I believed we needed to know how to cook our way out of trouble.
The book, which contained hundreds of recipes using leftovers, cheap cuts and glut deals, sold more than 20,000 copies in hardback and gave rise to a wave of similar titles and TV shows, especially after the 2008 banking crisis. Even Jamie Oliver, formerly an extravagant TV chef who dispatched his fans to butchers in search of beef fillet, got into responsible cooking with his book The Ministry of Food (2008).
There are now tens of thousands more people practising what I and others preached and developing their own strategies. Karyn Fleeting began her Miss Thrifty blog in 2007 when she found herself with only £60 per month to spend on food after moving with her husband, Jim, to Ripon, North Yorkshire. “We had each started a new business, bought a house, and we were broke and in debt,” she says. She devised ways to live and eat well, make do and mend, and get the cheapest deals.
“I made dramatic changes to our lifestyle and began writing the blog anonymously. But if I talked about money-saving to my friends, they weren’t interested.” They are now. The award-winning Miss Thrifty has become hugely popular. Her posts tackle all cash problems: beauty, fashion, holidays, weddings, personal finance and food. Refreshingly practical (“I am not trying to be a 1950s housewife”), she believes, like me, in eating well and having the odd cut-price bottle of champagne. I liked one post which pointed out that the freezer section of the supermarket is where the cheapest vegetables are to be found, and that they are perfectly good to eat.
Karyn, now seven months pregnant with her first child, says: “I don’t buy processed food because it’s not good for you, so I find cheap ways to cook from scratch.” Her budget has now increased to £80 per month for food and she does one big shop monthly because it minimises ''impulse purchases”. She also suggests shopping on Sunday, an hour before supermarkets close when prices are slashed.
Advice like this on how better to manage our food budgets is increasingly a national pre-occupation. In George Orwell’s 1939 account of working-class life in industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire, The Road To Wigan Pier, the author grumbled about the “appalling diet” of an unemployed miner’s family, living on the dole. It was the disproportionately large amount spent on white bread, sugar and margarine that upset him. “Would it not be better if they spent more on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread?” Today, supermarkets are engaged in a price war and slashing prices but, ultimately, there will be a bill to settle; whether it be the cost of ill health and obesity from higher consumption of food that, being cheaper, is often higher in sugar and fat, or the damage to the wider economy from the squeeze on food producers to lower their prices.
But our Government has no interest in teaching us to live healthily off our rations. On the contrary. The economists of the IFS say that economic weakness goes hand in hand with continued low levels of household spending, which is 65 per cent of GDP. Our leaders are desperate for families to spend and kick-start the economy, not to eat pulses or offcuts and offal, or read – and act on – Miss Thrifty’s blog.
However, there is much to be said for knowing what to do with chick peas, lentils and beans. I am devoted to my stores of pulses and grains. My teenage children have at last learnt to love dhal. I make stock from bones to use in rice dishes and soups. And the best quality food can go far. In one recent experiment, a 2.5kg free range chicken, costing £14, stretched to 16 helpings – including soup, sandwiches, salad and a roast – breaking down to 87p per portion. I buy gluts, like boxes of overripe tomatoes, and make sauce that can be used in a many ways. Like Miss Thrifty, I buy in bulk, and shop around.
Simple pleasures can be had for very little. Eating well is not expensive – it is lacking the skills to economise and cook that pushes up the cost of living unnecessarily.
Now is the time to admit that there is no shame in offering to teach the ''cottage economy’’ and re-engage with traditional home economics skills. No one likes austerity, but one day we may be able to say we were proud to have endured it.
'Kitchenella’ by Rose Prince (RRP £26) is available from Telegraph Books for £24 plus £1.25 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
An austerity recipe: Spiced butter and yellow split peas
This is my version of tarka dal, inspired by a North Indian recipe. Use yellow split peas or choose another hulled dal or gram, or drained canned chickpeas. Tarka roughly translates as 'spiced butter’, patiently cooked with the aromatic ingredients and onion for about 10 minutes without burning to allow all the flavours to bind together. Indian cooks view this as a very important part of perfecting the flavour of their food.
Serves 4
250g/9oz yellow split peas
3 tablespoons butter
2 tsp black mustard seed
1 tablespoon cumin seed
1 onion, finely chopped or grated
1–4 whole green chillies, deseeded and chopped
4cm/1 1/2 in piece fresh ginger, peeled and cut into matchsticks
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
2 teaspoon garam masala
2 teaspoon ground coriander
5 large tomatoes, chopped
100ml/3 1/2 fl oz water
leaves from 4 sprigs fresh coriander, plus chopped stalks and roots
To serve: extra melted butter
Put the yellow split peas in a pan and cover with approximately 1 litre/1 3/4 pints water. Boil for 40 minutes, skimming away the foam that rises to the top, adding more water if necessary. Drain in a colander and mash a little with a fork to break up the dal slightly. Set aside.
Melt the butter in the same pan and add the cumin. Cook over a low heat – cumin burns quite easily – and then add the onion, chilli and ginger. Cook for about three minutes before adding the garlic, salt and spices, followed by the tomato. Add the water and cook for about 10 minutes. The contents of the pan should look glossy and be very fragrant. Stir in the dal (cooked yellow split peas), cook for another 10 minutes (add a splash more water if the dal seems a little dry), then add the fresh coriander and about 1–2 tablespoons extra melted butter at the end. Eat with rice or flat breads. Sometimes I add a little chicken stock to make a soup.
It gives me no pleasure to reveal that I was ahead of the game on this. In 2004, I began writing a cookery book that showed how to buy fresh, high-quality food on a budget. I was persuaded to write The New English Kitchen by my husband, a former newspaper business editor. “It’s all going to go belly up – you’ll see,” he warned, post 1997, in the bumper years of growth.
But I had my own motivation. Having reported on farming, fishing and food industry matters from the mid-1990s, I was all too aware of the inconsistency between clear (and costly) problems with maintaining a cheap food supply – BSE, diminishing fish stocks and
E.coli outbreaks – and blind, rampant consumerism. It would inevitably implode – and I believed we needed to know how to cook our way out of trouble.
The book, which contained hundreds of recipes using leftovers, cheap cuts and glut deals, sold more than 20,000 copies in hardback and gave rise to a wave of similar titles and TV shows, especially after the 2008 banking crisis. Even Jamie Oliver, formerly an extravagant TV chef who dispatched his fans to butchers in search of beef fillet, got into responsible cooking with his book The Ministry of Food (2008).
There are now tens of thousands more people practising what I and others preached and developing their own strategies. Karyn Fleeting began her Miss Thrifty blog in 2007 when she found herself with only £60 per month to spend on food after moving with her husband, Jim, to Ripon, North Yorkshire. “We had each started a new business, bought a house, and we were broke and in debt,” she says. She devised ways to live and eat well, make do and mend, and get the cheapest deals.
“I made dramatic changes to our lifestyle and began writing the blog anonymously. But if I talked about money-saving to my friends, they weren’t interested.” They are now. The award-winning Miss Thrifty has become hugely popular. Her posts tackle all cash problems: beauty, fashion, holidays, weddings, personal finance and food. Refreshingly practical (“I am not trying to be a 1950s housewife”), she believes, like me, in eating well and having the odd cut-price bottle of champagne. I liked one post which pointed out that the freezer section of the supermarket is where the cheapest vegetables are to be found, and that they are perfectly good to eat.
Karyn, now seven months pregnant with her first child, says: “I don’t buy processed food because it’s not good for you, so I find cheap ways to cook from scratch.” Her budget has now increased to £80 per month for food and she does one big shop monthly because it minimises ''impulse purchases”. She also suggests shopping on Sunday, an hour before supermarkets close when prices are slashed.
Advice like this on how better to manage our food budgets is increasingly a national pre-occupation. In George Orwell’s 1939 account of working-class life in industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire, The Road To Wigan Pier, the author grumbled about the “appalling diet” of an unemployed miner’s family, living on the dole. It was the disproportionately large amount spent on white bread, sugar and margarine that upset him. “Would it not be better if they spent more on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread?” Today, supermarkets are engaged in a price war and slashing prices but, ultimately, there will be a bill to settle; whether it be the cost of ill health and obesity from higher consumption of food that, being cheaper, is often higher in sugar and fat, or the damage to the wider economy from the squeeze on food producers to lower their prices.
But our Government has no interest in teaching us to live healthily off our rations. On the contrary. The economists of the IFS say that economic weakness goes hand in hand with continued low levels of household spending, which is 65 per cent of GDP. Our leaders are desperate for families to spend and kick-start the economy, not to eat pulses or offcuts and offal, or read – and act on – Miss Thrifty’s blog.
However, there is much to be said for knowing what to do with chick peas, lentils and beans. I am devoted to my stores of pulses and grains. My teenage children have at last learnt to love dhal. I make stock from bones to use in rice dishes and soups. And the best quality food can go far. In one recent experiment, a 2.5kg free range chicken, costing £14, stretched to 16 helpings – including soup, sandwiches, salad and a roast – breaking down to 87p per portion. I buy gluts, like boxes of overripe tomatoes, and make sauce that can be used in a many ways. Like Miss Thrifty, I buy in bulk, and shop around.
Simple pleasures can be had for very little. Eating well is not expensive – it is lacking the skills to economise and cook that pushes up the cost of living unnecessarily.
Now is the time to admit that there is no shame in offering to teach the ''cottage economy’’ and re-engage with traditional home economics skills. No one likes austerity, but one day we may be able to say we were proud to have endured it.
'Kitchenella’ by Rose Prince (RRP £26) is available from Telegraph Books for £24 plus £1.25 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk
An austerity recipe: Spiced butter and yellow split peas
This is my version of tarka dal, inspired by a North Indian recipe. Use yellow split peas or choose another hulled dal or gram, or drained canned chickpeas. Tarka roughly translates as 'spiced butter’, patiently cooked with the aromatic ingredients and onion for about 10 minutes without burning to allow all the flavours to bind together. Indian cooks view this as a very important part of perfecting the flavour of their food.
Serves 4
250g/9oz yellow split peas
3 tablespoons butter
2 tsp black mustard seed
1 tablespoon cumin seed
1 onion, finely chopped or grated
1–4 whole green chillies, deseeded and chopped
4cm/1 1/2 in piece fresh ginger, peeled and cut into matchsticks
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
2 teaspoon garam masala
2 teaspoon ground coriander
5 large tomatoes, chopped
100ml/3 1/2 fl oz water
leaves from 4 sprigs fresh coriander, plus chopped stalks and roots
To serve: extra melted butter
Put the yellow split peas in a pan and cover with approximately 1 litre/1 3/4 pints water. Boil for 40 minutes, skimming away the foam that rises to the top, adding more water if necessary. Drain in a colander and mash a little with a fork to break up the dal slightly. Set aside.
Melt the butter in the same pan and add the cumin. Cook over a low heat – cumin burns quite easily – and then add the onion, chilli and ginger. Cook for about three minutes before adding the garlic, salt and spices, followed by the tomato. Add the water and cook for about 10 minutes. The contents of the pan should look glossy and be very fragrant. Stir in the dal (cooked yellow split peas), cook for another 10 minutes (add a splash more water if the dal seems a little dry), then add the fresh coriander and about 1–2 tablespoons extra melted butter at the end. Eat with rice or flat breads. Sometimes I add a little chicken stock to make a soup.
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