Thread by @RoadsideMum

Right let's clear a few things up about food...

1. A £2 chicken won't make 3 family meals without A Lot of help. Potatoes, carrots, peas, gravy, bread, butter, salt, pepper & oil. Minimum. 1-2h of fuel for the big oven. Hot water to wash up.

£10ish provided you have utensils?

Basic pasta & basic sauce is not a meal. Children need protein more than you do. Also fibre, vitamin D, calcium, iron, etc. etc. It's a long list.

If you give kids pretend dinners like this regularly expect scurvy, rickets, anaemia, arthritis, dental issues & mental ill health.

Foraging FFS.

I saw KIDS collecting on a DUAL CARRIAGEWAY roundabout today. Firstly it's DANGEROUS secondly it's FILTHY, thirdly IF YOU FUCK UP AT IDENTIFICATION YOU CAN DIE.

So many habitats are over foraged now, even old hands don't find much.

Tory Scum are so full of shit.

£1.50 stew. Didn't happen.

It's impossible to produce enough stew to feed 4 off that. Nowhere at all has stewable steak on that money, before you consider the vast quantities of potato needed if the steak is that sparse, or the oxos to disguise it, and are you not using carrot?

I haven't yet seen my favourites pop up. I am waiting to be told I can give kids:
- Jacket potatoes
- Porridge
- Sandwiches from 45p loaves of bread, minging margarine & fresh morning air.
Etc

We know!!!

But in between that beige snack shit, you have to give them actual food.

This is all a fucking distraction! The number of kids in hardship has tripled since Covid-19. More than that in some areas, depending on what the main local employments were.

The families who need feeding are not the long-vilified long-term unemployed, they are brand new.

Food is the least of their worries now. Rent/mortgage. Electric/gas. Phone/WiFi. Car/train/bus. Christmas/birthdays. Pets. Dependant Grandma's. Overdrafts/ credit cards gone toxic overnight. Kids clothes. Home essentials that wear out. Water. Council tax. Everything. Everything.

A short time ago these people worked in Pret & Monsoon. They were airline cabin crew & cinema projectionists. They acted, danced & made art. They taught sports. They worked in sales. Or motor vehicles. Or construction. Or so many more. What happened to them is not their fault.

In the same way what happened to us, who have been hard-skint for longer, is not our fault. We got ill, we got unlucky, we got left holding the baby, we got a black eye and had to run, whatever. It happened. And here we are. 99% of us are no more culpable than the new Covid poor.

There isn't enough employment for all. When there was (the 1950's and 60s) you could, as I have often been told, walk out of your job on Monday morning and have a new one by lunchtime. Now the number of people we need suddenly shrank, the pool of "the poor" got larger.

And the old narratives about 20p cans of beans, and £2 chickens get dragged out.

*They* are coping better because *you* are defective. Playing to your deep seated anxieties that you have let the kids down, you have no future, you are substandard.

Newly poor? You Are NOT substandard. The whole country is a fucking mess. Unemployment and wages and furlough and Brexit and whatever else is hitting your sector, or hitting you. Shit happens.

Don't be having this shite about how this is about your home management.

And you can NOT keep hearth and home together on basic pasta and basic sauce as any kind of main strategy. The kids need real food and so do you. If you want genuine cheap recipes see people like @BootstrapCook who went through this fresh hell you are in, years before you did.

But in reality you don't. If Karen with her fucking Aga (that she never costs out power for) has discovered budget sausages in toad in the hole w/ mash doesn't break the bank, then you know your own cheap eats too. We all do. Pity's sakes. It's not a secret of the fucking occult.

Imagine being that ignorant you think the poor are poor because they won't give up their precious pearl collection. (I am not making it up, someone really said it). Are you skint because you only know how to make lobster bisque are you?

No. Me neither. No one is.

Cheapening food drives down the quality, and drives you to accept American pesticides and chlorinated chickens.

Reject that hard and fast.

It also addresses just the smallest part of the whole huge mess, from becoming suddenly poor. Even then only superficially.

It deflects attention from the shattered and purposely cruel "welfare" system (warfare more like).

It also makes you unpitiable, and cools the demands of the public to fix this system.

One thing you will learn fast when skint is they are terrified of you using your voice.

People who aren't in poverty listen up.

The new poor don't need ever more ridiculous recipes. They need our country to rebuild social security (or try out UBI, either would do it).

Recipe willy-waving is serving no one but the oppressor. We have to stop sharing that shit.

This thread became an article, for @NE_Bylines. You can read my expanded writing on this, without swearing, here;

northeastbylines.co.uk/how-bad-recipe…