This article titled "I took £10 to Iceland to feed a family for a week and nearly pulled it off" from @kentlivenews is a joke, at the expense of low income families and that joke just ran aground here. 🧵
@AdamMcGroarty went to do a shop for a family of 4, and his first best idea was frozen ready meals? Does his mother know he is outdoors unsupervised? Not even the entry level, infamous "£2 chicken"?
Here's the tell that this had nothing to do with home economy and everything to do with pissing downward and calling it rain.
The premise was to try and do it without using brands. Why? Because the poor are rats and don't deserve 'em. Budget my arse. The aim is punishment.
And what's our intrepid Ex-poor-er come home with?
1/2 slice of toast for breakfast still won't last the week
1 fishfinger each & half slice of bread for lunch (only most days)
A burger, 1tsp of veg & a 3-4 chips on Sun
1 and 1/3rd nuggets each other days, 1tsp veg, 3-4 chips
71ml of milk per person per day isn't even as much as pub double measure of gin
There's some calcium in (almost a whole slice of) white bread, but your kids will be slowly dying from starvation anyway, so who cares about their bones?
This is the ethics policy of @kentlivenews. Editor is @lukemjacobs, therefore the complaints email is luke.jacobs@trinitymirror.com. Kent Live are owned by Reach PLC and they answer to press regulator @IpsoNews
For the sake of not leaving the thread incomplete, here's where I'd be directing the lawyers if I was working at @IcelandFoods and my brand had just been set up and promoted as the recommended route to abuse children.
The go-to name for how far the weekly food budget can stretch safely is @BootstrapCook, who can just about get a family of 2 done on £20, ideally with some luck with yellow stickers.
A family of 4 does not eat for a week on £10, except via a foodbank!
This article, and the brutally cruel joke it makes, at the expense of children's health, and parents sanity, heaping further gaslighting upon the poor, as if to eat is a luxury we have no right to demand, is unacceptable in the extreme.
I never thought I would see the day that the health and indeed survival of children in this country was more callously mocked than that abomination by Chartwells, but direct congratulations to @AdamMcGroarty and @kentlivenews team lead by @lukemjacobs 🎉
Not even halfway into the monthly payday cycle, and I am already running alarmingly low on funds. Every fucking month is like this. Every one. I can't even spend what energy I do have on productive steps forward out of the mire because I am spending my mental energy on making do.
It's so much more work to be poor. Imagine you can never replace anything and everything you have was either old or low quality to start with, and you have to juggle work arounds constantly... I'll illustrate...
Imagine you have so little money for food, you now take risks on what's gonna be ok. Stuff you never really liked but it was in the reduced. A past-best-before company your mate rates. Whatever came out of the foodbank last time you had to. Dinner becomes a game of chance.
I can't believe I am saying this but it's worse than my initial calculation. I over estimated the bread and milk, would you believe. Let me show you what your meal plan on this "nearly pulled it off" weekly shop actually is...
Lunch - 1 fishfinger. No bread at all unless you saved your 1/2 a slice of toast from breakfast
Dinner - 1 and a third nuggets, 1 heaped teaspoon of frozen mixed veg, 3-4 chips
35ml of milk (about 2 tablespoons)
Eat this for 6 days
2/
On the 7th day you can have a burger instead of your nugget and a bit. It's got no bun, no salad, no cheese, just a disk of brownness though. Eat with your spoonful of frozen mixed veg and your 3-4 chips.
Can we talk about the mental health impact and the social stigmatisation that results from callous mockery and rank dishonesty, such as the piece below.
Poor parents (more of whom are single mothers than any other arrangement) experience real, lasting, and serious impacts.
Let's set the benchmarks. £15 per person per week (£60 for a family of 4) is pretty low. Good job, if you get your family fed healthily on this.
£10 per person per week (£40 family of 4), healthily, is an extreme challenge. If you need to honestly learn how, see @BootstrapCook.
This article claims to "almost" feed a family of 4 on £2.50 per person per week.
I am still confirming the nutrition (@MiniMealtimes app is helpful) but I am going to say this diet barely makes the calorie need of an infant school child if they ate the entire lot solo.
I'm walking away from social media today and I am going to be very honest with why that is. Take the piss and you will be on instant block, I am not fucking around.
I feel like the appointment of an "opposition" to the Nazi government we have that has already used austerity
1/
as a means of murdering 130,000 sick/ disabled people, states I can expect nothing better or more hopeful from my future and indeed, it's probably going to get worse.
I don't feel like the woman who sourced a rented house in spite of no references or deposit, in 2 days flat
2/
I don't feel like the woman who crowd funded a wheelchair in 4 days . I don't feel like the woman who forced my kids school dinners to be fit for their growth. I don't feel like the woman who forced myself round a muddy field in pain all day Saturday for the love of the kids
3/
I have been polite and I have been nice for a Really Long Fucking Time at this point (over a year). My patience just wore out.
At first I didn't have anything but defence for Keir Starmer because the initial Tory attacks were both bollocks and within my capacity to refute.
1/
Then I kept my mouth shut, because God knows, when the man *I* had wanted to see lead got elected, the little bitches really should have kept it zipped, and I, being a better person, decided to extend courtesy to them such as they had denied me. "Give him a chance" they said.
2/
And it wore on and I felt like had given it a chance to be fair, and another one, and another one, and where was Keir? Where was the opposing?
Then the Free School Meals debate, which was probably the one important time KS and I aligned.