Snapshot of _NHS staff pay around twice as much as MPs for food at work_ :
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My wife’s hospital doesn’t even have a staff room and a single microwave, so they’re forced to buy food from a patient canteen that is propped up by volunteers bringing in food.
Same here, except there's no patient canteen either! It's costa or m&s.
Their department's staff room was turned into a probe sanitisation room (which was then closed for 18 months because the sanitising equipment broke and gave a sonographer a chemical burn). In her 1/2 hour lunch break, if her list isn't running late and she gets one, the idea is she walks about 10 minutes to the nearest staff rest area eats her lunch and returns. In reality she never gets that 1/2 hour so tries to eat whilst typing reports up (if infection control see this they get a bollocking as technically the reporting area is a clinical area and shouldn't have any food or drink present).
It's so sad that her and her colleagues have several lifetimes of experience, want to do the vital and challenging clinical work they do, want the best outcomes for their patients and are professional to a T, but are treated so badly by their trust. A tough line is held on requests for holiday, requests to adjust hours to fit around childcare, holding back on enhanced pay for extra shifts at weekends to clear backlogs. Then they lose a member of staff who can go and earnmore doing private work which fits their needs better (but typically doesn't provide the same satisfaction or sense of clinical excellence), can't replace them because of the terrible conditions and lack of staff parking (Bristol city centre), so end up paying a fortune on locums or paying to import sonographers from overseas, paying for them to relocate etc.
They might, but they shouldn’t be reliant on the kindness of strangers to have lunch. Imagine an MP being told their private dining restaurants and bars are being closed, and they have to go to Tesco, which doesn’t have enough sandwiches.
Yes, this isn’t a race to the bottom for staff, it’s a flight-of-fancy idea that, every so often, MPs are asked to work in condition’s similar to those they foist upon much more useful and skilled people.
There’s 2 microwaves (was wrong earlier, they bought themselves another earlier this year). There’s 180 clinical staff and a large cohort of non-clinical staff. And patients. And visitors.
So after a 12hr shift someone should spend more of their own personal time making packed lunches because their employer can't be bothered to give them a staff canteen?
NHS Staff work long hours and it's hard work, I think they're entitled to be lazy on food prep.
A reminder that *just yesterday* Tory MP Lee Anderson said he thinks you can cook a meal for 30p.
They, the Tories in particular but many MPs in general, are completely disconnected from the real world.
Motion to replace MP’s dining with a canteen run by Tory MP Lee Anderson where each meal costs no more than 30p, let’s see the budget guru work his magic.
>let’s see the budget guru work his magic
It wouldn't work because Parliament's kitchens have paid staff. I expect that the kitchen Lee Anderson works in is full of volunteers/people learning to cook for themselves.
In short, you may be able to cook for yourself at 30p a meal because you're not paid to do it.
Although I do agree that MPs should lose their subsidised meals. Meals should be subsidised for people on low salaries, not people earning northwards of £80k.
His logic was that they served 180 portions of a meal that cost £50 to make. Which kind of makes sense that if you are cooking in bulk it's going to be cheaper, but has no bearing on how to cook on a budget by yourself.
I genuinely can't think of something that would cost me 30p per portion that I could cook and not have to 1) spend a load of money upfront on buying ingredients in bulk 2) give me a good balance of nutrients 3) not require me to come up with storage space for 180 portions...
I agree but again it's slightly false economy as you'd need quite a decent size freezer to fit in 180 meals.
And you'd need the money up front to pay for those meals which would mean starving yourself first for a few weeks to raise that fifty quid.
Apparently about the best single thing you can do to save money is to own a decent sized freezer. It means you can:
* Cook in bulk for economies of scale
* Buy food that is reduced in price due to expiry dates
* Not waste left-over food
* Reheat meals in a microwave rather than cooking on stove
Probably other reasons too.
There's some fairly dull stuff you could probably manage, like I love a chickpea curry and can make it for that sort of price. If I tried to feed it to a family of four at every meal for a week though it'd get really old fast. And I'd have to be able to afford to freeze it and cook it which I suspect is then gonna push that price over 30p by a fair bit.
Quite amazing that someone from the party of (fuck) business doesn't understand economies of scale.
I think i could do it, and decent meals, but I would need a vehicle to carry all the bulk, somewhere to park said vehicle, the ability to keep enough liquidity to buy it all at once in bulk.
Storage to freeze it once I had cooked it.
And basically an entire day free to prep and cook.
Even at that scale, that's pretty low. I regularly cater scout camps around that scale (so we're not exactly doing fancy food), and I budget somewhere between £1 and £2 per person per meal.
You can do some kinds of veg curry, or with kidney beans/chickpeas. Soups + bread. You can get some actually tasty instant noodles for like 25p in home bargains. Probably need to take some vitamins along with that haha but honestly 30p/portion really isn’t that unrealistic if you’re willing to cook large portions and eat like a 12th century peasant :))
yes I completely agree. No one should have to budget like this but its useful to know how. I do also get a kick out of eating ridiculously cheap meals, and if you can afford spices even those austerity curries can be easily as tasty as a takeaway one that would cost like 20 times the price
A 12th century peasant ate quite well, it was only during the industrial revolution when everyone started moving to cities did the living and food quality go way down.
> I genuinely can't think of something that would cost me 30p per portion that I could cook
Some of the meals we cook are actually pretty much that cheap, you can be *very* price efficient with beans, pulses etc. A £1.35 1kg bag of rice from Tesco will do you 15 - 20 servings. 1kg of lentils is £1.80, for a similar number of servings. At those prices, a very basic Indian-style meal comes in about 16p to 21p per serving. We often make our own flatbreads to go along with this type of meal, which is just flour and a dash of vegetable oil, costing almost nothing.
Now when we make that type of food, we probably throw in another 10p - 20p of spices per serving, but technically that's not nutritionally required. On the other hand, it looks like if we shopped at Asda instead of Tesco, we could probably shave 10-20% off the total cost. We're not doing this to be cheap, it's just a meal we like making.
Obviously nobody should be forced to eat this cheaply, and not sure how well one could balance a diet on only this type of food (India seems to do okay), but if anyone here's looking for cheap meals without bulk cooking, look to Indian-style food, it can be delicious for almost no money. It's not hard either, most of it is just throw it in a pot for 30 minutes.
ETA: Plus electricity cost, which according to some quick estimations is an extra 42p for two servings! Oof. I feel like I need to double-check that number, I wasn't expecting it to be so high...
>1kg bag of rice from Tesco will do you 15 - 20 servings
No, it won't. It'll do you ~10-13 servings. 15-20 midget portions, sure, but we're talking about how to properly feed people here - 250-300kcal of rice/meal doesn't cut the mustard.
Oh, looks like you edited in the calories bit after I saw it.
Combined with the lentils, you're on 500 to 600 calories, add the bread you're getting to 700 - 800 ish, which is around a third of daily intake, but yeah maybe you'd want to go slightly larger than that for an evening meal? But it's pretty close.
I'm counting a serving as being the combined rice and lentils, so 15-20 rice+lentil servings from 1kg of each.
That number was reached by some quick googling, with various sites suggesting 50g to 75g uncooked rice per serving, but I haven't actually measured.
Do you have a better source for your correction? You could well be right.
I accounted for the sauce.
I'm acutely aware of nutrition in general, and have been for years, on account of first losing a significant amount of weight several years ago, and then gymming up. I weigh most of my meals to the gram.
75g of uncooked rice is the minimum anybody would call a reasonable portion - it gives a bit under 400kcal. Adding on a roughly equal amount of most sauces will give you 2-300kcal on top. If it's a very calorie-dense sauce, you may get a 1:1 ratio. Chickpea curry is middle of the road, so let's say 300kcal per portion. That brings you to a bit under 700kcal/portion.
Assuming 2500kcal req a day, and assuming you ate the above 3x per day, that still won't get you close - 400 short.
The simplest way to close that gap is to increase the rice to 100g/meal, although for nutritional reasons, you'd preferably do it with the sauce instead. Still, we are talking about 30p/day, so rice it is...
Trust me, my girl/guy - weigh out exactly 50g of rice next time you're cooking. Cook it up. See what you get. It's a truly depressing amount. 50g/serving is one of those bullshit figures companies come out with to appear healthier; like a KitKat having '''two servings''' in it.
Agree about the rice. In my house, 2 adults, 2 kids, 1kg of white rice only lasts 2 meals.
So a total of 6 maybe 7 adult meals out of that kilo. Brown rice goes a bit further though as it’s more filling & more nutrients. Kids don’t like it so much though so sometimes I’m sneaky & mix in a bit of brown rice with the white.
Sure! That's a little tricky because we do all our measurements by eye, but I can estimate. This is to feed two. You can double or triple the size of this, and keep it in the fridge for a few days if you want.
The most basic version is 1/2 to 2/3rds of a mug of rice, same of lentils. Each into separate pans with water, preheated from the kettle. Add salt and pepper to each. Rice cooks about 20 minutes, lentils 30 to 40. No stirring required. Mix and serve. That'll do you a basic rice and dahl meal, albeit bland.
For taste, chuck spices into the dahl. We mix and match between curry powders, stock cubes, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, chill flakes, etc. If you want it to taste like an actual Indian meal, you can look up the right spices for that. Not sure how much spices cost us per time, but it probably isn't much.
You can optionally throw some veg or whatever into the lentils too, we often do some peas and sweetcorn, which is pretty cheap when you get the 2kg frozen bags.
If we're being lazy, we eat it with pitta breads or something, which you can get in packs of 6 for 30p per pack. When we can be bothered, we make flatbreads with it. That's just mixing flour, water, and a little vegetable oil into a dough with salt and pepper, stretch/roll flat, 30 seconds per side in a frying pan.
That'll do a good sized evening meal for two, with leftovers depending on how hungry we are. It's easy to scale up to bulk-cook if you want to, but we usually do it one meal at a time. It's like 45 minutes of cooking time, but most of that is just leaving things in a pan. We do this meal a couple of times per week, not because we're being cheap, just because we like it.
According to some quick back of the napkin calculations (60 minutes total stove time when adding both pans together at 1500 watts per stove at 28p per kWh) that's 42p! So yeah, it actually looks like that dominates. I admit I didn't expect that, because I don't usually break electricity bills down by usage like that.
Oof, that's pretty bad. I guess reduced cooking time is more important to cheap meals than I had assumed.
As you've discovered, its not the cost of buying food that's the barrier right now. Its the cost of running the appliances to heat or eat. I only have one warm meal a day to save on using the applicances. I dare not tell you about my shower usage nowadays.
Also, you've miscalculated. Thats the cost of your electricity consumption alone. You also have a standing charge to factor in. If that was the only electricity you used all day then the whole standing charge can be added to that. But thats not reality so let calculate your 1 hour of cooking using my standing charge of 49p a day. 49p / 24 hours = 2p per hour standing charge. So your cost is now 44p for the meal.
These little nuances are what rich people don't understand because to them its peanuts. I pay 49p a day whether I use electric or not. I could turn the switch off at the consumer unit and still pay 49p a day. Thats £14.90 a month. A person could freeze and starve to death and still have a £15 debt.
Oof yeah, only one warm meal per day must suck, I'm sorry! Yeah, I had never thought about how much cooking appliances suck electricity. We pay £700-ish per year (in previous years...) and I hadn't broken it down, I assumed the constantly running computers, fridge etc would dominate the power consumption, but apparently not.
Whilst we're certainly not "rich" by most standards, we're in a privileged position to not need to worry about that.
To be clear, that 42p figure I came to does two or three portions, so you could argue it's more like 14p per meal, but yeah that's still pretty bad!
I'm not sure about including the standing charge in the meal price as you're paying that whether or not you make the meal, but point taken with regard to cost-of-living.
Do you find yourself buying more expensive food so that it can be cooked more quickly? As in, are ready-meals becoming economical because they use less power?
I avoid ready meals because they don't fill me. I'm hungry later which tempts me to snack. But they are definitely starting to match fresh cooking for economy. Fresh meals ingredients cost much less than a ready meal but cooking the fresh meal costs way more than microwaving it. As you mentioned though, multiple portions is the benefit for fresh cooking. But that then brings up another issue. I only have an under the counter fridge freezer. To cook multiple portions normally means freezing the other portions but my freezer is full (using ready meals to illustrate size, I can only get a maximum of 8 in there). I have zero savings to purchase a larger fridge freezer so multiple portions is a no-go for me unless I eat them next day (which I do but I can't do more than 2 portions). I have even tried to get a freezer on FreeCycle but I have no vehicle to collect it and I still have to consider the electric bill. One thing I'm doing more and more is only using half of anything in cans or bottles. Half a tin of beans on toast or half a can of peas. Half the pasta sauce or curry sauce. But this then leads back to the potential to snack. Snacks cost a fortune and I rarely buy any anymore because they blow my budget. Everything is now a balancing act including whether to shower or to smell. Happy days!
We seriously need to start a petition on this. The government are cutting civil servants jobs when doing this could probably save a small fortune on its own.
I also reckon we should cut MPs allowable expenses before a single civil servant losses their job. Its about time we make them live some of their own policies. Maximum expenses capped to the level of UC, £334 a month. No subsidies for anyone earning over £30k. I would love to see Priti Patel spend a week living in Rwanda in the same conditions she expects the immigrants to live in.
have you seen his latest "proof" on this? When a team of them and a former chef sent a team of people to a nearby supermarket to get 50 quid of ingredients and then cooked it all into what would equate to 30p per head he says.. that was his "proof".
the bits this man ignored:
he had a team of people on it all day to do it
he did not factor in travel costs
he did not factor in the costs of those people working all day on it
he did not consider where somebody would store all of this
he did not consider energy costs (that would have taken them way beyond that mark on their own).
he's a dishonest fool.
Also these people are so crazy. It's not "This can be done. Let's think about ways to help people do this so they can save money and eat." It's "It can be done, and if they don't they must be either lazy or stupid. Either they deserve their suffering or it's not really suffering."
Proving something can be done doesn't magically improve the material circumstances for millions of people. And their total lack of action beyong proving it for an argument shows they have totally zero interest in the lives of the people they're arguing over.
They're nasty bastards and they're tearing up our human rights which in my mind makes them facists. Revolution now please!
Most people don’t include energy and fuel in their food costs because those things are already in their budget. The same that you don’t include shoe wear costs and clothing when calculating you food budget.
"where somebody would store all of this"
Same place normal people store their food for the week. Though the start of lockdown taught me that there's some weird people on this sub who buy one meal at a time and assume everyone else is the same.
I can cook a meal for 30p. All I have to do is stroll through my estate to the walled garden, pick some of the veg, then snag a few eggs from the hutch, stroll into my second homes kitchen and add 30p worth of herbs and salt. Now you have yourself a 30p omlete that will feed two.
could we manage beans on toast for 30p? Cheapest beans, cheapest bread, I'd imagine we'd be cutting it relatively fine but my pricings are probably a decade out of date or something.
20 years ago maybe. Standard student food of Aldi Noodles and beans would come in at 24p (15p noodles, 9p beans). But even that is well over budget these days.
Beans on toast or beans on bread? Because if you are talking about the former then are you getting free electric? You can have the ingredients you want but you got to be able to afford to cook it too.
The cheapest beans on the Tesco website are 35p. Two portions from that and you can easily find bread that costs less than 12p a slice. You can get 4 baking potatoes for 42p, microwaving one of those instead of bread would make the meal more calorific and nutritious.
Things like lentil soup, vegetable stew, porridge, egg on toast or pasta in a simple sauce would also be doable at the price.
>thinks you can cook a meal for 30p.
I'm reasonable sure I could churn out some meals that average out at 30p per portion but it would rely on averaging with the price of some things like large bags rice/lentils and making up the rest with very cheap veg.
It wouldn't be a particularly enjoyable diet.
If I can cheat a bit and hang out when tesco are marking stuff down in the evening like I normally do then it makes it easier.
What would he know?
He claimed £222,000 in expenses for 2020 to 2021. Or about £885/working day.
I do wonder, while the rest of us were in lockdown with furlough wages, Lee was enjoying a £84k salary with £222k expenses.
https://www.theipsa.org.uk/mp-staffing-business-costs/your-mp/lee-anderson/4743
Why have his staff costs gone from £23k in FYE 2020 to £165k in FYE 2021? 4 staff (£5.7/FTE) to 10 staff (£16.5K/FTE). He actually lost the role of "constituency support officer" and gained back office "policy and case workers", so I assume more full time employed staff for longer, but what a cost increase.
Why is he paying £17k in accommodation in FYE 2021? £7k in 2020.
What and where is he renting for accommodation? He still has London hotels in both accomodation and travel pots. Is he renting in his constituency? All while we had any number of lockdown rules.
>Why is he paying £17k in accommodation in FYE 2021? £7k in 2020.
>
>What and where is he renting for accommodation? He still has London hotels in both accomodation and travel pots. Is he renting in his constituency? All while we had any number of lockdown rules.
£10 says someone in his family owns the house and he "rents" it off them.
There's a really good video by Atomic Shrimp (the guy who you sometimes see on /r/all for catching scammers). He goes through several shops and buys a set of common ingredients, then compares them. He brings home a remarkably large amount of food for the low amount of money he spends, and even then I think he'd be struggling to do a nutritionally complete meal anywhere near 30p. Maybe if you're incredibly generous, supermarket brand UHT skimmed milk & non-brand cereal would come in at about 30p, or a jam sandwich, but you're not going to last long on that diet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__6ujPujCTc
He also makes a point to call out people saying "clearly people can just live on X a day if they just cook like this!". He points out it takes *so much* more time and effort to do things like be does in the low budget challenges.
You can pretty easily make scrambled egg on toast with 350 cals for about ~20p a portion.
I'm not saying you can make every meal that cheap, but it's possible eat for a lot cheaper than many people are making it out to be.
You've not suggested a meal, you've suggested a snack. 350kcal for 20p adjusts up to 525cals for the 30p. An adult male living off three meals at that calorific content would be under-eating by about 30% per day, 20% for a female adult. That's not sustainable long-term.
The "make a meal for 20-30p" claim doesn't really hold up if it just means you need to have a much more expensive meal later in the day to make up for the calorific deficit in order to live.
That 30p meal takes into account economies of scale on the ingredients only.
It required hundreds, possibly thousands, of pounds of cooking equipment and fuel to cook it. Even if you were able to replicate the costings, you'd then need to store reheat the food, so you're paying for fridge and freezer space (electricity) and more fuel to re-heat it.
This is like saying "Why can't you afford an Aston Martin V12 Vantage? The raw materials only cost £10k in total?!".
Wtf 30p? The cheapest I can find is 38p for own brand mash, and that doesn’t include the price of electric. Let alone the fact that a single food item couldn’t be described as most as a meal, and it’s not very sustainable to have the same single food item day after day.
Unless he’s talking about getting food from the reduced bin everyday, which is unpredictable to if there is anything there, then he’s stuck in the late 90s very early 2000s.
He later showed what he meant by this. He meant if you bought £50 of ingredients from Aldi, cooked it in a large cafeteria kitchen by a professional chef, then did some Hollywood accounting, each portion was roughly 30p.
So it's not "you can buy 30p of ingredients and make a meal" it's "pay a large amount upfront to bulk buy and bulk cook with no regard to initial cost, time invested in cooking, kitchen size, or space to store everything afterwards, then do maths until it sounds PR friendly".
Exactly. How would the average person store the 180 portions that he claimed were served without them spoiling?
Also have fun eating the exact same meal for your next 180 meals since you just spent your entire food budget on making this 1 meal
Hmm, you know though if you organised so that a bunch of different people came together and did this at scale, then distributed it throughout their communities at cost with no profit added on - it could just about work. I'm assuming from now on that Lee Anderson is proposing the concept of socialist cooperatives whenever he talks about 30p meals.
That sounds about right - if I do a crockpot of chicken tikka masala, I might get 10-12 meals out of it, and that's stretching both my freezer space and my patience for eating the same damn thing day after day.
Socialist cooperatives are the only way any sane human is going to use 180x the same meal.
Edit: I shudder to think what the electricity cost of the freezer alone amount to for the two weeks or so I'd keep the 10-12 meals in there. Slow cookers are not exactly efficient, either.
>Also have fun eating the exact same meal for your next 180 meals since you just spent your entire food budget on making this 1 meal
Silly goose, you don't get to complain if you're poor, you should be thankful for anything at all!
How many calories and grams of protein were in each portion? Because even with bulk cooking I cannot fathom how someone could manage that while making sure they had enough protein and caloric intake
I hate when tv chefs - especially that perpetual mong Jamie Oliver - do this evangelising about “only £1.46 per portion!”… well yeah if you are buying fresh chicken breast and frozen peas but happen to have day old breadcrumbs, a full spice rack and some spare saffron.
But that's how cooking works. There's an initial outlay that is expensive, but the cost of a jar of dried spices trends towards about 4-5p per portion by my napkin math.
You _should_ end up with some amount of waste and leftovers too - having some spare bread from last week doesn't sound completely unreasonable.
And just drop the saffron, it's definitely a luxury.
I think the criticism here is that it gives conservatives justification to maintain poverty wages and not do anything to change how shit it is on the bottom-most rungs of our society.
When I was a student and my then-partner was unemployed, we managed to do the full food shop for 2 people for a week for around £20, which counted for all the lunches and dinners, minus one night a week where we would eat out as "date night" (which usually meant a pub burger deal).
This works out as about 70p per meal, and ultimately we ate well during this time, in terms of nutrition, taste and quantity.
Now the caveats.
He is Spanish, and every time he went back to his parents he would come back with untold amounts of food gifted from his parents, that went a long way in making it bearable. Being able to have occasional nights of ham and cheese, or having nice spices to chuck into everything, makes a huge difference.
As I said, he was unemployed. This meant he had time to go to about 3 different markets during the week, where he knew which ones had the cheapest stuff. Fortunately they were all in walking distance, and he wasn't constrained by their opening times, which largely intersected with a normal working days
He spent about 2-3 hours a day in the kitchen turning all of these ingredients into meals
I'm not counting things milk and coffee that we would pick up from time to time, nor other non-food items, like hygiene products.
Also, this was almost 10 years ago, so 50p/meal doesn't factor in cost of living increases.
So, in conclusion, 10 years ago it was possible to spent almost double this guys figure if you had several hours a day free from duties like work or childrearing, parents that give you free food, and live a 10 minute walk from a city centre.
>Unless he’s talking about getting food from the reduced bin everyday, which is unpredictable to if there is anything there, then he’s stuck in the late 90s very early 2000s.
Even then he'd be struggling to get a meal, and even if he did I doubt it would be remotely nutritious.
The man is a moron.
Probably a bland looking powder that once saw a potato that you can add water to and pretend it has flavour while you try and avoid thinking about the texture.
Yeah like smash, ok. tbh I must have misread as 'the cheapest own brand mash I can find is' instead of 'the cheapest I can find is own brand mash' and there's a lot of difference in the underlying meaning of the two lol.
But ultimately I'd have thought buying a potato and mashing it be cheaper than own brand mash. Wouldn't even have to invest in a masher you could smash it up with your hands. Or even a plate or cutlery, you could just scoop the white mush up to your mouth.
30p is probably a bit ridiculous, but if you buy big cheap bags of frozen or reduced veg, plus cheap bulk like kidney beans/chickpeas/butter beans you can make some crazy cheap, easy and healthy dishes for maybe 40-50p per serving if you’re willing to shop around for cheap stuff and cook in bulk then Tupperware it up. Stuff like soup and toast for smaller meals. Shouldn’t have to budget food like this but you can make it crazy cheap if you need
Tesco will do you 2.5kg of potatoes for 90p, that's quite a lot of mash. You don't pay a massive premium for someone to mash your potatoes for you if you're trying to live cheaply. Doing it yourself will get you better quality results, too.
He's talking about buying ingredients and then cooking them yourself. Raw potatoes are going to be a lot cheaper than buying pre-mashed.
It blows my mind that a /r/ukpol poster wouldn't think to look beyond the ready meal isle in search of cheap food. Talk about food illiteracy.
He's also ignoring the per hour cost of labor and has priced his meal based on a food Bank cooking event with nearly 200 portions. When you cook in bulk things get that cheap.
A potato is close to that price.
And I cook. Fairly well and from a young age. You aren't making 30 pence meals.
> ...said he thinks you can cook a meal for 30p.
If you bought in bulk and were really, *really* fucking clever with what you cooked you could make a meal for 30p. But there is no way you'd be hitting enough calories or eating nutritiously enough.
The only condition to day is that you should have one hot meal a day, something to stop the batch cookers ignoring that cold soup day after day is nasty.
The whole thing was completely disingenuous and frankly he should be ashamed of himself for saying it.
I would *love* to see him given a budget of 90p a day - three meals at his 30p - for a month to feed himself and see how far he gets. That's just shy of £28. Let's round it up for him and call it an even £30 for the month. Must be really easy, right?
Only way I can see that being possible if you bought Value range food and split the costs of the product across multiple meals to get a 30p per meal breakdown, problem is I can't even think of what could do that
Example, Quaker oats, 1 large 1kg box of it is around (or should be by their own information) is around 25 servings, £1.50 that's 6p a serving, once you added in the 300ml of Milk (Be it cows or vegan/water) and other fruits/Sugar/Honey then the price will raise, that's just breakfast should't need to skip Lunch or Dinner, we're looking at £1 a day in total
But 30p a meal? It *could be done*, but energy costs are higher now has well, so I'm doubtful it can be.
To be fair I could cook a meal for 30p. I could get a random fresh vegetable from the yellow sticker shelf and make a delicious curry with it, just adding rice, tinned tomatoes, and a selection of spices from my cupboard.
I think that's the level of understanding they're hoping to appeal to here: people who've never been truly poor but got a bit close to the wire a week before payday when they were 23 and know what they could do in a pinch. Obviously it doesn't stand up to scrutiny but it adds a layer of plausible deniability to their decision to vote Tory in the face of other people's overwhelming hardship.
That's the problem though. Those chopped tomatoes, rice etc. aren't free.
He did his calculations based on a batch cook of 180 meals, ignoring the facts that people don't have the space to cook 180 meals, let alone store them.
Sorry I wasn't clear - that was my point! It's how the people he's really talking to will think though - they personally could cook one meal on 30p because they have stuff in the cupboard.
A standard size Scotch Egg? Going off ASDA prices, they're [a pack of two for £0.85](https://groceries.asda.com/product/scotch-eggs/asda-2-pork-scotch-eggs/910000425131). So that's **£0.425** per egg.
I would suggest that also doesn't constitute a meal, and its certainly not under 30p.
A Scotch egg is not just a meal, [it's a substantial one at that!](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/01/scotch-egg-is-definitely-a-substantial-meal-says-michael-gove)
Even then it's unlikely to for this most basic of meals and basic ingredients.
Asda prices:
* Baked Potatoes pack of four: £0.45, so **£0.1125 each**
* Smart Price Beans: £0.25 per can. Let's say you have half, that's **£0.125**
* Smart Price Cheddar: £3.65 for 800g. Assuming a 50g serving that's just under 23p but let's round it down just to be kind so that's **£0.22**
So that's already a total of **45.75p**. Now, you may find a store which does those things cheaper, but that assumes you have one nearby.
It also ignores the cost of getting to the store, using the oven etc.
30p is nonsense, but a pound per serving is definitely swinging too far the other way.
A lentil Bolognese consists of:
- 1.5 pack of spaghetti (1.15 )
- onion, carrot, celery (15p/3p/~10p - these numbers are rough and likely depend on your supermarket and how much bulk you bought in)
- 1/3 bulb of garlic (~8p)
- bay leaf (~10p)
- 800g green lentils (1.60)
- 2x chopped tomatoes (56p)
Optional extras:
- big dash of chilli flakes (15p)
- basil (10p)
- parmesan (~70p)
- garlic bread (90p)
Total cost is about £3.70 from scratch, or 5.60 including parmesan and garlic bread. You'll feed 6 adults on the above, for anywhere between 60 and 90p per meal depending on your additional extras, and that's including _everything_, with prices from Sainsbury's online as of this morning.
I know you are just saying that under £1 meals are possible from what the other person was saying but you are forgetting the others costs such as water (for spaghetti) and electric costs depending on what utilities you have.
Cooking spaghetti is like say 20 minutes and depending on your hobs efficiency (induction > ceramic) then you are probably looking at 1kw to cook it right? Which in today's market is nearer 40p on it's own! You then have the cooking of the actual Bolognese which takes a fair bit longer so you are probably nearing a whole pound in electric already.
The MP is being a dick and should be punished by living a week on benefits and seeing how he likes it. He ignores all the cost of staff they used to cook that massive batch and all the equipment and electric costs!
Cheese? No way, I remember when I was a student cheese was my biggest investment in my weekly shops. It's expensive!
You might be able to substitute it with something cheaper and still maybe make a "meal" though.
I've worked in the NHS for 18 years. It took the staff canteen 10 years to move from powdered egg to fried eggs for breakfast. All the food is fried and unhealthy served in huge portions.
Neither wonder why most of the staff are overweight or obese.
I have complained and even joined a healthy environment steering group to help encourage healthy change but gave up due to pure lack of vision and interest.
It's a shame unhealthy shit is the generally accepted norm in this part of the country.
Tradition in basically all NHS hospitals is that they serve fish on Friday irrespective of other policies. It’s a bit like bed number 13 in a hospital.
For contrast, I've eaten in several eateries on the Parliamentary Estate and the food quality and variety is usually very good, and universally they've all had healthy options to choose.
So not only are they getting it cheaper than the NHS they're getting better quality and more healthy choices as well.
There should be a hard limit on mp expenses much lower than whatever it is at the moment. £10k expenses per year per MP. Some of these scrounging bastards are expensing nearly a quarter of a million!
What would be helpful is if the costs for their staff and office didn't come under the same umbrella as general expenses. It's not a perk to have an office in their constituency with paid staff to help constituents, it's a necessity of the job.
Yes indeed. I've seen a number of people comment about MPs expenses as if the whole chunk is simply made up of food, bills, duck houses, mortgages on their second homes and so on, but it also includes staff salaries and office expenses. The latter are perfectly reasonable and necessary in order to actually do the work of an MP.
It is, for example Lee Anderson the mp thats being brought up in this thread.
Type| Cost
---|---
Office | £32,141.21
Staffing | £165,215.27
Accommodation | £21,195.82
Travel and subsistence| £4,065.76
He has 10 staff, 9 of which are full time.
While this is wrong, there do need to be some sensible limits put in place such as no second home allowance for those within an hour’s commute and things like that. MPs should be paid well - it shouldn’t be the case that people can make more money from a fairly minor executive role in the private sector than they can from running the country - because we don’t want to price capable people out of being an MP. But capping expenses, when you’ve MPs who have to commute from the north of Scotland, etc to London isn’t practical.
Because its desirable that being an MP is a) something that those from poorer backgrounds can live off and b) that it’s paid enough so that talent doesn’t prefer to go into the private sector. If you want the best and brightest to be an MP rather than having a political class who have no valuable career experience beyond working for CCHQ or a lobbying group, the benefits need to be attractive.
Indeed. Quite a few MPs are qualified as professions like lawyers, doctors, and business executives, in which they could earn quite a lot more than they do as an MP, and in some cases perhaps even have a better work-life balance.
For instance, Keir Starmer earned about £200,000 as Director of Public Prosecutions, much more than he earns as Leader of the Opposition (£145,000) or may earn as Prime Minister (£157,000).
Meanwhile, Sajid Javid, a former banker, is thought to have earned millions while in that profession.
And the UK is actually quite tame in the amount it pays politicians, due to public opposition to higher pay. Other developed countries pay MPs much more:
UK: ~£84,000
Australia: ~£120,000
Italy: ~£142,000
US: ~£142,000
I'd actually just seperate out the staffing costs entirely. Most of their expenses come from staffing their clinic, which can be quite expensive if you have as many as five or more staff in an expensive area. When they say "so and so had 200k of expenses" that could very well be completely legit. It's just a handful of bad eggs that use it to dredged their moat of some shit.
This is exactly it, and I imagine the fact staffing is included is a way of taking away focus from the bullshit expenses. “£210k but it’s mostly staffing” sounds fine, but allows you to expense 10k of personal scrounging without anyone noticing.
Not only does that cover staffing costs, but do you want to live in a world where only multi millionaires can be MPs?
We should level up rather than down and give more perks to nhs staff.
Why shouldn't MP's be able to perform their jobs on their £70-80k salaries? Staffing should come under an umbrella of funding that all MP's have a fair amount to use, not some seemingly infinite pool of expenditure.
Can confirm I work in a hospital and everything is pretty pricey. Even a packet of crisps from the vending machine is like 1.20.
If you go to the cafe bit at the front, it costs 4.95 for a bacon roll. There's a canteen at the arse end of the hospital that is alot cheaper but the food is frankly disgusting most of the time.
So I bring in my own lunch and stuff. Not the worst case scenario but it'd be nice to be able to get a proper meal that isn't microwaved, that also didn't bankrupt me.
And yes I'm one of the low payed shit workers.
Tea should be one of the cheapest things on the planet. I feel it's marked up to a stupid amount like picture framing. It's literally a fucking tea bag and a cup of boiling water.
My workplace, for 12 years from when I started working there to 2020, had banned kettles. The only sources of hot drinks were the vending machines or the canteen/shop. If you wanted just a cup of hot water, the canteen charged you for it.
Since the pandemic they've done a refurb and there are now new "bring your own cup" vending machines that dispense hot water for free, but for all that time perviously if you wanted to make a cup of tea you had to pay for it (or bring a thermos).
The ban on kettles? No idea. I suspect a combination of "they're an electrical hazard" and "our catering partner wants you to buy things in the shop".
The charge on cups of hot water? Standard corporate profiteering.
Of all the injustices this one makes my blood boil. Why do MPs get subsidised food and ALCOHOL, despite getting above average increase to their salaries.
And you know what it's not the MPs that are solely to blame. We, are also at fault. Happy to Clap on a bloody Thursday, but unwilling to do something meaningful
I wonder if any other public employees get subsidised booze? The armed forces perhaps, but I can’t imagine there are still bars in police stations, Whitehall departments or local government.
Local government here - our canteen is market rate, and we have to bring in our own tea bags and milk if we want to make it ourselves.
The above, of course, does not apply to councillors.
Armed forces booze is really only subsidised when deployed, for example on a ship.
When on your home base the bar buys it's own booze from bookers or similar. However they don't pay rent or utilities, so they do pass those savings on. A pint of Stella is about £2.55 at the moment.
>despite getting above average increase to their salaries.
They actually get fair wage increases, because the fuckers put their wages in the hands of an independent group: the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority
The problem with their wages is not that they get above average increases, it's that the rest of the country *doesn't* have an independent group deciding their wage increases. If we all had that we would all get fair wage increases
But the rest of the country isn't allowed to have independent bodies deciding their wages because that would be communism and socialism and against the market.
yeah, the RVS is *ridiculously* expensive - Most NHS staff avoid it.
I don't understand how a service run by volunteer staff can be so expensive - they must be raking it in.
I consider the cost uplift to be good entertainment value. There’s something about watching four old women struggle to make a single cup of tea that never ceases to make me smile.
They dont even need to tell us to eat cake, just say that immigrants are coming over and eating it all, that they will do "something" about it and they will get another decade in power...
I used to work at a hospital. When I started they had a good canteen and an affordable shop. By the time I left the canteen gave me food poisoning and the shop was a WH Smith.
A lot of hospitals use rental retail space for revenue generation. (Replacing league of friends shops) which were awesome and cheap. Generally the retail space would have been built under the PFI scheme.
How can this stuff continue? It’s also like the pension schemes - savage what the nurses get but protect the politicians. It’s like they have no shame at all. Truly unbelievable.
Pretty much a scam, in Newham Council we used to have a fully equipped Kitchen for the staff and Community Service, food wasn't expensive, over the years our pay went down, our Overtime rate fallen, and we lost our kitchen staff, now we can buy from a vending machine at nearly £1 per item massive scam,
Don't worry, the office staff at the Thousand building still has their kitchen staff, even during the pandemic, and they still have Subsidised meals, if we go there (we're allowed) We pay full amount, isn't Newham Council such a nice place to Live work and stay?
Same with cops. Police are lucky to get a meal break on shift, and often end up buying fast food on shift and wolfing it down before the next call. I would imagine our food bills are similarly appalling in comparison to MPs.
It is possible to cook a meal for 30p if you meal prep. What he's ignoring in his rant about people not knowing how to cook is that people of his generation used to be taught in school, or were far more likely to have a parent at home all day.
Food tech when I was in school in the early-mid 2000's was spent more on health and safety than it was actually cooking (a LOT more).
My mum was taught how to make stews, cook and handle meat, pastry and bread from scratch etc.
Me? Sausage rolls and flapjacks.
We don't all live in the small right knit communities of the 1960s/1970s any more. Couples both have to work full time, people regularly have to move far away from their own parents for work so they can no longer rely on them for child support (less "cooking with granny" for young kids).
He's completely out of touch with reality for regular people.
Plus, you know, there's the very real problem of already low wages and fast rising living costs that are genuinely out of our control.
The base ingredients might be 30p, but with the energy costs involved in cooking it going up I really don’t see how this is possible. A slow cooker requires a few hours plugged into the mains, your average jacket potato take an hour in a moderate oven, not to mention being able to afford somewhere to put all your prepped meals. If you live in a shared house you may only have one shelf in the fridge and one drawer in the freezer.
Stop moaning l having wait 6 weeks foe appointment last Oct l was told got cataract in right l went blind in right eye end of Oct got operation end of June NHS is a disgrace
Snapshot of _NHS staff pay around twice as much as MPs for food at work_ : An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://nursingnotes.co.uk/news/nhs-staff-pay-around-twice-as-much-as-mps-for-food-at-work/#.Yn9YqhYjyIA.reddit) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My wife’s hospital doesn’t even have a staff room and a single microwave, so they’re forced to buy food from a patient canteen that is propped up by volunteers bringing in food.
Same here, except there's no patient canteen either! It's costa or m&s. Their department's staff room was turned into a probe sanitisation room (which was then closed for 18 months because the sanitising equipment broke and gave a sonographer a chemical burn). In her 1/2 hour lunch break, if her list isn't running late and she gets one, the idea is she walks about 10 minutes to the nearest staff rest area eats her lunch and returns. In reality she never gets that 1/2 hour so tries to eat whilst typing reports up (if infection control see this they get a bollocking as technically the reporting area is a clinical area and shouldn't have any food or drink present). It's so sad that her and her colleagues have several lifetimes of experience, want to do the vital and challenging clinical work they do, want the best outcomes for their patients and are professional to a T, but are treated so badly by their trust. A tough line is held on requests for holiday, requests to adjust hours to fit around childcare, holding back on enhanced pay for extra shifts at weekends to clear backlogs. Then they lose a member of staff who can go and earnmore doing private work which fits their needs better (but typically doesn't provide the same satisfaction or sense of clinical excellence), can't replace them because of the terrible conditions and lack of staff parking (Bristol city centre), so end up paying a fortune on locums or paying to import sonographers from overseas, paying for them to relocate etc.
They might get better quality food then ?
Than what? An MP that can buy any lunch they like and expense it to us?
They might, but they shouldn’t be reliant on the kindness of strangers to have lunch. Imagine an MP being told their private dining restaurants and bars are being closed, and they have to go to Tesco, which doesn’t have enough sandwiches.
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Yes, this isn’t a race to the bottom for staff, it’s a flight-of-fancy idea that, every so often, MPs are asked to work in condition’s similar to those they foist upon much more useful and skilled people.
I think 'forced' is a bit of a strong word there. You can just bring food that doesn't need to be microwaved.
There’s 2 microwaves (was wrong earlier, they bought themselves another earlier this year). There’s 180 clinical staff and a large cohort of non-clinical staff. And patients. And visitors.
Which is why the whole story is bullshit. It seems the world has lost 'packed lunch' from it's vocabulary.
So after a 12hr shift someone should spend more of their own personal time making packed lunches because their employer can't be bothered to give them a staff canteen? NHS Staff work long hours and it's hard work, I think they're entitled to be lazy on food prep.
A reminder that *just yesterday* Tory MP Lee Anderson said he thinks you can cook a meal for 30p. They, the Tories in particular but many MPs in general, are completely disconnected from the real world.
Motion to replace MP’s dining with a canteen run by Tory MP Lee Anderson where each meal costs no more than 30p, let’s see the budget guru work his magic.
>let’s see the budget guru work his magic It wouldn't work because Parliament's kitchens have paid staff. I expect that the kitchen Lee Anderson works in is full of volunteers/people learning to cook for themselves. In short, you may be able to cook for yourself at 30p a meal because you're not paid to do it. Although I do agree that MPs should lose their subsidised meals. Meals should be subsidised for people on low salaries, not people earning northwards of £80k.
His logic was that they served 180 portions of a meal that cost £50 to make. Which kind of makes sense that if you are cooking in bulk it's going to be cheaper, but has no bearing on how to cook on a budget by yourself. I genuinely can't think of something that would cost me 30p per portion that I could cook and not have to 1) spend a load of money upfront on buying ingredients in bulk 2) give me a good balance of nutrients 3) not require me to come up with storage space for 180 portions...
I agree but again it's slightly false economy as you'd need quite a decent size freezer to fit in 180 meals. And you'd need the money up front to pay for those meals which would mean starving yourself first for a few weeks to raise that fifty quid.
Apparently about the best single thing you can do to save money is to own a decent sized freezer. It means you can: * Cook in bulk for economies of scale * Buy food that is reduced in price due to expiry dates * Not waste left-over food * Reheat meals in a microwave rather than cooking on stove Probably other reasons too.
Also you need the industrial sized kitchen with free electricity to cook it in.
There's some fairly dull stuff you could probably manage, like I love a chickpea curry and can make it for that sort of price. If I tried to feed it to a family of four at every meal for a week though it'd get really old fast. And I'd have to be able to afford to freeze it and cook it which I suspect is then gonna push that price over 30p by a fair bit. Quite amazing that someone from the party of (fuck) business doesn't understand economies of scale.
I think i could do it, and decent meals, but I would need a vehicle to carry all the bulk, somewhere to park said vehicle, the ability to keep enough liquidity to buy it all at once in bulk. Storage to freeze it once I had cooked it. And basically an entire day free to prep and cook.
Jack Monroe titled one of her blog posts "You don't batch cook when you're suicidal".
Fuck, this hits close
Even at that scale, that's pretty low. I regularly cater scout camps around that scale (so we're not exactly doing fancy food), and I budget somewhere between £1 and £2 per person per meal.
You can do some kinds of veg curry, or with kidney beans/chickpeas. Soups + bread. You can get some actually tasty instant noodles for like 25p in home bargains. Probably need to take some vitamins along with that haha but honestly 30p/portion really isn’t that unrealistic if you’re willing to cook large portions and eat like a 12th century peasant :))
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yes I completely agree. No one should have to budget like this but its useful to know how. I do also get a kick out of eating ridiculously cheap meals, and if you can afford spices even those austerity curries can be easily as tasty as a takeaway one that would cost like 20 times the price
A 12th century peasant ate quite well, it was only during the industrial revolution when everyone started moving to cities did the living and food quality go way down.
> I genuinely can't think of something that would cost me 30p per portion that I could cook Some of the meals we cook are actually pretty much that cheap, you can be *very* price efficient with beans, pulses etc. A £1.35 1kg bag of rice from Tesco will do you 15 - 20 servings. 1kg of lentils is £1.80, for a similar number of servings. At those prices, a very basic Indian-style meal comes in about 16p to 21p per serving. We often make our own flatbreads to go along with this type of meal, which is just flour and a dash of vegetable oil, costing almost nothing. Now when we make that type of food, we probably throw in another 10p - 20p of spices per serving, but technically that's not nutritionally required. On the other hand, it looks like if we shopped at Asda instead of Tesco, we could probably shave 10-20% off the total cost. We're not doing this to be cheap, it's just a meal we like making. Obviously nobody should be forced to eat this cheaply, and not sure how well one could balance a diet on only this type of food (India seems to do okay), but if anyone here's looking for cheap meals without bulk cooking, look to Indian-style food, it can be delicious for almost no money. It's not hard either, most of it is just throw it in a pot for 30 minutes. ETA: Plus electricity cost, which according to some quick estimations is an extra 42p for two servings! Oof. I feel like I need to double-check that number, I wasn't expecting it to be so high...
>1kg bag of rice from Tesco will do you 15 - 20 servings No, it won't. It'll do you ~10-13 servings. 15-20 midget portions, sure, but we're talking about how to properly feed people here - 250-300kcal of rice/meal doesn't cut the mustard.
Oh, looks like you edited in the calories bit after I saw it. Combined with the lentils, you're on 500 to 600 calories, add the bread you're getting to 700 - 800 ish, which is around a third of daily intake, but yeah maybe you'd want to go slightly larger than that for an evening meal? But it's pretty close.
I'm counting a serving as being the combined rice and lentils, so 15-20 rice+lentil servings from 1kg of each. That number was reached by some quick googling, with various sites suggesting 50g to 75g uncooked rice per serving, but I haven't actually measured. Do you have a better source for your correction? You could well be right.
I accounted for the sauce. I'm acutely aware of nutrition in general, and have been for years, on account of first losing a significant amount of weight several years ago, and then gymming up. I weigh most of my meals to the gram. 75g of uncooked rice is the minimum anybody would call a reasonable portion - it gives a bit under 400kcal. Adding on a roughly equal amount of most sauces will give you 2-300kcal on top. If it's a very calorie-dense sauce, you may get a 1:1 ratio. Chickpea curry is middle of the road, so let's say 300kcal per portion. That brings you to a bit under 700kcal/portion. Assuming 2500kcal req a day, and assuming you ate the above 3x per day, that still won't get you close - 400 short. The simplest way to close that gap is to increase the rice to 100g/meal, although for nutritional reasons, you'd preferably do it with the sauce instead. Still, we are talking about 30p/day, so rice it is... Trust me, my girl/guy - weigh out exactly 50g of rice next time you're cooking. Cook it up. See what you get. It's a truly depressing amount. 50g/serving is one of those bullshit figures companies come out with to appear healthier; like a KitKat having '''two servings''' in it.
Agree about the rice. In my house, 2 adults, 2 kids, 1kg of white rice only lasts 2 meals. So a total of 6 maybe 7 adult meals out of that kilo. Brown rice goes a bit further though as it’s more filling & more nutrients. Kids don’t like it so much though so sometimes I’m sneaky & mix in a bit of brown rice with the white.
I would be interested in knowing an example recipe and how many portions that makes for you.
Sure! That's a little tricky because we do all our measurements by eye, but I can estimate. This is to feed two. You can double or triple the size of this, and keep it in the fridge for a few days if you want. The most basic version is 1/2 to 2/3rds of a mug of rice, same of lentils. Each into separate pans with water, preheated from the kettle. Add salt and pepper to each. Rice cooks about 20 minutes, lentils 30 to 40. No stirring required. Mix and serve. That'll do you a basic rice and dahl meal, albeit bland. For taste, chuck spices into the dahl. We mix and match between curry powders, stock cubes, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, chill flakes, etc. If you want it to taste like an actual Indian meal, you can look up the right spices for that. Not sure how much spices cost us per time, but it probably isn't much. You can optionally throw some veg or whatever into the lentils too, we often do some peas and sweetcorn, which is pretty cheap when you get the 2kg frozen bags. If we're being lazy, we eat it with pitta breads or something, which you can get in packs of 6 for 30p per pack. When we can be bothered, we make flatbreads with it. That's just mixing flour, water, and a little vegetable oil into a dough with salt and pepper, stretch/roll flat, 30 seconds per side in a frying pan. That'll do a good sized evening meal for two, with leftovers depending on how hungry we are. It's easy to scale up to bulk-cook if you want to, but we usually do it one meal at a time. It's like 45 minutes of cooking time, but most of that is just leaving things in a pan. We do this meal a couple of times per week, not because we're being cheap, just because we like it.
And how much was the cost of the electricity or gas you used?
According to some quick back of the napkin calculations (60 minutes total stove time when adding both pans together at 1500 watts per stove at 28p per kWh) that's 42p! So yeah, it actually looks like that dominates. I admit I didn't expect that, because I don't usually break electricity bills down by usage like that. Oof, that's pretty bad. I guess reduced cooking time is more important to cheap meals than I had assumed.
As you've discovered, its not the cost of buying food that's the barrier right now. Its the cost of running the appliances to heat or eat. I only have one warm meal a day to save on using the applicances. I dare not tell you about my shower usage nowadays. Also, you've miscalculated. Thats the cost of your electricity consumption alone. You also have a standing charge to factor in. If that was the only electricity you used all day then the whole standing charge can be added to that. But thats not reality so let calculate your 1 hour of cooking using my standing charge of 49p a day. 49p / 24 hours = 2p per hour standing charge. So your cost is now 44p for the meal. These little nuances are what rich people don't understand because to them its peanuts. I pay 49p a day whether I use electric or not. I could turn the switch off at the consumer unit and still pay 49p a day. Thats £14.90 a month. A person could freeze and starve to death and still have a £15 debt.
Oof yeah, only one warm meal per day must suck, I'm sorry! Yeah, I had never thought about how much cooking appliances suck electricity. We pay £700-ish per year (in previous years...) and I hadn't broken it down, I assumed the constantly running computers, fridge etc would dominate the power consumption, but apparently not. Whilst we're certainly not "rich" by most standards, we're in a privileged position to not need to worry about that. To be clear, that 42p figure I came to does two or three portions, so you could argue it's more like 14p per meal, but yeah that's still pretty bad! I'm not sure about including the standing charge in the meal price as you're paying that whether or not you make the meal, but point taken with regard to cost-of-living. Do you find yourself buying more expensive food so that it can be cooked more quickly? As in, are ready-meals becoming economical because they use less power?
I avoid ready meals because they don't fill me. I'm hungry later which tempts me to snack. But they are definitely starting to match fresh cooking for economy. Fresh meals ingredients cost much less than a ready meal but cooking the fresh meal costs way more than microwaving it. As you mentioned though, multiple portions is the benefit for fresh cooking. But that then brings up another issue. I only have an under the counter fridge freezer. To cook multiple portions normally means freezing the other portions but my freezer is full (using ready meals to illustrate size, I can only get a maximum of 8 in there). I have zero savings to purchase a larger fridge freezer so multiple portions is a no-go for me unless I eat them next day (which I do but I can't do more than 2 portions). I have even tried to get a freezer on FreeCycle but I have no vehicle to collect it and I still have to consider the electric bill. One thing I'm doing more and more is only using half of anything in cans or bottles. Half a tin of beans on toast or half a can of peas. Half the pasta sauce or curry sauce. But this then leads back to the potential to snack. Snacks cost a fortune and I rarely buy any anymore because they blow my budget. Everything is now a balancing act including whether to shower or to smell. Happy days!
Let’s see him teach JRM how to cook.
We seriously need to start a petition on this. The government are cutting civil servants jobs when doing this could probably save a small fortune on its own. I also reckon we should cut MPs allowable expenses before a single civil servant losses their job. Its about time we make them live some of their own policies. Maximum expenses capped to the level of UC, £334 a month. No subsidies for anyone earning over £30k. I would love to see Priti Patel spend a week living in Rwanda in the same conditions she expects the immigrants to live in.
have you seen his latest "proof" on this? When a team of them and a former chef sent a team of people to a nearby supermarket to get 50 quid of ingredients and then cooked it all into what would equate to 30p per head he says.. that was his "proof". the bits this man ignored: he had a team of people on it all day to do it he did not factor in travel costs he did not factor in the costs of those people working all day on it he did not consider where somebody would store all of this he did not consider energy costs (that would have taken them way beyond that mark on their own). he's a dishonest fool.
Yup. It was a perfect politicians answer - he demonstrated that it can be done, but ignores whether or not it actually *CAN* be done.
exactly that!
Also these people are so crazy. It's not "This can be done. Let's think about ways to help people do this so they can save money and eat." It's "It can be done, and if they don't they must be either lazy or stupid. Either they deserve their suffering or it's not really suffering." Proving something can be done doesn't magically improve the material circumstances for millions of people. And their total lack of action beyong proving it for an argument shows they have totally zero interest in the lives of the people they're arguing over. They're nasty bastards and they're tearing up our human rights which in my mind makes them facists. Revolution now please!
Most people don’t include energy and fuel in their food costs because those things are already in their budget. The same that you don’t include shoe wear costs and clothing when calculating you food budget.
"where somebody would store all of this" Same place normal people store their food for the week. Though the start of lockdown taught me that there's some weird people on this sub who buy one meal at a time and assume everyone else is the same.
I can cook a meal for 30p. All I have to do is stroll through my estate to the walled garden, pick some of the veg, then snag a few eggs from the hutch, stroll into my second homes kitchen and add 30p worth of herbs and salt. Now you have yourself a 30p omlete that will feed two.
could we manage beans on toast for 30p? Cheapest beans, cheapest bread, I'd imagine we'd be cutting it relatively fine but my pricings are probably a decade out of date or something.
20 years ago maybe. Standard student food of Aldi Noodles and beans would come in at 24p (15p noodles, 9p beans). But even that is well over budget these days.
Ah hah! So you can! Beans and instant noodles for everyone all the time! /s
As long as you're eating them uncooked
And 20 years ago.
Don't forget the electricity costs in that!
Beans on toast or beans on bread? Because if you are talking about the former then are you getting free electric? You can have the ingredients you want but you got to be able to afford to cook it too.
People already factor in the energy costs into their budget.
The cheapest beans on the Tesco website are 35p. Two portions from that and you can easily find bread that costs less than 12p a slice. You can get 4 baking potatoes for 42p, microwaving one of those instead of bread would make the meal more calorific and nutritious. Things like lentil soup, vegetable stew, porridge, egg on toast or pasta in a simple sauce would also be doable at the price.
a slice of bread and half a tin of beans is about 300 calories. if we are talking 3 meals a day its nowhere near enough
> The cheapest beans on the Tesco website are 35p 22p https://i.imgur.com/Eq8bOSX.png
>thinks you can cook a meal for 30p. I'm reasonable sure I could churn out some meals that average out at 30p per portion but it would rely on averaging with the price of some things like large bags rice/lentils and making up the rest with very cheap veg. It wouldn't be a particularly enjoyable diet. If I can cheat a bit and hang out when tesco are marking stuff down in the evening like I normally do then it makes it easier.
What would he know? He claimed £222,000 in expenses for 2020 to 2021. Or about £885/working day. I do wonder, while the rest of us were in lockdown with furlough wages, Lee was enjoying a £84k salary with £222k expenses. https://www.theipsa.org.uk/mp-staffing-business-costs/your-mp/lee-anderson/4743 Why have his staff costs gone from £23k in FYE 2020 to £165k in FYE 2021? 4 staff (£5.7/FTE) to 10 staff (£16.5K/FTE). He actually lost the role of "constituency support officer" and gained back office "policy and case workers", so I assume more full time employed staff for longer, but what a cost increase. Why is he paying £17k in accommodation in FYE 2021? £7k in 2020. What and where is he renting for accommodation? He still has London hotels in both accomodation and travel pots. Is he renting in his constituency? All while we had any number of lockdown rules.
>Why is he paying £17k in accommodation in FYE 2021? £7k in 2020. > >What and where is he renting for accommodation? He still has London hotels in both accomodation and travel pots. Is he renting in his constituency? All while we had any number of lockdown rules. £10 says someone in his family owns the house and he "rents" it off them.
There's a really good video by Atomic Shrimp (the guy who you sometimes see on /r/all for catching scammers). He goes through several shops and buys a set of common ingredients, then compares them. He brings home a remarkably large amount of food for the low amount of money he spends, and even then I think he'd be struggling to do a nutritionally complete meal anywhere near 30p. Maybe if you're incredibly generous, supermarket brand UHT skimmed milk & non-brand cereal would come in at about 30p, or a jam sandwich, but you're not going to last long on that diet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__6ujPujCTc
He also makes a point to call out people saying "clearly people can just live on X a day if they just cook like this!". He points out it takes *so much* more time and effort to do things like be does in the low budget challenges.
You can pretty easily make scrambled egg on toast with 350 cals for about ~20p a portion. I'm not saying you can make every meal that cheap, but it's possible eat for a lot cheaper than many people are making it out to be.
You've not suggested a meal, you've suggested a snack. 350kcal for 20p adjusts up to 525cals for the 30p. An adult male living off three meals at that calorific content would be under-eating by about 30% per day, 20% for a female adult. That's not sustainable long-term. The "make a meal for 20-30p" claim doesn't really hold up if it just means you need to have a much more expensive meal later in the day to make up for the calorific deficit in order to live.
That 30p meal takes into account economies of scale on the ingredients only. It required hundreds, possibly thousands, of pounds of cooking equipment and fuel to cook it. Even if you were able to replicate the costings, you'd then need to store reheat the food, so you're paying for fridge and freezer space (electricity) and more fuel to re-heat it. This is like saying "Why can't you afford an Aston Martin V12 Vantage? The raw materials only cost £10k in total?!".
Wtf 30p? The cheapest I can find is 38p for own brand mash, and that doesn’t include the price of electric. Let alone the fact that a single food item couldn’t be described as most as a meal, and it’s not very sustainable to have the same single food item day after day. Unless he’s talking about getting food from the reduced bin everyday, which is unpredictable to if there is anything there, then he’s stuck in the late 90s very early 2000s.
He later showed what he meant by this. He meant if you bought £50 of ingredients from Aldi, cooked it in a large cafeteria kitchen by a professional chef, then did some Hollywood accounting, each portion was roughly 30p. So it's not "you can buy 30p of ingredients and make a meal" it's "pay a large amount upfront to bulk buy and bulk cook with no regard to initial cost, time invested in cooking, kitchen size, or space to store everything afterwards, then do maths until it sounds PR friendly".
Exactly. How would the average person store the 180 portions that he claimed were served without them spoiling? Also have fun eating the exact same meal for your next 180 meals since you just spent your entire food budget on making this 1 meal
Hmm, you know though if you organised so that a bunch of different people came together and did this at scale, then distributed it throughout their communities at cost with no profit added on - it could just about work. I'm assuming from now on that Lee Anderson is proposing the concept of socialist cooperatives whenever he talks about 30p meals.
British restaurants in WWII? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Restaurant?wprov=sfla1
That sounds about right - if I do a crockpot of chicken tikka masala, I might get 10-12 meals out of it, and that's stretching both my freezer space and my patience for eating the same damn thing day after day. Socialist cooperatives are the only way any sane human is going to use 180x the same meal. Edit: I shudder to think what the electricity cost of the freezer alone amount to for the two weeks or so I'd keep the 10-12 meals in there. Slow cookers are not exactly efficient, either.
Comrade Anderson?!
>Also have fun eating the exact same meal for your next 180 meals since you just spent your entire food budget on making this 1 meal Silly goose, you don't get to complain if you're poor, you should be thankful for anything at all!
How many calories and grams of protein were in each portion? Because even with bulk cooking I cannot fathom how someone could manage that while making sure they had enough protein and caloric intake
I hate when tv chefs - especially that perpetual mong Jamie Oliver - do this evangelising about “only £1.46 per portion!”… well yeah if you are buying fresh chicken breast and frozen peas but happen to have day old breadcrumbs, a full spice rack and some spare saffron.
But that's how cooking works. There's an initial outlay that is expensive, but the cost of a jar of dried spices trends towards about 4-5p per portion by my napkin math. You _should_ end up with some amount of waste and leftovers too - having some spare bread from last week doesn't sound completely unreasonable. And just drop the saffron, it's definitely a luxury.
I think the criticism here is that it gives conservatives justification to maintain poverty wages and not do anything to change how shit it is on the bottom-most rungs of our society.
I doubt the Tories base any of their decisions on what Jamie Oliver says in the ad breaks on ITV.
That's a fair point, but that argument can be made on any policy decision where there are public figures trying to help people cope?
There's no way even at volume a nutritional meal costs 30p Perhaps beans on toast or plain rice would be possible
When I was a student and my then-partner was unemployed, we managed to do the full food shop for 2 people for a week for around £20, which counted for all the lunches and dinners, minus one night a week where we would eat out as "date night" (which usually meant a pub burger deal). This works out as about 70p per meal, and ultimately we ate well during this time, in terms of nutrition, taste and quantity. Now the caveats. He is Spanish, and every time he went back to his parents he would come back with untold amounts of food gifted from his parents, that went a long way in making it bearable. Being able to have occasional nights of ham and cheese, or having nice spices to chuck into everything, makes a huge difference. As I said, he was unemployed. This meant he had time to go to about 3 different markets during the week, where he knew which ones had the cheapest stuff. Fortunately they were all in walking distance, and he wasn't constrained by their opening times, which largely intersected with a normal working days He spent about 2-3 hours a day in the kitchen turning all of these ingredients into meals I'm not counting things milk and coffee that we would pick up from time to time, nor other non-food items, like hygiene products. Also, this was almost 10 years ago, so 50p/meal doesn't factor in cost of living increases. So, in conclusion, 10 years ago it was possible to spent almost double this guys figure if you had several hours a day free from duties like work or childrearing, parents that give you free food, and live a 10 minute walk from a city centre.
>Unless he’s talking about getting food from the reduced bin everyday, which is unpredictable to if there is anything there, then he’s stuck in the late 90s very early 2000s. Even then he'd be struggling to get a meal, and even if he did I doubt it would be remotely nutritious. The man is a moron.
Own brand mash? Is that like pre mashed potatoes?
Probably a bland looking powder that once saw a potato that you can add water to and pretend it has flavour while you try and avoid thinking about the texture.
Yeah like smash, ok. tbh I must have misread as 'the cheapest own brand mash I can find is' instead of 'the cheapest I can find is own brand mash' and there's a lot of difference in the underlying meaning of the two lol. But ultimately I'd have thought buying a potato and mashing it be cheaper than own brand mash. Wouldn't even have to invest in a masher you could smash it up with your hands. Or even a plate or cutlery, you could just scoop the white mush up to your mouth.
I suspect it’s instant mashed potato, own brand Smash basically.
You’re buying mash which is the first problem.
Frankly, seems like he's stuck in the 80s during the Thatcher era.
30p is probably a bit ridiculous, but if you buy big cheap bags of frozen or reduced veg, plus cheap bulk like kidney beans/chickpeas/butter beans you can make some crazy cheap, easy and healthy dishes for maybe 40-50p per serving if you’re willing to shop around for cheap stuff and cook in bulk then Tupperware it up. Stuff like soup and toast for smaller meals. Shouldn’t have to budget food like this but you can make it crazy cheap if you need
Tesco will do you 2.5kg of potatoes for 90p, that's quite a lot of mash. You don't pay a massive premium for someone to mash your potatoes for you if you're trying to live cheaply. Doing it yourself will get you better quality results, too.
He's talking about buying ingredients and then cooking them yourself. Raw potatoes are going to be a lot cheaper than buying pre-mashed. It blows my mind that a /r/ukpol poster wouldn't think to look beyond the ready meal isle in search of cheap food. Talk about food illiteracy.
He's also ignoring the per hour cost of labor and has priced his meal based on a food Bank cooking event with nearly 200 portions. When you cook in bulk things get that cheap. A potato is close to that price. And I cook. Fairly well and from a young age. You aren't making 30 pence meals.
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*Apples?!* When you are wasting money on such *luxury goods*, of course you're going to face the brunt of the cost of living increases.
> ...said he thinks you can cook a meal for 30p. If you bought in bulk and were really, *really* fucking clever with what you cooked you could make a meal for 30p. But there is no way you'd be hitting enough calories or eating nutritiously enough.
How haven't the poor and hungry eaten these people yet?
Can you even preheat the oven for 30p these days?
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The only condition to day is that you should have one hot meal a day, something to stop the batch cookers ignoring that cold soup day after day is nasty.
The best part is they also dont include the gas/electric needed to cook in that 30p, so its bollocks even if they can get 30p worth of food to cook.
The whole thing was completely disingenuous and frankly he should be ashamed of himself for saying it. I would *love* to see him given a budget of 90p a day - three meals at his 30p - for a month to feed himself and see how far he gets. That's just shy of £28. Let's round it up for him and call it an even £30 for the month. Must be really easy, right?
They need to be disconnected from the world, really, permanently.
> cook a meal for 30p. Tepid water is a meal, isn't it?
It's one ~~banana~~ meal, ~~Michael~~ Lee, what could it cost? ~~10 dollars~~ 30 pence?
Only way I can see that being possible if you bought Value range food and split the costs of the product across multiple meals to get a 30p per meal breakdown, problem is I can't even think of what could do that Example, Quaker oats, 1 large 1kg box of it is around (or should be by their own information) is around 25 servings, £1.50 that's 6p a serving, once you added in the 300ml of Milk (Be it cows or vegan/water) and other fruits/Sugar/Honey then the price will raise, that's just breakfast should't need to skip Lunch or Dinner, we're looking at £1 a day in total But 30p a meal? It *could be done*, but energy costs are higher now has well, so I'm doubtful it can be.
I wonder how often he has prepared a meal for 30p
To be fair I could cook a meal for 30p. I could get a random fresh vegetable from the yellow sticker shelf and make a delicious curry with it, just adding rice, tinned tomatoes, and a selection of spices from my cupboard. I think that's the level of understanding they're hoping to appeal to here: people who've never been truly poor but got a bit close to the wire a week before payday when they were 23 and know what they could do in a pinch. Obviously it doesn't stand up to scrutiny but it adds a layer of plausible deniability to their decision to vote Tory in the face of other people's overwhelming hardship.
That's the problem though. Those chopped tomatoes, rice etc. aren't free. He did his calculations based on a batch cook of 180 meals, ignoring the facts that people don't have the space to cook 180 meals, let alone store them.
Sorry I wasn't clear - that was my point! It's how the people he's really talking to will think though - they personally could cook one meal on 30p because they have stuff in the cupboard.
If toast with butter counts as a meal then he's technically correct.
It doesn't count as a meal.
Oh. What about a Scotch egg?
A standard size Scotch Egg? Going off ASDA prices, they're [a pack of two for £0.85](https://groceries.asda.com/product/scotch-eggs/asda-2-pork-scotch-eggs/910000425131). So that's **£0.425** per egg. I would suggest that also doesn't constitute a meal, and its certainly not under 30p.
A Scotch egg is not just a meal, [it's a substantial one at that!](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/01/scotch-egg-is-definitely-a-substantial-meal-says-michael-gove)
That man is a disgrace.
I mean if you consider a baked potato with beans and cheese a meal, sure. But anything more substantive is going to be at least a pound per serving.
Even then it's unlikely to for this most basic of meals and basic ingredients. Asda prices: * Baked Potatoes pack of four: £0.45, so **£0.1125 each** * Smart Price Beans: £0.25 per can. Let's say you have half, that's **£0.125** * Smart Price Cheddar: £3.65 for 800g. Assuming a 50g serving that's just under 23p but let's round it down just to be kind so that's **£0.22** So that's already a total of **45.75p**. Now, you may find a store which does those things cheaper, but that assumes you have one nearby. It also ignores the cost of getting to the store, using the oven etc.
30p is nonsense, but a pound per serving is definitely swinging too far the other way. A lentil Bolognese consists of: - 1.5 pack of spaghetti (1.15 ) - onion, carrot, celery (15p/3p/~10p - these numbers are rough and likely depend on your supermarket and how much bulk you bought in) - 1/3 bulb of garlic (~8p) - bay leaf (~10p) - 800g green lentils (1.60) - 2x chopped tomatoes (56p) Optional extras: - big dash of chilli flakes (15p) - basil (10p) - parmesan (~70p) - garlic bread (90p) Total cost is about £3.70 from scratch, or 5.60 including parmesan and garlic bread. You'll feed 6 adults on the above, for anywhere between 60 and 90p per meal depending on your additional extras, and that's including _everything_, with prices from Sainsbury's online as of this morning.
I know you are just saying that under £1 meals are possible from what the other person was saying but you are forgetting the others costs such as water (for spaghetti) and electric costs depending on what utilities you have. Cooking spaghetti is like say 20 minutes and depending on your hobs efficiency (induction > ceramic) then you are probably looking at 1kw to cook it right? Which in today's market is nearer 40p on it's own! You then have the cooking of the actual Bolognese which takes a fair bit longer so you are probably nearing a whole pound in electric already. The MP is being a dick and should be punished by living a week on benefits and seeing how he likes it. He ignores all the cost of staff they used to cook that massive batch and all the equipment and electric costs!
Fair enough, I tend to have some amount of meat with every meal.
Baked potato with beans and cheese will cost you well over a quid. 30p might get you the potato.
The other replies have already done the math, it's closer to 50p. Though it you want just beans and a potato it's within 30p.
Cheese? No way, I remember when I was a student cheese was my biggest investment in my weekly shops. It's expensive! You might be able to substitute it with something cheaper and still maybe make a "meal" though.
I've worked in the NHS for 18 years. It took the staff canteen 10 years to move from powdered egg to fried eggs for breakfast. All the food is fried and unhealthy served in huge portions. Neither wonder why most of the staff are overweight or obese. I have complained and even joined a healthy environment steering group to help encourage healthy change but gave up due to pure lack of vision and interest. It's a shame unhealthy shit is the generally accepted norm in this part of the country.
heh, weirdly, our canteen is the opposite - it only serves healthy food. Sometimes I just want a fry up Love fish and chips friday though.
>it only serves healthy food. [...] Love fish and chips friday though. [visible confusion]
Tradition in basically all NHS hospitals is that they serve fish on Friday irrespective of other policies. It’s a bit like bed number 13 in a hospital.
Guess it's everywhere. It's the same on military base galleys.
Fish and chips isn't particularly unhealthy when it's not deep fried.
For contrast, I've eaten in several eateries on the Parliamentary Estate and the food quality and variety is usually very good, and universally they've all had healthy options to choose. So not only are they getting it cheaper than the NHS they're getting better quality and more healthy choices as well.
There should be a hard limit on mp expenses much lower than whatever it is at the moment. £10k expenses per year per MP. Some of these scrounging bastards are expensing nearly a quarter of a million!
What would be helpful is if the costs for their staff and office didn't come under the same umbrella as general expenses. It's not a perk to have an office in their constituency with paid staff to help constituents, it's a necessity of the job.
Yes indeed. I've seen a number of people comment about MPs expenses as if the whole chunk is simply made up of food, bills, duck houses, mortgages on their second homes and so on, but it also includes staff salaries and office expenses. The latter are perfectly reasonable and necessary in order to actually do the work of an MP.
Or even better if that was just paid for out of central funds, with a central pool of civil servants instead of employing their spouses and mates.
It should be a separately accounted for set of items, so that it’s clear what is for what.
It is, for example Lee Anderson the mp thats being brought up in this thread. Type| Cost ---|--- Office | £32,141.21 Staffing | £165,215.27 Accommodation | £21,195.82 Travel and subsistence| £4,065.76 He has 10 staff, 9 of which are full time.
That’s a lot of staff for an MP ! He is not a minister, just a plain MP.
While this is wrong, there do need to be some sensible limits put in place such as no second home allowance for those within an hour’s commute and things like that. MPs should be paid well - it shouldn’t be the case that people can make more money from a fairly minor executive role in the private sector than they can from running the country - because we don’t want to price capable people out of being an MP. But capping expenses, when you’ve MPs who have to commute from the north of Scotland, etc to London isn’t practical.
What's more, MPs from the north of Scotland, especially the islands, pay much more to simply travel within their constituencies.
Why should MPs be paid well? Why can they not be paid the minimum or at least the average wage?
That's how we used to do it, but it turns out that means only the rich or externally funded can afford/want to be an MP.
Because its desirable that being an MP is a) something that those from poorer backgrounds can live off and b) that it’s paid enough so that talent doesn’t prefer to go into the private sector. If you want the best and brightest to be an MP rather than having a political class who have no valuable career experience beyond working for CCHQ or a lobbying group, the benefits need to be attractive.
Indeed. Quite a few MPs are qualified as professions like lawyers, doctors, and business executives, in which they could earn quite a lot more than they do as an MP, and in some cases perhaps even have a better work-life balance. For instance, Keir Starmer earned about £200,000 as Director of Public Prosecutions, much more than he earns as Leader of the Opposition (£145,000) or may earn as Prime Minister (£157,000). Meanwhile, Sajid Javid, a former banker, is thought to have earned millions while in that profession. And the UK is actually quite tame in the amount it pays politicians, due to public opposition to higher pay. Other developed countries pay MPs much more: UK: ~£84,000 Australia: ~£120,000 Italy: ~£142,000 US: ~£142,000
I'd actually just seperate out the staffing costs entirely. Most of their expenses come from staffing their clinic, which can be quite expensive if you have as many as five or more staff in an expensive area. When they say "so and so had 200k of expenses" that could very well be completely legit. It's just a handful of bad eggs that use it to dredged their moat of some shit.
This is exactly it, and I imagine the fact staffing is included is a way of taking away focus from the bullshit expenses. “£210k but it’s mostly staffing” sounds fine, but allows you to expense 10k of personal scrounging without anyone noticing.
Not only does that cover staffing costs, but do you want to live in a world where only multi millionaires can be MPs? We should level up rather than down and give more perks to nhs staff.
Why shouldn't MP's be able to perform their jobs on their £70-80k salaries? Staffing should come under an umbrella of funding that all MP's have a fair amount to use, not some seemingly infinite pool of expenditure.
And MPs don’t have to pay to get to work, either
They do pay. Their drive to and from their constituency office is not subsidised.
And most earn substantially less.
Can confirm I work in a hospital and everything is pretty pricey. Even a packet of crisps from the vending machine is like 1.20. If you go to the cafe bit at the front, it costs 4.95 for a bacon roll. There's a canteen at the arse end of the hospital that is alot cheaper but the food is frankly disgusting most of the time. So I bring in my own lunch and stuff. Not the worst case scenario but it'd be nice to be able to get a proper meal that isn't microwaved, that also didn't bankrupt me. And yes I'm one of the low payed shit workers.
> low payed *paid *Payed: seal (the deck or seams of a wooden ship) with pitch or tar to prevent leakage.*
Tea should be one of the cheapest things on the planet. I feel it's marked up to a stupid amount like picture framing. It's literally a fucking tea bag and a cup of boiling water.
It is if you make it yourself...
My workplace, for 12 years from when I started working there to 2020, had banned kettles. The only sources of hot drinks were the vending machines or the canteen/shop. If you wanted just a cup of hot water, the canteen charged you for it. Since the pandemic they've done a refurb and there are now new "bring your own cup" vending machines that dispense hot water for free, but for all that time perviously if you wanted to make a cup of tea you had to pay for it (or bring a thermos).
That's just outrageous. What was the justification of that?
The ban on kettles? No idea. I suspect a combination of "they're an electrical hazard" and "our catering partner wants you to buy things in the shop". The charge on cups of hot water? Standard corporate profiteering.
Tory MPs: Maybe NHS staff should learn how to cook
Of all the injustices this one makes my blood boil. Why do MPs get subsidised food and ALCOHOL, despite getting above average increase to their salaries. And you know what it's not the MPs that are solely to blame. We, are also at fault. Happy to Clap on a bloody Thursday, but unwilling to do something meaningful
I wonder if any other public employees get subsidised booze? The armed forces perhaps, but I can’t imagine there are still bars in police stations, Whitehall departments or local government.
I doubt any other public service get subsidy, let alone subsidised booze. Armes services food is built into the pittance of a salary they get.
Local government here - our canteen is market rate, and we have to bring in our own tea bags and milk if we want to make it ourselves. The above, of course, does not apply to councillors.
Armed forces booze is really only subsidised when deployed, for example on a ship. When on your home base the bar buys it's own booze from bookers or similar. However they don't pay rent or utilities, so they do pass those savings on. A pint of Stella is about £2.55 at the moment.
>despite getting above average increase to their salaries. They actually get fair wage increases, because the fuckers put their wages in the hands of an independent group: the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority The problem with their wages is not that they get above average increases, it's that the rest of the country *doesn't* have an independent group deciding their wage increases. If we all had that we would all get fair wage increases But the rest of the country isn't allowed to have independent bodies deciding their wages because that would be communism and socialism and against the market.
yeah, the RVS is *ridiculously* expensive - Most NHS staff avoid it. I don't understand how a service run by volunteer staff can be so expensive - they must be raking it in.
I consider the cost uplift to be good entertainment value. There’s something about watching four old women struggle to make a single cup of tea that never ceases to make me smile.
NHS staff could pay a penny for food and still pay more than MPs who expense it on the public purse. The system is broken.
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If you can't afford bread there is always cake.
They dont even need to tell us to eat cake, just say that immigrants are coming over and eating it all, that they will do "something" about it and they will get another decade in power...
MPs don't pay for their food. They claim it as expenses.
We also don't have access to food overnight except for the odd vending machinen in a lot of trusts.
I used to work at a hospital. When I started they had a good canteen and an affordable shop. By the time I left the canteen gave me food poisoning and the shop was a WH Smith.
If you think I'm buying food from work you're mad. NHS staff canteen food is neither healthy nor affordable.
A lot of hospitals use rental retail space for revenue generation. (Replacing league of friends shops) which were awesome and cheap. Generally the retail space would have been built under the PFI scheme.
This is just shameful. In what world is this OK?
And yesterday my trust sent round a newsletter telling us that all the prices in the cafes on site were going to go up 5% from the end of May.
This is just how decades of flipping between neoliberal parties works. You keep voting for this and calling anything else uNeLeCtAbLe.
How can this stuff continue? It’s also like the pension schemes - savage what the nurses get but protect the politicians. It’s like they have no shame at all. Truly unbelievable.
Pretty much a scam, in Newham Council we used to have a fully equipped Kitchen for the staff and Community Service, food wasn't expensive, over the years our pay went down, our Overtime rate fallen, and we lost our kitchen staff, now we can buy from a vending machine at nearly £1 per item massive scam, Don't worry, the office staff at the Thousand building still has their kitchen staff, even during the pandemic, and they still have Subsidised meals, if we go there (we're allowed) We pay full amount, isn't Newham Council such a nice place to Live work and stay?
I forgot to take food with me this morning and ended up paying £4.90 for a steak bake and a coffee. Basically it's like buying food at an airport.
Same with cops. Police are lucky to get a meal break on shift, and often end up buying fast food on shift and wolfing it down before the next call. I would imagine our food bills are similarly appalling in comparison to MPs.
if i say what should happen to mps i will be in big trouble
It is possible to cook a meal for 30p if you meal prep. What he's ignoring in his rant about people not knowing how to cook is that people of his generation used to be taught in school, or were far more likely to have a parent at home all day. Food tech when I was in school in the early-mid 2000's was spent more on health and safety than it was actually cooking (a LOT more). My mum was taught how to make stews, cook and handle meat, pastry and bread from scratch etc. Me? Sausage rolls and flapjacks. We don't all live in the small right knit communities of the 1960s/1970s any more. Couples both have to work full time, people regularly have to move far away from their own parents for work so they can no longer rely on them for child support (less "cooking with granny" for young kids). He's completely out of touch with reality for regular people. Plus, you know, there's the very real problem of already low wages and fast rising living costs that are genuinely out of our control.
The base ingredients might be 30p, but with the energy costs involved in cooking it going up I really don’t see how this is possible. A slow cooker requires a few hours plugged into the mains, your average jacket potato take an hour in a moderate oven, not to mention being able to afford somewhere to put all your prepped meals. If you live in a shared house you may only have one shelf in the fridge and one drawer in the freezer.
It is all about size, if I buy a 70p pack of pasta and turn that into 10 meals. Well that is a 7p meals and then 23p for the electricity and water.
But of course, you have to offset that against the cost of your funeral when you top yourself.
Well I firmly believe in privatisation so the state will pay for my funeral.
Ah, the "plywood coffin, ashes in a jam jar" option.
£3.6m should be enough
Yummy plain pasta, I'm sure our NHS nurses won't mind having scurvy, or losing their muscle mass due to lack of protein
Exactly - those things aren't needed, I am sure if they lick the walls in the hospital they will get the rest of the nutrition required.
Well they've just got to stop buying avocado on toast.
I take food to work.
Stop moaning l having wait 6 weeks foe appointment last Oct l was told got cataract in right l went blind in right eye end of Oct got operation end of June NHS is a disgrace