EATING WELL FOR LESS:Food prices have fallen by 14 per cent this year - not that cash-strapped families have noticed - so it's time, says cookbook author Elizabeth Carty, to get shrewd about food
HOW MUCH does it cost to feed a family of four for a week? A couple of hundred quid? More than that? Less? Last week Pricewatch carried out a not entirely scientific straw poll on Twitter and within an hour we had dozens of responses.
Some people based their answers on personal experience, others on the experience of their mates, while a few made what we suspect were wild guesses. Estimates of how much it would cost to feed our fictitious family for a week came in at anywhere between €60 per week and €500 - we reckon the chap who’s spending that much must be feasting on tKobe burgers every day. The average price, the Twitterati decided, was €200 a week.
But maybe we’re spending more than we need to? The author of a new recipe book reckons two adults and two children can eat well for less than €100 a week - a lot less.
Shrewd Food: A New Way of Shopping, Cooking and Eatingby Elizabeth Carty (Hachette Books Ireland) was published this summer. It complements a website – shrewdfood.ie – she set up to show people how easy it can be to eat well on less. The site and the book are based around recipes using foods commonly found on special offer in supermarkets. The idea of a cheap eats cook book is hardly new and since the start of the downturn budget cook books have become big business.
Books such as The Frugal Cookand the splendidly titled How to Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy, Balanced Diet with Very Little Money and Hardly Any Time, Even If You Have a Tiny Kitchen, Only Three Saucepans (One With an Ill-fitting Lid) and No Fancy Gadgets – Unless You Count the Garlic Crusher– have been flying off the shelves .
Carty is not daunted entering such a competitive marketplace and she told Pricewatch last week that what makes Shrewd Fooddifferent is that it takes all the hassle out of cheap eating. From this week her site will carry a weekly guide showing people how to live on less than €100 a week. "It is not that difficult to feed a family for under €100 at all, particularly when you take advantage of the special offers stores have on a week to week basis," she says.
“I am a third generation shrewdie.” Her granny had a shop in Dublin and a farm “down the country” so the family was pretty comfortable. Her mother was “one of the most generous people I’ve known” and “was also a shrewdie. Carty lived abroad for 26 years – in London, Cyprus and Dubai – and when she returned to Ireland in 2000 she was recently divorced and with a young son to care for. “If ever I needed my shrewd living skills this was the time. She bought herself a big freezer and took advantage of all the special offers to save money. She bought, she cooked and she froze.
“I think a lot of Irish people got out of the habit of cooking during the Celtic Tiger years but because we were eating out a lot more we grew accustomed to more adventurous types of food, food that many people don’t know how to cook. This book attempts to redress that balance. Food is really not that expensive and there are a lot of value products out there that are really good,” she says.
Now, value products are something Pricewatch knows a thing or two about, having reviewed countless budget options from the big retailers over the last five or six years. While some are okay, very few are wonderful and many are absolutely revolting so consumers do need to shop carefully in that space.
Of course, the real key to eating well for buttons is planning. You need to sit down at the start of the week, draw up menus and plan your shopping accordingly. Otherwise, it can be very hard to rustle up some class of exotic Moroccan tagine on a random Tuesday evening when all you’ve got in the house are a few Quorn sausages, some half-eaten pate that you’ve lost interest in and a salmon steak which has been hiding in your freezer for more than a year.
“The website takes the planning aspect out of it as we do it for you,” Carty claims. She sources and records all the supermarket specials weekly and draws up menus based on them. It sounds like a lot of work to us but she claims she has become very practiced at it. “I don’t think it is a case of being frugal, to be honest but if you can save money on the type of food you eat and still eat well, then you can spend it on something else like clothes or holidays.” She says she is shocked at what people spend on food and is “appalled at the levels of waste. If I cook too much of one thing, I just cool it and eat it the following day or freeze it but I hate to see food going in the bin. It is such a terrible waste.” One of her more recent tips to cut down on waste is fruit bowl jam. You take whatever you have in your fruit bowl at the end of the week – the fruit that is about to go off – and make jam out of it. Almost any fruit in almost any combination will work she says – except, incidentally, bananas. There’s a reason you’ve never heard of banana jam – it’s revolting.
Seven tips for seven days
1 Make a listLists save you money, there's no two ways about it. Use supermarket fliers and newspaper ads to inform your choices.
2 Stick to the listThe easiest way to waste money shopping is to impulse buy, if it's not part of your eating plan, ignore it.
3 Never shop hungryA starving shopper is a stupid shopper.
4 Shop in the morningRetailers put out specials early – once the quota is gone, it's gone.
5 Go genericDon't turn your nose up at own-brand products – own brand milk is up to 30 per cent cheaper than branded milk yet it comes from the same cows.
6 Don't overbuyTwo-for-one deals can be very bad value. If someone has to throw food out make sure it's the retailer, not you.
7 Buy localYour local fruit and veg shop or butchers often offers better value than the big supermarkets.
