We were talking about rising food prices yesterday and I remembered that back in April 2023 I did a Challenge to see if I could live for a whole week on just £3.50, so I decided to see what the prices of those same items would be if I were to go shopping for the same products today.
Could it still be done?
These were the prices I paid back then.
So I went onto the Sainsbury's website and filled my basket with the same things, and found out that it would now cost me £4.61.
I had to buy two loose potatoes to make up the potato weight because sneaky Sainsbury's have reduced the bag of potatoes from 2.5kg to just 2kg ... and I hadn't even noticed!!
The only thing that has gone down in price are the peach slices, the onions seem to be cheaper but they are dependent on weight when you get there.
So the shopping basket has gone up in price by £1.14, which doesn't seem that much, until you go to the shops with your £3.50 for your weeks food and realise you can no longer afford to buy it.
I wonder if there's anyway of changing the shopping to make it manageable again, or is it now just totally impossible?
Sue xx
Sue, if anyone can answer your last question, it's you!!! But you said you had finished with challenges ;)
ReplyDeleteHaha, I have and I won't be doing it in real life, but I may do it on the computer to see if it's possible. 😄
DeleteI'm reading about war-time food production and how before the war the poor lived mainly on bread and dripping - seem like we'll have to go back to that at the rate prices are still rising.
ReplyDeleteYes, there's a menu plan chart doing the rounds on social media at the moment showing what a family from Oxfordshire ate in a week. It's eye opening. 🙂
DeleteI'd be interested in seeing the menu plan chart. Do you have a link please? Also thanks Sue for adding me so I can read this blog again 😍
DeleteIt was somewhere on Facebook that I saw it. I'll try and find it again if I can.
DeleteI always like to compare to our prices here in the Midwest US. I put those items in a Walmart online cart and my cost would be $14.09 (11.36UK). Everything is going up here too. Just can never quite wrap my head around such big differences from UK to here. I know a lot of it is that we are a larger country and seem to transport our food further. ~Carol
ReplyDeleteIt's not just the food prices though, wages in our country have not increased in line with inflation for years but every is going up. Our fuel prices have also started to rise again. It's now almost £1.40 per litre of fuel, meaning that all other transported commodities will be rising again. ☹️
DeleteI visited the Titanic exhibition in Belfast. They told us that the diet of the men who built the ship was mostly tea, bread and butter
DeleteIt's amazing how people survived on that diet doing such hard manual labour. It shows how soft we have gotten in the years since though doesn't it.
DeleteOf course, the average lifespan of a man around that time was only 50 years. :(
DeleteYes, and sadly thanks to modern bad diets without so much medical intervention we would be back to that now. ☹️
DeleteThose items cost me 16 dollars US online. Depends on your location and store but high regardless.
ReplyDeleteFood prices just scary at the moment aren't they, and it's mostly the healthy stuff that costs the most. ☹️
DeleteThere's so much shrinkflation going on which the stores (obviously) don't let on about, but hope we'll not notice. Well I do!! It's getting harder and harder to keep food costs down, prices of something or other (foodwise) have gone up every week. US food prices though are even scarier than ours.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering when Sainsbury's shrunk the potatoes from 2.5kg to just 2kg, and how long did I fail to notice this for? Yes, US prices are high and Australia's are even higher especially for fresh produce. Australia also has higher fuel prices than us now, so another blow for them.
DeleteFood prices have indeed become a worry, especially for families with growing children. To eat healthily is even harder, carbs are cheap, fresh veg and fruit expensive. Maybe we need to revise the way we view food. Treat is as fuel for our bodies, not something to fuss about, porridge for breakfast made with water, homemade soup for lunch and steamed veg or a salad for supper. No meat or alcohol, no takeaways or processed food, just enough calories to keep you going. I don’t think it would be very popular but food seems to rule do many lives, always looking to the next meal, expensive restaurants etc, it’s just fuel you need, there are other things in life to concentrate on. Sarah Browne.
ReplyDeleteA very good comment, thank you Sarah.
DeletePeople's expectations are so high these days aren't they, even including the foods that they want to buy and eat. Eating out is now also the norm for so many, all our local restaurants are full to capacity every Sunday with people expecting to go out every week to eat Sunday lunch. Back in the day it was always a family time with a slightly larger than usual lunch cooked at home, with leftovers for at least Monday nights tea and cold meat sliced for sandwiches during the week. I think going back to simpler ways is a very good idea, both for health and financial reasons.
The 'Tin Can Cook', Jack Monroe has recipe books full of inventive ways of doing food cheaply. Some of her recipes are unusual, to say the least!
ReplyDeleteYes, I've got all Jack's books and some of her pictures too, we were blogging buddies for a couple of years. Some of her recipes are unusual but have all been checked for nutrition, and even her original £10 per week shopping for herself and 'Small Boy' was found to be very healthy considering the money spent.
DeleteThank you for doing the comparison today as I had just emptied a bag from Lidl which seemed to contain a lot less than it used to for the same money. As children we were always given a slice of bread and butter with our evening meal-I guess it was fill us up. Pudding at the weekend only and I never had a fizzy drink as a child-milk, water and weak tea were my drinks.Catriona
ReplyDeleteYes, there was always a plate of bread and butter or margarine in the middle of the table at teatime. It was my job to butter it and lay the table while my Mum made the meal. Fizzy drinks were for holidays or bought with our spends. 🙂
DeleteAccording to the historian Ruth Goodman, in Scotland the diet was oats, in Ireland it was potatoes, and in England and Wales it was bread, and not much else, every day.
ReplyDeletehttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ncn_LoAQXk
I check the yellow stickered items and look for the budget range and wonky fruit and vegetables. Frozen fruit and vegetables can be better value, we have Aldi blueberries, peas, and green beans, there is less packaging and no waste.
Our bread is cheaper, made from basic ingredients. DH makes a small loaf of wholemeal and white flour just as we need it. There is never any waste. I had Mum’s old bread-maker for years, the new one has paid for itself. Basic home baking is much cheaper, scones and rock buns are our staples, and Bara brith which needs no butter.
I think the most important step is to alter shopping habits, and to buy nothing but real food. I don’t buy sugary breakfast cereals, oat or almond drinks, biscuits, crisps, fizzy pop, ready meals, tinned spaghetti, deserts, sweets, snacks, fish fingers or burgers, or anything low fat or Ultra Processed. They are not food.
I watched Mum do her shopping list in the austerity of the 50s, bread, milk, flour, sugar, tea, streaky bacon, mince or stewing beef, lard, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, one orange, not much else. She grew what she could. We had school dinners for a shilling, and free school milk, and we were the healthiest generation in British history.
Brilliant comment, thanks Nelliegrace. 🙂 My son only commented quite recently that he feels that his generation was the last generation to grow up living on predominantly 'real food'. McDonald's etc was a birthday treat not a weekly meal.
DeleteI'm so grateful that I don't have to count the pennies and can afford to shop - well, not me! xxx
ReplyDeleteYes, we are feeling very grateful for everything that we've worked towards now. I would hate to turn back the clock and have to do it all again.
DeleteFood shopping is getting scarier by the minute, isn't it. We hardly buy any meat at all now, have fish once a week and our protein is usually from eggs or a bit of cheese. Despite the cutbacks our last food delivery came to £46 and there were no cleaning products or washing powder etc to push the price up :/
ReplyDeleteYour shopping list above shows exactly why it's getting harder Sue.
Angie x
Exactly, if such a small shopping list has gone up by that amount, it shows what a larger list will have gone up by. ☹️
DeleteI need to start tracking food prices as you have done. I did it February a few years ago, but not since. I did look for marmalade last time I was at the grocery and there was nothing under $4.00/US, even going with store brands. I'm in New York City.
ReplyDeleteIt does make for interesting, and occasionally shocking, reading when you do this. 🙂
DeleteI've just price checked at my local Coles supermarket the cost of your shopping. A bag of 2 kg white potatoes is $7.90 and I've put the onions down at 70 cents for 180g. Everything else is the same except spaghetti rings which we can't buy here so its a can of spaghetti in tomato sauce. I've used where I could cheaper Coles brands. The total cost is $21.30 which at today's exchange rate is 10 pounds 76 pence😱
ReplyDeleteOh wow ... that is just scary. It's such basic food and it costs so much!!
DeleteThe rather large pack of egg noodles I used to purchase I noticed would now cost me close to $8.00 Canadian. I finally found some for less than $1.00. So happy about that.
ReplyDeletePrices here seem to go up weekly.
God bless.
Oh gosh, stock up while you can. 🙂
DeleteLooked up the cheapest prices for the foods you bought. Ours came to $21.22 Canadian/11pounds 93pence sterling!! Because of the threat of tarifs from south of the border we are all trying to buy local, Canadian or anywhere other than USA if possible. Of course that makes a lot of stuff more expensive, When you talk about your 3 pound 50 going up 1pound 14 not sounding like much it sounds like a lot more when you figure that it has gone up about 32%, yikes. It's pretty scary!
ReplyDeleteIt's a huge percentage for anyone on a tight budget isn't it. ☹️
DeleteI am on the west coast of the USA and those same (or similar) grocery items would cost a lot more. Our food prices have gone up, too, and continue to go up, although the new administration promised to bring down grocery prices on "day 1" of taking office! Ha, ha, I'm glad I wasn't holding my breath for that to happen! I put in a grocery order today and tried to stock up on sales items, for the most part. Eggs have come down in price by a whole $1 and are now priced $7.99/dozen. :D
ReplyDeleteYour eggs might have come down in price now, but they're still expensive aren't they. Ours are going up in price again due to continued outbreaks of Avian Flu. ☹️
Delete30% increase in your basket? Sadly, sounds about right.
ReplyDeleteLike you I keep track of what we spend every month and the percentage increase in our food costs in the last 4/5 years is not 30% but still horrendous.
It's such a shame when the cheapest foods go up the largest percentage isn't it. ☹️
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