I reckon I keep a pretty close eye on our food bills, but budgeting £1 each a day for 5 days is a whole other ball game.
I’ve been trying to write about my own experiences trying to contain the cost of feeding my family, faced with spiralling food costs and diminished income. It makes me shrivel up with embarrassment, concerned about trivialising the issue of real poverty and genuine hunger for so many people.
Bemoaning the swap from Ocado to Sainsburys? Gracious the first world problem.
Banishing Shreddies in favour of supermarket own-brand “crunchy malted wholewheat cereal”? Boo hoo for you.
Dipped a toe in the brilliant orange waters of Sainsbury’s Basics range? How brave.
Justified buying Sainsbury’s Basics fruit and veg because I disapprove of food waste, and support eating produce of different shapes and sizes that supermarkets would otherwise reject? Hypocrite, I’d never have tried
it if it wasn’t cheaper.
If I’ve gone to bed hungry, it’s only ever been because of vanity or exhaustion, and I’ve always been able to feed my children.
I doubt that I would have considered the Live Below The Line challenge on the basis that 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty. The number is too big to get my head round, the population spread too widely. But this post, “Hunger Hurts”, by Jack Monroe, a member of the Mumsnet bloggers network, made me cry. It also made me want
to something, however trivial.