So, tonight Hannah and I went to the dreaded Asda to shop. I never like going to Asda, especially at Cribbs Causeway. This is because it is far too big, I have no idea where anything is, it's full of people that don't care about anyone else, the food never tastes that great and I really can't stand their TV adverts. However, to get the cheapest food, it is normally the best place to go. So, on a large dose of valium and shopping list in hand, Hannah and I went into Asda hoping to find all the food we need for next week.
With such a tight budget, we had very little chance to allow any food to be over the price we researched from the internet. We started looking for the fresh vegetables. We had allowed ourselves 21p for carrots, which equated to 300g. It took 4 or 5 attempts to find the right combination of carrots to get this amount. We had a similar issue with the leeks. The potatoes were a bit easier, as these came in pre-priced packs. When we reached the onions we found a huge problem. The price we saw on the internet on Monday was an offer price, and now they were double the price/. What should we do? Did we buy the same amount of onions and just take a hit on something else, or use have the amount? In the end we decided we'd just have to use half the amount as the pricing was so tight we couldn't allow for it anywhere else. When we found the mushrooms, there were none left at the price we saw on the internet, 250g for 83p. However, there were some cheaper mushrooms - 400g for 79p, so we went for these instead, which would help a little bit allowing for a bit of slack in the budget, or allow us to eat a few more mushrooms for the same price!
Most other items we found OK, until we came to the rice. Now, from our internet research we had found the cheapest rice was 49p for 1kg bag. However, as we were coming up to another pair of bank holidays, all this rice had been sold. The next cheapest rice was more than double the price. This would add an extra 3.5p onto our total for Tuesday and Thursday (see the menu), which would tip us over the £1 a day level. What should we do? Do we reduce the amount of rice we eat and risk going hungry? Hannah asked one of the shelf stackers if they had any in stock. He looked at us a bit strangely, why did we want this compared to any of the other products? It made me feel embarrassed and shy - should it have done so? I don't really know. When he said they didn't have any in stock, we had to make a decision, so we decided to buy the rice and figure out what we'd do later (a cross-that-bridge-when-I-come-to-it attitude). A similar issue happened when we came to the biscuits. We were going to buy cheap own brand chocolate biscuits to treat ourselves during the week when there was some spare money (I'm a bit of a chocoholic). However, there were none left. In fact, the only cheap biscuits left were Rich Tea biscuits, so we took these. It wouldn't be as much of a treat, but still any biscuits are better than none at all.
At the checkout, we looked at all the food we had for the next week. It wasn't much. And on the face of it, it didn't look like it was going to be particularly tasty.
Shopping on the checkout conveyor belt
Receipt - £15.59 for everything, but some bits only a proportion is required
On the way home, I crunched a few numbers and found that the savings we had made on the mushrooms would allow us to eat the same amount of the more expensive rice. However, some of the price increases we found really would sting a little - the doubling of price of the onions, meaning we would only be able to use half the amount of onions would definitely change the taste of the food.
I thought about the problems with shopping at somewhere like Asda. Yes, they did have very cheap food. But because they have cheap food, lots of people go there to buy it, and so it is quite regularly sold out. If you are cash poor, then you probably aren't able to stockpile food, and probably most of the food you eat is perishable. So, what happens when you go to a store to buy the food and they don't have the food you require for the price you can pay in stock? Do you go buy the next cheapest food, but possibly financially burdening yourself for the next week? Do you try and find a replacement - although what sort of replacement could you get for something like rice? Or do you just go hungry and hope that the next time you go shopping it is in?
I wondered what would happen if I actually did live in extreme poverty. Would things like this happen all the time? I felt so stressed trying to work out what to do about the rice, the embarrassment I felt when we asked if they had any of the cheaper rice in stock. If this was a matter of eating or not eating then I hope I would just take it on the chin, but it must add to the worries.
I'm slowly trying to climb into someone else's skin.
SAM
The food for the week
