I shall be shouting at the TV

[Kaz]

Mick earns decent money but I would never, ever, spend that much money on food!!

Where do they get it from?

[Osc]

We spend around €50 a week for the two of us, and I am regularly horrified by the rubbish I see in the trollies of other shoppers These people who say they can't afford to cook are talking nonsense, if they could just see how expensive that rubbish in their trolley is, compared to buying and cooking fresh.

[Kaz]

Exactly Osc. My bill in Morrisons was £56 yesterday, that's for three of us and I might need more bread and milk later in the week

[Workingman]

I tend to do three types of regular shop: 1. Is for food and food only 2. Is for household and bits and bobs 3. Is to top up milk and bread.

If my main food shop comes in at much more than £27 I begin to look at what I have bought. Sometimes I am replenishing herbs and spices and cooking oil etc, so the extra is OK, but if not I really do begin look hard at things.

[Diflower]

No idea where they get all the money from, it's horrifying isn't it

We spend about the same as you Osc and Kaz - plus wine - and Wm you're roughly the same as well.
We all seem about similar so can't be that unusual, can we?
Agree with you though Wm, you do see these huuuge trolleyloads...

Btw, last week in W/rose one woman was obviously buying food for a crowd/party of some sort.
Ready-made curries - 10 boxes - errm no I wouldn't, but excusable at a push.
But you really can't explain or excuse 10 packs of rice, from the same section
Quite apart from rice being so cheap and easy to cook, they do actually sell bags of frozen, cooked rice - just looked it up, 4x180g for £1

[Aggers]

We watched the first programme, and that was enough.

I find it hard to accept that people can be so stupid, and I wonder whether
the whole thing was just engineered by the TV producers to make up a new
programme. Surely folk can't be that daft? Or is it just the result of living
in an affluent society?

[debih]

Noooooooooooooo.

£224 a week on your shopping bill is still ridiculous.


Noooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Stupid programme.

[Workingman]

There is a theme, apart from the one of them all being complete idiots.

£197 on 93 items at an average of £2.11 per item and everything in a packet.... even fresh veg! Five top-up shops per week bringing the total to £327 per week. And the "experts" reckon they could save them £60 per week. I always had Gregg Wallace as a con man and saving £60 is conning the family and the audience.

The theme: Big brands, use by dates, best before, packets, buy too much and throw some away, cook to much and throw some of that away.

The chicken nuggets did it for me. The packet might say 100% chicken breast meat, but a lot of it is mechanically recovered then bulked out. ASDA do chicken breasts at various sizes for £3.55. One breast prepared properly will give the same number of nuggets as a pack for about the same price, as the programme showed.... and they really are chicken breast.

[saundra]

I watch it on a Sunday afternoon
As it clashes with sewing bee

[Diflower]

Obviously, I did a lot of shouting

However, I liked tonight's family.
Yes they were stupid to be spending that amount, and they needed a lot of help - far beyond 'we can save you x per week'.
But that's been a common theme, these families are sadly not unique, all over the country people are shopping blindly, cooking hardly at all, and wasting vast amounts of money

Much goes back to basics doesn't it.
Last week's family had 4 children, yet the mother said she wasn't a confident cook - which extended to not being able to cut up a carrot.
Even a few years ago, you wouldn't have been able to have four children but not be able to produce a home-cooked meal. Whether you were confident or not was irrelevant, you'd have had to do it.

My best friend from work has 4 children, and was a single mother from when the youngest was 18 months old - and she always worked.
By the time I knew her, the youngest was 9, eldest 16, she was working full-time and every night except Friday she cooked for all of them.

On Fridays she went shopping. She didn't drive (and anyway couldn't have afforded a car) so the best way was to go to Asda from work then order a taxi home.
She'd get home with all the bags, dump the lot on the kitchen floor and tell the kids 'put it away properly in 10 minutes flat and tonight you can have what you like'.
It was a wonderful free-for-all, they would grab pizzas and bottles of coke and bags of crisps - but there were no more for the rest of the week.
When I was living alone I'd often be her Friday taxi, I loved those Friday nights