Quality meals:cheaply
Given cost of living pressures faced by everyone these days, Adam was very pleased to see the article in the Herald on Sunday on how to prepare quality food for $10 or under for a family of 4.
He thought the recipes were good and the Herald on Sunday is to be commended.
Adam endorses seeking out local suppliers for example, especially butchers. He goes to the River Bank market, Lower Hutt on a Saturday as do hundreds of others, for fruit and vegetables. Even there shopping around between stalls can yield additional bargains.
Plus many New Zealanders do not eat offal such as liver, hearts or kidneys. Therefore, these can be purchased quite cheaply, are nutritious, tasty and great value.
Adam thinks that part of the problem with weekly shopping costs is that many choose branded, heavily promoted goods and further because of poor cooking skills buy pre-prepared meals.
He suspects that in some cases it will be middle income earners who may find difficulty adjusting as many lower income families have perforce had to do so already.
With the current uncertainties with food prices there is a greater need for us to conserve and be increasingly economical about food consumption at home. We have become wasteful as consumers of food and have never really had a need to feel otherwise before this crisis started. Blaming the rampant consumerism of the supermarkets has now irrelevant in this discussion. The situation now is that if we don’t change our food habits this situation could easily escalate completely out of control. The responsibility is now on us all to change our food buying and food consuming habits.
Simple food saving tips are things we need to get used to and practice more regularly. Most of these are common sense and can be quite creative. You can find a list of free food saving tips at sites such as http://www.foodcrisis.co.uk amongst other similar sites as well.
We all need to contribute to a fairer and more food wise program for ourselves.