How much do you spend on food?

kiwi pom

Member
Location
canterbury NZ
Perhaps this should be in off topic, Mods feel free to move it.
With all the current talk of food prices and the inability of people to cook, I wondered, who does the food shopping in your household, where do you shop, how often, roughly how much a week would you spend and has it gone up recently?
Also who's cooking and meal planning, how often do you eat out or buy takeaways?
 

kiwi pom

Member
Location
canterbury NZ
$13.99 for a lettuce in town plus $12.99 for a 250gm punnet of strawberries. meat is ridiculous on a per kilo basis. I'd say foodflation is running close to 25 to 30% here...

Cheaper to eat chips and junk and start drinking again.....
I heard lettuce is an issue. KFC using cabbage instead and McDonalds air freighting lettuce from NZ.
Down to the flooding?
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
Around $120/week here - mainly snacky stuff for kid's lunches.. coffee, sugar and cleaning /personal hygiene stuff. Same spend as when I was a kid but it buys a lot less.

Things have crept up but we spend a lot less than 5 years ago because we do more for ourselves than we did then - I do more fishing and diving, less hunting, more things growing in the garden, more meats in the freezers

Would hate to think what it would cost to buy all the ingredients to dine the way we do, I think $600/week would be ballpark.

Takeaways, yep we do quite often, good "pie cart" down the street does amazing sushi and pizza, burgers etc.
We give them our excess veg and Hiroki gives us freebies whenever we go there, a bit of bartering makes life very enjoyable, especially when we both finish work late some days and the lads are fractious.

All up, including the takeaways, fuel to go "hunter gatherer-ing" I would say $50 per family member per average week feeds us
 

B'o'B

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Rutland
My wife does the food shop 80% of the time, but I’ve noticed the rise in cost when I do the shop and mainly on the staples rather than the ‘nice to have’ items. It feels like food inflation on my basket of food is running at around 15-20% y-o-y (I hasten to add that is with out any serious analysis!)
 

wrenbird

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
HR2
Today’s lunch for four people was roast lamb, new potatoes, broad beans, carrots, mint sauce, gravy and Yorkshire puddings followed by Bakewell tart. All home cooked from scratch, the lamb, veg, mint all home grown.

I do all cooking, pretty much every thing from scratch including bread etc. This time of year the veg garden is coming into full production, any meat, other than lamb, comes from butcher in nearest village, all their meat is sourced as locally as possible, usually name of farm of origin displayed prominently.
Some dairy etc from large farm shop about six miles away. I was classed as extremely clinically vulnerable during covid, so had priority supermarket delivery, have kept on with that for other stuff we need, loo rolls, cleaning products etc.
Some weeks we would spend very little, other weeks more, buying flour etc in bulk to replenish larder.
Never eat take-always, very rarely eat out.
 

kiwi pom

Member
Location
canterbury NZ
Around $120/week here - mainly snacky stuff for kid's lunches.. coffee, sugar and cleaning /personal hygiene stuff. Same spend as when I was a kid but it buys a lot less.

Things have crept up but we spend a lot less than 5 years ago because we do more for ourselves than we did then - I do more fishing and diving, less hunting, more things growing in the garden, more meats in the freezers

Would hate to think what it would cost to buy all the ingredients to dine the way we do, I think $600/week would be ballpark.

Takeaways, yep we do quite often, good "pie cart" down the street does amazing sushi and pizza, burgers etc.
We give them our excess veg and Hiroki gives us freebies whenever we go there, a bit of bartering makes life very enjoyable, especially when we both finish work late some days and the lads are fractious.

All up, including the takeaways, fuel to go "hunter gatherer-ing" I would say $50 per family member per average week feeds us
Ours is around $300 a week but that includes cleaning stuff, washing liquid, bathroom stuff etc.
Go to Pac N Save or the local New World for odds and ends, as well as the butchers shop at the freezing works. We do have a veg garden and fruit trees. I always have a good stockpile of stuff, when we had the "sickness" and weren't supposed to go out for a week we didn't need anything.
Once a week take out probably, which might be Saturday lunch time after the kids soccer.
I end up with 80% of meal planning and cooking.
 

Lakes Nash

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
South lakes
My wedge is going down, mrs says she’s doing her best, not as much grown locally now, I don’t know any farm that grows spuds nr us or even green crop, forgot, we have a large greenhouse , so toms, peppers cucumber when ready and a few tubs outside with courgette n onions, and a big patch of Rhubarb
 
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Shop mainly in Home Bargain, Aldi, Asda and Morrisons. Veg and meat is mainly Asda and Home Bargain. Delamere goats butter from Morrisons. Cheese from Home Bargain. Have a list and a rough idea of price of everything in my head from previous week (sad, old bookeeper type!) and buy from whoever is cheapest.
We're 'eaters' not farmers but we've got a 100' garden. Keep a few hens and sell some eggs each week an money goes towards feed costs. Keep some bees too. Grow some veg, mainly spuds, carrots, onions, garlics, peas and tomatoes. We've a couple of apple trees, and grow raspberries and strawbs. Make jams and juices and bottle tomatoes and beetroot. Grow some herbs.
Our Sunday joint usually covers a stir fry on monday and a curry on tuesday most weeks. Half a leg of lamb was £8 ish last year but its now about £11 and a medium chicken was £3.25, now £3.90.
Average weekly shop last year (not just food) cost £70, but that has gone up this year.
 

cows sh#t me to tears

Member
Livestock Farmer
I heard lettuce is an issue. KFC using cabbage instead and McDonalds air freighting lettuce from NZ.
Down to the flooding?
Allegedly.......Rather skeptical it's not purely price gouging. Radio reports come out with price spikes like this, which in turn gives supermarkets license to jack prices, because it must be so.......See a thread on here about a cost of living march in the UK. I can see worse here soon. Wouldn't at all surprise me if there's not a few riots in the next 6 months..... Sure, as farmers we love nothing more than finally having our moment in the sun (even if every other wanķer is sticking all our inputs up to. ). But we are also consumers, Its frightening trying to keep food on the table for a couple of teenage boys....
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
Ours is around $300 a week but that includes cleaning stuff, washing liquid, bathroom stuff etc.
Go to Pac N Save or the local New World for odds and ends, as well as the butchers shop at the freezing works. We do have a veg garden and fruit trees. I always have a good stockpile of stuff, when we had the "sickness" and weren't supposed to go out for a week we didn't need anything.
Once a week take out probably, which might be Saturday lunch time after the kids soccer.
I end up with 80% of meal planning and cooking.
I have always had a weird "fixation" with buying tinned stuff, even if it's just a tin or two per week of things we don't actually 'need' at the moment

Your thread here had me run some rough calculations as to what this treasure-chest cost, vs replacement value today - it's appreciated about 105% already, most of the stickers have $1.20-$1.40 on them and would be over $2.50 now.
Multiplied by about 1200 tins and it's quite an "investment" really!

We have so many power cuts (lots of lines, not many peoples) that we often dine on tinned grub heated over the woodburner or camp-cookers - 2 unplanned outages and 2 planned ones this month to date.
Feel a bit sorry for all the homes with heat-pumps only, because that's another thing that is rapidly increasing in price, for no gain in quality or service
 

holwellcourtfarm

Member
Livestock Farmer
We stock up on cleaning stuff etc at Costco twice a year, about £130 a time.

Otherwise we plan every days meals, a week at a time, and I shop for it. Mainly Lidl or Aldi. Comes to £35 - £45 per week for 2 of us.

Both enjoy cooking from scratch so batch cook and freeze excess as homemade ready meals.

Within that cost we eat a lot of fruit, lots of meat, plenty of dairy.

Zero crisps, cakes, biscuits, shop bought ready meals etc. Only cereal is porridge. But tinned and frozen fruit too.

Have a take-out maybe once a month on average. We have a rotating dinner date with several friends 5 or 6 times a year (so roughly twice a year we cook for all 6), all home cooked.

Grow some of our own fruit.

Have usually had our own beef in the past.

Oh, and we bulk buy our butter from @onesiedale several times a year.
 

Tim W

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Wiltshire
I have no idea what we spend on food but buy / trade with locals as far as possible
I like good food & cooking so tend to just buy what I want without really looking at price.
But we don't do TV & gadgets, don't spend on outings or fashion
Grow as much veg as I can
Eating out? Yes please ....but it's not always possible to find anywhere with as good ingredients as I have
 
I have no idea what we spend on food. We buy bread at £2.09 a loaf for sandwiches which is too expensive really, but all gets eaten.

No eating out, fish & chips every so often.

Try to grow as much as a I can and less than I would like - late this year due to commitments. Would like to sell some veg at the farm gate and I do think people will need it soon.

Growing lettuce, onions, potatoes, peas, beans (broad, runner & french), beetroot (Shop beetroot is appalling), tomatoes (Failing), some cabbage & brocolli, carrots, radish, apples, strawberries and raspberries.

Next year want a further push to get some fruit trees planted and expand the veg garden. Want some ducks and maybe chickens but it's all work that can get interrupted.
 

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