Food poverty-the way out

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thirdcrank
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

Post by thirdcrank »

The eligibility for the £150 is based on Council Tax band so it's paid by the local authority
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simonineaston
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

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Bands A, B, C & D only
S
(on the look out for Armageddon, on board a Brompton nano & ever-changing Moultons)
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al_yrpal
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

Post by al_yrpal »

Ah yes, band D, much to neighbours disgust! :wink:

Al
Reuse, recycle, thus do your bit to save the planet.... Get stuff at auctions, Dump, Charity Shops, Facebook Marketplace, Ebay, Car Boots. Choose an Old House, and a Banger ..... And cycle as often as you can......
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Mick F
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

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Hi guys, I expected it would be by letter. No doubt with a cheque counterfoil like we get from Western Power Distribution for the two poles on our land as rental. Also, when we had extended periods of the water supply being off, Southwest Water wrote enclosing a cheque by way of compensation.

As for direct debits, we have two.
One for Netflix and one for Toyota insurance (roadside/home-start/recovery/assistance)

Everything else, I pay online directly from our current account. The way I see it, if we're on the bones of our wotsits, we would be in control, and not at the mercy of a direct debit.

We're Band B. Small two bedroom bungalow.
Mick F. Cornwall
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simonineaston
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

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I've been reading about these "cheque" things a couple of times recently... I think somebody sent me one - in a "letter", would you believe! the other month, but when I went to look for a building called a "bank" all I could find was something called a "Wetherspoon". When I showed them the cheque they seemed as puzzled as I was and offered me a pint of beer instead... :wink:
S
(on the look out for Armageddon, on board a Brompton nano & ever-changing Moultons)
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al_yrpal
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

Post by al_yrpal »

Apparently the average household monthly food bill (from last nights moneysaving programme) is £275. I monitor our monthly supermarket bill and its about £450 and thats mostly at Aldi. It does include a couple of bottles of wine a week, flowers and household items too. The couples that featured in the programme had spending way out of control. One of them was a keen cyclist spending large amounts on bike parts! :lol:

Al
Reuse, recycle, thus do your bit to save the planet.... Get stuff at auctions, Dump, Charity Shops, Facebook Marketplace, Ebay, Car Boots. Choose an Old House, and a Banger ..... And cycle as often as you can......
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simonineaston
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

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One of them was a keen cyclist spending large amounts on bike parts!
I'm sure that with the wrong - or right, depending on your pov! - attitude to budgeting and spending, it's just as easy to over-spend on cycle parts as it is on food, or alcohol etc. etc. We're largely creatures of habit (or to call it its darker, other name, addiction) after all !
S
(on the look out for Armageddon, on board a Brompton nano & ever-changing Moultons)
Jdsk
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

Post by Jdsk »

al_yrpal wrote: 12 May 2022, 9:51pm
Mick F wrote: 12 May 2022, 9:05pm
al_yrpal wrote: 12 May 2022, 4:48pm Regarding the cost of living, the £150 energy rebate turned up in our bank account today.
How did they know which or who's bank account to pay it into?

How will the rebate be paid if you don't pay by DD?
With me, firms send me a bill, and then I pay it if I want to.

No doubt I could do my own research and not have bothered asking the question on here, but it's more fun to have a discussion.
We pay Utility Warehouse for gas and electricity by monthly variable direct debit from our bank account. We pay as we go.I guess somehow the government got UW to pay the £150 into that account?
simonineaston wrote: 12 May 2022, 10:09pm Bands A, B, C & D only
thirdcrank wrote: 12 May 2022, 9:54pm The eligibility for the £150 is based on Council Tax band so it's paid by the local authority
Mick F wrote: 13 May 2022, 10:41am Hi guys, I expected it would be by letter. No doubt with a cheque counterfoil like we get from Western Power Distribution for the two poles on our land as rental.
The "guidance" to billing authorities. Includes how they must communicate with households, including media based on dead trees:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... y-guidance

Jonathan
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simonineaston
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

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Postie brought this y'day
screenshot of letter
screenshot of letter
Personally, I think the use of the semicolon in the second line of the first paragraph is going out on a limb - I would have just seperated the phrases with an ordinary full stop, however on the plus side, it's nice to see the little fellow out and about, making for a rare sighting...
S
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Mick F
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

Post by Mick F »

I don't think I've used a semi colon since way back when.
Commas and full stops for me! :D
Mick F. Cornwall
Vorpal
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

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Cugel wrote: 12 May 2022, 2:18pm
Perhaps there are more effective ways of encouraging skills such as those typically included in "home economics" than devoting an half-hearted hour or two a week to them at school. Good cooking involves a large range of skills, from selecting & buying ingredients to managing different tastes and nutritional needs, not just the cooking parts (which can also become quite complex). Like all practical activities, a large amount of practice is needed, with the theoretical stuff merely something of an accelerant to the learning-by-doing (and mistake-making) via a great deal of the actual activity.

People who come from families with a deep cooking tradition are often the most successful at themselves learning and practicing "good home cooking". Even these folk, in this day & age, are often undermined in these skills as they acquire demanding jobs and other high time demands. And they are also waylaid by the immense advertising and peer pressure to eat pre-packaged (often junk) fud.

Like many skill-based activities, cooking from basic ingredients to fully nutritional meals needs a certain degree of background socio-economic stuff, both to enable it and to encourage it. It also needs to be something of a norm. These days, ability to perform these skills seems far from normal.

Most people I know, even of my own ancient generation, now eat pre-packaged supermarket and takeaway stuff almost exclusively. "It's easier and quicker", they claim. Some of the same folk also drive 200 yards to the shop for their noosepaper, crisps and fags, even though I offer to lend them a bike! It's easier & quicker, see? :-)

Cugel, well-fed by the immensely skilful ladywife kitchen magic.
Welcome back, Cugel :)

There probably are more effective ways of encouraging such skills, but lets not think that home economics is the only exposure young people have to such things in school. From a quite young age, they are taught about nutrition and foods, and given related skills in various topics, including problems they solve in maths.

There are also quite a few resources for cooking on a tight budget, including things like Jack Monroe's Cooking on a Bootstrap blog, where she makes a lot of economical recipes available for folks who need them. https://cookingonabootstrap.com/category/blog/

The people who eat loads of pre-packaged foods and take-aways are mostly not the same folks using food banks, however much certain media would like us to believe that.

Resources to teach people to cook aren't much help, though if they do not have the capacity or equipment. They aren't much help to people who don't have a refrigerator, or a working cooker. They aren't much help for people who are considered able to work but have a medical condition that leaves them too exhausted to cook by the end of a working day.
“In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.”
― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Jdsk
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

Post by Jdsk »

simonineaston wrote: 13 May 2022, 12:18pmPersonally, I think the use of the semicolon in the second line of the first paragraph is going out on a limb - I would have just seperated the phrases with an ordinary full stop, however on the plus side, it's nice to see the little fellow out and about, making for a rare sighting...
I agree.

And I wouldn't have used contained in where details of how to repay this amount are contained. Rather something such as for details of how to repay this amount.

Jonathan
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Cugel
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

Post by Cugel »

Vorpal wrote: 13 May 2022, 2:56pm
Welcome back, Cugel :)

There probably are more effective ways of encouraging such skills, but lets not think that home economics is the only exposure young people have to such things in school. From a quite young age, they are taught about nutrition and foods, and given related skills in various topics, including problems they solve in maths.

There are also quite a few resources for cooking on a tight budget, including things like Jack Monroe's Cooking on a Bootstrap blog, where she makes a lot of economical recipes available for folks who need them. https://cookingonabootstrap.com/category/blog/

The people who eat loads of pre-packaged foods and take-aways are mostly not the same folks using food banks, however much certain media would like us to believe that.

Resources to teach people to cook aren't much help, though if they do not have the capacity or equipment. They aren't much help to people who don't have a refrigerator, or a working cooker. They aren't much help for people who are considered able to work but have a medical condition that leaves them too exhausted to cook by the end of a working day.
Whilst there are many sources of nutrition and cooking advice, these alone are not enough to induce the skills and habits of cooking well with base ingredients. School lessons (even practical ones) and watching a media construct don't really provide much in the way of personal practice - ormotivation to acquire that practice. That needs an opportunity and motivation outside of formal education, usually only available to younger folk from within their family or maybe friends.

The same is true of any subject taught primarily in a formal and theoretical fashion. How much do you recall and use of the stuff that was taught to you in your schooldays? I often think that I learnt little at school other than the basics of readin' writin' and 'rithmetic. They put me in geography, woodwork, history, chemistry and metal work lessons. I even got the GCEs. None of it was of any practical use beyond passing the exams.

Personally I felt that I really began to learn only outside of school when I began to practice a range of activities that involved actual physical work requiring actual physical skills, from cooking something better than beans on toast to riding a bike further than around the playground without getting killed by a car or running out of energy when miles from home. Those skills often came via the example of an adept practitioner family-member or friends, not from any academic source. And hundreds of hours of practice.

**********
As to the matter of pre-packaged junk fud and food banks ... I have insufficient experience of food banks to have any useful opinions on the matter but what I have seen is that food banks do contain a significant proportion of tinned and packaged things as well as basic fresh food ingredients. That seems unavoidable given that the food market contains a high proportion of foodstuffs that are not fresh and basic ingredients. (Measure this in any supermarket you might traverse).

As to the difficulty of cooking with basic ingredients if you can't afford a cooker or the fuel to run it ... I entirely agree. My remark that such cooking practice requires a social, cultural and economic context supportive of such practice translates to, amongst other things, the idea that a degree of such infrastructure needs to be available to all in a nation, such that these modes of cooking and eating are possible.

Personally I would like to see a society and government that provided the sort of infrastructure aimed for and largely provided by the Attlee post-war government (and it's immediate conservative follower) rather than the neoliberal degradation of a society we currently inhabit wherein government feels no obligation except to the already well off (and to an ever decreasing proportion of even them). An economic system that allows millions to starve of freeze is an abomination if such conditions are preventable but that option is not chosen because a tiny gang of immensely rich people and their political armatures want to own every little thing.

Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
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simonineaston
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

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An economic system that allows millions to starve or freeze is an abomination
And so is an electorate.
S
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Cugel
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Re: Food poverty-the way out

Post by Cugel »

simonineaston wrote: 14 May 2022, 1:36am
An economic system that allows millions to starve or freeze is an abomination
And so is an electorate.
If you mean that the government is just a reflection of the attitudes of the people that voted for it .... well, ....

Firstly a majority of voters who voted actually voted for something else but the first-past-the-post system means we usually get a not-who-the-majority-voted-for party in power.

Secondly, the electorate contains a large proportion of people who have had their minds constructed by some mass media organ or other. In fact all of us are such constructs, in one way or another, if we participate in general social, cultural and economic behaviours that are close to unavoidable in the modern age. But there's an argument that we electors are puppets, so that the puppet-masters are the "true" source of the abominable socio-economic system of neoliberalism and its thousand degradations of various humans (and everything else).

I suppose it all depends on how cogent we regard the notion of freedom - free thinking, free speech, free choice et al. Personally I've more and more come to think that we're all largely puppets, with even the puppet masters themselves having strings leading to the hands what used to be called gods or devils but which we now might call memeplexes - the evolving patterns of ideas and designs that we think we control as "our" culture.

But we don't "change the culture" ... the culture changes us. It's easy to see how this works when observed from afar, as in seeing how the Russian or American mass media induce a complete alternative reality and associated nasty behaviours in the heads of their consumers. But it happens to us too - we just find it harder to see that once we've been mentally suborned by "our own" cultural constructs and their mass media propagators.

***********
So, how does one get a truly free-thinking, free-choosing electorate that makes more cogent and sustainable choices? Personally "I think" (ha ha) that we can't. The memeplex gods will fight it out amongst themselves and we may one day get a mass media promoting more inclusive and communitarian values and behaviours than those of neoliberalism. I'm not holding my breath, just hiding out in one of the last bastions of community thinking out here in West Wales, where it's still 1947. :-)

Cugel, another lucky boomer watching boomerville fade away.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
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