Managing a low food budget

Managing a low food budget is not easy, and takes time and planning. I seem to be spending a lot of my time preserving food at the moment. Trying to be food secure is a balance. In the past I have gone over the top, preserving too much food.

I made 17 jars of jam one year, and lots of chutney. We don’t even eat one jar a month. Now I have realised that they last a couple of years, I will preserve different fruit, different years. It is hard not to preserve as much as you can, especially when it is wild and free. I do give new preserves as presents at Christmas, though, in hampers.

However, from making those mistakes, I am now better at deciding how much to preserve and grow. I also used to over stock bought food items but manage my cupboards better now as I have more of an idea of what we eat a year.

Preppers can look on line and there are various charts showing how much a person needs to survive a year. I am not a prepper, and, as I don’t do a manual job, it is more than I would need. I preserve food that I grow or forage so that I can eat well on a low income. It reduces visits to the supermarket whilst providing me with nutrition and better quality food.

I have an annual food budget of £700 this year for the 2 of us. I have increased it by £50 for 2025, due to rising prices. People ask me how I manage on that. It takes a lot of planning, preserving, foraging, growing, and a bit of maths.

First of all I grow what we like to eat, and what will be useful in meals. In order to provide lots of protein for the vegetarian meals I grew 4 different kinds of beans, and some peas. These are eaten fresh throughout the summer, and then frozen or dried. They cost too much to can (3 hour waterbath), and I don’t want to waste salt.

I can’t grow enough beans in my garden to sustain us all year, but preserve and eat as much as I can. We supplement these with two big bags each of chickpeas, beans, and lentils a year. I buy 1 of each every 6 months from the World Food aisle. We also get an odd can of lentils from the Company shop when they are selling them for 35p. They come in useful when I want to make something quickly.  I buy 20 tins of cheap baked beans a year from Lidl (28p each at the moment).

We eat other vegetables seasonally as we grow them, or we freeze them. I also stock up on the 15p veg when available at Christmas and Easter, and store and preserve those. Potatoes are planted from March to September and grown in the greenhouse when the frosts are around. Salad leaves are sown every 6 to 8 weeks so that we can have a continuous supply.  I buy a few pumpkins at Halloween as they are cheap, and do buy a bag of  sweet potatoes about 4 or 5 times a year. Last year I had to buy some carrots, but we have had a bumper crop this year, and more have been sown.

The vegetables that we have as sides or cook in our meals are sweetcorn, potatoes, Swiss chard, spinach, pak choi, peas, beans, carrots, courgette, and beetroot, mainly. These are crops that grow well in my garden. I also grow spring onions, radish, lots of salad leaves, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes. If vegetables can not be eaten fresh they are pickled, fermented, made into piccalilli, chutney, or just frozen.

Onions are important as they give lots of taste to food. We can’t grow quite enough onions, garlic or leeks,  in the space we have, and so we buy a big net of onions each winter. Farm Foods often have them at a good price. We also got lots of shallots in the 15p veg last Christmas. Foraging wild garlic in March, and preserving it, also adds taste to our food.

Tomatoes are a staple. I have about 50 plants growing as I always sow too many. These provide us with fresh tomatoes for between 2 and 4 months of the year, and at least 12 large jars of passatta to preserve. We make tomato based sauces about once every 2 weeks, and so that will mean that I will have to buy 12 cans of tomatoes. If I can bottle more I save money buying tins. Having the home preserved passatta means that when the organic tinned tomatoes are on offer, I can bulk buy the amount that I need for the rest of the year.

A lot of our desserts each week are derived from compote. It might be in a pie, crumble, or served with yoghurt, custard, or ice cream. We therefore need lots of fruit. This year I have water bathed big jars of compote and will need 2 a week. I have only made enough for 2 months due to lack of jars and storage space. It is also my first year of doing this and so I want to make sure that it works. I grow rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries,  have hedges of currants, and forage apples, pears, cherries, bilberries, blackberries, and sometimes plums and raspberries when we find them. Everything is frozen except the apples which are stored in boxes, wrapped in newspapers. Two thirds of them are cooking apples, the rest being eating apples.

We rarely buy fruit, except 4 lemons a month.  I might get an odd melon if they are on offer, or an odd bag of satsumas. We do get fruit (and veg) from the waste food project sometimes, as we go there now and again in winter. It is a ‘pay as you feel’ and open to every one. This was a great help last winter and gave us more variety in our food, eg we got lots of limes. However, it is a car ride away and there is no guarantee of getting anything, and so we don’t go often.

We started making our biggest saving 2 years ago on meat. We eat 3 lots of meat a week and stretch it sometimes to make more meat based meals. I stopped buying yellow sticker meat in 2023. It was a false economy as it needed cooking straight away and wasn’t always good quality. Now we buy half price joints at Christmas and Easter and we mince, cut them into chunks, and make sausages from them. This has saved us a fortune. We have also sometimes bought whole salmon when half price and filleted and cut them into portions.

Each year we buy 10 big chicken breasts from the butcher for £18. One breast will feed us both. If we have been lucky the Company shop have provided us with broken fish fingers in bulk, big packs of bacon mishapes for 75p, an odd half priced gammon joint,  and discounted prawns. All this means that we live well for little money.

Flour, pasta, and grains we buy in bulk every 6 months. Sometimes we make our own pasta or gnocchi. Bread and wraps are baked for most weeks, and so we  worked out the flour we would need for that from the recipes, and multiplied it by 52. Some of it is ancient grains if I can find it on offer, the rest is cheap wholemeal or white bread flour. We also allow for a bag of plain and self raising flour a month (bought from discount supermarkets). I buy yeast from Aldi.

I supplement our flour using foraged dock seed flour, and flour made from home grown. courgettes. Hopefully, I am going to try making acorn flour this year. We have grown Amaranth and quinoa to supplement our grains. A large bag of rice is bought when it is discounted for Ramadan and it lasts us more than a year.

For drinks Mr S buys his own coffee, and diet Pepsi, when it is on offer. I make my own herbal teas and cordials. I do bulk buy one big bag of tea bags each year.

We mainly bake our own cakes and biscuits, though buy odd  things discounted from The Company shop. We make some of our own snacks like pop corn, apple or potato crisps, fruit leathers etc. The rest we buy with our pocket money if we visit the Company shop.

We buy 2 pints of whole milk a week (from the milk man as it is creamier), and dilute some of it to be like semi skimmed. I have some dried milk as a back up. We make our own yoghurt, and cheese is bought discounted after Christmas, and frozen, or bought from The Company shop when discounted. If we have found discounted cream we will make butter or ice cream and freeze it. We are still cooking with olive oil bought before prices rose dramatically, or I will cook with lard, or saved fat and oil. Having the air fryer means we need very little fat.

Top Tips.

1. Shop around and only buy things if discounted.

2. Buy in bulk but check the price is cheaper.

3. Make meals, condiments, and staples like bread from scratch.

4. Meal plan and eat from what you have in.

5. Plan ahead.

6. Only buy and grow things that you really like.

7. Read world news. Mr S saved £4 a bag off his coffee and bought in bulk as I was reading that it had been a bad coffee harvest. 6 weeks later it had gone up. We still have olive oil from when it was £3 a bottle for the same reason.

8. Supplement with free food where you can. This might be foraging, an app like Olio, or ask for things like meat bones that family would waste (you can use to make stock).

9. Learn to adapt and be willing to change what you eat. Some years harvests fail, or are not as good. Bargains we have relied on may not be available. Stay flexible and think outside of the box. Substitute ingredients. I have used barley and orzo when I have run out of rice.

10. Use everything up. Don’t  have any waste.

11. Visit the supermarkets or shops as little as possible, and shop with a list. It is so easy to pick up extra items.

12. Eat vegetarian as often as you can.

Managing on a low food budget is not easy but if you have the time and can be creative, you can still eat like kings. Food is one of the few areas in a household budget that it is a possible to reduce spending. What are your tips for spending less on food?