Budgeting

When the children were young and my budget was tight, I started to think of the cost of meals rather than the cost of individual foods or rather to think of the value of the food cost, the role of the food in our diets. In the supermarket I would calculate how many meals a product would provide -

- a packet of four quarter pound burgers for instance would count as two meals. Such burgers tend to retail at around a minimum 50p each mark making the main component of the meal (the centrepiece in Douglas-speak) around a pound sterling, which if served with carrot and bread would have minimal additional cost, whilst with chips or another processed product the additional cost might be 50p-£1 more. For many years meal prices ranged in £1-2 bracket. Clearly beans on toast would come under that but as my children were never big baked bean fans I couldn’t resort to that too often although egg on toast has always been popular.

And at the other end of the scale are the luxury meals – lamb chops which we all love and nowadays, sushi – expensive, but I calculate based on the nutrient content. I feel the same about ready prepared fruit. They are too expensive ordinarily but when they are on offer I can justify the expense by nutrition – a pack of fresh fruit chunks for instance is a rapid way to increase vitamin intake so irresistable are the chunks, making the product seem a good deal less expensive than if I were to continue to view it as an exotic or luxury item. Many prepared veg are also so delicious that they are eaten with relish – mashed (pureed) carrot and swede, green beans and parsley butter, potatoes of various guises peeled or ready wedged I regularly buy if they are reduced.

A little bit of processed…

I first embraced processed foods in the 1990s when I decided to combine bringing up children with a career. Back in the 1980s, however, we even crushed our nuts by hand! Well, not me personally but I knew people who used stone rollers instead of electric appliances. On the other hand, one of my friends used electricity to advantage and found local fame through the use of her ‘whazzer’, a portable pureeing wand. When the children were babies her ‘moozle-doop’ (pureed milk and muesli) was much admired and the endless soups and sauces that she produced from that point on, from the wholest of fresh ingredients, were a source of much mouth-watering.

I, on the other hand departed from my wholier youth and embarked on a journey into a partnership with the food industry to nourish my offspring. In the early childhood years it is immensely hard to resist the lure of ‘finger foods’ – nuggets, pizza slices – because these are presented in exactly the way small children find it easiest to eat, small pieces to pick up with their fingers to part suck and part chew. I once attended one of those history brought to life days in a civil war time house in north England (17th century). In the nursery there was a young child sucking on a ball of muslin in which was wrapped a piece of meat. I was fascinated by this cunning device to introduce nutritive juices to the small-toothed child.

But of course the problem with modern processed finger foods is that many products contain excessive amounts of salt, sugar and fat and correspondingly low levels of fibre and vitamins. My strategy was thus to mimic this easy-to-eat format as much as possible with convenient fresh foods and to ensure that any processed finger foods that were consumed, were diluted with a good portion of fresh, fibrous fruits and vegetables. The result was the deployment of crudités in liberal proportions – carrot sticks, cucumber chunks, tomato quarters, apple pieces. The latter in particular I found I could provide almost endlessly by leaving and refreshing a plate of apple quarters sprinkled with lemon juice in the vicinity of the play area. In later life the chunks of vegetables became almost exclusively whole carrots and this seemed a perfectly acceptable solution – if the children were prepared to eat several whole carrots a day I couldn’t see the point of insisting on other modes or vegetables.