Pantry raiders slash food bills
The James family spent about $500 a week on their grocery shop plus $350 on UberEats . . . they were spending about $45,000 on food a year.
Usually, when a show comes to New Zealand from overseas it’s difficult to see the point past jumping on the bandwagon (I’m still expecting a
Kiwi version of The Chase), but
thankfully that’s not the case with Eat
Well For Less.
The new series started here last night and while it sticks pretty reliably to the UK format, the major difference is that it’s telling Kiwi stories, using Kiwi brands and, more importantly, prices.
If you’re unfamiliar with the format the general gist is that a team of experts find families around the nation who are spending way too much on food that is mostly trash. They then replace the family’s usual food items with cheaper and healthier “swaps” to see if the family can tell the difference between the brands they love and the alternatives which could save them hundreds.
They discovered a pattern of families doing a huge weekly grocery shop full of many of the right things — fresh produce, lean meats, grains — then putting it all in the fridge to rot while they blew hundreds on convenience snacks and takeaways.
Some children had never seen fresh produce — one family confronted with an avocado for the first time firmly decided it must be a gone-off pear. I have to assume they binned it. But I digress.
Here in New Zealand, things are shaping up much the same as chef Michael Van de Elzen and restaurateur Ganesh Raj take over pantries across the country.
The first episode focuses on the
James family in which everyone has a major sweet tooth — Mum buys four to five blocks of Whittaker’s chocolate a week and Dad’s got a major Demon energy-drink problem. Their 4-yearold, Gareth, refuses to eat a vegetable unless it’s well disguised and he has a complete meltdown on discovering he can no longer access his treats.
Thankfully, Eat Well NZ doesn’t feel as exploitatively judgmental as the UK version sometimes does. There’s a little bit of poking fun at the supermarket, but it feels designed to break the obvious tension.
The focus isn’t on making people feel bad for not knowing what an avocado is, it’s on the money and, more specifically, the savings.
The James family spent about $500 a week on their grocery shop plus another $350 on UberEats in the same week. The Eat Well team did the maths and figured out they were spending about $45,000 on food a year. That’s more than many people make in a year.
The craziest part is that they were surprised. I’ve had a sneak peek at next week’s episode, in which a couple is similarly stunned by their $600 supermarket bill. Which begs the question; were they completely zoning out at the checkout before?
If my grocery bill got anywhere near $500-$600 you’d have to pick me up off the shop floor. But then the same could be said for other people if they got my bill — it’s all about what becomes normal.
The main culprit? Convenience. People are — lockdown aside — working harder and longer than ever and have no time to cook delicious, nutritious meals so they grab pies, pre-packed cheese and crackers, treats to keep the kids quiet and then hit a drive-through on the way home because it’s easier and you don’t even have to do the washing up.
But at what cost? Both families quickly discover that by swapping their usual products — not even cutting anything out — they could be saving at least $10,000 a year. Each.
The lesson is though that extra dollar or two for something a bit fancier might seem negligible at the time or worth it for the convenience, it quickly adds up without us realising.
Eat Well For Less, at least in some small part, may wake us up to those potential savings by comparing everyday products such as jam and mayonnaise to show us just how much we could save if we just ignored branding.
This is especially important because I’m painfully aware that much of Eat Well won’t be relatable for most Kiwis. Spending upward of $800 a week on junk food is very much a rich-people problem and most of us aren’t out there buying $12 jars of yoghurt.
However, those small savings on jam or mayonnaise are savings all Kiwis can take on board and for that reason, Eat Well For Less could fast become a Kiwi viewing staple.