Fill up the family for £20 a week
IF YOU’RE ON A BUDGET, WITH MOUTHS TO FEED, LORNA COOPER HAS YOU COVERED, WRITES ELLA WALKER
FIVE years ago, Paisleyborn Lorna Cooper set up a Facebook page to help people get dinner on the table more easily, healthily and – most importantly – cheaply.
She recalls how at the start, “we had people commenting and messaging us saying, ‘We’ve got £3.75 to last us until Thursday, what can we do?’ Or people saying, ‘I’m on maternity leave so I’ve only got £15 to buy the next four days’ worth of food’.” Half a decade on, she says, “that’s been consistent”.
Food poverty is being increasingly (and quite rightly) talked about more than ever before, and in terms of how many people are affected, Lorna says, “one person is way too many, isn’t it?”
The 43-year-old, started the FYF (Feed Your Family) community after a back injury left her off work sick for almost a year. As a mum of three and stepmother of two, her family’s £100-a-week food bill had become pretty much unsustainable.
“I started to look at the budget to see where I could cut costs,” she remembers, and began scrapping expensive jarred sauces, cooking from scratch rather than just heating stuff up, and soon found herself sharing tips online with other people in a similar position.
Her Facebook page (facebook.com/fyf20quid) now has more than half a million followers
– and a new cookbook, Feed Your Family For £20 A Week.
But it’s not just about handing someone a £20 note and pushing them into a supermarket, saying: ‘Here you go.’ Instead, Lorna is pragmatic, providing an eight-week, £160 meal-plan (to feed four people), and employing batch-cooking, buying in bulk and using up leftovers in ways that turn basic actions into tools of total ingenuity.
The ethos behind the food – which she says is “not fancy; it’s healthy, it’s filling” – takes you back to “what your granny or your great-granny would’ve cooked, from scratch. They wouldn’t have thrown out leftovers, they would’ve gone in the next meal.”
Lorna says these are skills a lot of people just haven’t had the opportunity to learn.
“That’s one of the reasons I started the Facebook page. I didn’t get taught it. I lost my mum when I was only 11 and I didn’t know how to cook. I hadn’t been taught budgeting.
“Home economics at school for us was making a mandarin cheesecake and learning to sew a cushion – not exactly the most helpful,” she says.
These days, Lorna is well clued up. “It’s become a challenge and I really enjoy it,” she says, describing how she’ll spot a recipe or dish and think, ‘Oh, I could make that’, before going home and whipping up a significantly cheaper, veg-heavy version.”
So how can you stretch £20 into a full week of meals? To start with, for Lorna doing a big shop involves more than one supermarket. “There’s a lot of shopping about, to see where’s got the best bargains.”
When you get home, it’s about being savvy with your time and your freezer (“What I mean when I say ‘batch-cooking’ is it doesn’t take any more time to make two lasagnes than it does to make one”).
Despite the trend for veganism, Lorna’s approach to organic and free-range produce is just as pragmatic.
“When we didn’t have a lot of money, my main thing was getting food into the kids to make sure they were fed,” she says.
“If you can afford to, if you want to, you can use more organic and free-range things, but the core of the book at the moment, it’s to keep the costs as low as possible.”
That said, eating more affordably often has its own ethical and sustainable plusses, she points out – it focuses on minimising waste, going big on veggies and pulses (which are naturally cheaper), and by default, using less meat.
“Maybe the average family would use 500g mince to make a lasagne,” explains Lorna. “We only use 200g.”
There is one item she won’t scrimp on though – butter. She says: “I’ll always buy real butter, always have done. I won’t use margarine. It’s only one ingredient away from plastic!”
■ Feed Your Family For £20 A Week by Lorna Cooper, photography by Andrew Hayes-Watkins, is published by Seven Dials, priced £16.99.