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Cooking on a Bootstrap: Over 100 Simple, Budget Recipes

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I didn’t have a plan. Poverty is lonely, and isolating, monotonous and hopeless and grim, so I wrote about it because I’ve always written about things. Its how I process them, and anyway, nobody read my silly little blog so it didn’t matter. I documented the drudgery, the fear, the immobilising helplessness and depression, and I did it because I was planning to kill myself, and as niche and secret as it was, I wanted there to be some kind of record left of this excuse for a life when I was gone. If you're vegetarian, you might opt for a meat alternative, but lots of these products also "meet the definition of ultra-processed." Fridge pasta is another go-to for Suzanne Mulholland. “The oil means that pasta will last without being dried out. Then you can add feta or sundried tomatoes out of a jar to jazz it up. “Buying ingredients for salads that can be kept in jars is a great idea because they keep for so long without going off and add so much flavour,” she says. “Aldi has great jarred antipasti. Even seemingly luxurious items, like artichokes, are cheaper from budget supermarkets like Aldi, last a long time in your fridge and make a lunchtime salad much more exciting.” Thursday Soup

I write budget recipes. I have done for about 10 years now, publishing them for free on my online blog, and in books, several thousand of which have been given away free of charge to food banks. I do this because I was a food bank user, living in poverty, under the Cameron-Clegg-Osborne era of austerity Government. I found a way to cope with the mundanity and penury of my dismal day to day life, and I shared it, in case it could be helpful to anyone finding themselves in similar circumstances. I could have just done that, and probably been fairly wealthy by now, but unfortunately for me I don’t know how to keep my mouth shut and keep my personal brand palatable to the comfortable masses. But I find it unthinkable to simply offer up the canny ways to make a 45p bag of rice a bit less bland and shitty, without also examining the reasons why people need them in the first place. But, please don't let that panic you. Once more, "There are definitely ultra-processed products that aren't harmful. The issue is the pattern of diet," says the doctor (around one in five people in the UK and USA get 80% of the calories in their diet from UPF). Is it cheap to cut out ultra processed food?

Early on in my career, I was advised to step away from political and social commentary, because I would ‘sell more books, be more palatable to the Waitrose set.’ I parted ways with that person pretty swiftly, because while I don’t doubt that my outspoken brand of visceral campaigning absolutely harms my book sales, I was a political writer, sitting in the public gallery of my local council meetings, blogging about the people who were making the decisions that disproportionately impacted me and my peers, like the closure of Sure Start centres, libraries, the demonisation of single mothers, the cuts to local funding, long before I ever wrote a list of basic ingredients down and scrawled together a recipe. There's a very long, formal definition, but it boils down to if something is wrapped in plastic and contains an ingredient that you don't typically find in a domestic kitchen, then it's almost certainly an ultra-processed food," explains Dr van Tulleken. The Cauliflower Mac and Cheese from that book (A Year in 120 Recipes) has been reworked into an equally delicious Parsnip Mac and Cheese, but minus the eggs and bacon, for example.

If your next question is 'How easy is it to reduce my UPF intake?', it's important to note there are several factors at play and cost is one of them. They come from the same companies and the same system of production that makes the other ultra-processed foods, so they are not manufactured with your health in mind," but with the purpose of making more money, claims Dr van Tulleken. Below, Cosmopolitan UK talks to Dr van Tulleken about all things UPF, the benefits of reducing your intake, and why cutting out UPF might be easier said than done (but that doesn't mean you can't give it a go, if you'd like to). What is ultra-processed food? At the moment in the UK, we spend about seven to eight per cent of our household budget on food on average, and that's because everything else in our lives is so expensive. So, energy, housing, everything else. Real food is, for many, many people in the UK at the moment, unaffordable. They just can't buy good, healthy food however we describe it, even if you don't worry too much about the processing." Naturally, your next question is probably, 'Is all ultra-processed food bad for us?' This is certainly not the case, according to Dr van Tulleken, who points out it's not as simple as categorising food as either 'good' or 'bad'.Every one of the millions of hungry people in Britain today has a different story of how they got there. Benefit sanctions. Illness. redundancy. cancer. Military veterans. Survivors of domestic abuse. Generational trauma. Unpaid carers. The gig economy. Poverty wages. Zero hour contracts. Underemployment. Cleaners. Nurses. Teachers. Neighbours. You won't need a lot of expensive kitchen equipment for the recipes. A blender is useful, but not essential, many recipes are single -pot ones, so it's economical on fuel too. And it begs the point, that with several hundred thousand pounds of full time staff at their disposal to do the everyday grunt work, you’d think that MPs would use a fraction of that generous budget to actually do some research in their chosen field. Say, for example, the cost of a can of cheap tomatoes, and their availability nationwide, including in rural areas ill served by unreliable and infrequent public transport. Or investigate the limited grocery options in the immediate vicinity of the most deprived areas in their constituencies, before evangelically espousing how ‘the poor’ should spend their sorely limited income.

Major budget items such as fuel prices may be out of our control, but "the grocery budget is one of the few places where we can reduce costs,” says Lesley Negus, an East Sussex-based frugal cookery blogger. “You can’t reduce your council tax, but you can make little savings on everyday meals which add up to a significant difference, and help you to feel more in control.” But every single one of us, who has been desperately hungry, intolerably cold, suicidal, clutching at the periphery of survival by our bitten-down fingernails, have a single rotten thread that runs through us all. Binding us together, in our common unspoken grief for the ordinary lives that we didn’t get to have. That thread is austerity. A needless, useless ideology dreamed up by spin doctors and Old Etonians who have never missed a single one of their taxpayer-subsidised meals, let alone ten in a row. Its the idealistic abject cruelty of deliberately inflicting human suffering to bolster profit margins for the Treasury, by the rich, at the expense of the most vulnerable. Many of whom end up paying with their lives; snuffed-out mothers and disabled people, balancing the books of the economy, fertilising those much-lauded ‘green shoots of recovery’ with their decaying bones and subsequent ‘efficiency savings’. But low UPF recipes and diets have been on the rise lately, thanks in part to best-selling books like Ultra-Processed People, written by Dr Chris van Tulleken, an infectious diseases doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. This beautiful edition contains illustrations and original full-colour photographs to really make your mouth water.

His message reinforces what we already know: your diet has a big impact on your life. Research suggests poor diet is killing more people globally than tobacco, and when quizzed about what this entails, the author was very clear. "I think the evidence is very clear that by poor diet, we do mean an ultra-processed diet." Is all ultra-processed food bad for us? Recipes from here will no doubt be handed out at foodbanks with tins of potatoes, and tomatoes (suggestion try Aloo Dum, but with tinned peas). These are recipes based on storecupboard staples, and relatively affordable fresh ingredients such as spinach, carrots and onions. It's very easy to cook real food cheaply if you have a big kitchen and loads of Tupperware and a deep freezer and lots of time to do it. But if you don't have those things, real food is fantastically expensive," explains Dr van Tulleken. Far from loosening their belts over long business lunches, returning employees are preparing thrifty lunch box meals in the face of the anxiety-inducing cost of living price hikes.

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