Eating well on a tight budget

Filling your belly is becoming increasingly expensive, with recent figures showing that food prices are at a 34-year high. Thanks to fruit and vegetables currently costing on average 23 percent more than they did a year ago, eating well on a budget is tough.

Registered nutritionist Claire Turnbull says she understands that stretching the supermarket spend is a challenge.

“I know how hard it is when you're standing in the supermarket aisles trying to trying to decide what to do.

“There's a lot of people in the health and nutrition space that post a lot of things that are very expensive and unrealistic I find, but I try to do things that are more practical and realistic based on the budgets that we have to live to these days.”

She says there are two sides to saving money on food: one is managing what you spend, the other is managing what you waste. With that in mind, she's shared the following tips.

Plan to succeed: Think about what’s going on in your life before you start planning meals.Turnbull plans dinner first, then works out how to make the most of it in terms of effort and ingredients.

“At least two or three times a week I will make double what I need and then I've got a meal for next week. Or I'll make lunch for the next day. Because sometimes, particularly if you bulk buy and just the faff of cooking sometimes, it's easier if you make more and then you can just pop it in the freezer for later.”

Cereal is a budget killer: Ditch processed cereals for oats and repurposed stale bread to beat the budget blues at breakfast time.

“I'm such a big fan of oats. Breakfast cereals now, you know, they can get really expensive per box, so it's going back to the porridge. I make a soaked oats with some raisins and milk in it. 

“It really is so much more affordable than some of the processed breakfast cereals we buy and also so much better for you.”

If oats don’t appeal, “use any stale bread and dip it in some egg and make yourself good old eggy bread for breakfast”.

Bin the bags: If you buy pre-packed vegetables in plastic bags, ditch the plastic before they go in the fridge.

“If you get a bag of carrots or you get a bag of salad or anything like that, it is really important to take it out of the plastic before you put it into the fridge because it basically just almost sweats. 

“What I do with any bag salads or anything like that is I actually pop a piece of paper towel down each side of the bag when I get it home and that absorbs the moisture and stops it going off.”

Check your pulses: Can’t afford meat, chicken or eggs? Beans and lentils are your plant-based food friends, Turnbull says.  

“You can get a whole bag of lentils that would make enough to serve eight people, for $2.”

Cooked canned pulses, like chickpeas, butter beans or kidney beans are also cheap and versatile. “There are a million different things that you can do with pulses.

Frozen vegetables are fine: “They are just as good as fresh. So don't feel you're doing yourself any disservice by by getting some frozen vegetables.”

Flex those mussels: Mussels are an excellent alternative to other protein sources, Turnbull says.

“Ten mussels have the same amount of protein as three eggs. They’re packed with Omega 3, which is good for your brain, iodine, which is good for your thyroid, selenium, which we're often short on in New Zealand because of our soils, iron… honestly, it literally goes on.”

Don’t be a brand snob: “There are some great home brand products in New Zealand. To be honest, most of them are made by the same companies that make the other ones, because New Zealand's such a small country there's only so many food manufacturers for some of these things so often these things are made in the same factory by the same people with a slightly different twist.”

Treat sad green vegetables like flowers: Limp green vegetables can be revived with a drink, Turnbull says.

“Anything that can reabsorb water, you can bring back to life. With broccoli, if you chop just a little bit off the stalk, put it in cup of water, or for 20 minutes and it will literally come back to life. A cauliflower will do the same. It works for all sorts of different vegetables.”

Don’t give in to pester power: Don't let your children treat you like a short-order cook. 

“I think one of the challenges these days is that so many kids are used to being allowed to be fussy.

“Unfortunately, many of my friends, many of the people that I work with, will make multiple different dinners for their children. For my children, I say, ‘this is dinner, there is absolutely nothing else’.”

Prioritise protein: Eating protein-rich food helps you to feel full, as well as being important for the body’s repair processes.

“If you don't have enough protein in your meal, it's much more likely that you will overeat other things. If you’ve not got enough of the filling stuff, it's really easy to eat an entire plate of pasta and then want a lamington and a couple of biscuits with your cup of tea afterwards.” 

At breakfast time, that means eating eggs, or decent dollop of yoghurt. At lunch, opt for a tin of tuna or a couple of eggs mashed in a sandwich rather than a thin slice of cheese.

Keep potatoes and onions separate: “They both like the dark, but they will make each other sprout and go off quicker.”

Re-think the fruit bowl: Bananas (and a lot of other fruits) produce ethylene, which effectively makes them ripen each other. Keep them away from other fruit. Apples will last eight times longer in the fridge, Turnbull says.

Figure out where to trim the fat: Compromise is key to managing food costs.

“I know that for me, eating out is a thing of the past. I look at the price of sushi now and just think, ‘no, I'm just going to make my own’.”

Seeds are feeds: “We talk about nuts a lot but seeds - pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds - they are fantastic on your breakfast, on a salad, thrown into a stir fry…  definitely something to embrace having a bit more of for a bit of extra fibre as well for our gut health, because we all need to be looking after our insides as well as our outsides.”

It’s time to embrace tofu: “I've worked in nutrition for 20 years, and I have to say it's only in the last year that I've really accepted the fact I really need to learn to like tofu because it is nutritionally so good.

“It's got all the same amino acids that animal proteins have, so it's kind of equivalent to animal protein in terms of how good it is for you if that makes sense. It's just so cheap."