It’s Saturday morning at a busy supermarket in suburban Sydney. There’s the usual bustle of kids tearing around corners with shopping trolleys, parents balancing babies and baskets of food, young couples with bags of chips strolling arm-in-arm towards the bottle shop. And almost everyone The Weekly stops and chats with is feeling the pinch as the cost of living rises.
For some, it means cutting back on little luxuries – wine with dinner, sourdough bread, fancy ice-cream for dessert. For others, it’s more serious. The most recent Foodbank Hunger Report revealed that, in the past year, more than two million Australian households had experienced severe food insecurity, which means people had skipped meals or gone whole days without eating. And the Salvation Army reports that 3.3 million Australians (including 700,000 kids) are living in poverty.
We can’t fix the big issues here. But the good news is that, for many of us, there are all kinds of ways to not only keep household costs down but keep spirits up, our families and communities strong, and to live well – or at least better – on less.
Diet for a small budget
A University of Wollongong study found that eating healthy, nutritious, fresh food is more cost-effective not just than junk food, but than the average Aussie diet. So it pays to buy fresh food, but there are tricks to it.
The Weekly’s Food Director, Fran Abdallaoui, is a big fan of eating seasonally, not just because the food tastes better and is better for the environment, but because seasonal produce is almost always
