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Dinner for four for £3?

enjoyhealthyeating-siteNorthern Ireland’s Health Promotions Agency has launched a new website: EnjoyHealthyEating.info, which aims to encourage people to home-cook their own healthy food.  Conor Pope covers it in today’s Irish Times, and you may notice a quote from me in the article.

I think it’s a great initiative but wonder if you’d be able to get good quality ingredients for a similar price here in the South, given our much higher retail prices.  I think you’d need either to increase your spend a little, or spend a good bit of time shopping around and buying in bulk to ensure you get the value. But I do agree that it’s possible to cook healthy food at home for a low cost, and as the EnjoyHealthyEating site says, that ready meals and fast food can often be a false economy.

What do you think? Do you think you could feed four people for £3 (or €3.19 at today’s exchange rate)?

3 Comments

  1. Yes I think I could, pasta, fresh tomato sauce and herbs. Baguette and garlic butter. Admittedly I’d have some of the stuff in the house already but I think I could!

  2. I spent 4 euro today on a lovely sandwich at a service station. Although I usually make my own, probably saving over 3.50 per sandwich.

    I reckon up north you could do it for 3 pounds. Here, maybe 4 euro? Tight enough.

  3. You would definitely need to spend some time and effort sourcing your ingredients!

    Ready-made pasta sauce is a giant swizz- a tin of tesco value tomatoes is only 27c and you can’t taste the difference between these and Roma brand ones at nearly a euro. Throw in some onions, garlic, and dried or fresh herbs like basil and oregano and that’s all there is to it! Simple! And you don’t even need any fresh ingredients, you can cobble something together from whatever you have in the press!