If it’s 60 minutes of the bleedin’ obvious you’re after, I can’t recommend Eat Well for Less? (BBC1, 20 July, 8pm) enough.
Meet the Thomas family. Mum Mandy likes brands. She creeps out 12 times a week to covertly stock the cupboard with Coca-Cola, Walkers crisps and premium plonk. Oh, and ‘ping meals,’ (microwave meals to you and I) that feed up her four-strong brood when hubby Aidy is working late.
Sadly, this annoys Aidy. He prefers 17p own-label noodles and supermarket fizz. And you can see why. Top-up shops, an obsession with brands and enough snacks to send their kids hurtling into early obesity cost the family more than £230 per week - more than double the average amount a family of six spends on food.
And who helped tot up the receipts to deliver this bombshell (and make Mandy cry)? None other than Gregg Wallace and sidekick Chris Bavin, flown in to save the day and let the Thomas’s in on that elusive secret to eating well for less.
Or not so elusive, as it turns out. The secret, apparently, is to sneakily strip labels off food and replace pricey brand names with own-label alternatives, leaving brand-hungry Mandy none the wiser. Get rid of the ‘ping meals’ and cook a couple of times a week. Oh, and use leftovers.
And that pretty much covers it. Lo and behold, the family saved £85 per week, agreed to keep 89% of the swaps and are now off on holiday on the savings.
Cheers Gregg. How would we ever have worked all that out without you?
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