Tips for eating well on a budget by Latoya Ford

Latoya from @purenourish is here today talking about the sustainable swaps we can make to eat well on a budget. Life coach and advocate for healthy living, she certainly knows how to make delicious meals that will make you and your bank balance feel great! Latoya’s specialities are creating healthy meal ideas for children and simple ways to cook better with less waste. We were lucky enough to catch a quick ten minutes with Latoya to learn some simple tips for how you can use home-grown produce for National Gardening Week...

This week (Monday 25th April - Sunday 1st May) is National Gardening Week and this year there is a big focus on home-grown produce.

Sustainability has been a big talking point over the past 12 months especially when it comes to reducing food waste and reducing single use plastic. Although sustainable swaps when it comes to coffee cups and water bottles are easy enough to switch to, most people find the topic of food and sustainability a lot harder to manage.

For those of you who either don’t have a local grocer or who want to start living a more sustainable life without breaking the bank, let's look at some basic changes which you can start doing today;

• If you have access to a garden, even a small one you could look at growing your own produce. However, if you don’t have access to a garden you can contact your local council to find an allotment near you to rent. This is easy to do online.

• You’ll save money growing your own, improve your fitness levels by gardening not to mention the benefits which being outdoors can have on your well-being.

• Growing your own produce is a great way to get kids involved in learning more about fruit and vegetables, and it be a fun project from start to finish.

• Shop-bought products will of course be necessary which you will require every week but to reduce food waste I would highly recommend doing a monthly audit of your kitchen cupboards and create recipes with food which you already have, and then do a food top-up by using the handy Fridge List from Boxclever Press.

• The Fridge List has a section for a weekly meal plan, so I would suggest filling in this section first and then listing the ingredients in the shopping list section below. This ensures that you are only buying what you need. I have reduced my weekly food shopping bill by half since being more organised.

• One final tip is ‘cook once, eat twice’ and by this, I mean batch cooking. You can freeze meals to use for lunch or for when you simply don’t have time to cook from scratch. This ensures that you aren’t throwing away any produce which might have passed its use by date.

I hope that these tips will help you in not only living a healthier lifestyle but also in saving money along the way.