The Cauliflower Mac and Cheese from that book (A Year in 120 Recipes) has been reworked into an equally delicious Parsnip Mac and Cheese, but minus the eggs and bacon, for example. At the moment in the UK, we spend about seven to eight per cent of our household budget on food on average, and that's because everything else in our lives is so expensive. So, energy, housing, everything else. Real food is, for many, many people in the UK at the moment, unaffordable. They just can't buy good, healthy food however we describe it, even if you don't worry too much about the processing."

And it begs the point, that with several hundred thousand pounds of full time staff at their disposal to do the everyday grunt work, you’d think that MPs would use a fraction of that generous budget to actually do some research in their chosen field. Say, for example, the cost of a can of cheap tomatoes, and their availability nationwide, including in rural areas ill served by unreliable and infrequent public transport. Or investigate the limited grocery options in the immediate vicinity of the most deprived areas in their constituencies, before evangelically espousing how ‘the poor’ should spend their sorely limited income. Nutritionist Rhiannon Lambert is the author of a new e-Book, A Simple Way to Build A Lunchbox. She says: Early on in my career, I was advised to step away from political and social commentary, because I would ‘sell more books, be more palatable to the Waitrose set.’ I parted ways with that person pretty swiftly, because while I don’t doubt that my outspoken brand of visceral campaigning absolutely harms my book sales, I was a political writer, sitting in the public gallery of my local council meetings, blogging about the people who were making the decisions that disproportionately impacted me and my peers, like the closure of Sure Start centres, libraries, the demonisation of single mothers, the cuts to local funding, long before I ever wrote a list of basic ingredients down and scrawled together a recipe. Ultra-processed food refers to food that has been ultra-processed during its production, often with the addition of ingredients you wouldn't normally find in your cupboards, if you were trying to recreate the recipe at home (think emulsifiers, preservatives, artificial flavours and the like). Naturally, your next question is probably, 'Is all ultra-processed food bad for us?' This is certainly not the case, according to Dr van Tulleken, who points out it's not as simple as categorising food as either 'good' or 'bad'.

There's a binary food divide in the media these days between "the rich", who we imagine swanning round Waitrose with a trolley full of quail's eggs and umeboshi, and "the poor", who apparently live on fast food and ready meals. It's great that at least one food writer in print today understands the issues people on a tight budget have with good food - expensive to buy, cumbersome to transport and store, hard to cook from scratch with limited equipment, risky to spend cash on ingredients you're not familiar with. This is a definitely a book to buy for students off to university for the first time. The extensive use of tins means that even a fridge isn't essential for many of the recipes. Major budget items such as fuel prices may be out of our control, but "the grocery budget is one of the few places where we can reduce costs,” says Lesley Negus, an East Sussex-based frugal cookery blogger. “You can’t reduce your council tax, but you can make little savings on everyday meals which add up to a significant difference, and help you to feel more in control.” This beautiful edition contains illustrations and original full-colour photographs to really make your mouth water. I didn’t have a plan. Poverty is lonely, and isolating, monotonous and hopeless and grim, so I wrote about it because I’ve always written about things. Its how I process them, and anyway, nobody read my silly little blog so it didn’t matter. I documented the drudgery, the fear, the immobilising helplessness and depression, and I did it because I was planning to kill myself, and as niche and secret as it was, I wanted there to be some kind of record left of this excuse for a life when I was gone.

But low UPF recipes and diets have been on the rise lately, thanks in part to best-selling books like Ultra-Processed People, written by Dr Chris van Tulleken, an infectious diseases doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. Fridge pasta is another go-to for Suzanne Mulholland. “The oil means that pasta will last without being dried out. Then you can add feta or sundried tomatoes out of a jar to jazz it up. “Buying ingredients for salads that can be kept in jars is a great idea because they keep for so long without going off and add so much flavour,” she says. “Aldi has great jarred antipasti. Even seemingly luxurious items, like artichokes, are cheaper from budget supermarkets like Aldi, last a long time in your fridge and make a lunchtime salad much more exciting.” Thursday Soup

When you create your lunchbox, centre it around a balanced plate of carbs, protein, veggies and healthy fats.