A Retired Nurse Explains Why Paying For Food Matters

A weekly shop for less than a tenner sounds like a trick, until you hear what happens when surplus food meets a real community. We sit down with Caroline from Blacon, a retired nurse and former army medic, who found The Bread and Butter Thing through a leaflet at her GP. She talks honestly about pride, stigma, and why it matters that a food club feels like shopping rather than a handout, especially for people who would never set foot in something labelled a “food bank”. 

Caroline also brings the practical mindset you only get from years on wards and in uniform: use what you’ve got, waste less, and look after the people around you. We dig into food waste and date labels, including the difference between best before and use by, the sniff test, and why small bits of kitchen knowledge can stretch a budget without sacrificing dignity. The conversation keeps coming back to something bigger than groceries: sharing bags with neighbours, swapping items, and how community turns affordable food into friendship. 

We also talk about the face to face moments that change outcomes, like meeting Citizens Advice at a hub and doing a quick benefits check, plus why social prescribing and links with health professionals can help people find support earlier. If you’re navigating the UK cost of living crisis, looking for ways to reduce food waste, or searching for an affordable food scheme that actually fits real life, this one is for you. 

Follow and subscribe for more stories from our members, share this with someone who could use a boost, and leave us a review so more people can find the help that’s already on their doorstep.

Transcript

Welcome And How The Club Works

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Hello and welcome back to a slice of bread and butter with me, Vic, and Mark. We're from the Bread and Butter Thing.

SPEAKER_03 0:16

We run a network of mobile food clubs that take surplus food from supermarkets, farms and factories, and we take it straight into communities where families are struggling to get by.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

For less than a tenner, our members get bags packed with fruit, veg, fridge food, and cupboard staples. It's a weekly shop that helps stretch the budget and take some of the pressure off.

SPEAKER_03 0:32

Our members are at the heart of everything we do. They turn food into friendship and neighbours into community, and that's what makes us tick.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Yeah, and today it's Caroline from Blakeon.

SPEAKER_03 0:41

Let's have a listen.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

I'm a retired nurse from the Countess of Chester, and I found out about the Bread and Butter Club through standing in my GPs when I went to make an appointment.

SPEAKER_03 1:07

Tell me more about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

I saw this pamphlet and I was like, oh, what is that leaflet? Never heard of it. I've never seen physically any food bank. And I thought, oh, I'll I'll join that and see what it's like.

SPEAKER_03 1:20

Do you think we're a food bank then?

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Well, no, it's not a food bank, but I associated it with a food bank when I first picked up the leaflet.

SPEAKER_03 1:28

Got it.

SPEAKER_02 1:29

So when I went, and there was all sorts of walks of life in there, but it annoyed me in the beginning that people were associating it with a food bank. And I said, wait a minute, here, this is not a food bank. We're paying money here. They gather all the money from everyone that comes in here, and they use that money by the looks of it. I don't know who does it. To keep going. I mean, how they manage that amount of food for that amount of people, week in, week out, with the money they get is amazing.

SPEAKER_03 2:09

Let's talk about home first. So is it just you and Hubbie at home?

SPEAKER_02 2:13

Yeah. Yeah, that's just the two of us. And we get a lot. I get the f the middle one, the£8.50 one, because I give it out.

SPEAKER_04 2:23

You share it?

SPEAKER_02 2:24

I share it. With other families. Like next door, she's a one-parent family. I give her all the veg. And if she doesn't use it, another family will because she's part of the Polish community. So I I split it all the veg, and you get tons of veg. It's great.

SPEAKER_03 2:40

Have you ever heard of a organisation called Rap?

SPEAKER_02 2:43

Rap, no.

SPEAKER_03 2:44

So they do a lot of environmental studies and things for the government. They used to be part of they're a bit like a government quango. And they reckon that all demographics waste food in the home the same.

SPEAKER_02 2:57

I don't agree.

SPEAKER_03 2:58

Why not?

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Because I've seen it. I don't come from here have this and I come from a different background.

SPEAKER_03 3:06

So if you if if you think something's gonna waste with used by dates and all that.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

Yeah, yeah, I don't believe in used by dates, I'm one of them.

SPEAKER_03 3:13

You're an old schooler.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

I'm an old schooler if it's sniffers alright, and then it it's usable. If I can't do anything with it, I'll cook it and freeze it. So I don't like waste that sense. Or you open the fridge door and it's like, oh Jesus, there's nothing for dinner, but there is always something you can eat.

SPEAKER_03 3:32

Some of the uh chefs, etcetera, think that people need educating in how to cook. Are you a good cook?

SPEAKER_02 3:40

I'm a reasonable cook. I could cook every day, it wouldn't bother me. But I don't think my generation have put enough stock into the kids learning to cook. It's all just eat macadese. There's no oh let's make a proper meal. Everything's too disposable now.

SPEAKER_03 4:02

It wouldn't surprise you to know that my kids are not like that. But you're not like that. You would say that our generation, because it were I'm categorizing you as as my generation.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

My generation, no way. It's just I mean the bread and butter thing that's a lifeline to a lot of people, in my eyes. It's only£8.50 and it's not a lot of money. But it's a lot of money when you haven't got any.

unknown 4:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:29

And I'll never leave the bread and butter thing because it I just won't. Unless it dies a death or something like that. Or of course, that's in the UK itself, you know. That's another thing.

SPEAKER_03 4:42

Nothing has stopped us yet, Caroline. We went through COVID, we're like the Pony Express. We have never ever missed a hub.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

No.

SPEAKER_03 4:50

Ever. And that's ten years now.

Army Medic Stories And Nursing Reality

SPEAKER_02 4:52

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 4:53

So this is an interesting segue because you told me before we started recording that you were in the Gulf. So have you got a military background now?

SPEAKER_02 5:01

Yeah. I was a medic in the army. I enjoyed it, and then when I went over there, we flew out from Bryce Norton from Chester. We're sitting there, and all we had was a pair of joggers and a jumper, because we weren't allowed civvies. It's your army kit and that's it. So you had your trainers, your joggies, your jumper, and a short haircut. Because your chemical stick to your hair biological.

SPEAKER_03 5:29

Yeah, yeah. Chemical weapons, biological weapons, they're getting your It sticks to your hair. So it's better to be shaved.

SPEAKER_02 5:34

It's better to have no hair.

SPEAKER_03 5:36

So uh how long did you serve? Over ten years. So did you go into the army as a medic?

SPEAKER_02 5:43

Yeah. And then when uh we came here, um Alec was ex army as well. I met him.

SPEAKER_03 5:50

Um In the force, is it?

SPEAKER_02 5:53

Yeah, down south. Um we were doing a casual assimilation run through for a medic. We'd do all the casualties on through.

SPEAKER_03 6:00

He wasn't your mock patient, was he?

SPEAKER_02 6:01

No, he was an ambulance driver. Ambulance driver. And then when we moved here, I left all of that. So I got a job in the nursing home and then I got a job in the hospital, and then I got bored being a healthcare, and I went to uni, did my nurse training, went back in the hospital, stayed in there. And here I am today.

SPEAKER_03 6:28

Retired.

SPEAKER_02 6:29

Yeah. I'm old enough to be well retired. Well retired. Even when I was in there in my forties, I was well retired. People like the thought, oh I'm a nurse. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, hospitals are like giant nursing homes where everyone throws their elderly. And I'd never seen that before until I came to Chester. And I used to say it's not the patient that makes me cry, especially if it's end of life. It's the relatives that can't accept that this person's old and their their clocks just running out. Let them go. Just let them go.

SPEAKER_03 7:17

It's much more of an emotional drain to be a on Civvy Street.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Yeah. In the army when we set up our horse bow and rehad.

SPEAKER_03 7:27

You patch him up and kick him out again, don't you?

SPEAKER_02 7:29

We patched him on and kicked him out again. You know, we had a guy who was cutting some wood, you put it through, he cut off all his bloody fingers. We wasn't going like that to him in the morning. Did he not?

SPEAKER_03 7:44

Okay, so so Caroline's waving with a with a fist instead of a hand fingers extended.

SPEAKER_02 7:51

Every morning. That's how the mentality is, because you just got to pick yourself up and just-I'm gonna say it's military banter, isn't it? Get on with it.

unknown 7:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:00

So you mentioned before as well about talking to citizens of vice. Yeah, I did. As well.

SPEAKER_02 8:06

So um only because I wanted to find out if there was anything that I'm missing that I could like a benefits checker. Yeah, yeah, but there's nothing. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:16

But it's good to check, right?

SPEAKER_02 8:18

But it's good to check. What happened?

SPEAKER_03 8:19

Did they just turn up or No, well no, they were just there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:24

So they were there and I asked about it. And I think a lot of people they don't ask.

SPEAKER_03 8:28

This is something else that matters a lot to us, that face-to-face piece. Because if they weren't there, you'd have never asked.

SPEAKER_02 8:36

No. But if they're there, I'll ask, I'll always ask.

SPEAKER_03 8:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

And what I noticed was um the people that were there from Citizens of Ice, they had these smoke things, detector things. I said, Do you need any? And I said, Well, no, no, I've already got them. Somebody in the queue might need it.

SPEAKER_03 8:53

What you're doing is is exactly what we almost want, because the thing with Citizens of Ice, when they come in like that, we want people to come along and just go, can you just check?

SPEAKER_02 9:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:06

Because every year there's about£23 billion worth of benefits that go unclaimed.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

Well, yeah, I I I've heard of that. I've got um a private pension. And that is it. And when I retired from nursing when I was fifty five, you feel like a pensioner looking after pensioners at that age. You can't take the pain in your back, lifting people, moving and handling is a big deal in nursing. You need to be fit. And I've got spinostenosis, so that kind of knocked me to the side. It's degeneration, really, of your your little spongy bits in your spine.

unknown 9:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 9:51

So there's no more sponge, they can't replace the sponge. That's why I just decided this is it. I'm I'm going to retire. But unless you're on benefits of what's that common one that everyone seems to be on.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

Universal credit.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Yeah, that. I I'm not on that. Whether I qualify for it, I couldn't tell you. But I mean, I've been told that I should have claimed or something like that, the government wants nurses to work until they're 66 and fall over. And I said, I'm never doing that. Pensioners looking after pensioners is wrong in my eyes.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

So you nearly yellow carded Caroline might come. I think you did, to be fair, right at the get-go.

SPEAKER_03 10:52

Okay, yes, I admit it. I was I was gonna try and worm out of it, but no, I absolutely admit it. I was I was ready with my yellow card in the pocket because she was gonna call us a food bank and then she didn't.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

I think she was very gracious in sidestepping that yellow card.

SPEAKER_03 11:07

She was, yeah. Caroline's feisty as well, so it was.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Well, you feel like you were being brave.

SPEAKER_03 11:14

I did.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

It's really important distinction to make though, isn't it? So lots of people think I'm never going for a handout, I'm not going for a food bank, it's gonna make me feel naff. And not all food banks do that, by the way. This is not a a you know, a bash at food banks, but we are such the polar opposite, and people are choosing like I just see it as we're like a canny shop. Yeah, so people are just like doing that, like you'd get a yellow sticker, or you'd go to some of the discount stores, we're just the same as that, and our members do a bit of shopping with us and a bit over here and a bit over there, just to stretch their budgets further. So we feel quite strongly that we're not a food bank and we're a food club, but it's easy to say food bank, isn't it? Yeah, because that's the words that everybody knows.

SPEAKER_03 12:02

Hear it all the time, but what we also hear all the time as well is she was right on point as well, sharing food again.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Yeah. We see sharing a lot in our communities, and I'm doing a lot of thinking around this at the minute, and I think that part of the uniqueness about a bread and butter community is that there is community, is that there are people to share food with, and sometimes it's with family, but then sometimes it's with neighbours or birth across the road or whatever. And if you've not got that community and you're not thinking about food, and there's not that, oh, I gave my so-and-so's to so-and-so, and it generates the good behaviour, doesn't it? To be like, Well, oh, you can or people doing swaps, like my kids don't like rice krispies, well, mine don't like cornflakes, great, let's you know that kind of stuff. I think more and more that there's an element of the community bit which enables sharing that people aren't talking about that much. So that's my my next thing.

SPEAKER_03 13:03

I think you bob on, and we don't we don't talk about it enough because I as you say, if the community wasn't there, you couldn't share and swap, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Yeah, or you might be able to if you've got a massive family and they all live around the corner.

SPEAKER_03 13:13

Yeah, well, we've we've had a few where it you know they'll share down the street. So, you know, we we've had a couple of episodes where Margaret recently was she was introduced by one of her neighbours sharing food with her, but we've had older ones as well where people have shared it with neighbours that didn't know about bread and butter. And it and I guess it's one of the ways that people get to find out about us.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Yeah, you mean older podcasts, not older guess.

Cooking Skills Food Waste And Date Labels

SPEAKER_03 13:38

I don't mean older older members, no. Yeah, what she said. What about younger people then? Uh not cooking. I just wondered whether we actually had any stats on this Vic because I'm not so sure that I'm convinced that Caroline's right on this. I know we've asked our members in the past about this.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Yeah, so the cooking skills correlation tends to be where people say that the skills are a bit lower, is men that live on their own. Yeah. We don't really see that across a an age band, and we have people of all ages, and in some of our hubs, we've got quite a big student population now that are coming and shopping and sharing bags back in halls or residents and and things like that. So everybody's different, aren't they? We can't tag people. That's it's just not okay to like stereotype people. And I think more and more as things get tight for people, we're all a resilient bunch, aren't we? And we see that in spades with our members, like more, I think, than than anywhere else. And so people do learn from each other and ask each other, and it comes back to that community bit again, doesn't it? What am I gonna do with this? Solariac, you know, it looks monkey. Oh, but if you do this, that, and the and we'll they'll swap advice and things. So I'm not sure I agree either, but we probably need to do a little bit more work in that space to really understand if there's a truth there or not.

SPEAKER_03 15:02

Yeah, because there's definitely a stigma there. Do you hear it quite often that the younger generation don't cook, etc., or know how to cook, but I'm with you. I'm not so sure that's the case. It just leads on nicely to me about the kind of attitudes to waste as well, you know, the old sniff taste tests and all the rest of it, and whether you really rely on dates, etc. That feels like a generational thing to me. Would they know the egg test in a jug of water?

SPEAKER_01 15:28

I mean, who's doing the egg test? Do you do the egg test?

SPEAKER_03 15:31

I do, yeah, I do.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

Every time you eat an egg?

SPEAKER_03 15:34

Absolutely not. Oh, if they've been sat in the fridge for a good long time, though I will, rather than bin them.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Okay. I was gonna say that's next level. Yeah, I think that we try and chat to our members about date labels so that they understand them that best before is a quality thing, and you can do that, but used by you know.

SPEAKER_03 15:53

Yeah, you should stick to it.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So um we do do quite a lot of work about that, and people still get confused around date labels. But then I also think like now some supermarkets are taking the date off the milk, and if you think about produce, produce always used to have a date on, and now the date's gone on lots of produce. So I think retailers are also trying to do a bit, aren't they?

SPEAKER_03 16:18

I agree, because they trip themselves up with some of this because they used to have display on till dates. Yeah. And then what do you do? Just slight correction because I don't think they've taken dates off milk. I think they've just put best before instead of use by.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

That's right, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:32

It's one of the simplest things that you can actually just test, isn't it? Because it you open it up and you can smell it, you just don't touch it.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

Yeah, but then you don't want to eat for the rest of the day because you smell the monkey milk.

SPEAKER_03 16:43

Well, uh again, see if I can provoke you again. Caroline would say that it doesn't matter anyway, because all the youngsters are just eating macadese, they don't know how to cook.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Yeah, I don't think she quite said it like that. You know, it's it's something that is clearly another stereotype.

SPEAKER_04 16:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

What gets me from when we looked at our survey is we asked people how much they had to spend a month on food, but we explicitly put in the question, like including takeaways and stuff. So it wasn't just at the supermarket, it was all of your food. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure 14% of our members came back and said that they had naught to 25 quid to spend on food a month. Regardless of household size, that is, and they weren't all like one person household, that is not a lot. So it then went up in ranges, and only 1% had 200-ish to spend. So you've got like a lot of people in the middle.

SPEAKER_03 17:46

Well, we know the averages is about 50 to 100 quid, right, to spend monthly on food.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

So the bit that I'm trying to work out in my head, and this is not scientific, is if you've only got that much money, how on earth are you even a macis? How on earth are you just eating macis?

SPEAKER_00 18:04

You can't.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Because you can't. So I feel like it's not quite as good as more or less in terms of its uh evidential acumen, but we've disproved it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:13

Yeah. And I think I think it goes back to the thing that we haven't said for some time on this pod, but it is a truth, given the size of family, etc., the the average is about a quid a day people are living on for food or members.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:29

Um, what's the going rate now? About£4.50 for a cappuccino?

SPEAKER_01 18:33

Yeah, well, one of our new trustees came to spend a day with us and went to a hub. There's a like a local town that the hub's nearby, and they needed to go and get a sandwich for lunch while they were out doing the packing and meeting the community and stuff, and they needed to check a few emails, and they decided to go into the Costa, and they said that the Costa was totally full, and they spent the best part of a tenner on a coffee and a sandwich and did their emails, great, and then went back to the hub and then was like mind-blown. Oh my god, and now I'm giving out a family shop for£8.50. We all know that this is a thing, but it was a really interesting takeaway.

SPEAKER_03 19:12

Absolutely is, absolutely is.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

So GPs then.

SPEAKER_03 19:16

GPs?

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Caroline found out about us through her GPs.

SPEAKER_03 19:19

Yeah, that was new, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Yeah. So we do quite a bit of work with health professionals. We need to do more, so maybe we need to kind of get ourselves around all the GPs.

SPEAKER_03 19:29

Yeah. I remember meeting Andy Burnham and me saying something similar because he was a big fan of social prescribing and was putting bread and butter in that social prescription.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

Yeah. I did a little presentation to 40 health professionals that are delivering community health things. And some people hadn't heard of us and some people knew us really well. And one of the ladies opened up at the end of it and said, Well, I go to Chestnut and I volunteer on a Friday up in Chestnut. If I'm honest, I live on my own and time's a bit tough for me. So if there's bags left, then I'll get a bag, you know, a set of bags from you.

SPEAKER_04 20:07

Nice.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

Because it just helps just helps me out. And I thought that was really lovely actually, because um it's nice for them to hear from each other about the value that's added.

SPEAKER_03 20:17

And it just yet again goes to show it's every walk of life.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Totally. People don't have to be right at the edge and waiting until like, oh my god, I don't know what I'm gonna do, I'm panicking. Actually, become a member before you're in that situation, and hopefully you'll never get to that situation. That's what we'd prefer.

SPEAKER_03 20:36

Yeah, but that's the hard one, right? That's almost like the flip side of people waiting for people to be in crisis. It's almost like people try a lot of things, but don't necessarily always see crisis hitting them, and it's only when they do hit crisis that people get to hear it. So it's how do you get people to forward plan? You know, we we've heard from a lot of the financial planning guys as as well about this, like stop loan sharks and money matters, and everybody will like try and do things proactively, but as a species, we don't tend to do that very well.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

No, but you hear a lot of people saying, I've been tightening my budget for the last 12 months.

SPEAKER_04 21:16

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

Or we've stopped going out as a family because this, or we're really struggling to get the money together for the children to do that extracurricular activity. And so I'd be saying, Well, use us and do that. Don't wait until everything's gone. You know, when you've stopped giving up one thing, then even once a month, just come and do a bread and butter shop.

SPEAKER_03 21:40

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

It doesn't have to be every week. No, no. That would be better.

SPEAKER_03 21:43

Couldn't agree more.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

So if you'd like to know more about the bread and butter thing and what we get up to, you can find us at TeamTBBT on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. LinkedIn or online at breadandbutterthing.org.

SPEAKER_03 22:02

And if you have any feedback or thoughts on the podcast, or you'd like to come and have an atta, drop us an email at podcast at breadandbutterthing.org.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

Yeah, and just to recap, we're always open to new members at all of our hubs. If you or someone you know would benefit from our affordable food scheme, you can find your nearest hub on the Become a Member page of the website.

SPEAKER_03 22:20

And please do all those things that all the podcasts ask you to do, but don't do them for them, do them for us instead. Like us, subscribe, leave us a review, and share us with your mates and chat about us on social.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

See you next time.

SPEAKER_03 22:31

See ya, you can't do it.