Food ethics- great if you can afford them!

Is it just me or is it getting harder and harder to keep within a budget when grocery shopping? I'm sure that not so long ago there was a real difference in prices between certain supermarkets. If I did a weekly shop at Lidl it was £10-£20 cheaper than Tesco...

Recently we've been spending more than we used to on groceries. This weekend just gone we did our weekly shop at Lidl. We didn't need to buy any fruit or veg, so it was all the other food/drinks (milk, bread, tinned foods etc). I couldn't get everything that was on our shopping list and it still came to £56. I had to go into Tesco today to get what I couldn't in Lidl and it came to another £20. Tonight, just out of interest I went to the Tesco website and put in everything I bought at Lidl to see what the price difference would be. Guess what? It came in at £56 and a few pence.. basically the exact same price as Lidl except that with the offers availible with Tesco I would have ended up with 500g more chicken and more of some other items as well. I was interested to see that some items were the exact same price and some even cheaper.

I'm sure Lidl used to be classed in the cheaper bracket of supermarkets.. perhaps not so any more! I think that their fruit and veg is a very good price, but that's probably about it.

How very annoying.

We have an Asda store opening sometime before Christmas.. perhaps that will save us some money. Otherwise I'm going to have to look for a job and I don't want to do that. Despite all the ups and downs, despite how bloody hard and tiring it is looking after Ethan all week, I do enjoy it. I don't want to entrust him to someone else.. childcare costs too much and at best we could probably only get grandparents to cover a days worth of care...

In the past I bought organic dairy products, local organic veg (though I'm more bothered about it being local than organic) and organic meat. I still want to be able to do this, but despite what Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall say, I no longer think I can afford to do so. It just costs too much. Food ethics are great, if you can afford them. All good for the DINKYs of this world, not so for the rest of us. It pains me, but I think it's going to have to be the cheap stuff from now one.

Who's for beans on toast?