Helping Guardian editors go shopping

Well-meaning people sometimes write curiously unhelpful things about money. A surprising example comes in Jack Monroe's low-cost recipes published by the Guardian. She's the paper's food blogger and campaigns against poverty for Oxfam and the Child Poverty Action Group. She knows a lot.

But you wouldn't think that from this extract from her latest recipe. It's the ingredients list for a rice dish:

1 onion, finely sliced, 9p
2 cloves of garlic, chopped, 6p
2 tbsp oil, 6p
150g long grain white rice, 6p
100ml white wine, 47p
300ml chicken stock, 2p
100g garden peas, 12p
¼ savoy cabbage, finely sliced, 20p
Handful of fresh parsley, chopped, 20p

Note the prices following each ingredient. These are supposedly the cost of the ingredients. Add them together and you'll get the amount the meal cost. So this medley of white rice and veg is proudly presented as serving two people at a total cost of 64p each.

Are you thinking what I am thinking? Someone at the Guardian likes super-clever ironic jokes, is deliberately trying to mislead or has never been into a shop. I suspect the last.

So for the benefit of Guardian sub editors who don't get out much, here's some practical info about shopping and cooking on a budget. You can't go into a shop, decide how much you want out of a packet or a bottle and just pay for that amount. That's not how shopping works in the UK. You have to buy the whole item, not just part of it.

It helps if you try to visualise this. Can you see how awkward it might be if you took, say, 100g of frozen peas out of a packet and put them in your trolley?  They'd fall right through. Think what kind of mess the freezer section would be in after a few dozen customers. How would you get your purse out to pay if you had two tablespoons of oil, not quite a glass of white wine, a handful of parsley, a quarter of a cabbage and a pocketful of peas to juggle through the checkout?

The reality is that you have to buy the whole item, packet, jar whatever. Once you've understood that, you can revise the prices in the ingredients list.

Onion, £1
Garlic, chopped, 33p
Sunflower oil, £1.75
White rice, 45p
White wine, £3.50
Chicken stock, 20p
Frozen peas, £1.20
Savoy cabbage, 80p
Parsley, 80p

Which makes a total of £10.03, or a fiver each. Obviously, that could be more or less – this is calculated on the basis of a cheap bag of kilo of onions, for instance, when you could actually buy a single onion. Though not easily and probably not for ninepence.

It's worth pointing out that anyone doing this will have useful foodstuff left over – rice, onions, oil, cabbage and so on. But the financial reality is the actual cost – the money you have to pay out. To cook a single meal yourself you have to find a certain amount of money and spend it. A single meal isn't a useful unit of budgeting. You need to shift perspective and look at your food costs over a period of a few days.

It is a useful guide for someone shopping and cooking on a budget to know that you can spend a tenner, have a good meal and build up your storecupboard stash. And that tenner will give you most of a bottle of wine to drink – or skip it and save the cash. Approaching it the other way round, with notional unit pricing, is misleading and barely meaningful. Lousy financial education. And what's the point of that?

PJ White is editor of Youth Money