Five years ago, Paisley-born Lorna Cooper set up a Facebook page (facebook.com/fyf20quid) to help people get dinner on the table more easily, healthily and – most importantly – cheaply.

She recalls how at the start, “we had people commenting and messaging us saying, ‘We’ve got £3.75 to last us until Thursday, what can we do?’ Or people saying, ‘I’m on maternity leave so I’ve only got £15 to buy the next four days’ worth of food’.” Half a decade on, she says, “that’s been consistent”.

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Food poverty is being increasingly (and quite rightly) talked about more than ever before, and in terms of how many people are affected, Cooper says, “one person is way too many, isn’t it?”

Cooper, 43, started the FYF community after a back injury left her off work sick for almost a year. As a mum of three and stepmother of two, her family’s £100-a-week food bill had become pretty much untenable.

“I started to look at the budget to see where I could cut costs,” she remembers, and began scrapping expensive jarred sauces, cooking from scratch rather than just heating stuff up, and soon found herself sharing tips online with other people in a similar position. FYF now has more than half a million followers – and a new cookbook to match, Feed Your Family For £20 A Week.

But it’s not just about handing someone a 20-quid note and pushing them into a supermarket, saying: ‘Here you go’. Instead, Cooper is pragmatic, providing an eight-week, £160 meal-plan (to feed four people), and employing batch-cooking, buying in bulk and using up leftovers in ways that turn basic actions into tools of total ingenuity.

The ethos behind the food – which she says is “not fancy; it’s healthy, it’s filling” – takes you back to “what your granny or your great-granny would’ve cooked, from scratch. They wouldn’t have thrown out leftovers, they would’ve gone in the next meal.”

Cooper says these are skills a lot of people just haven’t had the opportunity to learn. “That’s one of the reasons I started the Facebook page. I didn’t get taught it. I lost my mum when I was only 11 and I didn’t know how to cook. I hadn’t been taught budgeting. Home Ec at school for us was making a mandarin cheesecake and learning to sew a cushion – not exactly the most helpful,” she says. “I was brought up in the Eighties, when processed food was just first coming out. People were all, ‘Oh this is fabulous’, and I think a lot of mums were going to work [doing] full-time hours for the first time in a good few years as well, so a lot of it was lost.” FYF is designed to help fill that gap for people.

These days, Cooper is well clued up. “It’s become a challenge and I really enjoy it,” she says, describing how she’ll spot a recipe or dish and think, ‘Oh, I could make that’, before going home and whipping up a significantly cheaper, veg-heavy version. “Occasionally my partner will complain now, because he says if we go out for something to eat, I’m always complaining that, ‘I would have done that differently’, or ,‘I would have used that instead’, or, ‘How much is that!?!’

So how can you stretch £20 into a full week of meals? Well to start with, for Cooper, doing a big shop involves more than one supermarket. “There’s a lot of shopping about,” she says, “to see where’s got the best bargains.”

And when you get home, it’s about being savvy with your time and your freezer (“What I mean when I say ‘batch-cooking’ is it doesn’t take any more time to make two lasagnes than it does to make one”).

Despite the zeitgeist for veganism, Cooper’s approach to organic and free-range produce is just as pragmatic. “When we didn’t have a lot of money, my main thing was getting food into the kids to make sure they were fed,” she says firmly. “If you can afford to, if you want to, you can use more organic and free-range things, but the core of the book at the moment, it’s to keep the costs as low as possible.”

That said, eating more affordably often has its own ethical and sustainable plusses, she points out – it focuses on minimising waste, going big on veggies and pulses (which are naturally cheaper), and by default, using less meat. “Maybe the average family would use 500g mince to make a lasagne,” explains Cooper. “We only use 200g.”

There is one item she won’t scrimp on though: Butter. “I’ll always buy real butter, always have done,” she says. “I won’t use margarine. It’s only one ingredient away from plastic!”

It resides alongside constant fridge companions, yoghurt and leftovers, while the rest of Cooper’s kitchen is “full! I actually moved house eight years ago and I went from having a tiny kitchen to a kitchen that’s three times the size of the one I was in before. I thought, ‘Look at all these units, I’ll never fill these!’” (Now they’re packed, with extra stuff stacked on top.)

Part of it is down to the fact she’s in a position where, if a crate of tinned tomatoes is on offer for instance, she’s able to stock up. The other part, she says, is “there’s a tiny wee bit of the… you just don’t know what’s round the corner.” At least if you can put £20 together, you’ll be set.

Feed Your Family For £20 A Week by Lorna Cooper, photography by Andrew Hayes-Watkins, is published by Seven Dials.

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