Beat rising food bills - follow the inflation-proof diet

Beat rising food bills - follow the inflation-proof diet

Mysupermarket.co.uk publishes prices for a shopping basket of staples, in various shops, year on year, and it is quite depressing. Every basic item, in every shop, is way up. Some increases are staggering - the price of fusilli pasta is up by more than 100%, everywhere but Asda. And yet, the odd item has stabilised or dropped and those, people, are what we should be eating. We don't just have to surrender to this. What is the optimum credit-crunch munch? How do you dodge the price hikes and stay full?

In short: tomatoes (which have stayed the same); sugar (down 14%); Dolmio sauce (down a little bit); orange juice (same, or slightly lower); apples (ditto). The first answer is obvious - add tomatoes to Dolmio, that way it will start to taste of tomatoes. Remember you will undo all your budgeting if you add pasta. Think of this as Atkins Bolognese. But meat-free!

Other statistics released this week give us stable prices also on various fruits, which you can add to the apples to make fruit salad. Now add some of that sugar, and you have a really sweet fruit salad. There's an impressive downturn in the cruciferous vegetable market (broccoli and cauliflower are down 50%). I use these for mixed-vegetable escabeche with thyme toast, which on our new budget, we can enjoy without any of the other vegetables (red peppers are well up, along with most salad veg), and minus the toast. Fishfingers are also down in price; they are a little like toast. It's a substitution.....continued below

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to consider.

It strikes me, as I wander up and down the aisles, that the price of wheat-based products has shot up beyond recognition, but seasonal fruit and vegetables are most stable. (Meat fluctuates with grain because that's what it eats. Before it, ahem, becomes meat.) So if you're counting the pennies, avoid the penne. Not only is that hilarious, it is also true: if you want to eat like it's 2007, you have to essentially think like a vegan. A vegan who doesn't like lettuce.

· This article was amended on Thursday August 14 2008. The broccoli price change mentioned in the article above was based on a shopping basket compiled by the Daily Mail - which in fact indicated a fall in price of 50%, not 20%. This has been corrected.

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