Eat Well for Less, TV review: No-nonsense advice has done the nation a great service

 

Ellen E. Jones
Friday 13 February 2015 01:00 GMT
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Gregg Wallace and Chris Bavin in Eat Well for Less
Gregg Wallace and Chris Bavin in Eat Well for Less (BBC)

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Gregg Wallace and Chris Bavin were feeling the satisfaction of a job well done as they concluded their three-part Eat Well for Less series.

Each week they've visited a different family to offer their no-nonsense cockney barrow-boy advice on the weekly shop and this week they were in Maidstone, Kent, with the Stantons.

No sooner had three year-old Sophia pointed at an item, than parents Dan and Zoe obediently popped it in the trolley. Letting a small child take charge is plainly a way to overspend and that wasn't the Stanton's only supermarket sin. They also failed to plan meals, had a chronic "fear of the freezer" and, worst of all, were doggedly loyal to expensive brands.

Anyone who tells you they can taste the difference between big brand baked beans and the supermarket's own is a deluded dupe of consumerism, and Eat Well for Less has done the nation a great service by proving so with a blind taste test. "Dat is a budget bean!" proclaimed one teenager confidently. Only It wasn't, it was M&S's finest.

Don't be fooled by branding, make a meal plan and realise that convenience costs: the tips were hardly revolutionary, but they worked. It's also so much easier to take greengrocer Gregg's word on matters such as these, than it is to trust his MasterChef musings.

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