Eating well on a budget is supposed to be a matter of sensible planning: batch-cook your lentils, embrace the slightly tired vegetables at the back of the fridge and never enter a supermarket without a list. In practice, when the day has run away with you and dinner needs to be on the table before everyone loses patience, the cheaper option can often feel like the easier one too.
That tension is familiar to plenty of households. New research commissioned by Lidl found that almost seven in 10 Britons believe healthy eating costs more, while nearly half said they had chosen a less healthy option in the past year because it was cheaper. There is no shortage of advice telling us to eat more vegetables, beans, pulses and wholegrains; the more pressing question is how to turn all that good intention into a dinner people actually want to eat, without spending half the evening cooking it or half the weekly food budget buying it.
