I ate last night the first of my cheap meals, Penne pasta with Sainsbury’s Basics Pasta Sauce. I added mushrooms and cheese for a little more flavour and protein. Unfortunately the attempt proved futile: that was possibly the worst meal I have had in my life. Worse than flavourlessly bland, it had a lingering cloying flavour that only faintly evoked either tomato or basil, the two primary ingredients of many such sauces. I began to wonder if the sauce had ever seen a tomato, much less been graced with the inclusion of one.

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Yesterday, Sunday, instilled with a sense of boyish novelty and studentish irony, I set out with my housemate Luke McNeil to Sainsbury’s, single ten-pound-note folded expectantly in my wallet. Owing to a lack of organisation, we arrived at the shop twenty-five minutes before closing-time and were obliged to rush our shopping more than I would have liked, denying me the opportunity to stand and pedantically weigh up the benefits of each product over another.

Still, I loaded up my basket with white-and-orange labels, finding particular amusement in the 7 pence jar of ‘curry sauce’ and the 45 pence tin of baked beans and ‘sausages’. Meanwhile, Luke filled his basket with items from the Taste the Difference Range, abstaining from any packaging that sported less than ten adjectives below its name, as if as a counterpoint to my thrifty food procuration.

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