Food is expensive right now, for everyone. It can be a shock when you fill your basket with the basics and it ends up noticeably more expensive than last month, or even last week.
If you’re gluten-free, it’s no less painful, but that shock may be slightly dulled by the fact this is how it’s always been – shop in the free-from aisle and you know your bank balance will take a battering. The cost-of-living crisis is simply exacerbating an existing problem. “Gluten-free food is too expensive,” says gluten-free cookbook author Becky Excell. “It’s always, always been too expensive.
According to charity Coeliac UK – Excell is an ambassador – a weekly shop on a gluten-free diet can be up to 35 per cent more pricey than your average, gluten-containing whizz round the supermarket. “It doesn’t feel OK when it’s not a choice,” says Excell. “If I could go back to when I was younger and eat just regular bread, I would, it’s so much nicer. No one does it through a love of gluten-free products. We do it because we have to.”
Granted, gluten-free food is beholden to different ingredients, smaller economies of scale and rigorous factory and testing requirements to ensure products don’t make people living with a gluten intolerance sick, which does cost more. But Excell, 34, says, even taking that all into account, the prices don’t fully add up.
“I wouldn’t put it past supermarkets to just add a bit more because they can,” she says. “I understand that products have to be a little bit more expensive, but when a gluten-free loaf of bread can be £4.50 in the supermarket, it just doesn’t seem quite right. I feel they just think, ‘We can add a little bit more. They’ll have to buy it anyway.’”
It’s not just supermarkets, she adds: “Order a free-from pizza – not all places are like this by any means, but some places – and they’ll say, ‘OK, you can have a gluten-free base, but it’s an extra two pounds,’ and that can make it very overwhelming and stressful eating out.”
Excell’s seventh cookbook, Budget Gluten Free, is designed to give anyone on a gluten-free diet a slice of affordability. It’s a collection of recipes she says was exactly what she needed when she went gluten-free 16 years ago, after becoming increasingly poorly at university. “I was going out a lot, drinking and eating meals afterwards that were making me feel incredibly crippled and really unwell,” she remembers. While it “definitely took a bit of time” for her to feel more herself after removing gluten from her diet, the realisation it was gluten causing such pain was a “wow” moment.
She began blogging about the gluten-free food she was making and amassed more than 1 million followers in the process. Nigella Lawson has since called her “the queen of gluten-free”. “I don’t think I’ll ever recover from that,” says London-based Excell. “It needs to be on my gravestone.”
At the core of Budget Gluten Free is making sure meals are reasonably priced, without scrimping on flavour. “We miss out on things enough as it is, we miss out on loads of situations because we’re gluten-free,” says Excell. She didn’t want people feeling taste-deprived, too. So she hasn’t stripped delicious but expensive ingredients out of meals, instead, it’s about making clever substitutions, like swapping parmesan for mature cheddar, and making sure you aren’t shelling out for ingredients, two-thirds of which then sit mouldering in the fridge after being used in just one recipe.
After tucking into her karaage popcorn chicken, crispy chilli pork and Vietnamese-style meatballs, you’re not going to feel hard done by. In fact, Excell’s recipes mean you can eat the kinds of meals you might eat out, without the stress of wrangling with people asking: “Do you just not like it?” when requesting gluten-free options.
“I understand that maybe my needs are a little bit trickier than someone who can literally eat everything,” says Excell. “I just wish places didn’t make us feel we were difficult. If everyone realised that it wasn’t a choice and we just have to eat this way, that would make me feel a lot better.”
Excell has decided 2025 is the year she’ll be kinder to herself. “I’ve always been such a worker and when a lot of your job is within social media, you constantly feel you’re always on,” she says, admitting she even works Christmas Day. “I have this really massive community of people who come to me for recipes, but also as a support network because they struggle with day-to-day life, or they don’t know what to eat, and I’m that person who can answer all these questions,” she explains, without any resentment. “I feel I can’t take time off because I don’t want someone to message me and really need an answer, and I’m not there to answer it.”
She sounds as much the gluten-free fairy godmother as she does the queen of gluten-free, but she’s hoping to take more time for herself. “Me, my boyfriend and our little dog, we went to Aldeburgh [a coastal town in Suffolk]. That’s what we’re trying to do this year: go for a walk on the beach, find somewhere I can actually eat some nice food and have a drink and just try and switch off and breathe in the sea air. That’s where I feel at home, by the sea.
“My life is too much in front of a screen and I’m coming to realise, I can’t help people to the best of my ability if I’ve not refreshed and helped myself. So that’s my aim, to look after number one, as well as trying to look after the rest of the gluten-free community.”
‘Budget Gluten Free’ by Becky Excell (Quadrille, £20).
