For those like me with difficulty building and maintaining routine, mealtime can be a difficult subject. This is especially true if we live on our own, without the support of others to directly influence your habits.

What would it cost you to make either breakfast, lunch, or dinner for a week and what would you make for yourself?

We get assistance from the government because my husband doesn't make much. Because of this (and the fact we don't get much help) we always get the sale items and count every last penny when buying food.

Meals come in all shapes and sizes depending on what was one sale or what we felt like, but everyone always eats!

I too found it very difficult (both financially and time-wise) to keep regular / good meals going. One of the things I did was get a crock-pot... very useful for cheaper food, whole food, and "ready to eat" food. I would often make up a soup / stew / sauce sunday night and put it in the fridge. Getting up for work monday morning I would take it out and put it on to cook. When I got home I could eat right away, dinner was done.

I would then proceed to reheat / change the meal over the next few days following a similar procedure.. what may start the week as soup or something would almost always end up being a stew by wed / thursday... Good way to eat cheap and healthy. As I ate it, more got thrown in the pot... All fresh veggies and meat from the local market and butcher and with relatively little "work" aside from the chopping and cutting... I was able to keep myself fed... for the most part.

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Aside from that, I had to constantly invite people over if I wanted motivation to cook a full meal of something else...

Since I live in an apartment, I actually cook the majority of the time (I say this as I ordered pizza tonight, haha).

I don't pay close attention to how much I spend on groceries because my parents are kind enough to let me have a credit card on their account for stuff like that and things I need for school. I do try to pick the cheaper items though, but I don't go out of my way to find deals and clip coupons.

Additionally, I'm a vegetarian which can be both a pro and a con. I love stir fries, and fortunately both rice and frozen vegetable packages are really cheap. I am still, to this day, not burned out on Ramen noodles (I never use the seasoning package). Yes, I've consumed those things for the last....seven? eight? years. But, on the other hand, things like tofu, veggie burgers, etc. can be pricey as compared to regular meat.

Admittedly, since I'm in school, my cooking doesn't tend to get too fancy. Breakfast tends to be a bowl of cereal, oatmeal, yogurt, or fruit (whatever I'm most in the mood for). Lunch is sometimes a veggie burger, other times Ramen, other times leftovers of stuff I made, or nothing (if I'm busy in the lab and work through a normal lunch period). I try to have a snack in the late afternoon of a cereal bar or one of the Quaker Chewy bars or yogurt or something in that vein. Dinner ranges from salad, to veggies, to veggie burgers, to potatoes, to pasta with marinara sauce, to pizza (I do make homemade pizza every now and then), and so on. I try to think of quick and easy things to make and save large scale cooking operations (i.e. pizza, dinner rolls, cheesecake, etc.) for the weekend.

In terms of places I shop, I do shop mostly at the dreaded Walmart (I hate that place, but they have almost everything and they're the cheapest) and occasionally visit Whole Foods when I need a slightly more exotic item or HEB when I only need one or two things (HEB is much closer to me than Walmart, but also tends to be more expensive).

I don't live on my own, but me and my fiancé have completely different diets. He's both a coeliac and a fussy eater, and the things he likes to eat are more expensive. I eat cereal for breakfast, then whatever random thing for lunch I can be bothered with. Work is a nightmare, as I can't stand sandwiches, so I tend to get tins of things, and decant them into a plastic bowl with a lid in the mornings, that I can then microwave at work. Dinner is more of the same. I work in a supermarket and have a staff discount card, which is very useful, and I like offers and looking at the clearance shelves. On average I spend about £20 a week on food.

Just a few random observations: in my area, prices at Wal-mart have increased to the point where many items are no longer competitive with my local supermarket chain. And when I factor in gas it's even less of a savings. If I am in the neighborhood of a Wal-mart I will stop, and get selected items, but I stopped doing my one-stop grocery shopping there after the last round of price increases.
A number of years ago, I made the belated discovery that for a single person, if one is judicious, in many cases it is actually cheaper to eat out or get something like a Smartchoice meal than to prepare something at home. I had heard all my life that "making it yourself" is always cheaper, but when I calculated the cost of something or other that I had made I was amazed and chagrined. Making bulk items like spaghetti, chili, soup, etc are where the savings comes in.
As a vegetarian I too have found some things to be problematic.

Hmm... I can understand the financial pressure on food.

I tend to graze rather than eat big meals, and don't like to cook everyday.
I can't eat most takeaway either, so I like to cook a batch then finish it over the week or divide it into individual portions to freeze.

Soy yogurt (can't do cows milk) and muesli bars are good snacks. (These can get pricey, so you can make cheap Anzac biscuits instead.) I used to like the individual serve tins of tuna for sandwiches, but I've stopped eating meat by way of an experiment and have been vegetarian for a month or two now.

Eggs for the win, the free range are more expensive but still a good value food.




I know. Lentils and beans are really cheap - but unfortunately I'm sensitive to them so the alternative is usually paying more for the meat analogues.

But at least in my area tofu and tempeh is the same or a little less than the cost of meat, and apparently you only need a smaller serve than you'd expect. I'm going to look for tofu at asian groceries, probably cheaper that way.



Oh yeah - and you can get a lot of things much cheaper in Asian/Indian/etc shops or sections of the supermarket. Vegies, noodles, spices, sauces, sesame oil... definitely worth a look.

Porridge is cheap and filling.

Hummus is pretty good if you can eat chick peas. It's a few dollars for a tin, and you whizz it up with oil spices and garlic.

Vegies make food go further grated into meat sauce/zucchini slice, or pureed into a creamy pasta sauce. Pasta is good too, I've seen homebrand for 59c a bag.

And if you're desperate, there's day old bread on sale or dumped behind bakeries.


(I'm starting to think this post should go in Red's meals thread.)

The best investment which has saved me more money than anything else I have ever bought is a coffee maker. I got a really nice one, it makes coffee, and espressom it's easy to keep clean... I love coffee. I was buying coffee and lattes 3 times a day from coffee shops and fast food places, $1 - $3 each time. Call that $6 a day, $42 a week, $168 a month.

I spent $100 on the coffee maker ONCE, a bag of coffee for $6 twice a month, maybe one gallon of milk over the whole month that's $3. That's $280 for the whole 1st year i bought it, so that's less than $23 a month. $15 a month every year after that until my coffee maker breaks, god rest it's soul (lol).

~Meo

I've found that bad food in the US is stupidly cheap, and good food is stupidly expensive. There is a bit more of a balance in the UK, especially if you shop locally for the good food (avoiding supermarkets and 'artisan' shops designed to relieve the wealthy & gullible.)

It can be very hard to eat smart and healthy when the cheaper, worse foods are nicer to the pocket book. You don't realize how expensive food is until you can spend nearly half your paycheck buying only things you need to realize that prices are ridiculous.

My husband and I always try to buy the fresh veggies, fruits, and get the good meats, but wow- after getting just that, along with some diary products it is So expensive- I want to pull my hair out every time we need food because of how taxing it is and how much it hits our pockets- even with government help.

Food costs so much that it gets to the point of wondering "Do I eat or pay my rent?" Of course when you have kids there is no option- you have to be able to do both, simple as that. Not so say to do, though, espeically when the prices just keep going up.

you know, looking back I don't see how my grandparents were able to keep such good food on the table like they did. My grandmother told me that she was much like me as I am now- worrying about feeding my family, but she always managed to do it. You never realize how hard it was on your parents, I think, until you are a parent yourself or out on your own defending for yourself without help. It's hard and its scary. Yet we manage.

To my children we are never in a bad way when it comes to food and they never seem to notice that our kitchen is clearly wanting more often than not. Ask our kids and they will tell you (if they could!) the great dinners we seem to pull out of asses so that they never notice the hardships.

This might offer up some tips on how to save money and still eat tasty: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/vip/~3/ANnwt56J3Sc/eat-like-a-foodie-at-home-without-breaking-your-budget

My wife and I are fortunate enough to be able to afford food and cook for ourselves and still eat out occasionally. Most of the time when we cook, we have left overs so that gets eaten for the following day's lunch. Eating healthy is difficult where I live as well, with produce being pretty expensive, especially organic ones (although they're so good).

One thing that's helped us quite a bit - a points card. The credit card I use to pay for groceries accumulates points rather quickly, and every two or three months I have enough to pay for a large amount of groceries (like $80 worth). Also, we normally stock up on foods that will last a long time when it's on sale (pasta sauce, pasta, canned foods, etc) so we always have something that we can make.

I find buying the raw/base ingredients and enjoying cooking saves me a bit of money.
The time it takes may be a hassle but getting into a routine of preparing items en masse is very helpful (every night when I get out of the I crack on with grilling the chicken and getting some omlettes knocked up for the following days work lunch)

This topic is particularly relevant to me as I will be moving into an apartment with my cousin in a few weeks. What I'm worried about is the fact that I'm so used to helping my mother with the shopping that I will buy allsorts of food but then let them go to waste as I tend to eat very little. I also am an artisan products wet dream in that I'm pretty much magnetically drawn to anything with a big price tag and a fancy name.

I find that I can deal with breakfasts and lunches pretty well, as sometimes I make a big vat of soup and use it throughout the week for either one meal or the other (who said soup wasn't meant for breakfast anyway?)

Mid, have you tried growing your own veggies? I've been doing some research on ways to help the poorest people in my area (of darkest africa) to grow the basics for themselves. Many people here survive on child grants of R300 (about fifty dollars) a month, with families of eight or nine people living off the grants brought in by two children.

Tower gardens seem like an easy and cheap way to grow food that does not take up too much space or time.

I picked up a bag of frozen stir-fry vegetables at Wal-Mart the other day, stir-fried them with teriyaki sauce, and added in some leftover steak cut up into bite-size pieces, and it was fantastic, not to mention cheap.