This is tangential, but what's a good starting point for "frugal ways to eat"? I'm not even remotely interested in getting down to $30/week, but my current budget is "not to exceed" $30/day, and I probably average around $20/day, and I generally cook at least one meal per day at home.
Even in a week where I only at food cooked at home I can't imagine getting under $70/week. I'm curious what I would have to give up to get to $50, much less $30.
How do you feed yourself for 50 cents a day with anything approaching a balanced diet? You'd have to be incredible frugal to make one nutritious meal for 50 cents, let alone three. I know beans and rice are cheap, especially in bulk, but if that's all you eat then your health will surely suffer.
Most food has 200-600 calories per pound, so you need 4-6 pounds of food per day. (This lines up with Google search.) Call it 35 pounds per week. Therefore, you need to spend an average of $1.50/lb to hit $50/week. Bananas and canned tomatoes or beans are well under $1. Pasta and bread are $1. You definitely don't have to give up all TV dinners or meat, you can eat pretty normal.
$50/week in food is doable, but it takes some careful planning. I'd be impressed at someone who could purchase fresh vegetables and fruit, balanced whole grain carbs, and a healthy protein of their choice, spices sufficient to produce a reasonable variety of meals, plus some occasional luxury food items for that budget.
Ditch the bacon and throw in rice and beans (since you can have more variety that way, while not spending any more).
Also, experiment with cheap veggies. I get sick of PB&J, so I stick things like cucumber slices or mushrooms in there, and it seems totally different to my taste buds. Cucumbers are dirt cheap, mushrooms less so, but either way, not breaking the budget. I also enjoy a zucchini sandwich (between buttered toast).
Another way most people could cut their budgets is to look seriously at their portion size. I realize this doesn't apply to you, but if one's definition of a 'meal' is what fills up a 15 inch dinner plate and involves at least four different colors, then yeah, it's hard to eat cheaply. Most restaurant 'meals' are really at least two.
Shopping at Trader Joes is a good start for keeping within budget, but you can't really make the case for eating well on $35/week if you go out occasionally and DON'T count that in your budget.
Yikes, would love to see how this goes! I read about all these live on $X for a month and shy away, mainly for nutritional value every very cheap diet I've seen has a fairly bad mix of calorie distribution. Is this always the case?
That being said, food is the one place I'm not stingy. Apartment? Sure. I downsized from a highrise condo to a small loft apartment. Got rid of satellite/cable TV, and did small things like removing unlimited texting from my phone, etc, I just can't find/get myself to eat cheaply. I try to get groceries on the cheap... then I just end up going out to eat 3x a week with my friends that have regular jobs and have lots of disposable income.
This reminds me of an experiment I did in college to see how small of a food budget I could go on while still maintaining three healthy (and delicious) meals per day.
I think I got it down to under $2/meal with a carb, protein, and veggie/fruit component to each meal. Pretty amazing when you factor in that I did ~50% of my shopping at Whole Foods. (they have quite competitive prices when it comes to frozen veggies and dried pasta)
Amazing how far money will go when you don't have very much of it.
My wife and I eat really cheaply. I generally eat three meals a day, usually tofu or some sort of fish like tuna or salmon. My wife eats similarly. It's not quite $5 a day, but we get by on about $200 a month with occasional spikes due to replenishing a store such as spices, flour, etc.
This is what I do. I can cheap food every day for lunch for about $6 and longingly look at, but not purchase, nice food (like salmon) for $10-12. Or I can cook and bring my own nice food for $2-6. It's kind of a no-brainer.
$60/week isn't bad, though I'm not sure quite how that is in NYC. In the Chicago suburbs I feed two of us on something around that level (including the TP as well), and that's with dietary concerns as well.
A lot of how much you can save like this depends on your situation. If you have storage space and decent cooking facilities, it's a LOT easier because you can have some reserve to allow you to take advantage of economies of scale and opportunities like that 20 pound bag of rice on sale for $6. Similarly, if you have a full-size refrigerator and freezer you can pretty easily make a week's worth (or more) of meals to take to work.
It's also important to have a good grasp of how much each individual meal costs, because you may realize that some less-expensive options may actually be preferable. That gluten-free bagel plus cream cheese? That's $1.50+, or would you prefer oatmeal, a couple of breakfast sausages, and a couple of eggs over the top of that? That easily clocks in at under $1, including with your choice of rolled or steel-cut gluten-free oatmeal (and if you don't care about gluten it's even less), and it takes almost no extra time in the morning over toasting and cheesing a bagel if you've pre-made the oatmeal. It's worth not getting carried away with this though - for some things it's just worth getting the more expensive option because making it at home takes more time or energy than you want to spend.
Knowing your cost of getting things is also important - don't drive 5 miles to save $0.50 on milk, because you're spending that much extra on gas. This is where shopping lists are important, as well as having a good feel for typical prices at different stores if you have multiple shopping options. If you know you're doing your shopping for the week at a store the cost of getting there is less of a factor, and conversely if you know cost of getting there is a concern then you'll want to avoid forgetting something that you have to run back out for (hence the list).
Finally, if you can stockpile some things and have multiple shopping options it's well worth keeping an eye on sales flyers and per-store discounts. Using myself and Meijer as an example, in January so far I've saved $12.34 using electronic coupons through their "mPerks" app and another 6.25 using paper coupons (either printed at checkout or on product packages, I'm not a couponer), plus $47 off of the regular prices of items by getting them when they're on sale - and I've only spent $128 there so far this month. I rarely buy items just because they're on sale, so that's almost all savings on items that I'd have been purchasing anyway.
The biggest issue to eating well for $35 a week is being single, if you have a partner, or kids it's pretty easy to average $35 a week per person.
Step 1) Buy a freezer
Step 2) Buy meat by the side
Step 3) Buy in season produce from the poor areas of town and/or drive out to an actual farmers market.
You can do $2 a day pretty easily in my opinion. Basically you want rice (or pasta) and beans to be the bulk of your calories, and anything else just adds flavor. Helps that in America you generally have access to $2/lb boneless chicken breast (and I've gotten drum sticks for 69c a pound before, but those are more of a pain) at one of your grocery stores, and rice and beans are almost free (25c-50c a day), even in smaller bulk sizes such as 5lb bags. Potatoes, carrots, bananas, and apples are examples of fruits and vegetables that are generally incredibly cheap.
Once you get up to $5 a day per person it really feels like you can eat any thing, once you start following a budget. I've met people with budgets around $400 a month for one person, though that usually includes a lot of eating out.
You can eat quite well on $3/day. $1.50/day of food is comfortably above subsistence in the US.
A diet of strictly rice and beans will net 1500 calories for $.30 - $.50 per day. That's not an appetizing diet, but provides a base number for calibration.
Even in a week where I only at food cooked at home I can't imagine getting under $70/week. I'm curious what I would have to give up to get to $50, much less $30.
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