How much do y’all extimate you average per day per person on food? I’m trying to get a handle on what reasonable/unreasonable is.
I think I spend around $10 to $12 on food, including tea and soda. This seems pretty high to me. I don’t really eat out that much (once or twice a week at cheap restaurants) but I’ve gotten addicted to prepared take-out food since I don’t cook much.
BTW, that would be “estimate”, not “extimate”… :rolleyes:
I tried to figure this out, honestly, but I can’t. There’s two of us, we cook nearly every day (Well we take turns). So most everything is from the grocery store.
But $10-$12 doesn’t seem that high if you’re talking about three meals. If a breakfast is a toaster pastry. You maybe spent 3.00 on a box of six - which is .050 apiece. Don’t forget milk.
Then lunch is a homemade ham sandwich, say. $0.99 for the bread. Say $3.00 for a packet of ham. $2.50 for the mayo bottle. .99 for the lettuce. For the sake of argument, I’m just going to add all that up and divide it by 5 (five days in a week) even though you’d use the mayo and bread for longer. So say $1.50 for lunch. Plus a can of soda. If you buy a 12-pack, it’s cheaper.
Dinner: chicken and race and gravy (ultra-simple). Wow, I guess $10-$12 is a lot. Chicken is probably $3-$4 for a packet of three breasts. Gravy is maybe a $1.00 for the can. And rice is $11.00 for a lot of rice…
Well I guess I was wrong. Even one takeout can significantly increase your expenditures! $2.00 on a cup of coffee is a lot more than making it and buying your own creamer.
I am amazed. Is my figuring way way off?
In American money, three to four dollars, give or take. I almost never eat out, and I mainly try to buy the cheapest brands of everything, when those aren’t markedly inferior.
Not very much, I’ve been economizing and I’ve been trying to watch what I eat.
So for lunch I’ll eat a ‘Lean Cuisine’ sort of thing. These cost between $2.50 and $3.00. Lucky for me, my job has a little kitchen and they provide soda/water/coffee for free. I used ot spend about $6 dollars on a junk food lunch. Then I’ll eat another for dinner or have pasta and some sauce. I might have a bowl of cereal for breakfast but I’m not much of a morning person so I don’t do that every day. So, I guess about $8 dollars a day.
I guess I was right. It seems we spend about double this, and we have two people. So…wow.
It sounds like you guys are a lot closer to the average than I am. I found this fascinating government report on household food expeditures.
The overall US average is $2037 which is $5.58 per day. It does say that smaller households tend to spend more per person. One person housholds averaged $2522 or $6.91 per day compared to three person housholds who spent $1813 or $4.97 per day.
I added up a sample “cheap” day for me and it’s worse than I thought. Almost $15 a day. I’d still be interested in hearing from other Dopers what they spend.
If you’re curious, here’s my sample day:
tea (two bags) .40
cottage Chz .75
yogurt .75
store bought veggies 3.00
tuna (packet) 1.00
mayo (tblspn) .05
crackers .50
walnuts .10
fruit 1.00
more veggies 3.00
entree 4.00
chocolate .40
total $14.95 on a cheap day! :eek:
I’m fairly certain I’ll be well above the posters who have posted to this thread so far. I eat lunch out every day, either at a restaurant/sandwich shop or at the cafeteria here. Dinners are all over the map, from pasta w. pesto from our garden to grilled meats and veggies to take out.
Here’s the breakdown:
Breakfast: two bowls of cereal and milk, say $2.50/day (both cereal and milk are very expensive here)
Coffee: Make my own, say $0.50/day
Lunch: $7-$13, call it $9/day.
Dinner: Anywhere from $1 to $15/day. On a typical day, probably $3-5. Call it $5.
Snacks: At least $1/day.
Total: $18/day, with an overall range of $12 to $32.
Damn! I spend a lot on food!
Well, here’s how it breaks down for us (family of 5): We spend about $100.00 a month on food at Sam’s Club. Another $100.00 at a “bent and dent” grocery store we hit once a month to stock up on non-perishables. Then, about $50.00/wk. at the regular super market. That’s $400.00/month, which is about $20.00 per week, per person, or a little under $3.00 a day. We very seldom eat out (less than once per month), and I try to economize where I can, while still eating healthy stuff. Also, I clip coupons and utilize store sales pretty efficiently.
About £3 a day, assuming I don’t eat out.
Spend similar to Giraffe an $8-15 dollar lunch, light evening meal (often just a sandwich) about $2. Maybe $2 worth of soft drinks/bottled water, and $4 worth of alcoholic beverages. So $20 per day average.
Thinking about it, it’s more like £2.
Anywhere from $5 to $20, depending on how hungry I am and/or if I eat out.
So far today, it’s been about $1 though… I’ve had half a loaf of french bread and some soda and that’s all.
I can’t give it in money, but I’m on the low end of the examples people have posted. Here are the typical buys, which vary as desired.
Habits: Closest big grocery store, A) go through produce department first, get some red-or-yellow items, some dark-leafy-green items, some fruit, all this in season as it tastes better, is also cheaper. Some potatoes or equivalent (bag of brown rice, say).
That leads to B), cupboard supplies. Seek whole-grain items normally (bread, even w.wheat spaghetti). Sometimes canned or frozen fruits or vegs, V8 juice, not often, as enjoy the fresh. Biggest size jar of nothing-but-peanuts-and-salt peanut butter; piece of good cheese; canned tuna (bought if out of stock). Mayo, tomato sauce, pickles, baking supplies, spices, misc. as desired. Chocolate.
C) Meat and Dairy, get a whole chicken at $1.29/lb or a pork roast at $2.39, or other fresh animal protein. Lunch meat maybe. Milk, butter, eggs, once in a while bacon. Milk is non-fat but that is a matter of taste, and of course calorie/cholesterol considerations.
This takes two twenty-dollar bills and into a third, more or less, and lasts for most of a week. If shopping while hungry, it’s likely to cost more.
Fortunately I happen to like a lot of healthy stuff. Some of this liking is due to slowly changing my habits toward health over time; I am quite self-indulgent by nature.
I’m not forcing myself to follow masochistic rules; I find what I like and cook it for satisfaction.
Strategy: set the oven at 350 F, set chicken in on its back with nothing inside; add a sweet-potato and/or small red potatoes and/or other bakable items. When done I have supplies for a number of microwave meals that can be trimmed according to whim.
Typical day: Breakfast, dry cereal and milk, chocolate milk, tea; lunch, melted-cheese-and-tomato-and-trimmings sandwich with some fruit or tidbit(s); dinner, piece of chicken, slab of yam with butter, green salad or broccoli (mix lemon & mayo to make it good), some small indulgence to end with. That’s a typical example; actual days vary a lot. Treats according to whim modified with some sense.
I don’t buy sodas, beer, or liquor except for hospitality supplies, and that should be from the lifestyle budget rather than food budget anyway. You don’t see me buying a lot of all-made-up-for-you items, but still I only cook about twice a week, while getting a lot of hot tasty meals.
It’s hard to say. I do a lot of my shopping in bulk, so pinning down a daily expenditure is tricky.
I probably do two big bulk shops a year. Call that £200.
Then on a weekly basis, maybe £15 a week, with say another £20 a month for longer lasting things. That totals £1220 a year, which comes out to about £3.35 a day, which is about $5 I guess.
Bearing in mind that I don’t eat meat or dairy products, don’t drink alchohol and rarely drink soft drinks, that seems about right.
All I can do is reckon my weekly grocery bill, which is about $80. I do feed someone else the choice bits out of that a couple-three times a week, but then I get taken out to eat once or twice a week also. So I guess I spend $12 a day on food.
On a typical day, less than four dollars. I must say I’m amazed when I see what my co-workers will spend on a lunch. It seems so extravagant; on the other hand, if I allowed myself a bit more splurging at mealtimes I wouldn’t have problems keeping my weight up. So I attribute that to my personal weirdness.
I don’t eat breakfast.
$8 average for lunch (with soda)
$1-2 on snacks/soda through the day.
$10 for dinner if we eat in (we tend to buy for one meal at a time), $20 if we eat out or have beer.
So, for me alone, somewhere between $20 and $40 a day, depending on leftovers.
Breakfast=~$5.00 (protein shake, milk, and a muffin)
Lunch=between $4.00 to $12.00 (I sometimes go home, make a salad with chicken and a lot of ingredients or go out to eat.)
Dinner=$5.00-$25.00 Some nights it’s a run through fast food or ordering a pizza, take out thai food on the way home too. I occassionally will stick some frozen type thing from Sam’s Club in the oven.
So minimally, $19 a day and sometimes around $40+
Roughly $5-6 a day, and I eat enough for 2 people. Maybe $8 a month for alcohol on top of that.
My diet consists of alot of food I buy in bulk with coupons and in store savings, so that $5-6 may be lower than it would be if I just bought it w/o coupons & store savings. However looking at what I ate yesterday the cost comes to $3.60.