I live by myself and i rarely eat out. I always buy my own food at supermarket and cook. I don’t like eating out because most of the food is pretty unhealthy and thus if i do, its usually a salad or something like that.
I mostly eat brown rice, salmon fish, chicken breast, broccoli. Fruits/vegetables its mostly blueberries and any type of berries.
I spend anywhere from $350-$500 a month.
Im curious but how much money you spend on each meal for dinner since many of you who eat at home, the only meal you do is dinner since breakfast you probably just eat a bagel or snack and lunch you just buy something outside?
Salmon usually cost me $3.50-$4.50 for the piece im eating, broccoli is usually another 1 dollar, brown rice is probably $0.75 maybe. So basically me cooking the food for dinner cost me around $6 plus gas so its probably $6.75.
Out of curiosity I priced this up in my local supermarket. Of course the price would vary with where I shopped, but this gives an idea:
Salmon steak = £3.00
Broccoli = £0.50
Brown rice (4oz) = 50p
Gas = No idea, but only a few pence.
Total = £4 or so. ($6.85)
A frozen ready meal at the same store, described as "Our Smokey Macaroni Fish Bake makes a really tasty meal for one, with chunky pieces of Alaska Pollock fillet in a smokey [sic] cheese sauce, with Macaroni pasta and a cheesy crumble topping." is priced at £1.50.
Mine costs about the same as the OP.
I find also the healthier I eat, the more expensive it is. Of course!
Moderator Note
Pauly01, questions about personal experiences or opinions go in IMHO, not General Questions. You’ve started many such threads in GQ, which then have to be moved. I’m going to ask you to think more carefully about which forum is appropriate before you post your threads. If you keep posting threads more suitable for IMHO in General Questions, I may start closing them instead of moving them.
Thanks for your consideration. Moved to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Living alone, I prepare all my food from scratch. My monthly grocery bill is about $70. I don’t drive, so I walk to the supermarket (1.5 miles RT), so gas is not a factor.
Typical day:
Breakfast, about 12-15 mini shredded wheat biscuits and enough milk to cover them. Once a week, eggs sausage and toast.
Lunch: One ear of corn and a sliced tomato. Or 1/3 cup cornmeal boiled to polenta, with sour cream and a tomato. Or four corn tortillas filled with refried beans and cream cheese. Or a small sandwich.
Dinner: My only meat meal, about 2-4 ounces of organ meat, fish, or pork when I find it cheap. Or as a pot roast with vegs, making enough to last 4-5 days. Or as a chicken leg quarter (10-pound frozen, 59 a pound) cooked in curry, paprika, wat, or something, with onions and peppers, with an appropriate starch (rice,dumplings, etc.), making enough to last 4-5 days. Or beans and rice, from dried beans in the pressure cooker with lots of onions, carrots.
Night snack: Tortilla chips with bean dip, or crackers and cheese. Twice week with a generic soda. I bake my own cookies.
Once a month or so, I use a coupon to get two burgers for the price of one. Cutting them in half, yields four lunches.
Easy to do for a little over two dollars a day. I’ve taught myself to never splurge – just a splurge a week can nearly double the grocery budget, and all the other effort has gone for naught…
Last night dinner was a Greek salad, which served two and had leftovers for two.
English cucumber: $2.00
Heirloom local organic tomatoes: $2.00
Bell pepper: $1.25
Olives: $3.00
Feta: $3.00
Herbs, spices, olive oil, vinegar: Call it $1.00
Gas: Nominal, since the grocery is on the way home from work
Beverage: Water
$12.25/4 = $3.80 per person per serving. That’s a little high for this meal compared to next week when we’ll start using our own tomatoes, but we like to support the organic growers at the farmer’s market.
I’d be interested to know where you live, Pauly01, that it costs that much every month for basically dinner stuff and fruit. I live by myself, prepare almost all my meals at home, including breakfast and lunch which I pack to the office, and give myself $275 per month to do it on. I do not eat processed food or anything out of a can, except occasionally tuna and roasted green chilies. My diet is fresh vegetables and fruit with small amounts of protein (meat, eggs, fish). I do not eat wheat (no bread, bagels, pasta, etc), but do eat some rice and quinoa. I do not drink soda or beer, although I do buy three bottles of inexpensive wine per month.
Huh. I wonder where you live.
My household spends between $300-400/month for TWO people, and we’re heavily brown rice/fish/chicken/vegetable ourselves.
Most of the time we eat all three meals in, or I take something to work. About half the time I buy something to eat at work, usually between $3-6 for that.
When I do a salmon dinner it’s usually about $1.75-$2.50/per person for the fish. Broccoli I buy frozen, which is cheaper than fresh and keeps longer but nutritionally is nearly the same, about $0.25/person. Brown rice is around $2/pound where I am, but 1 pound dry uncooked makes a lot of portions, so… yeah, around $0.50 to $0.75/person. There’s also cooking oil, spices, and condiments involved, but the cost is minor compared to the major ingredients, let’s say another $0.25/person. So I’m looking at $3.00 to $3.75 per person for that meal. The biggest variability is the cost of salmon.
I’m trying to figure out how I’m spending about half as much as you for the same meal. Granted we’re both middle aged so our portions tend to be smaller than for younger person but I’m not sure they’d be half the size of yours.
On the other hand, it does seem consistent that we’re feeding two people for about half of what you spend to feed one.
I’ll note that some meals - leftovers, some vegetarian stir fries - come in even cheaper than the fish/veg/rice meal.
I buy all my groceries at the same store for the most part and eat out maybe 4 times a month. My girlfriend and I spend about 600.00 per month including detergents, toilet paper, kleenex etc.
Im from NY but i stay in canada 1/2 of the year and basically on and off.
Where in the world do you get salmon for $2? Are you eating like a very small piece or something?
In canada, salmon is usually $7 a pound if on sale at best. Majority of the time if its on sale its $8 a pound. When not on sale it could be $11 or $12 a pound. Basically its usually between $8-$12 a pound but majority of the time its $8 or $9 a pound.
In NY where i buy food, salmon is between $6 and $8 a pound. So even if it was $6 a pound, are you all eating an extremely small piece of salmon? $2 in salmon is very very little.
Im assuming most of you are not from the major american cities?
I should have mentioned in my post above that I never drink anything but tapwater (except the couple of sodas a week, generic, 20c a can, cane sugar-made). I get a complementary cup of coffee every morning when I pick up my mail at my apartment office, a resident perk. Drinks can swell your grocery bill rally fast. A beer a day would amount to a quarter of my total food budget.
Is this a typo, or do you really get a month’s worth of groceries for $70 dollars? Even considering your rather meager meals (compared to mine), it’s gotta be more than $2+ per day.
Nope. $70 a month.
It’s a little hard to say. If I’m cooking for me and my wife, it’s well worth putting some real effort and money into it. A common dinner would hit $10 each.
But if I’m really cooking just for myself… it’s not worth getting fancy. I’m just eating to fulfill the dietary requirements. Lots of my meals would be under $5 each. For example, my go-to meals for myself are bean and cheese burritos, or spaghetti with olive oil, garlic and onion. I’d be surprised if these guys hit $3.
Salmon prices range a great deal, including whether it’s farmed/Atlantic or wild, as well as the variety.
Before I quit, I spent almost that much per day on wine alone. (For two of us)
I don’t know what we spend to have a meal at home, but I figure however much we spend, it is less than going to a resturant.
I spend probably $350-$400 a month on food, including alcohol. I buy a lot of organic, and meat comes from the farmer’s market only. This time of year is Salmon time for me, as I don’t buy farmed stuff and wait for when the wild-caught Alaskan stuff is freshest. That goes for around $14 a pound on sale. Anyway, the most basic set amount I spend is $40 at the farmer’s market for meat and vegetables, and $25 a week for an organic fruit box put together by a nearby grocer. So if I buy nothing else, $65 a week is for sure. Add in other staples, bread, beans, pasta, dairy and yeah, at least $85 a week.
But that’s a choice. I could certainly spend less on factory farmed meats and conventional fruit/veg. I choose not to.
Breakfast and lunch are always very simple. A veggie burger (or salmon filet) and a piece of fruit for breakfast. Tortilla, cheese, and fruit for lunch. So we’re talking about a $1-$2 per meal. I rarely break from this routine.
I’d say dinner is probably $3-$5, on average. I don’t do a lot of cooking, so I’ll buy a couple of microwavable meals and supplement with a vegetable (usually the raw and leafy green variety). But on the weekends, I usually eat out. I look forward to eating a couple of decadent meals at the end of the week considering that all my other dinners are so boring.
We both usually eat the vast majority of our meals at home or bring them from home - maybe once or twice a week, we’ll eat out. Groceries for 2 end up costing maybe $600/month. We don’t buy a lot of prepared foods; we like to cook from scratch. We try not to splurge too much on groceries, but we don’t make a huge effort to eat the cheapest possible food, either. We cook and eat a wide variety of things; one day might be brown rice and dal (cost per serving: well under $1), and another day might be seared tuna steaks if they look good that day, at $14.99/lb. Usually it’s somewhere in the middle.
Weekday breakfast is usually fruit, plain yogurt, walnuts, and honey, maybe with granola or muesli. Lunch is usually leftover dinner from the night before. This week, for example, Tom Scud has been out of town, so over the weekend I cooked up a pot of brown rice and a veggie and tofu stir fry, some Persian-style saffron rice, and a big pot of ghormeh sabzi, and have been alternating between those for the past few days. Then last night I got tired of that routine and went out for a burger. Tonight I am tired and not feeling ambitious, so I cooked up some frozen pumpkin ravioli and ate them with butter and parm. On the weekends I try to bake bread, and we sometimes undertake more ambitious cooking projects (and get ahead on meal prep for the coming week).
We don’t buy soda, or generally any ready-to-use beverages other than orange juice and the occasional bottle of wine. We buy organic when it’s not insanely expensive, and tried a CSA for a while but found that just didn’t work well for us. We avoid foods with a lot of added preservatives, sugar in non-desserts, etc. and try (not always successfully) to eat more veggies and less meat. We also try to cook things in big batches for leftovers and/or freezing (which is really what I should do with the rest of the ghormeh sabzi at this point).
So dinner? Sometimes $0.75, sometimes (very rarely) $15, but probably most of the time in the $2 - 4/serving range. The ingredients for the ghormeh sabzi, for example, were less than $20 total, and I’ve had 2 dinners and 2 lunches out of it so far, and more than half of it is left.
A typical meal for me is a bowl of rice (often with something like umeboshi or shiokara), fillet of fish, and steamed vegetables of some description. If I go with the dinner I had last night:
Grilled salmon fillet (pre-salted): 125 yen
Steamed komatsuna with sesame: 25 yen (+10 yen for the sesame and other seasoning)
One bowl of rice (about 75g uncooked): 40-50 yen (when I have to buy it, I often get this for free)
Umeboshi: 20-30 (also often free)
So I’d say in general it costs me a little less than 3 USD to make a typical dinner. It sometimes costs more if I splurge for more expensive ingredients, but I’m usually quite happy with buying whatever is cheapest.
I like soda water a lot, and usually drink one or two bottles an evening (85 yen each), but with dinner I usually have tap water or tea.
I walk or bicycle to the shops, so I’m not spending money on gas.