Two Americas?Follow

Yeah but even breasts are something like 10-15¢ a lb more expensive than leg quarters or drum sticks.

Now I personally would buy the whole bird, roast it and then make soup from the carcass afterward but, again, I think you hit a barrier where people who have been eating boxed/frozen/fast food their whole life need to be taught why it's worth their time & effort to make a soup out of a mainly stripped bird.

And you can make good stock out of the bones and other leftovers.

Thanks, Obama.

This has nothing to do with poor people, I think we made that perfectly clear. It's a thread about chicken, or pigeon, or something.

Which brings up one of my frustrations, how much do the bones weigh anyway? I never know how much to subtract from the price because of that.

If they can grow watermelons without seeds, they should be able to grow chickens without bones.

Not my fault you don't know how to cook a chicken. There's probably a sweet spot in there -- poor people and rich people can't cook chicken but middle class white people dominate!

I have never cooked chicken. I don't think this is necessarily a class based thing.

I'm still going with the theory that they were buying enough food for between 6-8 people OR they were buying food for the entire month at once.

From my experience on food stamps, they are most likely buying food for the month. Most I ever got was $450 in food stamps a month for me and my 3 girls. We shopped weekly as I didn't have a car. If I had budget my food stamps to were I had some extra the last week of the month, I would buy a real good cut of meat as a treat.

It's trivially easy. Several people have already posted that they do this consistently (a couple even saying $300/month feeds their family of 4 or even 5). And while searching for sales helps, it's really not necessary. Just knowing which items are "cheap", and which are expensive will help you. Avoid boxed and pre-prepared foods and you'll save a bundle. The key is to use rice, pasta, beans, and potatoes to stretch out the meats and vegetables.

I tend to shop in weekly portions, not monthly. Since I'm eating for one, I work with meals that can be separated into a starch and a protein, and a typical "meal" will last 5 days (yes, I eat lots of leftovers because otherwise it's incredibly wasteful. Obviously, if you have 4-5 mouths to feed, this actually gets easier). Here's the deal though, a typical 5 portion meal should cost about 8-10 bucks. Rice/pasta/beans/potatoes for one portion. Add some protein (chicken or ground beef typically), and a veggie side. Someone talked about a 25lb bag of rice. That'll last a ridiculously long time. 1 pound of rice is sufficient for a whole meal (so 5 days in my budget). So that's about 6 pounds of rice a month if all I ate was rice based dishes. Pasta is slightly more expensive, but not much. And btw, heaven forbid you actually make your own pasta, since flour and water is so ridiculously expensive, right? Potatoes are ridiculously inexpensive for the sheer poundage you get, and lets not get started on beans.

You don't need a freaking pound of protein on your plate btw. I've found that a pound is more than enough for a whole meal (5 days, remember), and will typically run you about 5 bucks (and is typically going to be the most expensive thing you spend money on). Buy frozen instead of fresh and you can save a bit as well. Eggs for breakfast is easy. I eat an egg sandwitch (two eggs, two slices of bread, some mayo), for breakfast. At about $150/dozen for large eggs, and say $2/24 slices for bread, (and say $3/month for mayo), that works out to around 50 cents a day for breakfast. Dinner should run you around $10/month for starch/carb, and $25/month for protein, and say $15/month for veggies. Add in another $10/month for sauce materials and we're looking at around $75/month for our food budget. Add in some more bread and lunchmeat for lunch and we're right around our $100/month range (I tend to not eat lunch, preferring a late breakfast and early dinner, but that's just me and my ever slowing metabolism speaking).

I don't exactly do a meal plan, and I certainly tend to splurge over those levels (buying fresh fish will do it, as someone pointed out, but boy is it worth it). But if you were to challenge me to live off just $100 for food per month, it would be really easy to do. And frankly, this gets much easier to do with a larger family since the meal calculations get more efficient and you can get away with greater variety.



That's just bizarre to me though. What the hell are you buying? Snack packs? Fruit cups? Soft drinks? Don't buy that stuff. You can drink freaking water. It's better for you. Use milk for cooking dishes, not drinking (unless you're a growing child building up strong bones and all that, of course). Juice is for mixing with your vodka.




It's funny because I remember years ago, I used to subsist off of fast food and pre-packaged stuff. I also could not imagine that buying base ingredients and actually cooking my own meals would not only be much more healthy, but would also save a ridiculous amount of money. I just couldn't imagine it. I'd do the math and conclude (as you do), that it just wasn't worth it. Now, years later, I'm happy to admit that I was dead wrong. Once I started trying it, I realized that I could come up with meal plans that not only worked for me, but were much less expensive than you might think. Don't eat breakfast out of a box (actually pancake mix might be an exception to this, but you get what I'm saying). Don't eat lunch out of a box. And don't eat dinner out of a box.


Hell. I walked into the store last Friday and saw a manager's special on pork loin (like $5 for like 2 lbs, might have been more really, wasn't paying more attention than "holy hell that's a lot of meat for that much money"). I bought that, a bottle of barbeque sauce, a box of baby greens, and a bottle of honey mustard dressing. I slow cooked the pork in the barbeque sauce on Saturday. This made a huge amount of portions of fall off the bone pork (I'm still only about halfway through the leftovers). I had some butter in the fridge and chicken granules in the pantry, so a basic rice pilaf on the side (for variation really). Add a handful of the greens and the dressing for a salad, and I've been eating honestly too much dinner each night. Total cost (including the dressing which I can re-use for like 50 more salad servings): About $15.

And that was honestly a bit of a splurge meal. But it'll likely result in about 1/3rd of my months dinner requirements (although I'm suspecting the greens might not last that long, but they're pretty cheap). It really honestly isn't that hard to do. You just have to shift your perception about food and meal prep.

Edited, Dec 11th 2013 3:28pm by gbaji

People on food stamps can't hire the sort of personal chef who does their own shopping, duh.

Such rampant excessive indulgence.

Since I'm eating for one

Still not pregnant? Don't worry, it'll happen someday.