2 adults, 2 teenage boys. About $800/month, including milk delivery and the half steer we buy each year. And cleaning supplies.
It's high. But we eat out approximately never, we buy almost no convenience or pre-prepared food, and we cook about everything from fundamental parts: Meat, dried beans, vegetables. The older kid looked at a completely full fridge last week and said "why isn't there anything to eat in here", meaning "it's all basic components that require assembly, there's nothing I can grab and eat." My goal is to have an empty refrigerator on Friday evening/Sat morning before we go grocery shopping. We eat very, very well, but haven't thrown out food in a while.
We also have 2 cats, but their stuff is calculated elsewhere.
this begs the question of how do you spend that much money then? this should equate to a very low budget if you dont bbuy packaged food. dry beans are cheap. meat and veggies bought on sale are cheap. so how do you get to 800? does it inolve the buzzword organic which makes food cost 2x what it should for no added value?
Have you ever fed teenaged boys??
Aww, thanks for defending me!
Very high COL area, no Aldi or other discount grocer, a fair amount of gourmet ingredients (although we buy them at Trader Joe's, so they're ... less outrageously expensive), and we try to buy responsibly raised meat, but not too much of it. We're totally not optimizing on the food -- I decided I could bash it back to $100-$150/week (the rest is delivered milk and that half steer, which I've split into a monthly amount).
Interesting that the responses seem to be bimodal -- lots of folks with "high" grocery budgets up around mine (per person), some folks striving for and/or achieving half that.
From memory, our menu this past week:
Breakfasts: coffee, milk, cereal (from TJ, so $2-$3/box), granola (which I make), soaked oats, pancakes, all with fruit
Breakfast fruit this week was two $1 pineapples and a $2 box of blueberries
Lunches: sandwiches, leftovers, bean cheese & spicy pico quesadillas for lunches, with oranges/apples. Big salad for me of celery, apples, blue cheese, walnuts, and dried cranberries (chopped salads last several days).
Dinners: tonight was a pasta carbonara baked in a springform (smitten kitchen), salad. This was an experiment, and contained some fancy-pants ingredients.
tomorrow: sausage, lentil, (frozen)kale soup with croutons made of the leftover bread from this week
red curry beef and cabbage, steamed rice
pozole (chicken & hominy stew), cabbage and carrot salad
burgers, sweet potatoes, green beans, salad
peanut noodles (tofu, veg)
tuna steaks (we try to have fish once per week, these were on sale for $5 or $6/lb), potatoes & greens & garlic, some cooked vegetable. Upside-down orange cake.
Looking this over (and comparing to boarder's list), I see a couple of things:
1. We try to eat fish once or so per week. We never find OK fish for under $5 or $6/lb. We live in the center of the country, and I'm the creepy lady who asks to smell the fish if I think it looks questionable.
2. Our vegetables (especially in the winter) are more like $3 - $4/lb, and we eat a pound to a pound and a half per dinner, typically. I do look at the sales flyers before I head out, and I do plan ahead of time to have meals based around whatever's on sale.
3. We're all absurdly active. We eat a lot. Side effect of not driving during the week, possibly.
4. I'm a bread snob. We buy a loaf per week, and it's freakin' expensive at $6 per largish round loaf. I've spent entire winters working on mastering bread baking, and mine is decent, but not as good. I've decided the stuff I buy is worth it to me. (Bring on the catheter and the motorized armchair, please.)
5. That half steer? Grass-fed, grass-finished, I've met the ranchers and had a friend who's a grassland ecologist look at the ranch. I've also walked through the "processing" facility, and am happy with the way the animals AND the people are treated. We're willing to put our money where our mouths (literally) are, in this instance. Basically, same story for the milk, which arrives in glass bottles like we're totally fancy people (or regular people 40 years ago), then the glass bottles go away again, courtesy of the milk fairies who come and go in the dark. Those two are probably $40/week, right there. I am not unaware of this, and we could cut it if necessary, but right now we can afford it, and it's part of how we support our community and put our money where our values are.
This is a cool thread -- thanks!