Anonymous wrote:This is OP. I spend about $400 - $450 a week and I think it’s insane. I do have two teenage boys in sports.

I cook from scratch and we eat leftovers. I shop at Aldi, Lidl, Trader Joe and Lotte/HMart for Asian and Hispanic foods and some small local shops for middle eastern foods.

I would just love to know what the families who spend less on groceries eat. Are they eating quesadillas and spaghetti with tomato sauce every day or are there some that still make a variety of meals on less?

I think the culprits for us might be fruit and that my family wants a variety of food.

I have 2 teenage boys in sports as well, who also want a variety of food. We save a ton of money because we are vegetarian, and buy our beans, lentils, and grains dry and in bulk (like 10-20 lbs at a time). With an instant pot, it's almost no work to cook beans from dry -- just dump beans in with water and salt/seasonings, set the time, and walk away. The instant pot will shut itself off when its done. Because of the huge variety of grains/beans/lentils that exist, we can make a seemingly endless variety of foods. In-season vegetables dictate the meals I make -- in winter, there are more soups/stews/baked items, in the summer, there are more bean salads/grilled foods/sandwiches.

We eat a veggie/some fish diet and got our food costs down to about $500 a month, by:

1) getting take-out only once a month
2) getting coffee out one day a week only
3) Doing 90% of shopping at Lidl
4) All lunches are leftovers
5) lunch is largest meal of day six days a week, dinner is usually omelets, open faced sandwiches, salads
6) Sending school lunch
7) Avoiding packaged food
8) Cutting snacks except a formal 4:00 snack like homemade baked goods
9) Cooking in bulk, freezing half
10) meal-planning

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Having done this analysis and carefully compared prices at WF with the Giant and similar markets, I've concluded there's only minimal savings shopping at cheaper supermarkets *for the same basket of goods*. And you suffer lower quality in exchange.

The real savings comes from your menu. People who spend less on food are eating rice and beans, casseroles, ground beef or turkey, hamburger helper, tuna fish, canned soups, noodles and pasta. You want to save money? You need to simplify your diet.

And what you save on food costs, you end up spending on insulin!

OP i think you are doing great at 450 a week for 4 people inclusing 2 teenage boys. Don’t listen to the devil aka people pretending they spend only 500 a month for six without resorting to food banks and/or having someone do incredibly labor intensive food prep like cooking beans from dry and baking their own bread and telling their kids their only snack is a mouldy banana split three ways

Wrong. Eating unprocessed foods and cooking from scratch never made someone diabetic. What a weird take.

Seriously. Rice and beans are not fueling the diabetes epidemic. The PP's ignorance is contributing to the health problems we have in this country.

Anonymous wrote:Please walk me through what you eat every week.

We recently had a thread about how much people spend on food every week, and some families of four were in the $250/$300 range.
I need to get my costs lowered and apparently it could be done. I would love to know an example of what you eat for each meal in a week.
(I shop at Aldi, Lidl, Trader Joe’s, so not spending outrageously at WF).

Same food as “average” DCUMer, but we don’t buy organic and never shop at Whole Food$. Huge waste of money.

- Eat less meat. Eating vegetarian a couple times a week can really reduce your costs if meat is a major line item for you. But make sure you are replacing meat with unprocessed whole foods, like grains and beans and lentils, and not the processed vegetarian items in the frozen foods section or shelf-stable, highly processed foods. That stuff will cost even more than meat (and also likely is no better for you because of all the stuff they add to it).

- Learn to make (or find inexpensive versions) of good sauces and dressings that really dress up your food. It's a very easy way to make simple meals more appetizing and exciting. And usually cheap -- sour cream or yogurt is pretty inexpensive, we use herbs from our garden or relatively inexpensive ones from the store, and basic veggies like onions and garlic that are really cheap.

- Relatedly, splurge on spices. When you are well stocked on spices and season your food well, you can spend less on your other ingredients because you can always dress up really simple items.

- DON'T BUY PREPARED FOODS UNLESS YOU REALLY HAVE TO. I think this is a big one. Prepared foods are so much more expensive than ingredients. Even semi-prepared foods (like buying pre-made ravioli, jarred sauces, pre-chopped veggies, etc.) cost so much more than the raw/unprepared alternative. I think this is where a lot of people's food budget goes.

- Learn what is cheap at different stores. There are inexpensive items at TJs, Whole Foods, Aldi, HT, everywhere. There are rip offs everywhere too. Learn where the deals are and rotating stores according to that knowledge, as opposed to choosing at random or going by what's closest.

Anonymous wrote:This is OP. I spend about $400 - $450 a week and I think it’s insane. I do have two teenage boys in sports.

I cook from scratch and we eat leftovers. I shop at Aldi, Lidl, Trader Joe and Lotte/HMart for Asian and Hispanic foods and some small local shops for middle eastern foods.

I would just love to know what the families who spend less on groceries eat. Are they eating quesadillas and spaghetti with tomato sauce every day or are there some that still make a variety of meals on less?

I think the culprits for us might be fruit and that my family wants a variety of food.

I spend that every two weeks. Not sure what you are buying but we do things like quesadillas or grilled cheeses and cheaper stuff like pancakes and waffles.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Having done this analysis and carefully compared prices at WF with the Giant and similar markets, I've concluded there's only minimal savings shopping at cheaper supermarkets *for the same basket of goods*. And you suffer lower quality in exchange.

The real savings comes from your menu. People who spend less on food are eating rice and beans, casseroles, ground beef or turkey, hamburger helper, tuna fish, canned soups, noodles and pasta. You want to save money? You need to simplify your diet.

And what you save on food costs, you end up spending on insulin!

OP i think you are doing great at 450 a week for 4 people inclusing 2 teenage boys. Don’t listen to the devil aka people pretending they spend only 500 a month for six without resorting to food banks and/or having someone do incredibly labor intensive food prep like cooking beans from dry and baking their own bread and telling their kids their only snack is a mouldy banana split three ways

Wrong. Eating unprocessed foods and cooking from scratch never made someone diabetic. What a weird take.

Anonymous wrote:This is OP. I spend about $400 - $450 a week and I think it’s insane. I do have two teenage boys in sports.

I cook from scratch and we eat leftovers. I shop at Aldi, Lidl, Trader Joe and Lotte/HMart for Asian and Hispanic foods and some small local shops for middle eastern foods.

I would just love to know what the families who spend less on groceries eat. Are they eating quesadillas and spaghetti with tomato sauce every day or are there some that still make a variety of meals on less?

I think the culprits for us might be fruit and that my family wants a variety of food.

I have younger kids so there’s just going to be less quantity consumer around here for sure! Teen boys will quadruple your grocery bill. That being said, we eat a pretty wide variety of food but a lot of it is plant based — we have shrimp about once a week (treat for the kids) and a nice cut of meat about once a month (treat for me) but other than that it’s a lot of chickpeas and tofu and eggs and lentils and beans and nuts and second time around meat (eg split pea soup with a ham bone, rice pilaf with chicken broth made from a roast chicken carcase, etc) and cheap meat (ground beef, chicken that was on sale, etc).

I buy my most of my produce locally/seasonally which necessarily adds variation to the diet and cuts down on the prices. Berries are mostly in May-June; currently it’s the season of apples and we’re buying those by the half bushel — most farmers market people give you a deal when you buy in bulk.

I do also do the things PP mocked some of us for like exclusively buying dry beans and often making my own bread although I’m not actually sure the bread is a cost savings; I do that because I enjoy baking bread and occasionally freak myself out but reading about highly processed foods and how they’re terrible. The beans might be a savings but honestly I do that more because the dry ones are lighter to drag home from the grocery store.

Since I work full time and have two kids and do almost everything from scratch our meals are also pretty simple and I make in bulk — tonight we had chili and sliced avocado and leftover sourdough bread. Tomorrow we’ll have leftover chilli but maybe I’ll make cornbread to go with it instead since I won’t be making the main. Last week I have a night where I didn’t get all the prep I’d planning for done so we had sliced cherry tomatoes, plain chickpeas, feta, and a little olive oil in pitas. I find that because I make most of the food we eat to my taste, I don’t mind really simple dishes. And my kids are younger enough they’re pro deconstructed meals too. But I’m not at all sure this kind of menu would feed growing athletes!

Anonymous wrote:This is OP. I spend about $400 - $450 a week and I think it’s insane. I do have two teenage boys in sports.

I cook from scratch and we eat leftovers. I shop at Aldi, Lidl, Trader Joe and Lotte/HMart for Asian and Hispanic foods and some small local shops for middle eastern foods.

I would just love to know what the families who spend less on groceries eat. Are they eating quesadillas and spaghetti with tomato sauce every day or are there some that still make a variety of meals on less?

I think the culprits for us might be fruit and that my family wants a variety of food.

Are you always eating everything you buy and not wasting anything?

Every so often can you not grocery shop for one week (except for some fruit & milk) and scrounge and do pantry / freezer meals with what you have on hand?

We eat a variety - but could eat quesadillas once night and spaghetti and tomato sauce another night.

For your teenage boys, I highly recommend an everyday snack that they can gorge on to their hearts content. For our boys I’d make a huge (like giant salad bowl sized) bowl of pasta with red sauce and frozen meatballs every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’d throw veggies in there and they’d eat it without complaint. Stocked up on Costco pasta, meatballs, Parmesan, and red sauce. Otherwise they would eat $500 of snacks in a week.

Our other everyday snack was peanut butter balls: PB, raisins, honey, and oats all mixed up and made into balls they can pop in their mouth for quick energy between sports stuff.

No drinks except water.

Anonymous wrote:Having done this analysis and carefully compared prices at WF with the Giant and similar markets, I've concluded there's only minimal savings shopping at cheaper supermarkets *for the same basket of goods*. And you suffer lower quality in exchange.

The real savings comes from your menu. People who spend less on food are eating rice and beans, casseroles, ground beef or turkey, hamburger helper, tuna fish, canned soups, noodles and pasta. You want to save money? You need to simplify your diet.

And what you save on food costs, you end up spending on insulin!

OP i think you are doing great at 450 a week for 4 people inclusing 2 teenage boys. Don’t listen to the devil aka people pretending they spend only 500 a month for six without resorting to food banks and/or having someone do incredibly labor intensive food prep like cooking beans from dry and baking their own bread and telling their kids their only snack is a mouldy banana split three ways

Anonymous wrote:Having done this analysis and carefully compared prices at WF with the Giant and similar markets, I've concluded there's only minimal savings shopping at cheaper supermarkets *for the same basket of goods*. And you suffer lower quality in exchange.

The real savings comes from your menu. People who spend less on food are eating rice and beans, casseroles, ground beef or turkey, hamburger helper, tuna fish, canned soups, noodles and pasta. You want to save money? You need to simplify your diet.

My bill is literally 40% cheaper at Aldi vs Giant when purchasing the same items. Yes some fruit is not good, I just shop around it.

Having done this analysis and carefully compared prices at WF with the Giant and similar markets, I've concluded there's only minimal savings shopping at cheaper supermarkets *for the same basket of goods*. And you suffer lower quality in exchange.

The real savings comes from your menu. People who spend less on food are eating rice and beans, casseroles, ground beef or turkey, hamburger helper, tuna fish, canned soups, noodles and pasta. You want to save money? You need to simplify your diet.

This is OP. I spend about $400 - $450 a week and I think it’s insane. I do have two teenage boys in sports.

I cook from scratch and we eat leftovers. I shop at Aldi, Lidl, Trader Joe and Lotte/HMart for Asian and Hispanic foods and some small local shops for middle eastern foods.

I would just love to know what the families who spend less on groceries eat. Are they eating quesadillas and spaghetti with tomato sauce every day or are there some that still make a variety of meals on less?

I think the culprits for us might be fruit and that my family wants a variety of food.

*Eat less meat
*Scope out the circulars each week for deals
*Avoid being processed foods
*Make your own meals, desserts, snacks, pizza,popcorn
*Freeze deal items when they are on sale
*DIY salad dressing, coleslaw, potato salad
*Filter tap water
*Make your own lemonade and iced tea