To spend £30 a month on ALL food and drink?

Do you want malnutrition? Completely impossible. Even £30 a week is pushing it when it comes to including protein and five a day. No.

It's do-able, but you won't enjoy it or get the nutrients you need for your health. Why not instead aim for a realistic budget for a healthy diet?

Can you breakdown how you spent your £2 per day and what you ate?

When I was a student, I managed on about £10 a week. That was in 2015 though and with heavy reliance on Olio app. Vegetarian meals and 100% cooking from scratch. No eating out, even in Gregg’s. Most meals were a stew of some kind. I could normally manage 5 days or so out of a large pot.
If you have to, you probably can. If you don’t absolutely need to, then I don’t see much point in being so restrictive.

DD at university reckons she is spending around £15 a week on food.

But ... that only includes supermarket food, not "eating out" food (which is a meal deal from a supermarket or a share of takeaway pizza) at least once a week.

And ... she is short and petite and doesn't eat much

And ... we did stock her up with a lot of basics (pasta, rice, basic herbs and spices etc) at the start of term

I thought she was doing well to keep her food bills so low. i think £30 is totally unrealistic.

A Greggs pizza slice is £2.75 I think (I googled), so unless you plan on making it last nearly three days I don't think even that is an option.
I don't think £1 a day is possible.

Several years ago I did a charity challenge to live off £1 per day for 14 days. It was miserable. I had to have porridge for breakfast every day. I don't really like porridge made with water. For lunch a slice of toast and an apple. For dinner beans on toast or a jacket potato or just 2 or 3 slices of toast. I bought a tiny bit of cheese that had a yellow sticker and grated that for a couple of days. I found some yellow sticker ham one day. That was the only meat I ate for the entire 14 days. I bought a packet of cream crackers as cheap if I got hungry. I had to buy tea bags and milk out of my money as part of the challenge meant you couldn't eat stuff from home you already had except seasoning. A group of us did it and we all said never again. I felt drained and tired most of the time. It's possible in the short term but not the medium or long term.

But only if safe to do so

That sounds a lot better than some of the crap that I read people eat.

I mean. Try it…,.

I was homeless growing up and we lived on one tin of beans. 4 slices of bread and two baking potatoes for 2 weeks….

Whilst you can definitely eat healthily and nutritiously on a budget, £30 a month is very very low and practically impossible, even if you’re eating pasta, porridge and toast most days.

I too live alone and if I can eat healthily a week on £30-£35. This is sometimes what I naturally spend on food a week if I don’t eat out or buy any bottles of wine or get hosting food in. Within this amount, I can have Greek yoghurt and fresh fruit with eggs for breakfast, and something like chicken salads, vegetable stews, goulash, crudités and humous, soup and bread, stir fry, chicken and rice, omelettes or sausage casseroles for lunch. I intermittent fast though so only have a big breakfast and lunch and don’t have dinner, but I drink hot drinks liberally through the day. If I was having dinner each day, it would be more like £40-45. Then there are times you need cleaning and kitchen household products and basic toiletries. That will need to be costed for too.

Are you quite young or living alone? That’s the only way I could explain you not understanding how much an ingredient costs, what goes into even a basic meal, the importance of getting proper amounts of fat, protein, fibre, macronutrients in etc. Your comment about a slice or two of pizza at Greggs is perplexing as it’s about 2-3 days of your food budget!

Bonkers

This was my budget for several years in the nineties. And it was supplemented by free food (I would turn up to anything with food - university focus groups, church music events, time share presentations...) and the early days of loyalty points. I ate a lot of reduced bananas.

I think it would be a struggle now - prices have gone up a lot and there is much more competition for free/cheap food.

Bread is about £2-£3 and milk is also £2. This thread makes me angry and the person who posted it must be quite thick. Food is supposed to nourish your body so it can run all your organs and give you the energy to get on with your day.

Why though? You're putting in trite replies which don't expand on this, you mean you just felt like doing it, or you were forced to? I don't know why I'm asking though!

Even with a Mumsnet roast chicken you’ll be struggling. 😂😂

I think you're overly optimistic.

I use to have £13 a week for food for me and toddler ds.

I walked around also with a calculator and would batch cook.

It was just about doable with no treats.

But this was 2007!!!!

I spent £65 a week for teen ds and I 3 years ago.

Now same shop is more like £100!

In the very short term, just to prove you could do it, it might be possible if you went round all the supermarkets near closing time grabbing yellow stickered stuff such as loaves of bread for 10p, but not if you then included the petrol you spent driving round all the supermarkets. You could also get free stuff from Olio or reduced stuff from too good to go. But if you factor your time into the equation, you would be better to work an hour or two of overtime, to counteract the time you would spend on this 'challenge'.

If you only eat 1 large potato, a banana, and a few pints of water per day you could probably just about do it.

Agree. Awful stuff trying to mimic those who ARE in absolute food poverty. I can't believe what I am reading.

It might be doable if you’re fasting everyday and eat one small meal but you still need calories and good nutritious food to feed your body. Does your work feed you? My brother gets breakfast and lunch provided at work and they let him take the leftovers for dinner so £30 a month would be doable for him (he works for a company that wants them to be in the office full time so offers them this inducement and he’s also on a very good wage).