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

OP, do you think this was a worthwhile exercise? Do you think you've proved anything? Do you think you've risked your health? Do you think that not eating a single veg or fruit portion for 19 days is wise? How many actual meals have you had in 19 days? 2? Out of the recommended 57?

Do you not see how this is insulting to people who are genuinely food-poor?

Are your finances tight at the moment? Would you like some budgeting tips which don't involve stupid experiments?

I don't think its possible without starving oneself.

You could probably do £7.50 on the occasional week. I certainly have as a single person but there's no way you could manage it for more than a month. It's impossible these days, even if purely shopping at Aldi/Lidl.

You'd never be able to buy fruit for a start and even 2 pints of milk for a week would be nearly £1.50. You wouldn't have a balanced diet on £7.50 a week.

My brother is the most minimalist person I know. He spends between 4k to 5k per year all in ( though he does have emergency savings if something breaks in the house), but otherwise 4 to 5k per year covers all his living costs, fuel ( he never has heating on ever), housing ( no rent or mortgage but is council tax and water rates), food/ toiletries/ household cleaning products, travel costs ( pretty much zero) and going out (a beer in a pub occasionally).
And even his monthly spend is 323 to 403 per month, and his biggest cost after council tax is food. So even my uber minimalist brother spends more than this on food.
So YABU.

Possible yes, sustainable no.

I’ve got a fair bit of experience with feeding people on a tight budget. With careful budgeting and savvy shopping it’s possible to eat reasonably healthily for £30pppw (per person per week) - £4.28 per day. I think £30 a month, whilst it may not be impossible, would be really very tough. Following with interest.

Agreeing with the minority: not possible without malnutrition.

20 years ago as a student, my shopping budget including all items bought at a supermarket (ie not just food) was £25/wk, so the food element was likely around £20/wk. This was batch cooking from scratch and then eating the same dinner 3 nights in a row. I bought all my fruit and veg at a greengrocer and the meat from the butcher as it was cheaper and better quality, and a lot of staples such as cheese and bread were bought from Iceland. It was repetitive but nutritious.
It could be done cheaper if you were happy with ulta-processed and nothing fresh. There was one week I noticed my flatmate had absolutely nothing on his fridge shelves or in his freezer drawer, and a peep in his cupboard showed that it was empty too. He was a very fussy eater who mostly lived off cheap frozen food, biscuits and crisps. Iceland used to do really good value 'all this for £5' offers each week, which equated to around a week of dinners for a single person if you didn't mind a bit of repetition (I've still seen this about at supermarkets, but you don't get nearly as much any more). I bought one of those offers, plus some staples like bread, cheese, butter, and jam plus a packet or two of biscuits and it filled his kitchen spaces. It was about £10 in total. I remember because I was shocked at the time about how my method of shopping/cooking was literally twice as much as his readymade bung-in-the-oven food, despite me doing all the 'right' things of shopping around, batch cooking, buying reduced/using BOGOF, cooking from scratch etc. I wasn't cooking fancy things either - lots of soups and veggie dishes, mince bulked with lentils etc... He always looked drawn and undernourished though, so overall his way wasn't better IMO. The only fruit and veg in his weekly shop (and the one I bought him) was the bag of frozen peas or sweetcorn that came in the Iceland deal

Basically, it wasn't possible to do it for £7.50/wk 20 years ago if willing to eat utter crap. My food bill has doubled in the last 5 years alone, so it sounds like a complete impossibility in 2024.

This is just another silly wind up post.

So for 3 weeks you ate some biscuits, crisps and milk?
If that is the case, I can give some ideas about further savings for you. Like, I dunno, boiling eggs instead of buying pre-boiled....
If I didn't think your post was inflammatory before, I certainly think so now.

OP you are clearly bonkers 😂

However I'm going to humour you and suggest you have a look on YouTube, plenty of people have done this challenge and produced actual meals instead.

Here's one for

Yes but you haven’t given the example menu?

OK I see you did later provide a list of somethings but none of this makes sense. As pp said this is unnecessary and unhealthy and not a good thing to try out.

So yes YABU.

Look op, I'm not having a go but I'm really concerned about you.
Do you have parents or family around that have shown you how to cook or meal plan at all?
Your shopping list reminds me of when I left foster care and had no idea how to plan and budget properly with the £50pw I was given, although I didn't buy biscuits and cakes my first shop was nothing I could make proper meals from, it was ridiculous tbh 😅

After living off a jar of peanut butter and a pack of pasta I was fed up of myself and went to the local library and wrote out recipes and meals from cook books and asked a neighbour to show me how to cook eggs etc.

You have so many more resources than I did back then, look up on YouTube how to cook or meal plan and there's a varity of videos showing you how.

Invest some time into this, learn how to provide yourself nutritious meals/snacks, even 30 mins a day, set yourself a goal, write out a weekly menu, create a little routine that suits and you can eat healthy on a budget ( hopefully more than £30 a month ) and lose weight if you want to.

I dunno if you ask '30p Lee' about it you could probably make it work for that budget. He seems to think that you can.

I had an ED in my teens/early 20s and I thought the same
But mn seems to have a lot of people with ED , I stay away from the what have you eaten in a day because I don't want to get drawn into that again

I think it would be pretty tough. Just googled some prices (sainsburys) and if you bought the following:
Whole Chicken - £4
potatoes = 1.35
carrots = 60p
Onions - 85p a kilo
Basics bag of pasta = 50p
a tin of economy chopped tomatoes - 40p
1kg rice - 55p
2 tins of beans = 54p (27 ea)
bag of porridge oats - 90p
Cheapest white bread - 47p

That comes to not much more than a tenner.

From that id make:
Porridge for breakfast with water
Roast dinner two days with carrots and spuds, leftover sliced chicken on sandwiches. (whole chicken would do loads for 1 person)
Tomato pasta for two days using some onion and chopped carrots for flavour.
Rice with a bit of chicken onion and carrots 1 day.
2 days of jacket potato with baked beans.
You wouldnt starve to death but it'd be really, really boring.

So you spent £35 on snacks.

Why not do intermittent fasting while you're at it. That would make your snacks last a month. 🙄

That food list is awful- all processed food carbs, junk and sugar.
You are living on crap. No vegetables, no protein.
Also why buy cheese slices when you can buy a block of cheese?
Why buy Greggs pizza rather than a whole supermarket pizza and bring from home
Why not buy eggs and boil them yourself
Cheap balanced food!
Baked potatoes (make yourself)
Lentils
Tinned tomatoes
Tinned fish
basic fresh vegetables like onions, carrots
Look at frozen veg like spinach, peas
Get some mince and batch cook bolognese or chilli
Make some vegetable soups

Then stop eating crap

Sugar will just turn to fat and you will crave more because you are not feeding your body the nutrients it needs so it hungers for vitamins and minerals and you keep feeding it carbs and sugar
Your body is a machine. In order for it not to break down you need to put in it what it needs to function

On the off-chance that you're not on a wind up mission, you really do need to seek help for your disordered eating.

You'll get seriously ill from eating like that.

I have a well-stocked cupboard, good access to Olio in London and could stand with losing weight, so I suppose I could for one month. In fact maybe it's not a bad idea 🤔