These threads fascinate me. I really cannot see how some people spend so little.
We spend an average of £335 a month at the supermarket (Morrisons), so £84 a week for two adults and one cat. As the cat costs us about £6-ish a week, I'd say we spend £39 a week per adult, so around £5.50 a day per adult.
That spend includes one adult's food for every breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack seven days every week, plus their share our toiletries and household goods (we buy Morrisons own brand washing powder and shampoo for a £1 from bodycare). We only buy wine for cooking, so we will get a couple of cheap bottles every month, and we don't buy takeaways or ready-meals. We also don't throw food away; I simmer my veg peelings to make stock for casseroles and sauces.
So if I take the non-edible stuff out of the equation, which is about 10 percent of the bill, we are looking at an average of £5.35 a day per adult on food and drink. I really can't get this much lower without our diets becoming very carb heavy.
For example, I made two moussakas (with peppers and courgette instead of aubergine) yesterday out of 500g of minced beef: one was about three adult-sized dinner portions and the other two smaller "lunch-sized" portions, so long as we had those meals with a big salad.
The cost of these moussakas were ...
500g mince = £3
2 onions = 16p
one tin toms = 31p
garlic = 12p
fat to fry onions and beef = 12p
wine (quarter of bottle) = £1
stock cube = 10p
herbs and veg stock = zero (I grow my own herbs and make my own stock)
two red peppers and one yellow = 96p
three courgettes = £1.31
three large potatoes = 50p
pint of milk = 25p
70g cheese = 70p
(salt, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, juniper berries, cloves, allspice, cornflower all already in the cupboard)
The total cost of these moussakas was £8.53 and that is not accounting for the ingredients already in the cupboard or the cost of the herbs I grow myself (soil feed or repotting compost after the first year etc). As all together, they made five adult portions, that's £1.70 per adult portion just for the moussaka. Then there's the cost of the salad to go with it, which I would estimate at about 80p for the lettuce, 60p for the toms, and an extra 40p for cucumber and other gubbins so about £2 in all. Divided by five, that adds another 40p onto the cost of adult portion so we would be looking at £2.10 per adult portion.
And that £2.10 is just one medium-sized-ish dinner meal for one adult with no pudding or sweet for afters, though I could have got it down by 20p had I had skipped the wine.
But then there is the rest of the day's meals. A medium-sized jacket potato with 60g of tuna for lunch would cost about 75p per person. A couple of eggs for breakfast with two slices of supersaver own label toast would be about 50p pp, and take 50p pp out for drinks, and you are looking at spending £3.85 per adult person per day. We spend an extra £1.50 per person per day, which I think is reasonable and not in the least bit profligate. DH will often have three eggs for breakfast, we don't buy super saver bread, and both of us drink a lot of mineral water, for example.
But there seems to be people on mumsnet who feed and water teens or adults on less than £2 a day and I can't quite figure out how this is possible in terms of hitting nutritional targets, unless they are forgetting to account for breakfasts, lunches or dinners bought or eaten outside the home or eat a heck of a lot of dried pasta for every meal.
I remember looking at some of Jack Munroe's recipes back in the day and even they were based on the slightly bizarre notion that a reasonable meal for an adult could be 100g of cooked dried pasta with 75g of mushrooms and some oil and lemon juice and even then the total cost of the meal for one adult was about 85p.