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

[Jumell]

I’m single and live alone. I want to set myself a good budget and admit I’ve overspent /been wasteful in the past.

As a single adult female living alone - is £30 per month on food doable do you think ? Includes eating out etc

I really hope you aren't doing this just to write an article in daily mail/telegraph about how poor people should stop moaning, as it's perfectly possible to eat well on £30 a month.

And what have your meals looked like since that date? Fresh fruit? Veg? Enough protein?

If you were happy to eat the cheapest noodles as a sandwich in the cheapest bread, possibly.

Even a couple of things from Greggs would wreck your budget.

This must be a joke

I do £240pm so £60pw including cleaning products and some toiletries

Laundry stuff I buy separately as it's cheaper in bulk

@Jumell are you ever planning to tell us what your daily food intake has been?

It’s possibly doable per week

per month would be a struggle. But then again I swear Tesco sell loaves of bread for like 30p, that could last a week or 2, so get a few of them. You could probably get other cheap things like rice, pasta, noodles. So you physically could eat with £30 per month.

the struggle would be getting in the right nutrition. Fruit and veg costs can stack up as best before dates can be short. You’d also likely need to have a vegetarian diet to keep costs down.

things like alcohol, snacks, toiletries and household cleaning items are likely unattainable in that budget

£30 a week would be hard enough.

Uni friend of mine back in the 80s lived on £1 a day for food and it was a struggle, even though it was worth about £4 in todays money so much more doable.

Don't like people playing at poverty, there is enough of the real sort around.

I read an article about ten years ago buy a man who claimed to live on a £1 a day for a month I think ,he failed to.mention he had his own chickens ,that gave him daily eggs ,a rather substantial veg patch and a very well stocked store cupboard before he wrote his article 🙄

You’re deluding yourself not disciplining ffs!
As @Overthebow says: So you’ve really spent about £40 including the treats for 19 days. That’s around £60 a month so almost double your challenge budget and a lot more doable. Try actually doing £30 for a month
I can only imagine that you’re going to end up malnourished, constipated and unwell. I just hope that you don’t end up with long term health problems.

But a pizza slice is £2.75 and your budgeting £1 a day (even less in months with 31 days). So if you buy a slice that’s your budget gone for 3 days?

Yes, if you buy your groceries at a food club. That's what I do

Sorry but I don't thinks that's doable or reasonable, I would worry about you not having proper nutrition to say healthy.
My vegetarian daughter spent that a week at uni if she was careful but I that was a couple of years ago food prices have risen since

In 19 days you’ve spent £35 so how are you going to make £30 stretch to 30-31days?

I live alone and there is no way £30 would cover me for a week let alone a month. I meal plan, bulk cook and freeze, lots of homemade soup, curries, bolognaise sauce, stews (meat and veg). I do have breakfast,lunch and an evening meal and maybe a snack or two. Prior to the cost of living crisis, £30 was fine while I stick to the same sort of shopping and cooking I have noticed that the cost has risen astronomically. I reckon that some weeks I spend about £40-£45 and then perhaps about £25 the next week as I will be using shopping from the previous week or my store cupboard.

Yea that was my thought, especially given the first post nature.

OP when you’ve finished cosplaying poverty writing your article maybe you could see if you have the discipline to set and stick to a realistic budget that allows you to eat healthily and even perhaps get involved in some campaigning / awareness / community support around actual poverty? That would probably help you to grow as a person more so than whatever this is.

Oh good, poverty porn.

As it is just an interesting trial, why not have a go at seeing what you can buy, cadge, somehow get for a mere £7, and then see what kind of meals you can make that will get you through a week? It would be easier if you could look at £31 for the month, and that way buy bigger packs of things like pasta, rice, some tinned stuff. You want products with good use by dates, and a freezer to make up batches. Reduced price goods will be your friend as well. Ditch your Greggs treat to start with, see how the month goes, and if you are lucky you might be able to afford. Bakery’s often really reduce goods at the end of the day, so there might be some treats here as well. Trying to build up a stock of staples such as flour, sugar, will allow you to bake things for yourself with eggs, milk added. The fuel to cook and freeze certain stuff I take it won’t be included in your £1 a day, because this is a huge factor in terms of living on a strict budget.

those greggs pizza slices are terrible too, they literally taste the same as any supermarket oven pizza

I’m trying to work out what type of person has literally nothing in their cupboards except some instant coffee and some teabags. No tins of anything, no pasta/rice, no garlic, salt or pepper, spices etc? Just tea and coffee.
Other than people living in poverty I can’t understand this at all.

This post got me thinking. We're proper country bumpkins, grow loads of our own fruit and veg, with a nice stocked up produce freezer, and make our own bread, jam, sauces etc and are always big fans of the reduced aisle, as well as fortunate to live in the country where we can pick apples, pears, blackberries growing wild.

We also live mostly vegetarian and make our own oat milk.

I think, if pushed, we could probably just about do this. But we have a LOT of opportunity for free food (i.e. What we forage/grow) and wouldn't particularly enjoy the repetition of pasta/jacket/pizza and toast / porridge that this diet would enforce.

This is utterly meaningless unless you also adhere to ALL the official nutritional guidelines on minimum calorie, protein, fat, fruit, veg, etc requirements.

You also need a starting inventory of ALL the food supplies you already have to hand, including basic storecupboard ingredients. Lots of people could cobble together 'interesting' meals for many weeks by excavating the darker corners of their cupboards and freezers.

You also need to note your current weight and BMI, and track it going forward. An overweight person could potentially skimp on calories for quite some time, but a healthyweight or already underweight person might quickly harm their health.

Honestly? You sound like a stooge for the Labour govt/DWP, seeking to justify yet another cut to benefits which already don't cover adequate nutrition.

How could you ‘eat out’ unless you are eating out of bins?

It would cost £30 to eat out once. What are you talking about?

This