Last summer, the New York Times Cooking section published an article called, "How to Feed a Family for $28 a Day." (Warning: the article may be paywalled. I tried to share it as a gift link, but apparently my subscription doesn't allow that for Cooking articles.) In it, recipe developer Kevin Pang chronicles how he challenged himself to feed his family of three (himself, his wife, and their "picky 10-year-old") for a whole week on a budget of just $200. He says that may sound like "a nice, big number," but it's actually less than $10 per person per day, which he claims is roughly equal to the $196.25-plus-tax limit set by the USDA's Thrifty Food Plan. (Actually, according to the site, that isn't quite right. For a 10-year-old, picky or otherwise, and a man and a woman between 20 and 50 years old, the Thrifty Food Plan budget is $187.90 per week. But it's possible the number has come down a little since he checked it in August.)
For Pang, this was a major challenge. The budget left "no room for impulse buys" and forced them to cut corners in several places, swapping out strawberry jam for cheaper grape jelly and a $4.35 tub of baba ghanoush for $3.77 hummus. They also had to forgo convenience items like "a microwavable frozen dinner here, a jar of marinara there." But they succeeded in feeding themselves three meals a day, using some new recipes that he links to in the article, such as carnitas, bacon cheeseburger meatballs, and sesame soy chicken. At the end of the piece, he proudly outlines the lessons they learned, such as "Assign a role to everything in your cart" (as opposed to "buying whatever looks good"), "Give leftovers a new life," and "Buy produce that lasts."
That's all sound enough, but it struck me as awfully elementary. Brian feeds our two-person family on a grocery budget of around $3,535 per year, which works out to only $4.84 per person per day—roughly half as much as Pang's. Even if you adjust for the two weeks or so per year we spend visiting, and eating with, friends and relatives, it's barely over $5 per person per day. I thought perhaps his higher budget reflected the high cost of living in NYC, but no; the Pang family lives in "the Chicago suburbs," where living costs generally and grocery prices specifically are nearly identical to what we pay in central NJ.
After reading the article, I thought maybe I should write my own, following the same structure as Pang's, to explain how we feed our family on roughly half as much as his budget. I could list all our grocery purchases and their cost, outline exactly what we ate every day for a week, and wrap it up with some general budget eating tips. But after thinking about it for a minute, I realized I'd already done this (except in even more detail) in my 2014 Reverse SNAP Challenge. Our eating habits have changed a bit since then, as we've shifted away from dairy products and started making more foods from scratch. But our principles remain roughly the same:
- Eat plants. Pang spent $43.60 of his $200 budget—about 22 percent—on meat. Six of the seven dinners the family ate were meat-based. Brian and I, by contrast, eat fish maybe once every week or so, poultry only a few times a year, and red meat basically never. As I outlined in my 2022 Ecofrugal Manifesto and observed again at the supermarket checkout this spring, skipping the meat and getting most of our protein from beans and grains cuts a big slice off our grocery budget.
- Cook from scratch. Convenience foods are an even bigger budget-buster. Pang recognized this, which is why he steered away from frozen meals and jarred pasta sauce. But it didn't occur to him to make his own hummus, which would have taken all of ten minutes and shaved an extra dollar off his budget (according to the Homemade Hummus Cost Calculator, which apparently is a thing that exists). And he certainly didn't go so far as to make bread, granola, or tortillas from scratch, all things that Brian does routinely.
- Shop around. I think Pang put himself at a disadvantage right from the start of his challenge by purchasing his entire week's worth of groceries in one go at "our favorite grocery store, Fresh Farms in Niles, Ill.," which doesn't sound like a particularly budget-friendly place. Our approach is to keep track of prices at different stores and make the rounds of them all over the course of a month, picking up whatever we need at whichever store has the best price.
- Use a discount grocery. Although we shop at multiple stores, the one we rely on most heavily is Lidl, a "limited assortment" grocery that sells primarily its own store brands. Before Lidl opened, we were regular patrons of Aldi, which works along the same lines. And we spring for a Costco membership because, while it doesn't have the best prices on all foodstuffs, just a few truly unbeatable bargains in the grocery aisle are enough to cover the membership cost three times over.
To anyone who reads this blog regularly, none of this comes as news. But it's always nice to get a little confirmation that what has worked for us all these years is still working, and that our bargain-hunting skills can beat the smart kids as handily in 2026 as they did back in 2012.
Posts
