Typical Food Budget?

BCEagle91
Sat, 08 Oct 2011 10:25:43 +0000

What is your typical food budget if you work in the city and eat out
for breakfast and lunch? I know a friend of mine spends on average
20 dollars a day for breakfast and lunch. That is 100 dollars a week
and 400 dollars a month. That is a bit much.

This is for a recent graduate who doesn’t prepare food because of
late hours.



My typical breakfast/lunch is:

1 cup of beans (pinto/black/red kidney - whatever is $1/pound)
1 cup of black bean soup or chili ($0.75 for soup, $1.10 for Chili)
1/2 cup of almonds or pistachio nuts ($0.60 from Trader Joes)
2 cups of cabbage/broccoli/tomato ($1.00 at the most)

Optional (typical cost well below $1.00):

Banana, peanut butter sandwich, extra 1/2 cup pistachio nuts,
Clif Builder Sampler bar (1 oz), one or two fried eggs, turkey
meatballs, soy chorizo, peeled apple or pear, brussels sprouts,
okra, broccoli



So my typical lunch is $3-$4 per day. But this requires preparation.
My wife cooks the beans in a crock pot overnight on Sunday night so I
have about six - seven cups of beans. I have had to throw out one or
two cups regularly because they went bad but I’m putting some in the
freezer to fix that problem. The soup (New England Country Soups has
been $0.75 a package for two cups but has gone off summer discount
and is now $1.25/2 cup pouch). I have two GlassLock containers that
I use to put in 1 cup of soup and 1 cup of beans - bring one to the
office and leave the other in the refrigerator. This typically works
out to 400 to 500 calories.

My wife prepares the cabbage/broccoli/tomato in the morning though I
could do it too (I used to host dinner parties when I was single and
did a lot of cooking and cleaning on my own). She buys a large head of
white cabbage (it’s pretty dense) and just slices off some, we use
frozen broccoli which is about $1.10/pound and small plum tomato. The
proportions are usually 1.4 cups cabbage, 1/2 cup broccoli and 1/2
tomato. She sautees it in the skillet. This works out to about 80
calories.

Almonds are about 300 calories.

The options are typically 100 to 200 calories.

So for me, breakfast/lunch are typically 750 to 1,100 calories. I
adjust the number of calories for my planned activity level for the
day.

This approach requires some food preparation - I think that everyone
should learn how to prepare food beyond throwing frozen food in the
microwave. It also involves optimizing for nutritional value (it’s
high in protein, relatively high in unsaturated fats, very high in
fiber, low in sodium, cholesterol except the eggs, and very low in
sugars). These ingredients could cost double what I pay in New York
City and I imagine that it would take some effort to find grocery
stores to source the ingredients.