How I used to feed 6 adults for under $100 a month
Tl;dr- this is is basic system I used to keep a family of 6 adults fed for under $100 a week. I'm really tired and have to go to work tomorrow and spent forever writing this all out, so if you have questions just leave them below and I'll try to get to them!
Hey there, I had someone in another sub tell me I should post here. When I was 17 I was feeding a family of 6 adults on my very part-time earnings, and developed a bit of a system for feeding a family for cheap. Last time I went to WalMart (note I made this post the first time 9 years ago I know prices have changed but the guts are still there, these prices are from 2013). I even got current prices(1) on what I used to purchase. Perhaps if I have some extra time later, I'll add a bunch of links with recipes you can make with all this stuff.
If I was dead broke and had a very limited budget to eat with for the month, this is what I would buy:
25 lb sack of flour, Great Value brand, $7.89
25 lb sack of sugar, Great Value brand, $11.98
20 lb sack of pinto beans, Great Value brand, $13.97
20 lbs Great Value long grain enriched rice, $8.44
4 lbs of Armor lard, $4.98
64 oz Great Value nonfat dried milk (for baking), $14.982
10 lbs frying chicken leg quarters, $5.30
5 lb bag of russet potatoes, $1.97
3 lb bag of yellow onions, $1.94
1.25 lbs of garlic, $3.68
If you are eating a really pared down diet like this, you will NEED the garlic and onions.
That comes to $75.15. That is a LOT of food for under a hundred bucks. That's 113 lbs of food, and most people need about a pound of food a meal to feel full. So, for a family of 4, this will cover most of what you need for 28 days, or just under a month, giving you a little wiggle room in the budget to still keep it under $100 for the month for basics, which gives you a little more budget to play with for everything else.
With anything over that, I'd also get:
A variety of beans. Pinto beans are the cheapest in my neck of the woods, but I far prefer black beans and lentils. They are still cheap as hell and worth buying.
Whatever is on sale. I try not to pay over .99/lb for meat, which is getting a lot harder. Safeway still has the best sales on meat.
50 lb sack of popcorn, Mighty Pop brand, $23.983
A cheap, bulk sack of steel cut oatmeal
Sauces. Soy sauce, fish sauce, vinegar(apple cider, balsamic, rice wine), mirin, furikake, pepper, salt, epizote, bay leaves, hot sauce, maple syrup, etc.
The biggest box of eggs I can get. I know in my area I can get 60 eggs (5 dozen) for under $10, but I did not check the price at WalMart when I went last time.
Curry pastes and coconut milk
Bag of bacon ends and pieces
Better than Bullion, or some kind of bullion.
a mix of canned tomato products
Some fresh fruit and vegetables- whatever is on sale/cheap. I ate a LOT of bananas.
I'm assuming you already have things like baking soda, baking powder, etc. If not, you'll need to get salt, baking soda/powder, vanilla, pepper, etc to fill out your pantry.
Now these big sacks are cheap and you CAN NOT get down to the per oz or per pound unit cost in smaller quantities. These are large amounts of food to keep you through a month, if you have a problem with vermin in your apartment (or you have neighbors who like to feed the roaches because all life is sacred- I was SO happy to move out of there), you might want to swing by your local burger fast food place and ask for their pickle buckets. They will forever stink of vinegar, but I think that would help keep bugs away from your grains. I kept mine in 5 gallon buckets that I just bought (they're >$2.00 each), and if you have a little wiggle room you might want to get gamma lids or easy open lids. If you can't, there's a tool that helps pop bucket tops that will save your hands.
First, you'll be doing a lot of baking. Baking from scratch is not only going to save you money, but there is NOTHING like home baked bread to make you feel like you're not on a survival diet, but that things are OK. It's just delicious. I didn't price yeast, but you want the little tubs, not the packets. If you can, get to a library and order "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" or pick it up on amazon, it's really a wonderful book, and you really can get your baking down to five minutes of active time, before you get the rest of your meal started.
Here is how a basic day would go:
Breakfast Mix up milk to use for coffee creamer/baking that night. Oatmeal with a little sugar on top and some butter, or some syrup if we have it. If I'm making beans for dinner, use one of the zillions of recipes available for crock pot beans, get that started before I leave the house.
Lunch: Leftovers with rice.
Dinner: Fresh bread and/or cornbread
Pinto beans and rice, with a sausage link or two cut up and used as a seasoning/topping for all 6 people in the house.
Refried beans, home made tortillas, and a little cheese and/or cook up a chicken leg or two and shred them.
Home made pasta (cheaper with the flour than buying it, tastes better, not hard to learn to make), tossed in butter with a little garlic powder and parmesan cheese, with a fried egg cracked on top.
Baked potato, scooped out, mash the middles, mix in a little sour creme (a small tub is .88), some shredded cheddar, and some chopped cooked broccoli (microwaved frozen works fine for this). If you got the bacon ends, cook some and chop them fine, and mix them into this. Save the fat for cooking something else in, later. Bacon fat adds a lot of flavor.
Fry some of the bacon ends and pieces, chopped fine. Drain, put meat aside, put fat back in pan. Dice an onion, pop it in the fat, stir it until it's golden brown. If you can get some, add a carrot and celery in there, diced the same size. Chop some garlic, put it in there. When it smells like heaven, some coriander seed and some cumin. When that's toasted and lovely, add a can of chopped tomatoes. Add about two quarts of water (or your home made chicken stock if you have it, bullion if you do not) and a one pound bag of lentils. Let it simmer on medium-low for about 40 minutes. This goes ahhh-MAAAAY-zing with home made bread.
If you are cooking for kids like this, make sure to put butter on their bread and in their cereal, and to give them the richer bits. Kids need fat for brain development, and this is a lower-fat diet than is really healthy for them.
This is also pretty shy on Vitamin C, and you can get scurvy if you eat like this too much, BUT- seasonally, oranges and carrots are cheap, so you can buy them, and I HIGHLY SUGGEST you use whatever greens are available and cheap (it's the winter now, so turnip greens, kale, and cabbage are cheap, in the spring it turns into lettuce being cheaper) to fill out your weekly budget. Also, I used a sprouting tray and got seeds to sprout, because that's a great, cheap way to get vitamins year-round.
I actually got a microwave rice cooker at Walmart for ~5.00 that I use when I'm cooking like this, because I make a LOT of rice bowls. In 2024 I just got a Aroma rice cooker from Amazon for $25, those are also a godsend when you're cooking like this. You'll want to google those for dinners because you can do a HUGE amount with them to keep things varied, but here is one of my favorites:
Get rice started in the microwave. Cook two chicken legs, separated into one leg portion and one thigh portion, in soy sauce and a little lemon juice. When they are done, toss some hardy greens (mustard, kale, etc) in the pan, maybe add a touch of vinegar. Cover with a loose lid, stir occasionally until the greens are soft.
Take bowls, fill about halfway with rice, then layer on the greens. Place portion of chicken on top. Serves four people.
Another thing I would do to make things stretch is I would invite over someone to have a meal, if they provided an ingredient. I had plenty of friends in college who were broke but could spare enough to buy a few steaks or pork chops, which I could season, cook, and then slice really thin to put on top of a rice bowl. They got a meal they otherwise couldn't have cooked, we got some extra meat which wasn't really in the budget, and everyone got to socialize, so it was a mega win. If your broke friends realize that you bake bread every day, inviting them over for dinner is an easy sell. :)
Also, put a freezer bag in the freezer, and every onion bottom, veggie peeling, and chicken bone that goes through your hands, pop it in there. Roast everything and turn it into chicken stock. Use that instead of water to give your recipes a lot more depth and flavor.
If I was now in this sort of a budget shortfall, I'd get a few chickens, garden a lot more for my greens, possibly get some quails for eggs. The eggs are critical, and I have a big enough back yard I could feed the chickens scraps and get some eggs in return.
1.I live in rural Texas. It's cheap to live out here, so the prices are likely to be on the low side, even for WalMart.
2. This is one of the first things I would cut if things were SUPER tight, but if you're doing your own baking it's a lot cheaper than real milk.
3. Popcorn is the same as the corn that goes into corn meal. Put it in a blender, and mix it half and half with some wheat flour, and you have the basis for a zillion recipes, from johnny cakes, breading for food, cornbread, muffins, etc. You can also just buy corn meal, but I didn't' snag the price for it while i was out. It's not expensive, but popcorn can also be popped, and was marginally cheaper, so I used to get that instead.
Hope this is helpful! You can live well on nearly nothing, but the thing is, you have to give up a lot of convenience food. I had a Russian friend tell me the only thing Americans were afraid of was inconvenience, so that can be hard. In some ways, though, I ate a lot better when I was too poor too afford cereal, I sure as heck don't eat fresh bread every day anymore.
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