I Can Teach You: How to Eat on $85 a Month

{Your professor today is Katie, one of the fabulous five, who never ceases to amaze me with all the awesome stuff she's done. She's incredibly kind and modest, so you only find out about her complete and utter amazingness one detail at a time.}

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When Janet asked me to write a post for Pink University I thought and thought and thought...and came up empty! Like Janet, I am studying for the California Bar Exam. Everything useful has drained out of my brain and pooled on the sidewalk (it’s about 500 degrees in Davis right now). Whatever was in my head before bar study has been replaced by awfully boring facts, like how many days a defendant has to file an answer after someone has served her with a complaint (21!).

So I am piggybacking on an idea from another friend and guest Pink University blogger, Mary, who told you about how not to buy anything for a year. In this post, I can teach you how to eat on $85 a month – something I did for a year.

After I graduated from college, I joined Lutheran Volunteer Corps and moved to Washington, D.C. to work at a nonprofit organization. I’m not Lutheran (I’m a bad, bad Buddhist), but those friendly Lutherans accepted me anyway – Faith-wise, I only needed to participate in monthly community faith nights in my “intentional living” house filled to the brim with four other LVC girls. This meant we cooked up dinner, drank cheap wine if we had it, and watched movies like Dogma together.

Part of our intentional living household also meant that we were each given $85 a month for personal expenses and $85 a month for food. Now, anyone who has visited or lived in D.C. knows that our nation’s capital is NOT cheap. And without a car, limited Metro passes and two-armed personal carrying capacities, we were mostly restricted to smallish intercity grocery stores.

After a lot of trial and error in cooking healthy, edible meals for five people on a budget in D.C. (we pooled our food stipends every month), here are a five easy things I can teach you about eating well on a limited budget:

1. GO VEGGIE! Meat is expensive and hard to budget on a smaller food income. Our house made the decision at the beginning to use our food budget for vegetarian food. For the omnivores in the house, happy hours around the city and nonprofit office parties provided the occasional meatballs and grilled shrimp.
2. GO LOW. On the food chain, that is. We ate lots of beans and rice cooked every way imaginable—Caribbean Black Beans and Rice and Festive Black Bean Chili were favorite recipes (featured on this fabulous blog about cooking LVC-style from the LVC Cookbook). The key to many of our recipes was an inexpensive base ingredient, cheaply available year round, with seasonal add-ins when our budget allowed.
3. PLAN AHEAD. We did the majority of our shopping one day a week. As a group, we’d create a shopping list with meals planned out ahead of time (everyone cooked one dinner a week during weekdays for the house). This planning really helped us stay within our budget.
4. CO-OP. We didn’t do this, but I’d love to try this someday, and I hope LVC houses have dinner co-ops like these now. When I was in D.C., the Lutherans had several houses full of volunteers. There were also Jesuit volunteers, Catholic volunteers, Mennonite volunteers, and I think AVODAH came to D.C. shortly after I left.
5. STEAL. Bloggers like the folks at 30 Bucks a Week post frequently and have great ideas about how to eat healthy on the cheap. The 30 Bucks couple in New York put up lovely food photos, recipes and stories about feeding two on $30 a week. Also, they scan in and post their weekly receipts – talk about accountability!

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This post is going to help me immeasurably in the coming months of unemployment. Do you have any tips for eating on the cheap?

Comments

[Will]

Katie, I love this post. With your tips, it could have alternatively been called, "how to eat in order to live a long and healthy life."

Cheap doesn't necessarily mean sacrifice. Great suggestions!

[gwen d.]

Very inspirational. Especially w/ the current economy, being frugal is so important (plus it saves money for other important things like the occasional new shoes and movies out).

[Appetite for Conversation]

Katie, I love this! My hubby and I seem to be lifelong students, so we're all about eating simple and cheap. (most of the time!) And I definitely agree that going veggie saves a TON of money.

[The Boob Nazi]

I thought you were going to suggest becoming anorexic. I've considered it in order to save money haha.