What Does it Cost to Eat in America?

Okay so I have some extra time on my hands today. I decided not to go to church this morning after one look at the unploughed roads here in Fountain. Jeff actually drove to Safeway earlier because he was in desperate need of nicotine. Crazy person. He said that the roads are really bad and told me to stay home. I wasn't going to argue. Anyways I digress...

Yesterday, I ran across this website after watching an Internet broadcast of Fox and Friends. Its called One Dollar Diet Project. These two teachers decided to try an experiment. They wanted to see if the could eat for $1.00 a day per person for an entire month. Sounds crazy right. They blogged about their experiences. He lost weight (15lbs), they both were cranky, tired and irritable but they did it for an entire month. Why? Because people all over the world live on $1.00 of food a day. They were talking about how much food they wasted on a daily basis and wanted to see if they could live off of one dollar a day. So they tried it for a whole month and they were thankful when that month ended. So that got me thinking. How much do I spend in a month just on groceries.

Well, as I said before, my budget is $60.00 a week. Sometimes I spend a little more sometimes I spend a little less but it usually evens out to $60.00 a week. If you break that down per person, you come out with $15.00 per person, per week which is about $2.14 per day. Not too bad right? Granted two of the people in the house are tiny but they still eat A LOT. Just for breakfast today, Kylie ate 1 egg, a biscuit, a glass of homemade chocolate milk (milk, 1/2 tbsp baking cocoa and 1 1/2 tbsp powdered sugar) and about a half a can of fruit salad. Kaitlynn also had an egg, fruit salad and a biscuit. So they maybe tiny but they are not little eaters.

For $2.14 a day, we have plenty of fruits and veggies. Granted the veggies are mostly the frozen variety and the fruit mostly the canned. We have snacks, hot breakfasts, desserts. We have meat which is mostly cheaper cuts but its still meat. We eat really well for $2.14 a day per person. Most of that money is funneled into dinner. Breakfasts and lunches cost a lot less. We are not malnourished and no one here is losing any weight (yet, check back with me when the national body challenge starts next month).

A typical day for us looks something like this...

Breakfast

Either oatmeal in some form (baked or cooked with flax and cranberries, if its cooked instead of baked I usually throw some canned pumpkin in there) or eggs (we like green eggs: spinach, eggs and garlic pulsed in a food processor and then scrambled in the pan) and toast both served with some kind of fruit.

Lunch

Its a smattering of different things but always includes some kind of fruit: either apples, oranges or something from the can; and a veggie: carrot sticks, frozen peas and carrots or corn. The main dish varies from sandwiches (PB & J for Kylie, Sunbutter and Jelly for Kaitlynn who is allergic to peanuts), to chicken nuggets, leftovers from dinner the night before, soup (if I serve soup, I don't usually include a veggie side)

Dinner

Also a variety of things. I get bored easily with food so I try to vary the kinds of foods I make. I posted about the soup I made the other night. On Kylie's birthday (this past Thursday), I made spaghetti. We had this with warm pears (29oz canned pears in their syrup throw into a 425 degree oven with a little cinnamon sprinkled on top) and my quick greens recipe (I used frozen green beans this time. Green beans cooked in chicken broth with garlic, 2 pieces of chopped fried bacon, garlic powder, onion powder, and garlic pepper. YUM!) The price of this dinner?

Spaghetti
Sauce: $1.00 (purchased on sale)
Noodles: $.88 (purchased in bulk at Sam's Club)
1/2 lb ground beef: $1.50
1/2 chopped onion: $.02 (a 3 lb bag bought on sale for $1.00 6 onions in the bag)
1 tsp minced garlic: $.02 (1 jar of minced garlic bought for $1.00, 48 tsp in a jar)

Pears
29oz can of pears: $1.00 (purchased on sale last week)
Cinnamon: ? (I really couldn't tell you how much cinnamon I used so I can't really determine a price but I just sprinkled a little on top and the jar of cinnamon cost me about $1.25 at Walmart)

Green Beans
16oz frozen Green Beans: $1.00 (purchased on sale)
1 tsp minced garlic: $.02
1 can chicken broth: $.39
2 pieces of bacon: $0.16 (purchased on sale for $1.77, 21 pieces in a packages)
Spices: again, I don't know the quantities I used so I can't tell you exactly how much they cost.

Total price for dinner approximately: $5.99 or $1.50 per person, a lot less if you include that we had a lot of leftovers. It probably ended up factoring to more like $.75 a person just because we had 1/2 of everything leftover after we were done eating. We had enough food leftover for the girls to have it again for dinner on Friday and for Jeff to take the majority of it to work with him for lunch the next day.


So okay, typical long winded Kristi. My point is that $1.00 a day in our economic climate is extreme. Most people around the world live on $1.00 a day because they grow or gather their own foods, raise their own animals for meat or hunt for it. So meat costs them nothing to very little and the same goes for vegetables and fruits. It takes time and not much money but you are subject to low food supplies during times of extreme weather. I think in a truer $1.00 a day experiment, they should have grown some of their own foods. They would have been able to eat well while maintaining their budget. It would be interesting if they did this again but planned on starting a garden in spring. I wonder what their food intake would look like then.