Tips for minimizing the food budget: - Cut your meat intake in half or lower. It's expensive, and you'll feel better. Avoid red meat in general, as it is most e

Tips for minimizing the food budget: - Cut your meat intake in half or lower. It's expensive, and you'll feel better. Avoid red meat in general, as it is most expensive. Eggs are the cheapest protein. Tuna is probably second. - Generally speaking you should consider rice, potatoes, oats, and beans the base of your diet. They're all cheap if you buy them unprocessed. - Get in the habit of diluting everything that is processed by half. So if you get a package of cheesy rice mix for 1 euro, add a cup of plain rice to it. Likewise with Tuna Helper, etc. I don't know why they put so much spice mix in those things. Also you can do this with canned soups -- add a can of beans or veggies, and you have two cans of soup for a lower price. - I would encourage you to cut out sweetened soda all together, as I believe it has almost no nutritional value and is probably the leading cause of obesity, but if you can get the large containers (they sell 3L bottles over here) on sale they are probably the cheapest source of calories. - Make your own coffee and tea. Get a thermos if you don't have one. - Consider milk a luxury. It is relatively expensive for what you get out of it. Cutting out all of these things that are above-average cost, you may wonder what damage it will do to your health. I'm a firm believer that optimal nutritional health comes from 1) greatly lowering the excess bad stuff and 2) eat green things. Really, anything loaded with chlorophyll is probably good for you, and will fill in the gaps in your nutrients. I'd bet you could live on rice and spinach alone indefinitely. When I was in college I a single-burner hot plate and a 1-qt non-stick sauce pan for just about everything. So basically the cost-minimizing technique is to eat as most of the Chinese do. We have a few discount stores over here (I'm thinking of one in PA, but I know of another in MT) that sell dented cans, out-dated (but perfectly good) boxed food, etc. for roughly half of regular retain price. It's the same thing you'd get at a regular grocer, but the packages aren't right. If you have one near you it could save you more than any other diet-changing strategy.