6 ms·

After the last Soylent discussion here, I reevaluated my diet and ended up going with emeals to do breakfast/lunch/dinner plans. Food went from $300/mo to $450/

• IkmoIkmo 12y ago
  > Edit: I just realized that's your per-person figure. Mine is for two. That is quite expensive :( $450 a month is definitely a lot by my standards, where/what do you tend to buy? But comparing it to his $60/w, $240/m, isn't quite fair. His meal plan is for 6 meals at $10 a meal. Considering you'll want a meal everyday, that's $300 a month and that's just for dinner. If you add breakfast and lunch he's either paying as much or more than you. $10 a meal is just crazy expensive for a cooked meal. If you look at recommended servings of say 100g of vegs, 100g of rice or potatoes, 100g of meat or fish, you're looking at about 30c, 10c and 60c. With seasoning, oils, onion, garlic etc, you're looking at a $1.50 meal. If you double the servings for example, and get more expensive ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to top $5. But again, a $2 meal is very doable, meaning you can do dinner for $100 a month ea-si-ly. Another $100 for breakfast (oatmeal with milk & a piece of fruit is a 0.5$ meal at most, or $15 a month) and lunch (make any sandwich, another piece of fruit, a salad) and some snacks here and there. It's hard to top $200, and this'll get you a really healthy 3-meal a day. Curious how you spend $450. I mean don't get me wrong, I easily could, if you buy oatmeal with banana chips instead of oatmeal and a banana you pay $2 instead of $0.20, and you can get that 10x price increase for 'processed food' everywhere, but if I were planning my meals and cooking myself, $450 is really unnecessary.
  • lfowles 12y ago
    I'm actually buying less processed food now than before (funnily, this has also reversed the mostly recyclables trash trend in the household). Not especially expensive ingredients, generally substituting similar cheaper meats. One note is that we've been testing the paleo meal plans. A week of that pretty quickly ate up a third of the $450 budget. Representative meal plans for the rest of the month: Dinner - http://emeals.com/meal-plans/30-minute/emeals-30-minute-family-plan.pdf http://emeals.com/meal-plans/30-minute/emeals-30-minute-fami... Breakfast - http://emeals.com/meal-plans/breakfast/emeals-breakfast-plan.pdf http://emeals.com/meal-plans/breakfast/emeals-breakfast-plan... Lunch - http://emeals.com/meal-plans/lunch/emeals-lunch-plan.pdf http://emeals.com/meal-plans/lunch/emeals-lunch-plan.pdf Lots of fun little optimizations could be made here and in fact that's something I've been playing with. 2 months ago was baseline "exactly as the meal plan dictates" month, the next month I rotated Paleo -> Budget plan after we spent the first third of the budget, this month we are choosing half of the meals off of the family size 30 minute meal plan. Next month might include larger meals so more lunches can be made from leftovers, but I really enjoy a lunch that's not the same as a previous dinner. Brightens the middle of my work day. Crunching numbers, I was actually replying to nahname spending $100cad/week/person == $80/week/person. $450 is $56/week/person. $8/day feels damn good considering that's a combo meal at Wendy's!
    • IkmoIkmo 12y ago
      Ah I misunderstood, thought you were trying to say yours was expensive rather than the other way around. Thought the $450 was for an individual. No clue how I got to that. Anyway, yeah $8 a day is fine. I'm at about $4 a day or so, but if the euro had been stronger like two years ago it'd be closer to $6 a day, not much different from you. Anyway you asked about real prices so I looked them up. So here's a typical meal with prices from the most expensive large supermarket chain in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with the less expensive ones cutting prices by about 10-20% across the board: Protein wise: 100g of Chicken: €6 per kilo, so €0.60. Fish is a bit cheaper unless it's salmon, about €5.50 a kilo, as is ground beef at €5.50. I tend to eat 2x chicken, 1x beef, 2x fish, 2x veg. Looking to replace a chicken with another veg at some point. The vegetarian meal is mostly lentils, beans, soy etc. Then there's veggies, it's about €1.80 for a kilo of broccoli or spinach or zucchini. A 100g serving is about 18c. Then there's some form of carbs. Rice or potatoes at about €1.80 and €0.70 per kilo respectively. So a 100g serving averages about 14c. So that gets you a €0.92 meal, which is about $1. It's the type of serving size I used while lifting heavy years back with a pretty muscular lean build, with a decent oatmeal breakfast, two pieces of fruit, a salad with dinner and a light lunch and plenty of water. Nowadays I have a pretty normal build, 6'2, not muscular or fat, not skinny either. The salad I always eat with dinner is a tomato, part of a cucumber, a carrot and some lettuce and an olive oil, vinegar, garlic and onion dressing with some S&P. It's about $0.70 or so all together. So my dinner, with all the extra dressing, seasoning, oils etc, comes out around $2, with the option of shopping cheaper by 10-20%. The vegetarian meals are even cheaper, which I eat 2/7 days. It's basically $0.25 of lentils with a ton of extras like a few tomatoes. Hard to top $1 - $1.50 on these meals. Again breakfast is really cheap for me. Liter of milk is about €0.60, oatmeal is €0.80 a kilo. A banana is about €0.20. So we both have half a banana, 10c of oatmeal, 10c of milk and we get a €0.30 breakfast. It's just a really great meal, the banana and oatmeal both don't spike sugar so they'll sort of give off sugar for hours until lunch, despite filling you up. Lunch is usually pretty light for me. A sandwich or two with peanut butter. Tend to eat another piece of fruit, like an orange, around 4, sometimes a sandwich if my lunch was light. I can't really be bothered doing something fancy. That gets me to dinner around 7 where I go with a decent meal and a salad, and that lasts me until after 12 as I tend to sleep late. So yeah $100 a month is possible, but I tend to do 180 a month in dollars if the euro is stronger like it usually is, or about $6 a day. Girlfriend likes to buy tons of the small things like dried tomatoes or olives that you tend not to buy in bulk. So 1 kilo of olives is €14, as opposed to say brocoli at €1.80. Those orders of magnitude more expensive small items that barely fill you up end up being almost half the budget. But it's what makes food fun and nice and not some kind of factory work :p
  • lfowles 12y ago
    An aside: I'd really like to see you do this with actual prices and see how it compares to your guesstimates.
  • zaroth 12y ago
    $1.50 a meal? In what country? Where are you buying your protein for $3 per pound? Ground beef costs more. 100g before cooking is a pretty small serving. My local Safeway wanted $7/dozen (!!) for store brand eggs last week. I walked away shaking my head. Dollar isn't what it used to be. This week it was a "more reasonable" 5.49.
    • Amezarak 12y ago
      > Where are you buying your protein for $3 per pound? That's easily doable, at least here in the southern US. I regularly buy $10/3lb of chicken tenderloins. You can do much better if you're prepared to buy in bulk. Of course, venison is cheapest, if you're willing to kill it yourself/eat fresh roadkill/get the excess from hunting friends. ;) Catfish runs about the same here as chicken, but tilapia can be had for super cheap. Of course, that's another one you can get for almost free after the investment of a fishing rod and a weekend. Your egg prices are insane. I can buy 60-packs of eggs for $8.72.
      • madcaptenor 12y ago
        In Atlanta (specifically, the Buford Highway Farmers Market) I regularly buy 10-pound bags of chicken legs for $0.99 a pound, and I've seen them as low as $0.69. The comparison isn't quite apples-to-apples as legs have bone, but I can't imagine I'm paying over $1.50 or so for the meat. Note for non-Atlantans: we don't know what "Farmers Market" is here, this is basically a large grocery store with a good produce section.
    • IkmoIkmo 12y ago
      the Netherlands. Pretty easy if you cook, it's actually about a dollar. Check some of my latest comments for a breakdown of pricing. Prices are from AH, one of the more expensive supermarkets here. [0] Chicken breast is $6.50 per kilo, no bones just the breast, or indeed ~$3 a pound. 100g serving is recommended here, but then that may be the difference between Europe and the US. Ground beef is even cheaper. Of course these are the lower-end prices, you can pay $20 for a kilo, too. But for the cheaper prices the meat is still excellent as AH is one of the most expensive supermarkets. The cheaper supermarkets here, which are still decent quality overall, get you a 10-20% discount. The cheaper shops have small discounts (5-10%) on things like meat or salmon as we don't see a lot of branding premiums here on meats. And bigger discounts (15-20%) on things like ketchup or cola, where if you buy a no-name brand that tastes just fine you pay a third less. Wouldn't have thought the US had more expensive meats. When I was last stateside I remember paying a pittance at the golden coral and leaving with the feeling I just ate 5 cows for the price of a cinema ticket! How they remained profitable boggled my mind at the time, even with cheap & absolute garbage ingredients I must have cost them some that day :P Eggs are as cheap as 15c and as expensive as 40c an egg. So a dozen can be less than $2. Two things must be mentioned... one is that it's not a purchasing power parity comparison. I'd say average wages are a little lower in the Netherlands than in the US (although I think the median family is a lot better off here), meaning there's a bit less to spend here, putting cheaper prices here on some foods in perspective. And the Euro is abnormally weak right now which is likely a temporary thing. Normally the Euro is about 30% stronger, so any price conversion I do now would normally be 30% higher. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Heijn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Heijn
  • JohnBooty 12y ago
    > $10 a meal is just crazy expensive for a cooked meal. Yes. I have to be clear that Blue Apron only makes economic sense for us in the sense that it has replaced dining out to a large extent. A sit-down dinner for two usually winds up being at least $50 including the tip. If you use it to replace restaurants, it's a win. If you use it to replace groceries... well, kudos to you if you can afford it. :) (Another caveat is that Blue Apron's prepare-it-yourself meals generate a lot of packaging waste, since every ingredient is individually packaged. This is actually my least-favorite aspect of it. It's all recyclable, which helps tremendously although still incurs an environmental cost obviously)
    • maratd 12y ago
      > If you use it to replace groceries... well, kudos to you if you can afford it. It really depends on where you live and what your time is worth. An hour every week at the grocery store, gas, wear on the car vs going once every two weeks. Also, with fresh groceries, my meals generally run in the 7 dollar area. If I value my time at 100 per hour, plus gas, I'm definitely saving money, even if I'm not using it to replace eating out. I live in NYC, for reference. EDIT: Ok, I wanted to do the math. So at 3 dollars more per meal, per person, I would be paying an extra 3 (additional expense per meal) * 6 (meals in a week) * 4 (weeks in a month) = 72 (additional expense per month). If I'm saving two trips to the groceries and my time is worth 100 per hour, 100 * 2 - 72 = 128. So I'm up by 128 bucks. That's not factoring in the novelty of it or the time spent planning meals/ingredients.