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Jason Murphy\u2019s shopping receipt<\/p>\nI spent $490 at the supermarket on the weekend. It was a big shop, we bought some wine, and some of the items will last ages\u2026 but still. That\u2019s a lot of money for a grocery run (receipt appended). The cost of food has soared, as the next chart shows.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the internet, I often encounter people asking for advice on how to make their food budget stretch as the cost of living continues to bite. Last week a young person made a desperate entreaty: How can I make a $50 food budget last a week?<\/p>\n
Jason Murphy\u2019s shopping receipt<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an interesting question. There are are a few people out there on the internet producing content to show what\u2019s possible, including @dollartreedinners in the US. The TikTok and YouTube account, run by Rebecca Chobat, shares recipe videos for meals<\/a> that can be made using ingredients from discount store Dollar Tree. (A video on how to cook up a Dollar Tree Thanksgiving dinner for just $20 <\/a>totally took off.)<\/p>\n Obviously I\u2019m a long way off spending so little. But if you eat at home and have a fridge, cooktop and some utensils, there\u2019s ways of achieving it.\u00a0<\/p>\n The first hurdle you need to clear is making sure you have enough essential calories. The most economical way to get calories in a supermarket is vegetable oil, and vegetable oil is cheap (which is why it is in all the processed food these days).\u00a0<\/p>\n \tIndependent. Irreverent. In your inbox<\/p>\n \n Get the headlines they don\u2019t want you to read. Sign up to Crikey\u2019s free newsletters for fearless reporting, sharp analysis, and a touch of chaos <\/p>\n By continuing, you agree to our\u00a0Terms & Conditions<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n A $6.60 bottle of canola oil has enough energy (68,000kJ) to power a person for almost seven days.\u00a0<\/p>\n (We are working off the theory of a person needing\u00a0around 10,000kJ a day \u2014 if you\u2019re young, male, work a physical job, or you are tall, you may need more; if not you may need slightly less.)<\/p>\n So you could, in theory, meet your calorie needs for far less than $50 a week. A more sickening idea than living off pure oil is hard to imagine, of course. So it\u2019s very pleasing to discover the second-cheapest way to get raw calories is rice.\u00a0<\/p>\n A $8.50 bag of rice has 71,000kJ and could power an adult human for just over seven days. And of course rice and oil combined starts to be less disgusting. We are working our way towards a fried rice here!\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Throw in some salt ($2 for a 1kg bag is the cheapest) and some vegetables ($2.80 a kilogram, frozen) and you can make a palatable meal. Not delicious. But edible. It would be a hard but not Sisyphean task to eat it three times daily for seven days in a row. You could go to bed feeling full and you might not even get scurvy.\u00a0<\/p>\n Plus we haven\u2019t even blown the budget yet. So forget a week for $50. Can we do a month for $60?<\/p>\n A month of eating for $60. Is it possible?<\/p>\n Without further ado I present my shopping list. What follows is a plan for how to survive a month on a $60 food budget, eating more than just fried rice, and shopping at Woolworths.<\/p>\n (Note the quantities, we\u2019re getting three one-litre cartons of milk, for example. They cost $1.65 each.)<\/p>\n So what do we get out of this shopping list?\u00a0<\/p>\n Breakfast<\/p>\n Oats and milk. 150g of oats and 100mL milk. Porridge or muesli, your call. There\u2019s protein in there. Not a lot. But some (3.3g per 100g in milk, and 13g in 100g of oats). This meal delivers about 30% of your daily calories. You get a cup of tea as well (teabags are so cheap, a hot drink is the luxury on the list).<\/p>\n Lunch\u00a0<\/p>\n Fried rice. Recipe as above. White rice, oil, salt and frozen veg. We do not want fully half our calories to come from oil so the canola oil pack is not the economy-sized pack I mentioned above, we will make 750mL of oil cover the month.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lunch has about a third of your daily calories.<\/p>\n That frozen veg mix, by the way, includes carrot, zucchini, potato, green bean and sweetcorn. It\u2019s 8% carbs, 3% fibre, about 1% protein, and I assume the rest is pure vitamins.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dinner<\/p>\n Hope you like rice! Dinner is rice-based too, this time brown rice. Accompanying our carbs will be lentils, prepared with the curry powder, some oil and the same frozen veg. Dinner has a bit more than a third of the daily calorie total.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lentils have protein, at 25g per 100g. If we tot up the daily protein intake we are at about 50g, which is short of the requirement<\/a> for men (64g) but a little bit over the recommendation for women (46g).\u00a0<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a chart that illustrates the calorie content of each food.\u00a0<\/p>\n The assumptions<\/p>\n The good thing about this shopping list is it doesn\u2019t presume, like most recipes do, you have some staples in the fridge. All the oil and seasoning is budgeted for.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\tRelated Article Block Placeholder<\/p>\n \t\t\tArticle ID: 1221790\n\t<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/image_57d830.png\")
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