What's your 'cheapest' diet?

FlaatusGoat

This is for people on maybe £10 a week or less for food. Per person. I know this sounds bad but it's a fact of life. Apart from visiting the food bank, here's mine (excluding 'reduced')

Spaghetti hoops with microwaved potato. Porridge oats (either raw or cooked if I can afford to top up the Lecky)

One banana (per day)

Tinned kidney beans with salt and maybe a tiny bit of ketchup of the own brand kind

Baked beans, the cheapest own brand ones.

I know the M and S, Waitrose elite will scorn me for not including the essentials (Caviar, red wine, lobster and aged steak fillets but there we go)

maisie_cat

Lidl veg box curry, chilli and soup with added beans or lentils for protein and carbs.
My very cheapest is using home grown or foraged veg.
Many years ago I had a period of extreme skintness and lived on baked beans, bread and milk. I'm not sure that I could do that for £10 a week now.

RobM99

As above, LIDL veg box (get what you're given to a degree but you do get a lot - I mean a LOT!)

elsien

While there’s probably not many caviar eaters lurking around here, I’m not sure it’s entirely necessary to be having a pop at other people’s shops of choice. 

You’ll probably get more response to this in the old style part of the forum where I think there’s already a couple of threads running about cost of living and keeping prices down et cetera.
London1 (used to be Jackie O) is really good at keeping costs down. 

pickledonionspaceraider

Basics spaghetti - boiled with a big spoon of marmite stirred in, and eaten hot - feeds a family for about 50p
It sounds awful but if you are a marmite lover, its actually pretty good

Bluebell1000

Our average grocery spend is just over £40 per week so that's £10 a person. We have a really good diet and I don't see it as basic or on a tight budget at that level of spending. We had homemade vegetable lasagne yesterday, and a bun cake, then cheese on toast (homemade bread) and fruit (banana/plum/apples) for tea. Cereals come from Lidl as theirs are the tastiest, then the rest is from Asda. We tend to buy basics range apart from meat and Yorkshire tea. I don't think it tastes any different! This morning we had homemade scotch pancakes for breakfast with homegrown raspberries.
Today is broccoli and tomato quiche and chips, tomorrow's main meal pasta pesto veg and sausages.
We batch cook, so we also have quiche and lasagne later in the week, and we have chilli from a previous week which we've frozen.

If we're aiming for a cheap week then jacket potatoes in the slow cooker work well, with baked beans. Pasta, a tin of tomato sauce, an onion, and spinach (garden grown) is probably about 20p a portion. Chili with lentils (no meat), value kidney beans, mushrooms, making the sauce from tinned tomatoes and spices is a cheap slow cooker meal too - though only if you have spices already.  That goes well with jacket potatoes or rice.

london21

You get more value for your money from supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi, just my opinion.

bulk cooking,

frozen vegetables etc are reasonably priced than fresh ones.

Sometimes the supermarkets reduce price towards end of the day, when I worked at M&S part time whilst studying got some decent bargains and will be expiring soon or near expiry date. 

theoretica

I find it works out cheaper to get my variety on a longer scale rather than day to day - buy the biggest cabbage and eat a lot of cabbage, then buy a big bag of carrots...  freezing meals can spread things out for more variety, but you have the cost of that much more food storage needed.

FlaatusGoat

london21 said:

You get more value for your money from supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi, just my opinion.

bulk cooking,

frozen vegetables etc are reasonably priced than fresh ones.

Sometimes the supermarkets reduce price towards end of the day, when I worked at M&S part time whilst studying got some decent bargains and will be expiring soon or near expiry date. 

You can't do that around where I live, the supermarkets rarely reduce anything any more and it's usually only a few pence. Other times I've seen scuffles break out with lots of pushing and grabbing so I think that's also partly why it stopped. Usually cheaper for them to just bin it I suppose especially when they are short staffed

bouicca21

I did a rough costing of two of my cheaper meals, Chilli pork kidneys and black bean burgers with either rice or potatoes and I reckon both are tastier and more nutritious than spaghetti hoops and potato, at a similar/same cost.  The black bean burgers would be even cheaper if using dried beans rather than canned ones.  But of course you would have to have a stock of spices and other basic bits and pieces.

London_1

I remember years ago back  when I first left home at 17, the first week in my bedsit before I got paid, in the cupboard all I had was a tub of Birds custard powder, and some dried hard sugar someone had forgotten and left at the back of the cupboard.

The milkman luckily delivered back then so I managed to have milk. I lived for 5 days on custard for dinner every night Lunchtime was the free tea or coffee at work which was handy. I had enough money to buy a bag of porridge oats, which I made with water, soaking them overnight  then cooking and sprinkling some salt from the salt cellar in the cupboard. I had to ration the cooking as it was a shilling in the meter.

 I had no tea bags in the evening so it was water to drink. it was the brokest I have ever been and maybe a reason why I always have a 'just in case' stash of tinned food.But I survived, and although  went off of custard for awhile, it didn't kill me  

This has, at times when the wolf was knocking at the door, helped both myself and the family (back in the 1970s when the mortgage rate hit 17%)
 Its been invaluble to keep  a stash of tinned veg ,sardines ,corned beef .Dried rice, lentils etc has got us through tough times. Many people may turn their noses up but food is food and having grown up with rationing, I will happily eat virtually anything edible if hungry . But its not a diet I would recommend to anyone

JackieO xx