Day 1 of 7: What does it cost to eat?

Rob and I have been talking a lot about finances lately. Given all the time that we are spending together, we are talking about things we normally wouldn't. But this is good, as communication is essential to a healthy marriage (everyone knows that!) But sometimes you gotta talk about the hard stuff you'd rather not talk about. Our conversation started like this, "...so I know we don't have much money, but we gotta get some groceries soon, and I'm wondering how far we can stretch our grocery budget?" The conversation lead to us brainstorm some recipes/dinners that are both healthy/cheap, and to sketch out a rough draft of a monthly meal plan for dinners.

When I looked at the finished monthly plan of dinners, I gulped. It seemed like all those ingredients: the pounds of meat, vegetables, side dishes, etc. would cost a fortune! Now, I've never been one who goes to the grocery store on any kind of weekly or bi-weekly basis, and I usually never plan dinners more than 4 or 5 days in advance. But looking at just 1 week on that calendar dinner plan, I asked myself, "How much would 1 week of eating cost us?" I have no idea what it would cost us. So here is where I thought I'd do a little experiment.

I am going to track what we eat for 7 days. I'll take a pic of my breakfast, lunch and dinner, and take notes on the amount of food eaten during the day. Then, at night, I'll do the math and figure out how much my food for the day cost us.

So here's Day 1 of the week-long Newton Food Cost Experiment:

Breakfast:
1.5 cups of Honey Bunches of Oats cereal
1.25 cups of Almond milk
1 8-ounce cup of Light & Fit yogurt



Lunch:
1 Lo-Carb whole wheat tortilla
0.5 cup refried beans
2 eggs, scrambled
0.5 cup cheddar cheese
0.5 cup canned corn
1 cup Orange Juice (calcium enriched)



Dinner:
one-half of a Kroger brand frozen pepperoni pizza
1 cup of Almond milk



Snack:
2 fuji apples
1 sugar free chocolate pudding cup

Sorry, no picture for my snack! Now, I just took about 15 minutes to remember what we paid for each item I ate and then run the math on how much that food portion cost. For example, a 4-pack of yogurt cost us $1.89, and if I eat 1 of those 4, the cost of me eating that works out to be 47 cents. I'll spare you all of the math on each individual thing I ate and just total up each meal per day.

Breakfast was $1.13
Lunch was $2.02
Dinner was $1.91
Snack was 75 cents

So a grand total for me to eat today was $5.81 - but I have a feeling that tomorrow's lunch is going to be way cheaper than today's...although, the dinner I have planned for tomorrow is our absolute favorite, super healthy dinner that we have every once in a while when we can afford it. I chose to be able to afford it since we received a really awesome gift card to Kroger from my parents! (Thanks Mom and Dad!)

So that's it for Day 1. I hope that you will enjoy reading about this for the next 6 days! Food and money, what could be more exciting? :)