Ramen was actually too expensive for me. (Spaghetti has identical nutritional information and costs less.)
If you are buying food on a minimal budget, you go calories per dollar (which I'll abbreviate as C/$). If you have money left over, nutrition per dollar.
Set a target - if you want to spend $14 a week, avoid buying foods that do worse than 1000 calories/dollar.
Sugar is 4000 C/$, flour and rice are about the same. Olive oil is 1000 C/$. Ice cream, 700 C/$. Oatmeal, 2000 C/$. Whole milk, 500 C/$. Potatoes (even instant flakes) and peanut butter are also good deals. Eggs and beans are cheap protein.
Vegetables are a bit trickier. Kale for instance is only 140 C/$. An all-kale diet would be $100 per week! Wheat sprouts were the best I could find at 400 C/$ (and that jumps to 700 if you can find a local supplier). Fruit is also tricky. Grow your own if you have space. Raspberries have great yield, require no effort besides picking them and grow almost everywhere. But I'll assume this is not an option.
Meat is stupidly expensive per calorie. Spam is one of the better deals at 400 C/$, but I do have standards.
So anything cheap becomes a staple. Work these into being a large part of every meal. A lot of my breakfasts were "something on oatmeal" and a lot of my dinners were "something on rice". But the more you fill up on the cheap stuff the more money is left over for nice things.
The nice stuff you "ration". For example, I limited myself to at most 8oz kale and three pieces of fruit a day, as well as 8oz of nice steak a week.
Of course, budget a few bucks to flavor - soy sauce has no calories to speak of but it makes rice much more palatable.
Probably the biggest way to save money is to never eat any food you did not make your self. Lots of clever ways to do this. For example, lunch at work: fill a vacuum thermos with rice and boiling water, and it will be done in 90 minutes and keep hot until you eat it.
Can I afford to eat out all the time? Sure. But I like to cook and this is a fun little numbers game.
Thanks for the breakdown. It looks like you've put some significant time into getting those numbers and I'm going to keep them for future reference.
Our approaches aren't all that different as I cook all my meals at home now, but because I've forced myself to do this, I allow myself to buy whatever I want at the store. This gets especially expensive at the specialty meat store.
If you are buying food on a minimal budget, you go calories per dollar (which I'll abbreviate as C/$). If you have money left over, nutrition per dollar.
Set a target - if you want to spend $14 a week, avoid buying foods that do worse than 1000 calories/dollar.
Sugar is 4000 C/$, flour and rice are about the same. Olive oil is 1000 C/$. Ice cream, 700 C/$. Oatmeal, 2000 C/$. Whole milk, 500 C/$. Potatoes (even instant flakes) and peanut butter are also good deals. Eggs and beans are cheap protein.
Vegetables are a bit trickier. Kale for instance is only 140 C/$. An all-kale diet would be $100 per week! Wheat sprouts were the best I could find at 400 C/$ (and that jumps to 700 if you can find a local supplier). Fruit is also tricky. Grow your own if you have space. Raspberries have great yield, require no effort besides picking them and grow almost everywhere. But I'll assume this is not an option.
Meat is stupidly expensive per calorie. Spam is one of the better deals at 400 C/$, but I do have standards.
So anything cheap becomes a staple. Work these into being a large part of every meal. A lot of my breakfasts were "something on oatmeal" and a lot of my dinners were "something on rice". But the more you fill up on the cheap stuff the more money is left over for nice things.
The nice stuff you "ration". For example, I limited myself to at most 8oz kale and three pieces of fruit a day, as well as 8oz of nice steak a week.
Of course, budget a few bucks to flavor - soy sauce has no calories to speak of but it makes rice much more palatable.
Probably the biggest way to save money is to never eat any food you did not make your self. Lots of clever ways to do this. For example, lunch at work: fill a vacuum thermos with rice and boiling water, and it will be done in 90 minutes and keep hot until you eat it.
Can I afford to eat out all the time? Sure. But I like to cook and this is a fun little numbers game.