Food for $29 a Week? Yes, if you're Doing Low-Carb and Shopping the Sales

With some help from my frugal Internet friend Galina, I've figured out how to live within a $29-per-week grocery budget, which is what some people get as part of SNAP:

	calories	price	$/100 calories
12 eggs	852	$ 3.00	$ 0.35
2 chickens, whole	4,280	$ 8.40	$ 0.20
head romaine lettuce	106	$ 0.99	$ 0.93
pound butter	3,240	$ 5.00	$ 0.15
head cabbage	218	$ 1.62	$ 0.74
avocado	227	$ 0.88	$ 0.39
can salmon	536	$ 2.48	$ 0.46
3 pounds pork	4,272	$ 4.50	$ 0.11
salad dressing	2,176	$ 1.49	$ 0.07
	15,907	$ 28.36	$ 0.18

Calories per day	2,272

I've seen butter for $5 a pound, whole chickens for $2 a pound, eggs for $3 or less a dozen and Galina tells me she sees pork on sale sometimes for $1.50 a pound. The rest of the prices come from store flyers and my latest shopping trip. Calories are from nutritiondata.com and the web site of Double Q Salmon.

Some people complain that low-carb is an "expensive diet." But look at the price per hundred calories--18 cents! There's plenty of satiating fat and protein and other nutrients.

Is this perfect food? No--there's seed oil in the dressing and a lot of omega-6 fats in the pork. But it's food without the antinutrients of grains and beans and the fattening, blood-sugar spiking, tooth-decaying effects of those foods.

Comments

tess said…

yes, trying to "eat cheap" ya gotta watch the sales! :-) takes me back to my college days....

May 11, 2015

Lori Miller said…

I like to stock up during sales, too.

May 11, 2015

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