This is part of an ongoing series that chronicles our challenges and (hopefully) successes living on a $4/person daily food budget starting with absolutely nothing in our cupboards or fridge. For the what and why of this series, or to start from the beginning, please read our first post HERE.

We did it.

Saturday marked the final day of our attempt to eat on just $4/day for six weeks. We made it. We achieved our goal. We kept up our training for a half and a full marathon (which we completed Sunday!). We even had money left over. Through the initial struggles right through to the final weeks when our pantry was once again full, and food was plentiful, it’s been an eye-opening experience. We’ve realized we can live on less. Much less.

Now that we’ve had a few food-filled days to digest the last six weeks of cheap eating (pardon the pun), we’re going to break down the ten biggest lessons learned about eating on a $4/day food budget over the past six weeks. We’ll also share our favourite meals, and what former practices we’ll get rid of  as we continue saving money on food now that the experiment is over. Finally, we’ll share the problems with this challenge when it comes to the broader issue of food security.

1. Meal planning is key:
Hands down, our most important tool was taking the time at the beginning of each week to carefully plan each meal, sketch out what ingredients we would need, and estimate how much things would cost before heading to the grocery store. We then stuck to that list. My list each week was almost perfectly planned to hit our target budget. Once in the store, I would challenge myself to save even more when and where I could. Sometimes those savings were needed to make up for items I had accidentally underpriced, but other times it meant having money left over to buy an extra item like peanut butter, or (finally) coffee in week five.

2. Start with what you have:
If meal planning was our most important tool, starting with what you have is a close second. Each week, we started our planning by taking a close look at what we had left. It allowed us not only to waste much less food (a huge problem in the global food security equation – plus, why throw money away?) but to save a ton of money through smarter planning. It also helped keep our meals creative. Most of our meals came from the Good and Cheap cookbook (free download of this awesome resource HERE), but that weekly check-in always led to a quick search for new online recipes that only required a few new ingredients to make.

3. It’s all about the basics:
Staple items that keep for a long time like oatmeal, chickpeas, lentils, rice, and common spices were our best investments. As our pantry grew, our ability to create something healthy and cheap became far easier. It also allowed us to then focus more money into the local economy by buying fresh, in-season ingredients that we could combine with our basics. Buying dried bulk ingredients also saved us a bucket of money compared to single serve or canned equivalents. And while it took longer to prepare some recipes when starting from scratch, once we were in the habit of planning and preparing, it became habit and just as easy as buying something ready-to-make.

4. You’ll adapt:
Tastes and habits were easier to develop than we thought. The first few weeks of the challenge, we couldn’t afford sugar. I remember biting into an apple on the first day and thinking how sour it was. By the end of that first week, the same bag of apples tasted almost too sweet. Throughout the challenge, we found ourselves fantasizing about products that we missed – things like beer and chips and ice cream and even general things like dining out. In our first week following the experiment, we’ve actually found those things to be far less satisfying than we remembered.

5. It gets easier:
The first two or three weeks were really hard, but by week 4, 5 and 6 we had gotten to a place where we were not only feeling full and healthy, but we actually had a bit of extra money each week that we could use on extra items.

6. Find your favourites:
Once we had a chance to play around with a few recipes we learned which ones could be thrown together in a pinch. Jambalaya, for instance, turned out to be a quick, healthy, delicious 30-minute meal that we’ll now keep the main ingredients on-hand for busy nights. Same with our risotto and our pasta. These are cheap, relatively healthy mainstays that we’ll keep in our meal rotations. Also, the leftovers made for great lunches the next day.

7. Practice makes perfect:
My first attempt at making gluten free bread wasn’t perfect, but after a few tries I learned not only to make a foolproof and tasty loaf, but the process became fast and easy for me. While the first time took me more than an hour, it’s now a mere 15 minutes for me to make and bake. Same with gluten free pizza crust. If you’ve been following along with us over the past few weeks, you’ll know that our first attempt at pizza was a disaster (think raw pizza dough and toppings falling apart and all over the floor) but now I want to make pizza for everyone. It’s become my go-to quick, tasty, cheap meal, perfect for at home or to take to a party. The first time took me hours and failed, but this week I made five full pizzas for a gathering at my parents’ place in a snap.

It definitely wasn’t all good – here were the major snags and negative parts of eating on $4/day:

8. Our social life disappeared:
Friends and food go hand-in-hand, and so we often found ourselves having to turn down even the cheapest of get-togethers. Over the past six weeks, potlucks were our best bet, but even then it was sometimes difficult to afford the raw ingredients to feed a group. Drew had to turn down a $5 staff get-together, drinks or appetizers were totally out, and even a cheap coffee date was too rich for our limited budget. It was embarrassing to tell friends that we couldn’t afford something as simple as a coffee, and it added a lot of stress.

What I have realized, though, is that many of us struggle to feed ourselves and many of us would like to spend less money on food. By starting to open the door to gatherings that don’t involve always dining out – things like pot lucks or cooking parties or just getting outside for a walk together, we can start to change the norms around social gatherings. With that said, there is something very powerful about breaking bread together. You can read more of our thoughts and discoveries on that in a prior post, How Cooking for Others Comes Back to Feed You.

9. Food stress became a daily reality:
We found ourselves constantly thinking about food over the past six weeks – because we were hungry or because we had to plan down to the cent or because we were craving an old favourite or because we were worried our food plan for the week wouldn’t pan out the way we thought.  There was rarely a moment when food was not on my mind.

When we were hungry, it impacted all other areas of our life – our productivity at work, our training schedule for the marathon, and even our interactions with each other (read: hunger = irritability).

10. Eating on a budget took time and money from other places:
This was the biggest downfall (though something I think would start to work itself out with time and practice). Eating on a budget meant shopping from multiple locations. We weren’t looking at the cost of gas or opportunity cost in our budget, but I’d guess that gas alone added a fair chunk onto our weekly expenditures. We tried to plan our shopping around destinations we already needed to visit to cut down on extra fuel cost (which is why Withrow’s appears so much in our shopping list and the market appears less often). The reality is that many of us struggle with transportation and do not have the option of traveling to multiple locations to get their groceries making living on such an extreme budget while still eating healthy and local meals impossible.

Then there was prep time. I have never spent as much time in the kitchen as I did over the past six weeks. As mentioned above, this was starting to work itself out near the end of the experiment, and I do believe that with time, I’ll have my kitchen time down to a few hours a week. But, there are many of us working long hours or multiple jobs in addition to raising kids or taking on other commitments, and the required prep and cooking time is just not an option.

I don’t think that our particular approach will work for everyone, nor do I think that the Good and Cheap cookbook will work verbatim for all people, but it worked for us and it is a truly inspirational and helpful resource. I think that the cookbook is a great guideline, a starting place to start saving money on food while putting healthy meals on the table. We’ve decided to keep a reduced budget indefinitely, though we are going to bump it up a few dollars a week so that we can once again start brewing our own beer, growing a few vegetables and herbs, and taking steps we think will save even more money in the long run but that we think will require a bit more of an initial investment. We love that we have simplified our food, and so we’ll be maintaining many of the habits we developed over the past six weeks.

Our Favourite Meals From The Past Six Weeks

One of the best parts was getting to try a number of new dishes. These were our five favourite – they were easy, cheap, and delicious:

1. Herby Tomato Risotto

2. Jambalaya (Good and Cheap Cookbook)

3. Mexican Street Corn (Good and Cheap Cookbook)

4. Zuccini Pasta (Good and Cheap Cookbook)

5. Gluten Free Pizza (toppings always changing!)

What Didn’t Work

There were a lot of things that worked for us (as you can see above) but there were a few things that didn’t. These are the things we’ll leave behind:

1. Single-Week Spending:
For the past six weeks, we’ve limited spending to $56 every week – so rather than having $240 for the month divided in whatever increments we liked, we had a weekly cap. We did this because we wanted the amounts to be close to realistic for the average person. With many Canadians living paycheque to paycheque, having a lump sum of money to spend on food at a given time isn’t always possible.

The hard part about buying by the week was that it was difficult to take advantage of bulk purchases on the things where bulk is vastly cheaper (like those pantry items – oatmeal, rice etc). It also made it difficult if there was a really great sale on something like cheese or butter which will keep for quite a few weeks unopened. We’ll leave that practice behind moving forward (when we can) in hopes that in the long run we’ll save even more and be able to build a better pantry.

2. Looking for the Lowest Price on Everything:
Most things – especially items that cannot be sourced locally – will be items we continue to source as affordably as possible, but moving forward we want to support more of the local vendors we love when we can rather than keeping our local spending to a set amount. Spending more money in our local economy leads to increased global food security. Plus, there are some vendors whose products we just love and want to keep eating. We’ll increase our budget by a few dollars a week to bring some of our local favourites back to our table.

3. Shopping Around:
At its worst, I was making seven grocery stops in a single week. We want to return to doing the bulk of our shopping for fresh goods at the market. This ties into #1 because we’ll plan to make just one or two trips a month for pantry basics, and source any fresh products at a farm stand or farmers market. While it may mean paying more on a few select items, there are savings on others and I think it will balance out with the gas and time savings.

If the goal was to spend less money on food, to eat healthy meals, and to source half our food from local vendors, we passed with flying colours. But if we’re talking about the broader issue of food security, our experiment wasn’t a success.

We have realized that WE can spend far less money on food. We’ve also realized that, if we can do it, there are also others who could find the same success that we have. But not everyone could. Because, when push comes to shove, this experiment does not address the many issues that come hand in hand with personal food insecurity.

The fact that we have been able eat on $4 per day and still incorporate a significant amount of local food isn’t a solution for food security issues. It doesn’t mean we can stop seeking solutions and championing better models, systems, and tools to support the many people who are food insecure. Over the past six weeks, we had a number of advantages that seem easy to be taken for granted. We  have a strong family support system, regular access to transportation, the luxury to spend hours (and hours, and hours) in the kitchen creating food from scratch, the knowledge to tackle basic food preparation, and the tools to create many items from scratch.

I don’t want to discredit the past six weeks. What we did learn (and what I hope others learned from following along) was eating healthy and local is made more accessible with planning and that there are simple steps that can be taken to decrease or eliminate food waste at the consumer level. Those are two big pieces in the food security puzzle, they just aren’t the whole picture. 

Want to follow along with our next Downshift experiment?

Since getting together six years ago, we have given away our television, begun weekly DIY nights, experimented with urban homesteading, challenged ourselves to drive less (100 days car-free in 2013), and have learned more about food security. We have experimented with a range of budgeting strategies, all of which involve consuming less stuff. We buy food with reducing packaging in mind. We got a dog.

We have been doing these things for a variety of reasons: financial, social, environmental, to achieve a better work-life balance. It has resulted in us enjoying an increasingly simple and satisfying lifestyle.

We’ve been influenced by a lot of people we’ve encountered and things we’ve read about along the way, notably the Transition Movement, the Antigonish Movement, and, more recently, traditional Acadien living. And we’ve learned that we are by no means alone. There are many, many people who are taking steps to downshift their lives.

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What is your biggest obstacle when it comes to feeding yourself and your family?