The quality 3 meals a day I consume and make at home average 5€ per portion. resulting in 450€ food budget per person per month, I generally go for white label products if the quality is good enough.

That's 900€ a month for 2 people for food alone (this was 300ish before COVID).
850-1000€ for entry level 1 bedroom rent here, brings us to 1750-1900€ a month for a roof and food, another 75-100 for electricity (and then you have to be very usage conscious) brings us to 1825-2000€ a month, add required insurance (fire/health/accidents) for another 50-100€ brings us to 1875-2100€ a month.

Now, a phone and internet sub are pretty much a requirement these days, so say the cost of a cheap phone, internet and gsm abbo combine to be another 50€ a month per person.

So we're at 1975-2200€ a month to cover the very basic living expenses for a 2 person household.

You'd need to have one person with a decent wage or two people working minimum wage to barely get by.

Any surprise or extra cost and you're in the red.

Eating McDonnalds to cover breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, you'd need over 2000€ for food alone.

[–] Blake@feddit.uk 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The quality 3 meals a day I consume and make at home average 5€ per portion

That’s really very high, are you guessing or did you actually work it out for an average day?

[–] LwL@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tbh eating quality food is simply expensive. It's a thing where i wanna say you could easily save 10€ a day but it'd definitely be less healthy and eating unhealthily is ideally something people shouldn't be forced to do because they're poor.

Personally I eat out for lunch whenever I'm in the office (3-4 times a week) for 10€ and I spend less than 15€ on food a day. My regular meals at home are like... noodles with store bought pesto where ~4€ feed me an entire day, or frozen pizza which varies from 1-3.5€ per pizza. Though with some effort i could easily make my own pizzas for a similar (or even less if i make my own dough) price and have them be not unhealthy.

I also find 100€ for electricity to be pretty high (certainly not "very usage conscious") given that I consume around 80kwh a month, and 2 people shouldn't just double that since around a quarter is probably my fridge.

[–] Blake@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tbh eating quality food is simply expensive.

I don’t really agree with that, if you mean in terms of money. Eating healthily can be very cheap, but can consume a lot of time and effort.

Take wholemeal rice with red kidney beans, for example - that’s a very healthy, filling meal and it’s also incredibly cheap.

Honestly, in my experience, the unhealthiest food also tends to be the worst value.

I’ll ask again because it’s important and you kinda brushed past it: have you actually properly checked - e.g. calculated price per 400 kcal, or are you just guessing based on your grocery budget?

[–] LwL@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not op - i eat cheap (outside of my going out for lunch at work meals for 10€) but unhealthy. I did a quick estimate based on my cc charges in the last month and I don't think I'm above 250€ a month, while eating out for lunch around 13-15 times a month... I definitely agree that 5€ per meal is a lot.

Tbh I'm not nutritionally educated enough to know how relevant this actually is, but I was under the impression that some variety of ideally fresh produce would be required for optimally healthy food, and that is what seems to be expensive to me. Otherwise yea, aldi spaghetti for 80 cents and whipping up a sauce without much fat for maybe 5 euros max (high estimate) wouldn't be particularly unhealthy either and last a day, and much like your rice with beans example there are probably many meals like this.

[–] Blake@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Fresh produce is extremely cheap, if we’re talking about the same thing - how much is it for you to buy 2kg of potatoes, carrots and onions from the supermarket, and how much food can you make from that amount of veggies?

Edit: Also, don’t go out of your way to avoid fat in the sauce, but avoiding dairy is a good idea. Using olive oil as part of a sauce for example, is perfectly healthy. Fats are good for slow release energy.