A Dollar a Day?

I have been intriqued by a couple of blogs about eating on a dollar a day. Their motives are to save money but also to understand the meaning of poverty. They each have rules they have to live by on their 30 day challenge. You can access both of these blogs by going to
http://www.theresacooks.blogspot.com and going to her January 2 , 2009 post entitled , A dollars worth of food.

I don't think we can get the true meaning of poverty through this challenge but it gives a person an idea of what it's all about. I want to be more compassionate but I'm also interested in getting by on as little money as possible. I'm eying the dollar a day diet for the purpose of saving. Think! $365. a year for food. That's pretty thrifty. I'm thinking that if one has started out with food storage and then went into the dollar a day diet it would be much easier than starting from scratch. This is one dollar a day per person, not per family. I do remember reading about the Baskin Robbins heir who took his family to the woods to live and their yearly budget for food was about $350 - $450 for the year. They used a lot of grains and beans and hunted and gardened.

I always enjoyed The Tightwad Gazzette and the breakdown of costs she used. I enjoy reading about it but I don't know how good I am at it. I am going to try to break things down and give an account here of my food budget . What I'm spending and what I'm using each day and how much it costs.

I'm not making the same rules that the others have. I will use coupons and freebees when I can.

Last week I purchased 2 packages of Jenny-0 ground turkey breast. It was two packages for $7.00. I had a coupon for $5.00 off which made it $2.00. With one package I made porcupine meatballs. I cooked half in 1 can of tomatoes and 1 can of tomato sauce. They cost .50 cents each. That made that half $2.00. I got three meals out of half of the meatballs. With another helping of rice that is about .70 a meal. These porcupine meatballs were made from the same 1 1/2 cup of cooked brown rice that I added to the dinner with the gravy over. That's a little higher than I would like. My breakfast for the last two weeks has been my homemade pumpkin bread which I calculated at .25 cents a serving. I toast it and spread a TBS of peanut butter on it and have 1/2 banana on it. The bananas are free and the peanut butter was gotten for .68 cents on a coupon deal. There are 32 TBS per jar@ 12.1 cents per TBS. That makes me over the one dollar a day as I also have 1 or 2 cups of my homemade chicken vegie soup. Here is the breakdown on that. Ground turkey, .25 cents 1/2 head of cabbage @ .38 cents a # about .40 cents, 1 celery @ 1.00, chicken bouilion, .15 cents, other spices, .15 cents. 1 # mixed frozen vegies @.90 cents. = 2.85 for about 2 gal soup. I'll say .20 cents a cup as I also added some leftover cooked black beans and brown rice.
Breakfast: .37 cents
Lunch: . .40 cents
Dinner: .70 cents
Snack: .50 cents Total: 1.97

Not a dollar a day but decent.