What do you find is the actual hardest thing to get properly and do you need a supplement for it?

Like I know some people struggle with iron. But it could be various things depending on your food preferences.

going to die from a protein deficiency

Haha, ya that is amusing. Protein is probably the easiest thing to manage in that situation as long as you can enjoy rice and beans.

Uhhhh minus the lead you almost had me interested to try it out.

Regular grocery store prices for spices can be stupid at times.

I wish potato’s lasted longer without a dark chilled area to keep them. Sometimes the grocery store by me puts on these crazy deals for 10lb-20lb bags, but I can’t go through that that fast.

Unidentified Drone - identify yourself or we will shoot you down with feathers!

/operator/ feathers? Dammit, is there even a drone there or is that also a hallucination.

Automated #4 Turkey Turrets with AI tracking.

We might get a video of the white house’s defence systems shooting it down instead.

Microsoft’s

I would have sworn you wrote McDonalds the first time, and I was like wtf went on there that I had no idea about, until you got to the 2nd Microsoft.

Really? That’s interesting, even rice and oats?

Edit: where I’m at for spices, you can get 3-4x the amount at Costco vs the grocery store, but on a budget like this you’d probably only get 1 a month while you built up the kitchen. I’ll check rice again next time I’m out but I swear it’s cheaper as well. Haven’t bought oats in awhile, but used to have them for breakfast daily (the basic quaker oats kind, not the expensive flavored sachets)

Edit: Also I’m annoyed that you can’t see Costco warehouse food prices online. You get the online/delivery prices which are raised making price shopping more difficult.

You don’t need a chest freezer for a 2-3kg bag of frozen veggies and berries. Any standard fridge will fit that with plenty of additional space.

Nor do you need a membership to even get these things at all places, but it can make it cheaper (and likely pay for itself)

I would expect a person this poor to likely have a bus pass, they probably wouldn’t be driving. So transportation costs are probably already covered, so the real issue is, is there a place they can buy frozen/bulk food within a reasonable bus distance.

Edit: E.g Krogers in Milwaukee where OP referenced has frozen peas 60oz for $5.29 (NOT on sale), as well as other vegetables. Ideally find a mixed bag. That’s your veggies for the week, and it’s only $0.75 of you’re $9.41 day for eating, and no paid membership. I’m not saying this is good, it’s poverty, but it’s doable.

Edit: In Log Angeles at Food4Less you can get 80z mixed veggies for $6.99 on sale ($1 off), that’s $0.699 a day for 10 days, even cheaper, in LA an even more expensive city! You can even get that down to $0.54 a day at Walmart.

Not that I suggest you do this, but in the context of eating cheap, you can get that cheaper by finding a place that sells larger bags of frozen vegetables, such as the carrot, pea, green bean, corn mixes. Go for the store brand to get that cheapest. They’re just as nutritious as they get flash frozen when their nutrients are at their peak. It won’t be very exiting though.

You won’t have a lot of variety trying to eat on $292 a month.

Ya, it’d be a lot of vegetarian meals. If you can get to something like a Sams Club or Costco (although that has it’s own cost) you could get things like eggs, rice, oats, and even some spices over a few months to get you going, really cheap compared to other places.

Even being able to get something like a bulk frozen blueberries to be your fruit for the month that you can put in the oatmeal for example would go a long way, but is probably too pricey if you’re buying it in small quantities.

Trying to do that at an expensive grocery store and no access to cheaper bulk pricing would make that less comfortable.

Is that amount for a family, cause I can definitely eat on $292 a month in a very expensive city. I’d need to make adjustments, but it’d easily be doable.

My best days as a software dev are negative line days.