random curiosity

[ratcreature]

Poll #4781 the price to feed yourself

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42

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How much money do you spend on food per week per person? (in an average week, eating your average food, not an exceptional one with a holiday feast or a dinner treat at an for you unusually fancy restaurant or the like)

View Answers

less than 20 € (currently exchanged to about 27.50 US$ or so or 17.50 UK£, convert € below accordingly, though I realize the exchange rate vagaries don't reflect local purchasing power for stuff like food necessarily)
4 (9.5%)

20-30 €
11 (26.2%)

30-40 €
11 (26.2%)

40-50 €
3 (7.1%)

50-60 €
5 (11.9%)

60-70 €
1 (2.4%)

70-80 €
2 (4.8%)

90-100 €
3 (7.1%)

100-120 €
2 (4.8%)

120-140 €
0 (0.0%)

140-160 €
0 (0.0%)

160-180 €
0 (0.0%)

180-200 €
0 (0.0%)

200-250 €
0 (0.0%)

250-300 €
0 (0.0%)

more than 300 €
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[mecurtin]

I'm stunned at how high most of these estimates are, frankly. It's the effect of years (on my part) of:

- cooking for a family, not single
- making food from scratch
- eating out *extremely* rarely when not traveling
- not even going to coffee shops

I would never have thought to include the upper reaches of your poll, and would have split the lowest level into sub-categories.

[ratcreature]

Well, the minimal subsistence margin set by the government here calculates with €4/per day for food for an adult living alone, that's €28 per week. I already started lower than that. ETA: And the upper limit, I calculated that some people go to lunch or dinner or sometimes both daily and not some fast food place but decent restaurants, and have a bottle of wine several times a week, and then maybe prefer organic food and so on, and then maybe regularly splurge on an expensive restaurant once a month. I have no trouble to image €300 for food per week on average if you have a good income.

[mecurtin]

What do they calculate for a family of 3 or 4? I wonder how much of my saving is due to never eating out, how much for being a family instead of single.

Every Saturday, we have a dinner party for 6-10 people: we do most of the cooking, other people bring wine. This *feels* like a special occasion enough that I don't often have the urge to eat out, but it costs very little -- we could keep doing it even when our finances had gone from "tight" to "dire".

[ratcreature]

It lowers in shared households. And not just children, also non-married partners and even roommates. If you live together you have to prove that you don't share costs if you want to get the full support. I think they reduce to two-thirds in the calculations but I'm not entirely sure.