After tuition and rent,
food is most likely to be your largest expense over the school year. How can you enjoy your food and still not
blow your entire food budget? Mac and cheese from a box can only satisfy you
for a bit. Here are some strategies that
are sure to keep your tummy full, your body healthy and your wallet happy.
1. Stretch your
proteins
Protein is the most
expensive food, per unit volume and weight.
It is also very important to eat enough protein throughout the day, or
you will not be in your best health.
A ham and cheese omelet
for breakfast may see like a great breakfast – however, that’s all protein and
it’s going to set you back a few dollars.
Saving the cheese for lunch (tomato and cheese sandwich?) and the ham
for dinner (ham with peas and mashed potatoes) will stretch your protein budget
and make you feel satisfied; have a spinach and onion omelet for breakfast.
2. Veggie proteins are
cheaper than meat.
Eggs, dairy products,
tofu, beans, lentils and nuts (including peanut butter) are great and frugal
ways to get protein into your diet. Eggs
are about $2.50 a dozen, which means they are about 21 cents each (they last 3
weeks in the fridge). Milk is low fat,
contains proteins AND calcium. A yogurt
is a great snack and is pretty portable, as well as cheese (cream cheese has
almost no protein or calcium though).
Canned beans can be reheated (once drained) with a bit of salt, pepper,
and some salsa for a great wrap filling.
Raw lentils can be added to spaghetti sauce because they cook in about
20 minutes; they add proteins and ‘bulk’ to your sauce. Nuts and peanuts as well as nut butters are
pure protein – however, with many people allergic to them, they are best kept
as a food for home and not for class.
Try a few meatless meals each week.
3. Eat raw
Eating raw vegetables
and fruit is a fantastic habit to get into in university. An apple, an orange or carrot sticks are some
of the healthiest snacks you can have, and some of the cheapest. They are full of different vitamins and
fibres, are frugal, and easy to grab on our way to class or the library. They also travel well in a backpack and they
require close to no preparation. Add ranch salad dressing to your veg’s for a
‘fancier’ snack.
4. Eat in season
My favorite fruit is
raspberries and my favorite fruit is avocado.
Living in Canada, raspberries are affordable for about 2 months of the
year! So I use them as a treat, but not
as part of my every day diet because of their prices. However bananas and apples are always a
bargain, and for most of winter, so are oranges and grapefruit. In the summer, I eat loads of fresh tomatoes
and cucumbers, but in winter, I rely on frozen peas and corn, carrots and sweet
potatoes. I can’t afford to eat all my
favorite food year round, so I gorge on my favorite while in season and cope
the rest of the year.
5. Store some backup
food
You don’t want to have
to go out because you arrive home at 7pm, starve, and have nothing to make
dinner with. Make sure you always have
some basic food that satisfies you at home.
For some it can be cereal and milk; for others, banana and peanut
butter. It doesn’t matter what it is as
long as you have it as a ‘backup’ food in your fridge or cupboard. This backup food may act as dinner some days,
or as a snack to give you enough time to decide what to cook some other days.
6. Find the perfect
sauce and salad dressing for you
By having a few hot
sauces for cooking foods, and a couple of favorite salad dressings on hand, you
can make any veg and meat into a great stir fry and leftover cooked meats and
crudités into a great salad. I always
have soy sauce, mayonnaise and Dijon mustard in the fridge for my meats and
cooked greens, and Thousand Island, Ranch, and Catalina salad dressings for my
salads. I can therefore throw together
fast salads from all my leftovers in the fridge, add salad dressing and voilà:
dinner.
7. Buy in bulk
We all know that buying
larger sizes, in most cases, saves you money per serving. When shopping for one though, there’s a
problem: will you get through the food before it goes bad? One solution to this is to buy with a friend:
you buy a bag of apples and split it; you buy toilet paper for your entire
shared house and split the cost; you buy for a friend and you one week, and he
does the same the following week.
8. Don’t go too cheap
When I was a poor and
frugal graduate students, I decided to make all my food from scratch – my
husband and I already had a rule about desserts (to limit spending and the
ingestion of empty calories) so I decided to push this further: buy dried
beans, not canned; eat more root vegetables (more turnip, less tomatoes), etc.
The problem was, none of these foods were foods I really liked – so after a
couple of weeks, I could not stand my own food and ended up going out for a few
meals in a row. Not the great savings I
had planned! So I went back to eating
the foods I liked, but made these foods cheaper – and I enjoyed them as well!
Eat and be merry!
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