He said 20 a day for two people. 10 per person. Which is fairly cheap, but not out of the realm of possibility.
Consider that most americans throw away about 40% their food.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/21/food-waste-americans-throw-away-food-study_n_1819340.html
It's actually pretty easy to see how this happens, my family is guilty of it many times. What happens is we are busy and want to shop once a week. So we go to the store really hungry with all these elaborate dinners planned out, spaghetti and meat sauce + garlic bread + salad on Monday, chicken fajitas + beans and rice Tuesday, pork chops + potatoes and grilled veggies Wednesday, etc. For the meat sauce a small pack of hamburger is like $4 a pound while a pack double the size is a "family pack" and on sale for $2.79 a pound so we buy like a two pound pack for $5 instead of one pound for $4 (more on that later). But we only planned one meal that involved hamburger. So we go home, use about a third of that meat. Then a week later we open it up, it's smelly, and throw the rest away. Same with the other meats. Oh and it gets even better, we'll have tons of left overs from the meal too and usually throw those away as well. Why? Cus we bought a whole ton of lunch stuff and snacks, so we never are required to eat the leftovers. They're just extra food that goes bad in our fridge.
Then fruit and veggies, we stock up cus we are too busy to shop more than once a week ya know, but those avacados that were perfectly ripe on monday are mushy messes by friday and we toss them. And my wife is a strict follower of best by dates so she constantly throws away dairy products the second that date is reached. Most americans do this actually which is ridiculous. Cheese, yogurt, sour cream, salad dressings, even eggs consistently taste fine a while after the best by date. The only product to me that seems to sour exactly on that date is milk.
Then on top of all of that, even more waste, we'll get to thursday or friday and be tired from work and kids and say hey let's go out or order a pizza and then we don't consume the meal we planned and it gets tossed when it's spoiled next week. Honestly when you live like this it's just cheaper to get takeout lol. We were spending about $1000 a month on groceries and we have us, a 4 year old and an infant. We also over serve our 4 year old. Cus it doesn't look like much food when you give her half a chicken breast, an orange and a half cup of brocoli, but she ends up eating only half of it cus duh she's 4 and her stomach is like the size of a plum. Instead we should cut the orange in half, save rest for a snack later etc.
So anyway, we recently had a come to jesus moment where our budget was out of control and I told my wife look if we just only buy what we know we will consume and don't shop more than a few days in advance we will cut our bill in half easily, which was about what we needed to come up with monthly to balance our budget, around $500. She didn't think we could do it, but what we did was go online and for $7 at our grocery store you can pick out your items online then they deliver them to your car when you get there. We bought one package of chicken and made two meals out of it. We bought no lunch meat cus we ate the leftovers for lunches, I took them to work. We didn't do any impulse junk food buys. We only bought a few days worth of fresh stuff cus it was so easy to shop and pick up we'd just go back when we ran out. First week in, not out of food yet and under $100 spent.
Second reason americans waste so much on food is buying prepacked, quick and easy meal things. It's not quite restaurant level expensive, but it's easily double. It's like what I was pointing out about the burger meat, you have to buy a bigger pack and freeze it or something. Condiments are the worst, the cost per ounce of a small container is often double what a big one costs. My wife at one point was buying 8 oz packages of precooked chicken fajita strips and small bags of pre sliced peppers to make fajitas cus it was easy and she needed fast dinners. The chicken doesn't seem expensive, it's only like $4, and that package of peppers is like $4, plus we'd get a single meal pouch of seasoning for a buck, add in some other toppings and we're at like a $15 meal. Which isn't that bad right, $15 for a dinner for three? But consider if we bought a bulk pack of seasoning, one pepper and sliced it ourselves and a pound of fresh chicken that we split into two meals, we could've gotten that cost down to like $7. Individually packaged anything is a huge ripoff, you pay for the packaging. Which I guess when you think about it isn't really a markup, cus it costs the food company a lot of money for that packaging. But applesauce, yogurt, fruit cups, chips, soups for 1, salads, anything individually packaged I try to stay away from now where before we used to live off that stuff. We still spend a ton of money on drinks, orange juice, milk and pop, but that's kind of luxury we aren't willing to compromise on yet. We just make sure to stock up on pop when it's on sale for like 25 cents a can vs normal prices of 40-45 cents a can.
That got a little longer than I expected, but in reality it's totally possible to live on ~$5 a day food wise which would be like $150 a month. Need a meal plan? Ok here goes. These are actual prices from my grocery store, just buying normal quantities of stuff. For example chicken breast in 1-2 pound packages is ~$3 a pound. It goes on sale for less sometimes. A bunch of brocolli which yields a couple cups is around a dollar. What you can't do is eat trendy expensive stuff like sugar snap peas cus those are $4 a pound! Or grass fed beef cus it's like $8 a pound.
Breakfast, two eggs (12 cents each), two slices of wheat toast (15 cents each) = 54 cents
Lunch, tuna (1), bread for sandwich (30 cents), some mayo (10 cents), ounce of potato chips (20 cents), an apple (50 cents) and a banana (25 cents) = $2.35
Dinner, chicken 1/3rd to half pound (1.50), cup of fresh broccoli (0.5), sweet potato (0.5) = $2.50
total $5.39. Add idk 60 cents for some seasoning cus you probably aren't eating that chicken without some salt and pepper, and maybe some oil or butter to cook your eggs/put on your potatoes etc, and that's a day of food for $6 that includes lean protein, a little fun junk food, fruit and veggies and complex carbs. You could go even cheaper if you sub white bread and potatoes and frozen veggies in bulk, or ditched meat for cheaper proteins like bulk yogurt or beans.
