Eating on €10 a week: the experiment that doesn't add up

Really eating on €10 a week: the basket falls short

A store-brand packet of lentils at €0.75 for 500 grams, a kilo of rice at €0.68 and minced pork at around €5 a kilo. With those three price tags you can already build the basis of a week's meals for an adult, provided that adult is willing to eat lentils four or five times. The doubt starts right there: how many times in a row can you repeat the same dish before it stops being nourishment?

The experiment was set up with strict rules. €10 for seven days, one adult aged 30, a minimum of three meals a day, and electricity, tap water, oil and salt included in the budget. The rotation had to include white and red meat, fish, pulses, pasta and eggs. The shopping was done at chains with a significant presence in the country, with the sole exception of vegetables, reserved for greengrocers to take advantage of offers on produce nearing its sell-by date.

The first conclusion arrived before the stove was lit: €10 a week doesn't add up. The second was an adjustment, not a surrender: €20 every two weeks starts to look like something.

Pulses and rice: cheap, yes, but in portions for four

Here the first misunderstanding of any tight budget appears. The price per kilo is ridiculous — own-brand lentils at €0.75 per half kilo, rice at €0.68 — but the packaging is not designed for one person. One packet makes four or five servings. If you live alone, you either repeat it or throw food away, and throwing food away is the quietest way to blow any budget.

Pasta and rice play in the same league: half a kilo of pasta costs around 50 cents, and half a kilo of basmati rice, about the same. The issue isn't the price, it's the monotony. Eating the same thing three days in a row is the fastest way to send the experiment to hell.

Meat: where the maths stops working

The survey of butcher shops and supermarkets leaves an uncomfortable figure. The most affordable minced meat is pork, at around €5 a kilo, and lean pork appears below €4. A forum user says he has seen minced Galician beef at €3.50 a kilo, a price that he and other participants questioned, recommending checking the labelling on the trays before trusting it. The prudent thing, when the product is packaged out of sight, is to ask for it to be minced in front of you.

Chicken is the other battlefield. A whole free-range chicken at €2.99 a kilo can work out better than loose breasts, which at some counters sell for €6 a kilo, though they drop to €4.50 a kilo if you buy two kilos. Breaking down a 1,905-gram chicken left 1,732 usable grams: 660 grams of breast, 334 of thigh and drumstick, and 680 of bones and wings, with the bones at €1 a kilo for stock. Offal — liver, kidneys, brains, blood, feet — and near-date trimmings, discounted by up to half and frozen, are, according to a forum user, a very cost-effective route.

Fish, eggs and dairy: the list of cents

Oily fish is the cheap door: sardines, anchovies and mussels, with a kilo of mussels at around one euro. The rest is built from a list read in cents: a tin of precooked chickpeas or lentils at €0.44, a dozen eggs at €1.15-€1.20, 200 grams of fresh cheese at between 50 and 80 cents, 400 grams of sliced chicken breast at €1.83, surimi sticks at €0.99, tins of tuna at €0.80, two litres of milk at €1.20, sweetened natural yoghurt at €0.84 for six, sliced bread at between €0.80 and €1.19, lettuce and tomato for €0.60, and a carton of fried tomato sauce at €0.20.

With those pieces, some argue that the correct split for animal protein would be two days of meat and one of fish, and that at that frequency the budget no longer holds.

The cost that doesn't show up on the receipt: time, scale and cooking

There's a part of the saving that doesn't show up on the shelf. Flour at €0.6 a kilo allows home-made bread whose ingredient cost is around 36 cents a kilo; ready-made yoghurt works out at €0.14 per unit, according to a forum user who argues that sometimes the ready-made product is worth it compared with home-made. Potatoes show the difference of scale like few other things: a forum user recalled, from memory, that a 10-kilo sack had once been €2 at his neighbourhood market, 20 cents a kilo, compared with around 80 cents per kilo for the 5-kilo bag in the supermarket.

The pattern repeats: the bigger the format, the cheaper the kilo. And that is the underlying problem. Someone living alone doesn't get volume discounts, doesn't buy the whole piece and doesn't make the freezer pay off. As one participant noted, three people with €30 buy better — more variety, less waste — than one person with €10. To the money you have to add hours of cooking and travel: the euro that the cheapest burger costs is equivalent to three made at home, but someone has to make them.

Eating cheaply isn't eating badly, but it isn't free either

Positions split into two camps. At one extreme, those who argue that a diet built on starches and pulses is little short of eating junk and that prolonging that pattern takes a toll in the long term. At the other, those who respond that pulses provide fibre and protein at bargain prices and that giving them up is a mistake. The sensible warning is the same on both sides: this is not medical advice, it's arithmetic.

The uncomfortable reference also came up. Some recall that there are soup kitchens and food banks where you eat for zero euros. And some point out that food is extraordinarily cheap and that what is expensive is preparing it: the difference between buying potatoes and buying a bag of crisps is the difference between feeding yourself and buying time.

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In the end, the figure that throws you isn't the price of chicken. It's that the experiment began by trying to find out whether ten euros were enough and ended up recast at twenty without ever leaving the same shopping list. The gap between the two numbers isn't closed in the supermarket. It's closed in hours of cooking that nobody counts.