A Gentleman's Guide to Cheap Food

When's the last time you spent $10 on a meal? All the time, right? Hard to go out to eat and spend any less than $10 on yourself, usually more, perfectly ordinary, to be expected, part of the day to day marvel of living and eating, appearing in public with your friends at establishments with menus where they actually bring the food right to you.

That was then and this is now, bub. As a non-working member of the new poor, you must have the skill to prepare three meals a day at a buck apiece. Whether you're getting about $100 a month for one or about $300 a month for a family of three, it usually works out that they expect humans in the US to be able to feed themselves on three dollars a day.

They used to be called Food Stamps, but the government found it much cheaper and convenient to switch to a credit card system called EBT. No more food stamps, which means you get to feel like you're still rich, with a working credit card and all. It also means no more buying fantastic cheap fruit from roadside Mexicans with crates of oranges and mangos who used to accept food stamps but can't accept EBTs.

So let's say you and your two kids have got your $10 a day, one of your old meals divided by nine, a little more than $1 per person per meal per day. You know what? You can do it. It's all figured out. Here's all you have to do…

· Give yourself a daily budget and shop daily instead of weekly, keeping a sharp eye out for sales. Your entire month's cash allotment is already gone the second you get it on things like rent and utilities, though sometimes, if you're extra prudent, you might have $20 left over for a spending spree on things like soap.

· If you have access to storage, a cabinet, or a luxury like a refrigerator and freezer, spend half your monthly allotment all at once to take advantage of bulk discounts on things you can store. Then give yourself a daily budget, $5.00, and shop daily for perishables. Get milk, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, some kind of meat depending upon what's on sale, aha, this week, beef back ribs $1.00 a pound, pester the meat man till he finds one that’s exactly three pounds because everything you buy is going to be divided by three, perfect, two ribs apiece plus some of those potatoes equals a meal at a bit more than a buck apiece.

· Buy two gallons of real milk and five pounds of powdered milk which, strangely enough, once mixed, ends up costing almost exact the same as the fresh stuff. This will save you money in transportation to the store. Every penny counts. After you've used a half of a gallon container, add three cups of powdered milk and water to the rest, filling it back up all the way with water. Turns each gallon into two and no one will notice the difference.

· Since food stamps only cover food items, how do you get other household items like soap and toilet paper and shampoo and bug spray and napkins and Kleenex and cat food? Glad you asked. Ever notice that all those items are the ones that give away the most coupons in the Sunday paper? You must always save enough change to buy the local Sunday newspaper, which contains coupons that can save you at least $20, making it your wise investment of the week. Do the crossword puzzle then throw the rest away, or save it to use instead of paper towels, which you can no longer afford.

· Don't buy something if it's on sale and don't buy something if you've got a coupon. Only buy something if it's on sale AND you've got a coupon. Let's say you need toilet paper. You have no way of knowing which toilet paper is going to be on sale but there's always at least one, so you have to cut out every single toilet paper coupon from the paper, go to the store to see which one's on sale, then go through your coupons and hope you've got a coupon for that brand. If it's on sale for $2.25 and you've got a $1 off coupon which the store doubles, the toilet paper ends up costing only a quarter.

· A strange thing can happen to EBT food charges when they're used in a store that doubles coupons. This is a loophole that many states have fixed so you'll have to check it out for yourself. The manufacturer pays back the store for the stated savings on the coupon, say $1, which is subtracted from your total, and the store matches it with their own $1, which is also subtracted from your total as cash. Buy a $1 bottle of shampoo at the same time you use a $1 coupon for any item and the extra dollar somehow covers the cost of the shampoo, even though you're only using EBT food. You can even get cash back if you play your cards right. Most stores are on to this trick so you can only use it once. Make your purchase without using your coupons, turn to leave, then go "Hey, wait, I forgot to use my coupons." Since the transaction is over and there's no way to subtract the coupons from what you've already purchased, they will accept the coupons and pay you back in cash.

· Check out a box of 250 Kleenex. Now check out a container of 500 Napkins. If all you're doing is blowing your nose in it, why the hell are you paying twice as much for Kleenex? Because it's softer? Get over yourself. Save Kleenex for special occasions like dabbing a wound.

Sound complicated? It is. When you're got nothing, you spend half your time fighting to somehow make do with what you've got, then you do nothing else, ever, since everything there is to do costs money and you don't have any. Poverty is surprisingly hard work.