The USDA Thinks I Can Live on $65 a Week. Can I?

Welcome to The Receipt, a series documenting how Bon Appétit readers eat and what they spend doing it. Each food diary follows one reader’s week of expenses related to groceries, restaurant meals, coffee runs, and every bite in between. In this time of rising food costs, The Receipt reveals how folks—from different cities, with different incomes, on different schedules—are figuring out their food budgets.

In today’s special edition of The Receipt, we're unmasking the diarist and following James Beard Award–winning writer Paul Greenberg—a self-described cheapskate—on his quest to live on the USDA's Thrifty Food Plan.

My friends sometimes mistake me for a survivor of the Great Depression and not a Gen X-er raised in a household free from deprivation. I don't just bargain hunt. I bargain scour as if it were 1931.

This habit stays with me no matter if I’ve got a book on the bestseller list or if the stock market has just tanked. As a lifelong fisherman, I love angling for opportunities lolling in the currents of American commerce. I can’t stand the idea of buying a $5 gallon of milk when I know that the same milk from the same cows is lurking at a supermarket across the street for under three bucks.

With the inflationary surge of recent years, my friends have at last started to take a curiosity in the methods of my madness. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of sirloin steak is up 21% since January 2024. Romaine lettuce? 27%. Even a gosh darn cup of coffee will cost you over 50% more in 2026 than it did when the Kansas City Chiefs last won the Super Bowl. So when Bon Appétit asked my cheapskate self if I could get through a week of groceries for below what the USDA stipulates as its “thrifty food plan,” I smiled the knowing smile of an old-timer. Bon Appétit and USDA, I accept your challenge.

The USDA established the Thrifty Food Plan in 1975 and updated it in 2021 in an attempt to model a healthy diet that hits all the food groups. The TFP, as we’ll call it here forward (to economize on words in these lean times), proposes different shopping lists for different genders and age groups. I took those 2021 numbers and adjusted them for 2026 inflation. As a man in his 50s, I was given a total allotment of $64.90 per week, and recently, I took to the weird yet familiar corners all over New York City at which I procure my groceries. Using my usual shopping list, I mostly beat those numbers across the board—without, as US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently suggested, resorting to a nutritionally suspect “$3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, you know, a corn tortilla and one other thing.”

However, the experiment raised a deeper question: Should I have to? But first, here’s how I did it.

Out of habit or laziness, many of us have a favorite grocery store. In an era of rapacious capitalism that has pushed so many Americans toward insolvency, there can be no favorites. Rather, it pays to seek out places where merciless competition drives major chains toward a common bargain basement. In Manhattan, where I live, I call these places “golden corners”—spots where Trader Joe’s, Target, and the rising star of discount grocery chains, Lidl, cluster together around a single intersection.

I’m able to easily deduce which place offers the lowest prices and run between them in a single shopping outing. While I’ll occasionally venture elsewhere for my meat and dairy (see: Chinatowns, featured later in this article), I find a good cutthroat corner serves me best when looking for animal protein.

Note: There is no beef on this list. For climate change reasons, I’ve never been a fan of the world’s most carbon-intensive protein, and to my mind, the $3-cheaper-per-pound ground turkey works just fine in a Bolognese. Also note that neither the TFP nor I put any cheese on our lists either. I’m not sure why TFP refrained, but after beef, cheese is one of the most climate-impactful animal proteins on the planet. The environmentalist in me also says cut the cheese.

Professional economizers often encourage us to choose vegetables and fruits with longer shelf lives that can bang around in our fridges until we’re ready to eat them. I’ve found picking the cheapest fruits and vegetables when they’re available is ultimately a better deal. For this, I turn to a staple of American urban street life: the fruit cart.

Fruit cart vendors, common in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago, buy produce wholesale and offer deep discounts, especially when shelf life is short. My go-to cart guy in Lower Manhattan nearly always has a $1 special (cauliflower, cucumbers, asparagus, berries of all kinds) and the relationship we’ve built means he steers me toward what’s good.

What if the nearly overripe berries go off? To this I say: There is no berry too off that can’t be made into jam (which saves you in the miscellaneous category at this article’s end). As for salad greens, while the mainstream shopping world wrings its hands over cyclosporiasis, I’ve found that joining a community garden circumvents the dreaded disease while also purging the scourge of inflation from your wallet. My community garden costs me about $50 a year in membership fees, seeds, and fertilizer, plus about an hour of my time a week in tending. The buy-in amounts to roughly 50¢ per salad.

Whatever fruit carts and my garden can’t supply, I usually find at great prices in Manhattan’s Chinatown, likely because vendors have connections to a handful of small farms and wholesalers that operate outside of most mainstream supermarkets. According to the California Migration Museum, there are roughly 50 Chinatowns across America in nearly every major American city, which is to say that a lot of the country should have access to one.

Note: Even with bargain basement shopping, I only barely hit the USDA fruit mark. This was because nearly half of the USDA’s fruit budget is juice, which, to my mind, is a bit like calling ketchup a vegetable.

The TFP drives a hard bargain on grains, expecting the home shopper to plunk down $3.76 for an entire week’s worth of “refined-grain staple grains," which include rice, pasta, bread, tortillas, and the like. That’s tough when a loaf of Wonder Bread at Walmart costs you $2.47. Add a single 1-lb. box of pasta and it could send you over budget.

There’s a bit more give in the "whole-grain staple grains" category, which allows $6.94. But even a whole wheat loaf from Walmart (priced at $2.97) eats up just over half of my weekly allotment.

The only way I was able to snag the bread, rice, and pasta in my weekly shop and stay under budget was by leaning on another Asian country and by working hard on my home turf.

Patel Brothers, a national chain of Indian grocery stores, sells brown and white rice as well as beans of all flavors and provenances for prices that range from 80¢ to $2 per pound. As for bread, Target’s house brand of whole wheat flour is $2.69 for a 5-lb. bag. About a pound and a quarter of it makes a loaf. Weekly sandwich bread therefore costs out at 67¢ per loaf.

Last and actually also least: pasta. Nobody but nobody beats Trader Joe’s buck a pound.

Shopper beware—the last-minute, forgotten miscellaneous item is often the thing that stings you most at the register. Salt, sugar, cooking oil, and coffee purchased last minute, at even a cheap store, can be double what you’d pay if you are keeping careful track of who's charging what at your local golden corner. Keeping a passive list in your head of where the best buys on miscellany live helps these kinds of rookie mistakes from happening.

Additionally, as above, a little home elbow grease can be surprisingly effective in the condiment aisle. Fruit cart fruit made into jam and an immersion-blended home mayonnaise (a commitment of two minutes max) cost you pennies. And then there’s online. I have yet to find a better deal on coffee than on Amazon.

So I did it. I filled my fridge, stocked one shelf of my pantry, and even had a little left to treat myself to breakfast after this exhausting pan-city forage. Here’s what the final numbers looked like:

Does this mean the USDA’s stingy allowance is appropriate for these ever more expensive times? That anyone can be a successful cost-cutter like me?

Um, no. My kids are grown. I’m a freelance writer with weird hours. I live in a vast, quirky city with odd corners that can cost out cheaper than parts of the developing world. A busy working mom in a food desert who can’t commit to a community garden would find the ordeal a heavy lift.

Thank you for joining me on this ride through my own personal Great Depression. But as for you, USDA, I think it’s time you upped your budget. Stop cutting things like food stamps and healthcare. Perhaps the newest iteration of Congress will be more inclined to make this happen than its predecessor. We are, after all, among the wealthiest sovereign nations in the world.

C’mon, America! Don’t be such a cheapskate.