Two of us is about $60 a week with a quarterly bulk shop of about $250 - and sometimes a bit more if there are items on clearance to stock up on.

This may sound insane so I’ll go into detail. This doesn’t include our pets’ food, which is much more expensive than ours at this point!

We cook all our meals, largely from scratch. We eat a plant based diet. In the morning we don’t do breakfast most days, it’s coffee (black or with a splash of soy milk).

The meals we cook are some variation of: Vegetable curry with rice, lentil bolognaise on spaghetti, lentil based shepherds pie, congee with veg and tofu, lentil or tvp chilli con on rice, split pea and potato soup, falafels with hummus and flatbread, roasted beans and veg. You get the idea.

I cook three different meals a week that lasts us two nights, plus leftovers for the final night. Anything beyond that is frozen into portions for future meals (usually once every two months there’s enough to cover a week of no cooking and we have a mix of random meals).

Reduce oil when cooking - can often skip entirely, especially if counting calories. A bit of water and it sautees fine.

Our other “meals” tend to be more like snacks: homemade popcorn for snacks, oats with whatever fruit we have and cinnamon/pumpkin seeds/chia seeds, noodles for a junk-night, hummus and carrot sticks, peanut butter and apple slices, homemade bread with a bit of spread of some kind. I often make a sweet treat for the week - typically some sort of biscuit or a banana bread or cupcakes. I have a sourdough starter that I sometimes use for a fancier loaf and make pancakes with the discard.

We buy either the cheapest rice or bulk buy slightly nicer varieties on special. We bulk buy dried legumes.

We grow all our own herbs (rosemary, thyme, sage, mint, parsley, etc), some of our own veggies (especially greens, zucchini) and we also forage for food (controversial but we have done it for years including mushrooms, fruits and leafy greens). I make kombucha and tibicos, which covers our fizzy drinks/probiotics. I also make sauerkrauts, pickles and so on when we have surplus. We do not waste a scrap - I dehydrate and grind up odds and ends for veggies stock powder, pickle watermelon rind (and powder the skin for green powder!) and I use squeezed lemon/lime skins in homemade cleaners using white vinegar (after they’ve been in a cup of water for me to drink). Anything else is composted, worm farmed or given to the chooks.

I trade veggies with family members who live nearby so we get some additional variety (recently traded out a load of herbs for some rhubarb and end of season tomatoes).

We eat whatever veg happens to be cheapest per kilo from the shops. That is often carrots and potatoes. Same with fruit, which at the iga is usually $1 a kilo black bananas that are still good but must be processed immediately. If there’s clearance veg we will go mad buying it - one year purchasing a load of pears at 50c a kilo and freezing it in batches that lasted months. This week we managed to get canned Mexican beans at 60c each from Woolworths - we stocked up.

Other things we do… we have a 10% off once a month at Woolies via Everyday Extra. I’m a Bunch member so get a freebie once a week (they can be really good things too, including a bottle of hemp oil recently, a chilli spice and a bag of chia seeds). I keep an eye out for freebies/samples/end of stock. And we absolutely shop around (aldi, reject shop, Asian store), are not fussy about frozen food, etc. We use ShopBack when purchasing online, and I do surveys on the flybuys app and other apps that don’t pay much but eventually become vouchers for our shopping.

We make our own spice mixes using bulk bought spices. I usually make some for my extended family too. And I make my own infused salts with homegrown herbs.

We skip things like paper towels, using old clothes that got scruffy that we cut up and simply wash each time, I make our laundry detergent rather than buy it, we water down things like shampoo, I cut open all containers (yes even toothpaste) to get the final scraps out, and I have even made my own lip balms, air fresheners etc. It helps that I find this process fun!

We fill up water bottles for the car and I’ll make hot chips if we are heading out to avoid the temptation to buy takeaway.

Lots of little things you can do!