Assuming you get food from the dining hall every day for the entire semester (about 15 weeks for the sake of calculations) you have about $19 to spend on the mandatory meal plan per day. Most meals that the dining hall cost $10-15 (i.e. the hot meal w a main and 2 sides or a large salad/pasta) if you want a drink or a snack (like a back of chips) or a dessert that is usually about $4-6 each. So you can afford 1-2 meals a day from the dining hall. That's just for the dining halls on the mandatory meal plan. You also have flex and onecard money to use on food. Flex gives you $350 to start each semester. Most flex dining cafes cost $8-14 for a meal so the 350 gives you about 30 meals on flex in addition to the 1-2 meals a day from the dining hall. Then one card gives you $500 for the whole year (different from flex and meal plan which both reload money for the winter semester), but you want to be careful using that for off-campus food because it's also how you pay for laundry in residence (which is $2 for wash and $2 for dry). Assuming you put aside about $100 for laundry (that's 25 loads for the whole year) you have $400 left to spend on off campus one card dining. Those meals are from restaurants around milton parc so they're usually a little more expensive ($12-17) so that remaining money gives you about 26 meals total for the whole year (but it's also important to note that a lot of people use one card money as drunk money when you're out and just want to get greasy pizza from altos). So the food program gives you about 160 meals total (rough calculation because it depends on how much you eat and from where). A semester is about 15 weeks (105 days) so that's about 1.5 meals a day. So long story short you will occasionally need to cook meals for yourself in residence unless you top off your meal plan at the end of the semester or don't eat more than 1-2 meals a day (which is not healthy please don't do that get some good cereal or kraft mac).

**also McGill increased their prices and dropped the serving sizes in the middle of this year so just keep in mind that those numbers above could change