The Struggle Meal Survival Guide
How I Save $1600 a Year by Meal Prepping
If you’re trying to save a dollar and are tired of instant ramen, today is your lucky day
Sometimes the going gets rough. Other times, you’re putting something aside for that new car or vacation. Either way, whenever we need to tighten our wallets, the struggle meal is the tried-and-true solution.
I’ve been a professional chef for nearly a decade, and I’ve pondered the struggle meal like a PhD dissertation. Crafting menus, living on an underpaid wage, and mastering cost-effectiveness have all made me pretty good at struggle meal survival.
So if you’re trying to save a dollar and are tired of instant ramen, today is your lucky day.
Intro to Meal Prepping
The backbone of struggle meal survival is meal prepping, also called meal planning. As you’d imagine, meal prepping is a system of organizing your meals. But why go to those lengths?
- A meal plan saves you money. Everybody lives paycheck to paycheck these days — seriously, 60% of Americans do — so we need to help our wallets any way we can.
- Meal prepping also saves you time. Time is the only resource we can never get back, so you should maximize it at all opportunities.
- Lastly, a meal plan controls what enters your body. We don’t monitor this enough, be it substance or portion. Structured meal planning helps with good nutrition and overall health.
Let’s take a closer look at these concepts.
How you save money
We all gotta eat. And to eat, we gotta spend money. In 2018, a survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that Millennials spent a little over $3700 on their groceries (defined as “food at home”).
By comparison, I spend about $2100 a year. And I can calculate this because I allocate $40 a week on my grocery bill, and there’s 52 weeks in an average year. (40 x 52 = 2080)
That’s $1600 in savings!
And that’s not including the hidden savings inherent to meal planning. Those scraps from onion and garlic? Toss them into a Tupperware instead of the trash can, and use them for a soup stock. This way, you avoid any waste.
You lose money when you waste food, but you also lose something more important — a little humanity. Letting good food go bad, in a world with millions of starving people, is a shameful thing to do. So please, don’t waste food. 🙏
How you save time
By choosing your meals ahead of time, you remove all the guesswork. Instead of opening the fridge and spending five minutes staring at scattered ingredients, you already know what to grab.
Having ingredients already prepared saves time, too. I’m an early-bird, and I like not having to rush in the morning. By setting overnight oats or making breakfast tacos ahead of time, my mornings are freed up for writing, studying, and exercising.
Not repeating the same steps — like cutting only a little bit of onion at a time — also speeds things up. This concept is known as mise en place, and we’ll be revisiting it in a later article. Just know that it’s a critical part of what makes for a successful cook!
How you control your nutrition
It’s easy to lose track of what enters your body. Anyone who’s seriously counted their calories will tell you that we grossly underestimate our food intake. But by planning out your meals, you naturally create a portion control system. This helps with overeating, on top of actually choosing your foods.
Then there’s all the additives and preservatives in today’s food, which can be a separate article. The bottom line? Whole foods are better for you than processed foods. Period. Obesity, cancer, increased blood pressure, and other disease can be linked to artificial crap that’s pumped into food.
Even without additives, processed foods like pre-cut produce are worse than their whole equivalents. That’s because once fabrication occurs, the product begins to deteriorate — compare fresh-chopped herbs with the whole leaf. And those pre-cut veggies sold at the store may have been deteriorating for nearly a week in the supply chain before you even open the bag. Yuck.
I’m not telling you to wear a tinfoil hat, but start reading labels. Pay attention. Chop your own produce. You are what you eat, after all.
BONUS: You practice a skill
There’s something magical about cooking. It is technical, quantifiable, and scientific; and yet it’s interwoven with human emotion, able to evoke memories our childhoods, experiences, and cultures.
But unfortunately, many Millennials and Zoomers lack confidence in the kitchen. You should know how to cook. It’s embarrassing if you don’t. I’ll never forget the time where my buddy let a [second] date cook dinner for them, and she served him undercooked shrimp. I laughed my butt off, he pooped his butt off, and she was never seen again.
So in closing, I ask you these three questions:
- How much money do you spend on food?
- How much time do you spend deciding on what to eat?
- Could you use that money and time better in your life?
If you’re ready to make a change, keep an eye out for the next chapter, where I explain how I only spend $40 a week on groceries!
