That was revealing

[Teacher Terry]

WE had 3 teen boys at one point so 4 men in the house. My ex would do all the shopping & fill up his entire small car every 2 weeks. I never bought less then 3 gallons of milk at once. I feel your pain! We sometimes did breakfast for dinner, casseroles & soup & grilled cheese for dinner. I think Lessibest does a great job of minimizing her food costs but most people lack the time to do that.

[Float On]

You might consider further divvying up your expenditures so you can see what is actually going toward food. I categorize eating out, so I can see if we're getting too carried away with it (it can be a budget killer!)
Having more detailed categories might tell you more about where you can plug the drain.

As we go I will probably break up the categories. I really wanted to make it simple the first couple months as we get back into the habit of keeping track again.

I do mostly all my cooking from scratch but we did do a lot more of stopping for something quick this last month with our overlapping schedules.

I have a lot less waste by shopping every couple days instead of doing big stock up trips but I need to be better at sticking to my menu plan.

[Rachel]

We averaged 718 last year..per month, 2 adults. So you are doing great if you can feed three guys plus yourself for $1000. We are trying to get our number down, but it is really hard in our situation. One thing you can do is to serve some big salads with plenty of olive oil---that olive oil may help satisfy some of the meat cravings for those guys and possibly reduce the amounts of needed animal protein.

[Glo]

We are close to $500/month for three of us. That's only food for us. It keeps dramatically increasing each year. I know this because I've been keeping a spreadsheet for years.

[kib]

Eating out is the biggest challenge for the budget here. I do my best to have something planned at home for every meal, but a lot of the socializing we do is some external event and then food. I really enjoy this so it's a trade off - I want the experience, I'm not so excited about the bill that comes with it. None of our friends want to eat somewhere just because it would be cheap or we have a coupon, so ... well as I say, it's a challenge.

[ApatheticNoMore]

Yea but you can't have it all. You can't for instance live in a tiny house and never go out to eat or somewhere to socialize (even a rental apartment doesn't work that well ).

[Lainey]

Eating out is the biggest challenge for the budget here. I do my best to have something planned at home for every meal, but a lot of the socializing we do is some external event and then food. I really enjoy this so it's a trade off - I want the experience, I'm not so excited about the bill that comes with it. None of our friends want to eat somewhere just because it would be cheap or we have a coupon, so ... well as I say, it's a challenge.

Same here, kib. My eating out is mostly combined with socializing of one sort or another, so some of that expense has to go under the entertainment column too. That's the world we live in.

[Rachel]

Eating out is the biggest challenge for the budget here. I do my best to have something planned at home for every meal, but a lot of the socializing we do is some external event and then food. I really enjoy this so it's a trade off - I want the experience, I'm not so excited about the bill that comes with it. None of our friends want to eat somewhere just because it would be cheap or we have a coupon, so ... well as I say, it's a challenge.

Exactly. Where I live everybody is sharing small apartments and it just doesn't work to entertain at home. Esp. if for example "the girls" are meeting up, it's not fair on the husbands or partners to take over the apartment for a whole evening or afternoon.