[epbrown]

Depends on how you do it: $5 a day is tricky, but make it $35 in groceries a week and it's a piece of cake.

My breakfast trick, back in the days when i was broke as the 10 commandments, was generic oatmeal for breakfast, with no-name brand raisins added for flavor/sweetness. It literally cost pennies per serving, it's filling, and the fiber's good for you. Not the flavored stuff in packets, plain oatmeal in the round cardoard tube.

For lunch, my thing was pasta. Cheap, filling, easy to heat up, and the sauces are actually pretty cheap. I'd cook some meat to add to the sauce, but not a lot. If tuna was on sale, I went with casseroles. Usually averaged out to $1/day.

For dinner, with $24.50/week to spend I could splurge: I'd make a pizza for the weekend, hamburger or tuna helper for a couple of weekdays, or just throw something together from "The Joy of Cooking." You'd be amazed how cheap a lot of food is when you make it from scratch, like bread (I still make my own every week, by hand). Prepared food is expensive, and junk food is worse - at work, a 1.5oz bag of chips is 80 cents, a 12oz soda 75. Don't even think about what stopping by Starbucks every day would do to such a budget.

But meat is always the most difficult part: you'd be eating more ground round than ground sirloin, chicken drumsticks and wings rather than skinless breasts, etc. They won't be choice cuts and you'll often have the same cuts for days in a row unless you've got a good freezer, like the other meals, but you can eat easily on $35/week.