Yesterday, Sunday, instilled with a sense of boyish novelty and studentish irony, I set out with my housemate Luke McNeil to Sainsbury’s, single ten-pound-note folded expectantly in my wallet. Owing to a lack of organisation, we arrived at the shop twenty-five minutes before closing-time and were obliged to rush our shopping more than I would have liked, denying me the opportunity to stand and pedantically weigh up the benefits of each product over another.

Still, I loaded up my basket with white-and-orange labels, finding particular amusement in the 7 pence jar of ‘curry sauce’ and the 45 pence tin of baked beans and ‘sausages’. Meanwhile, Luke filled his basket with items from the Taste the Difference Range, abstaining from any packaging that sported less than ten adjectives below its name, as if as a counterpoint to my thrifty food procuration.

My single extravagance was the £2.39 packet of chicken pieces for the curry sauce, the 52 pence biscuit selection naturally being a necessity. Consequently, my food-supply for the next seven days will consist of the following:

The cost of all this was £8.01. With the £1 I docked for using some stuff I already have, that leaves me with 99 pence until next Sunday. Now I would consider myself quite frugal in my shopping, but my usual weekly shop at Sainsbury’s is almost twice that, and then I often ‘top-up’ during the week with one or two things from Tesco.

Still, I don’t think this little experiment should pose much of a challenge to me, unless all the food is truly, inedibly awful. And I must confess, I’m already quite used to the 10p noodles, a fan even: they taste fine, they take two minutes to prepare and they’re cheap carbohydrates. Providing the novelty doesn’t wear off, this semi-self-enforced poverty for a week should be a breeze, which is fortunate because I did order a new computer yesterday as well, my grandmother having graciously offered to front the money for it.

I’ll be sure to keep you all posted on what are sure to be the riveting developments in this saga of low-cost survival, omitting for the benefit of conciseness the meals, such as the chicken curry, that span multiple days.

Tags: blogging, cheap, food, one week ten pounds, Sainsbury's, save money

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.