A lot of the recipes are not frugal

A lot of the recipes on this sub are not frugal. Most have expensive ingredients like red wine vinegar, avocado oil, fish sauce, tatian, etc. They seem to be more about cooking and trying new recipes than saving money.<br><br>Those are good but you all need to get some perspective. If you're coming from the middle class you didn't realize how expensive the ingredients you've been buying are because you have always been blinded by your economic privilege.<br><br>I've lived my entire life on half the amount of the poverty line and these ingredients are not frugal. And that stuff is expensive to buy and replace. It percentage wise it is more expensive to buy high quality food than to buy cheap food.<br><br>What you need to do is sit down and figure out how much you've been spending on food. What are the percentages? 10% on fruits and veggies, 30% on meat. That's how much you are spending on what.<br><br>Take those percentages and apply them to whatever lower number you want to cut your grocery budget down to.<br><br>For example, if you've been spending $100 a week on groceries and you want to cut that down to $50 and 30% of your grocery bill has been going to meat. Then 30% of the $50 should be meat as well. So you need to figure out how much you can buy with $15.<br><br>Or let's say you want to go full time vegan, but you don't want to spend a lot of money to replace your kitchen with vegan substitutes. Well then all you need to do is figure out how much you are spending in percentages off of other grocery categories and reallocate them to whatever new vegan categories you're creating.<br><br>The key is to make it sustainable. You need to actually look at the numbers and write them down on paper.