What a week of meals costs this year, in one house
By Hollis Treadway, Contributing editor, research review · · 2 min read
One hundred eighty-seven dollars. That is what one week of home cooking cost a reader in Ohio in late June, for two adults and a nine-year-old grandson who stayed Thursday through Sunday, counting every item that went into a meal and nothing that did not.
She kept the receipts and a list, at our request, and she did the thing most people do not do, which is to price the pantry: the flour, the oil, the quarter of a bag of rice, the half-used jar of mustard, estimated by the portion rather than the purchase. Her husband, told the figure, said it was not possible and that they spent far less than that. He was thinking of the weekly grocery run, which was one hundred twelve dollars. The other seventy-five was pantry and freezer, bought on earlier weeks and drawn down on this one.
Where the money went
Meat and fish: fifty-one dollars, of which the Sunday roast was twenty-two. Produce: thirty-four. Dairy and eggs: twenty-six, which she said was high because the grandson drinks milk the way other people drink water. Bread, grains, pasta: nineteen. The pantry draw, the oil and spices and the end of the rice: eighteen. Snacks and the grandson's cereal: twenty-one. Coffee: eighteen, which she underlined, and which was the second pot, every day, and which she said she would not be giving up.
Twenty-one meals were cooked. Two were leftovers reheated, which she counted at zero. One lunch was a sandwich at a ballgame and is excluded. That comes to a little under nine dollars per cooked meal for the household, or about three dollars a plate when three people were eating and four-fifty when two were.
What this does and does not tell you
It is one week, in one house, in one state, with a child who eats. She shops at a regional chain and a discount grocer and did not use coupons that week. A week without the grandson would have come in, by her estimate, around one hundred forty. A week in December would be higher. None of this is a national figure and I would not use it as one; the government's own food cost estimates for a couple over fifty on a moderate budget run somewhat higher, and are built on a model basket rather than on anyone's actual stove.
What the log is good for is the argument at the kitchen table. He thought they spent far less. She thought, before she added it up, that they spent more. The number was between them, closer to her side, and it settled, for one week in August, a disagreement they have been having since 1991.
She has agreed to do a December week. We will publish it, with the roast priced separately, because he has asked.
Correction, August 20, 2026: An earlier version of this article gave the week's total as one hundred seventy-eight dollars. The reader's receipts add to one hundred eighty-seven; a nine-dollar item was left out of our tally. Corrected.