For serious frugality, you need to learn how to do basic cooking, although you don't have to cook every single day.
Eating habits are one of the most obvious examples of behavior that's not biologically sex-based, but is culturally gender-identified. Some people, most of whom are male, routinely pay to have food cooked for them. It might be cheaper and easier to prepare the same food at home, but these people drive out to restaurants, if only "fast food" restaurants, and pay to have someone else assemble a sandwich or heat up a bowl of (often canned) soup. Other people, in contrast, eat in restaurants only when friends (nearly always men) offer to buy these people (nearly always women) a meal, usually in order to have a family-friendly conversation, and expect themselves normally to cook "better" and cheaper meals at home.
If you are looking at budget cuts or new expenses, it pays to think like the stereotypical woman. Every meal doesn't have to be a feast. In fact, some frugal women plan and shop to spend minimal time cooking huge batches of food they can freeze, in order to rewarm leftovers for the rest of the week. The purpose of eating is to fuel your body, not to "see and be seen." The time restaurant eaters spend in going to restaurants and waiting to be served can be more usefully spent cooking.
What about "power lunches"? If your business really requires those, you can afford them. If you really are making sales to companies by eating in restaurants with business executives, learning to cook at home will make it easier to pay for essential "power lunches." But it's worth getting to know your prospective clients. Some of them, especially the ones with food sensitivities, hate eating in restaurants and would enjoy meeting with you more if you met for a walk or at least a picnic in the park.
Say no to restaurants when you want to be frugal. Likewise say no to "convenience foods" that sit in the supermarket promising to be like restaurant meals--they never really are, and the time you save isn't worth the money you waste.
Frugal food is, of course, economical with time as well as money. It's your diet. You have to work out what works for your budget, your body, and any other bodies you may be feeding. Can you eat enough beans to make it cost-effective to buy and cook dry beans? Do you have a freezer, and a reliable enough source of electricity to make it cost-effective to pre-cook meals and freeze covered bowls for meals a week or two ahead? Do you save money by warming frozen meals n a microwave oven, or by not having a microwave oven? Baking your own bread, or not eating bread? How much of your own food will grow on your property?
For maximum frugality, it helps to be familiar with the edible plants that grow on your property. If you have a flat, sunny back yard, you can probably raise your own corn, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, maybe lettuces, maybe peas, perhaps a few strawberries. If you have a shady back yard, those favorite plants will not grow well, and you may be overlooking the food crops your back yard already produces, like violets and chickweed. In fact most of the "weeds" in the garden are good snacks to graze on while waiting for the vegetables to ripen.
Few wild plants are so toxic that a nibble could kill a person (there are a few exceptions, like oleanders), but several are indigestible. Humans get no nutritional benefit from eating grass or clover, though some vitamins may be preserved in dried clover blossom tea. It's hard to overemphasize the importance of knowing what your soil is growing; daylily and iris plants look somewhat similar, but several parts of a daylily are good to eat, whereas iris plants have never tempted anyone to eat enough to make the person very sick. If people have not sprayed poisons on their gardens, most people could live for several weeks on their "weeds."
Some wild plants aren't cultivated because they offer little flavor or nutrition, and some because they offer more of either than most people can handle. To some extent this depends on where plants grow; soil, light, and water determine the biochemical composition of plant material. Some wild plants are so loaded with nutrients that you may have been warned that they'd make you sick. This "sickness" would be Vitamin C shock, which healthy people do not feel as "sickness." At worst Vitamin C shock causes a few extra trips to the bathroom during which large amounts of rotting food material may be flushed out of the intestines. This is a health-promoting process but it may be awkward in a business meeting. If this causes concern for you, nibble plants like chickweed carefully. You don't have to eat as much chickweed as you would eat iceberg lettuce. I usually eat ten or twenty chickweed sprigs as a light meal, or ten or twenty violet flowers. Extra calories come from other types of food like rice, beans, or nuts.
A frugal diet is not based on junkfood but, if you get adequate nutrients from fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and some animal protein, "road food" is not necessarily junk. Eating candy and chips for breakfast every day would add far too many calories from fat to anyone's diet. Eating candy or chips once a week, as an addition to a diet of raw plant material, may add just enough calories from fat to prevent an imbalance. Once you become accustomed to frugal habits of eating, your body will tell you when you can afford a high-calorie snack.
However, frugal people's usual "fast foods" are not found in the snack aisles of grocery stores. The ones that do come from grocery stores may be packaged for "convenience," but the best bargains are often in the foods' natural form:
* Nuts (you may be able to save money by gathering wild ones)
* Sunflower seeds
* Pumpkin seeds
* Oranges
* Pineapple
* Melons
* Bananas
* Cucumbers, if not exposed to chemical sprays
* Salad greens, ditto--leaves can be nibbled out of hands like chips
* Carrots, ditto
* Celery, ditto
* Parsley sprigs, ditto
* Small tomatoes, ditto
* Apples, pears, and peaches, ditto
* Grapes, ditto
* Strawberries, ditto
* Blueberries, huckleberries, or bilberries, ditto
* Raisins, prunes, and other dried fruit, ditto
* Dry beans and peas, cooked, if not exposed to chemical sprays
* Rice and quinoa (you can get pre-mixed, pre-measured, microwaveable mixes if you insist)
* Oatmeal, if not exposed to chemical sprays
* Potatoes, if not exposed to chemical sprays
* Onions and garlic, if tolerated
* Vidalia onions, in season, if available
* Air-popped popcorn (with sweet or savory dipping sauce, if you must)
* Puffed rice
* Oat cereal, if not exposed to chemical sprays
* Puffed wheat, if your body digests it and if it's not exposed to chemical sprays
* Wholegrain crackers, as tolerated
* Fruit and nut spreads, if not exposed to chemical sprays
* Canned or frozen vegetables, reheated
* Canned or frozen fruit
* Wholegrain breads, as tolerated
* Eggs
Although you probably don't want "WIC vouchers" (federal handouts for "Women, Infants, and Children" to use to buy specific "staple" foods) even if you qualify for them, it's worth looking for the WIC label in supermarkets. That label is applied to foods that have been rated the best nutritional bargains in their category, nationwide. In some times and places local products may be even better bargains but "WIC foods" are generally good deals for people who can eat those types of food.
The drier you can learn to like sandwiches, and the more you can let salads dress themselves, the more frugal. Mayonnaise is the ultimate junk food; extra butter on sandwich bread is not much better. Some of the nutrients in a salad are easiest for some people to digest when taken together with a little fat, and adding nuts, meat, or cheese to the salad will supply that need and add nutrients, while adding oil merely adds calories and expense. Chewing dry food until saliva lubricates it makes the food easier to digest than lubricating it with oil does.
A frugal diet favors cold food in hot weather, hot food in cold weather. When you need heat anyway, you might as well cook on it. When you don't need heat, why cook? (Fresh corn on the cob begging to be grilled is a valid reason.)
A frugal diet is not obsessively vegan and is unlikely to include any specialty "vegan foods" like the specialty breads guaranteed to have been baked in pans lubricated with vegetable oil only, unlike ordinary breads marketed with the claim that the cheaper vegetable oils have been flavored with an occasional trace of real butter. You can certainly save a lot of money when you realize that, although the human body does need some animal protein, and long-term vegans have usually depended on subterfuges like eating bread made of weevilly wheat or taking ground beef liver in tablets as "medicine," the human body does manufacture some of its own animal protein, so most healthy people can afford to go vegan for two to five years at a time. The body uses a lot of the other nutrients it requires to digest meat and milk products, and gets most of the protein and B-vitamins it requires by digesting the yeast organisms that might otherwise get out of balance inside the digestive tract. So it can be healthy and frugal to clean out your system by going vegan for a season, and no, this will not stunt your growth if you're still growing.
(Yes, worried parents of vegan teenagers...Lack of nutrients can postpone growth for a few months, which is why some girl athletes eat special diets to supply strength and energy while delaying puberty, but in fact some teenagers put on healthy bone and muscle mass when they go vegan. Digesting that yeast can improve absorption of nutrients from other food. Every body is different. Teenagers who want to go vegan, or vegetarian, or dairy-free, for a few months are developing self-control as well as restoring a nutrient balance. As long as they're strong enough to do a reasonable amount of housework, this is good.)
Just by considering these ideas, most Americans can save a substantial amount of money on their food budgets. It's possible to go even further. Hot meals can be cooked off the grid--on the grill, over a trash fire, sealed in foil packets on the car's motor on a long road trip, on a room heater, in the fireplace, over a candle. The longest time I personally have lived on "weeds" almost alone (with two or three diversionary "meals" of chocolate-covered peanuts) was six weeks; I could have continued the diet for a few more weeks before symptoms of malnutrition would have appeared. Most people have missed a meal, or a few meals, because we felt tired or were busy or ran out of groceries the day before we went to the store; this does nobody any harm, and in fact, for people who are not diabetic or hypoglycemic or hypothyroid, fasting (water alone) for two or three days can be an easy way to save money, though it's not an efficient way to lose weight.
This kind of thing, I think, should be considered hyper-frugal--things frugal people might do in an emergency, but not things to plan on making part of a permanent frugal lifestyle. However, choosing foods that deliver the best nutrition for the money, cooking them at home, or eating them raw, is already part of many frugal people's regular lifestyle. Why not make it part of yours?
It should be mentioned that eating frugally is actually recommended by some doctors, for health reasons, when disease conditions are caused by an unbalanced diet. Reducing unnecessary expense does not mean depriving yourself of vital nutrients. On the contrary, if a frugal diet is chosen sensibly it is likely to be more nutritious than a more extravagant diet. I don't like recommending any dietary plan for everyone as if all bodies were equal, because they're not. I detest extravagant claims for foods or diets, which are usually based on what worked for one person, which then fails to work so well for other people. However, if the topic interests you and you have not already read Jethro Kloss's Back to Eden or John McDougall's McDougall's Medicine, you should read those books about what sound doctors--not quacks--were able to do with prescriptions that began with a frugal, mostly vegan diet. Dr. Kloss became my family's primary physician, posthumously, when I was in primary school--just old enough to read passages in Back to Eden myself--and he has served us well; years go by in between our visits to secondary doctors.
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