Second only to rent, food is my budgetary downfall. There's got to be some kind of psychological underpinning here that I have yet to unearth, but for some reason the idea of not eating what, or when, I want to eat makes me feel unbearably vulnerable. Like eat-a-whole-funfetti-cake-in-one-sitting depressed. I've lived under suboptimal conditions (roaches, mice, and bedbugs, oh my) and I have gone to great, pitiable lengths to avoid an expense or two, but these things don't stir up the same sort of emotion in me that food deprivation does.

I say this, because one of the first pieces of advice I'm given when I say I need to cut costs is that I should eat rice, eggs, and beans for a couple months. Even the more nutritionally-conscious of my friends seem to think that a daily salad, pile of chickpeas, and canned tuna will be my silver bullet. "Just eat oatmeal for dinner, you get used to it." Nope. I don't need to spend a lot on food, nor do I need to eat anything particularly decadent, but I do need to eat like a person or I lose my mind.

But also: meal planning is not always feasible in New York. First of all, kitchens are afterthoughts - I think a six year old could do more with an Easy Bake oven than I can do with my kitchen. In fact, I found out recently that my oven does not work at all, and my landlord responded with: "Oh, I had no idea - you're the first tenant in 8 years to have tried to use it."

Plus, things come up. When you meal plan, you buy a bunch of food at the start of the week that you plan to use. You "invest". But then you have an impromptu business trip scheduled, or a date, or a work dinner, or some other engagement that requires you to pick something up so you don't pass out, and then you've bought a bunch of perishable food for nothing. And it perishes.

I'm going to try a new strategy, which is to NOT buy food in advance, but to buy only what I need a day or two (max) before I need it. Because I live mere blocks from 4 different grocery stores and markets, this doesn't really cost me anything additional (i.e. transportation costs). I find that I operate much more frugally this way and am more realistic about what I can and cannot eat.