Since you’re here right now, I’ll assume you want to eat vegan, but you need to do it on a budget. I’m here to tell you that it is in fact totally possible.
Eating vegan does not have to break your bank! In fact, I have fed two people before on a budget of just over $200 a month. So, it is totally possible, and I’m going to tell you how I eat vegan on a budget.
Bear in mind that many of these meals are extremely simple for a few reasons. Mainly, it’s hard (but not impossible) to have a significantly varied diet on such a tight budget. It makes sense that in order to save as much as possible, you recycle your ingredients throughout several meals.
Let this guide serve as a starting point to base your meals off of, and fill in the gaps with any other meals and ingredients as you and your budget see fit.
Shopping List
- Bananas
- Apples
- Avocados
- Carrots
- Old Fashioned Oats
- Tofu or Tempeh
- Walnuts
- Dates
- Diced Tomatoes
- Dried Chickpeas
- Dried Beans
- Lentils
- Rice
- Natural Peanut Butter
- Nutritional Yeast
- Tahini
- Tamari or Coconut Aminos
- Lemons/limes
- Cholula
- Olive/Avocado Oil
- Bread (without seed oils e.g. Dave’s Killer Bread – NOT the sprouted)
Breakfast
If you’re looking to eat vegan on a budget, old fashioned oats should be your best friend. Breakfast usually consists of either oatmeal (I’m not talking the instant oatmeal packets!) or bananas/apples and peanut butter.
Old fashioned oats are made cheaper if you get them in bulk from a store like WinCo, where you can get them for $0.61 a pound! Bananas should average you about $0.63 a pound. When you get peanut butter, I recommend that you get the natural peanut butter that is JUST peanuts and salt! It tastes even more delicious than the sugary stuff loaded with inflammatory oils1.To spice up your oatmeal, you can sweeten it with dates (which you can also find in bulk sections of your local grocery store to make them way cheaper), bananas, raisins, and cinnamon.
Another option for breakfast is to do a nice tofu scramble. Crumble up your tofu and scramble it with different seasonings to eat it like eggs.
Lunch
I will warn you, there is a lot of repetition in meals when you are eating on a budget, because it’s so much more convenient for your wallet to buy the same items in bulk rather than trying to vary your diet with a lot of ingredients that can go bad and need to be thrown out and that will vary by price.
Lunch often times will be a banana or apple with peanut butter, especially if you ate a nice filling bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. You can eat a few bananas and apples with peanut butter to make the meal more filling.
Another option for lunch is rice mixed with lentils for extra protein. You can cook the rice and lentils with vegetables like carrots (which are extremely affordable), and add homemade hummus (made with dried chickpeas, not canned!), tamari, and hot sauce for extra flavor.
Snacks
A favorite snack and indulgence of mine is raw avocado with a little bit of salt and Cholula. Avocados aren’t the cheapest, so this wasn’t an everyday snack, but is super healthy and delicious.
Walnuts, or any nuts of choice, are another great go to snack. They’re high in protein and healthy fats, so they’re both filling and nutritious.
Another healthy snack that is a favorite of mine is homemade hummus. I will publish my recipe for homemade hummus soon, so stay tuned if you are interested. I truly believe my homemade hummus is the best I have ever had, and it’s so much cheaper than store bought.
Dinner
Dinner is going to be a big pot of rice and lentils cooked together with carrots. You can add homemade hummus, tahini, nutritional yeast, and Cholula hot sauce to spice it up. The nutritional yeast is extremely important for the vitamin b12 content! If you want to, you can also add cooked tofu to the dish for even more protein, and as an added bonus, tofu is easily affordable.
Another option for dinner is making a big pot of bean chili. You can also throw in some carrots and bell peppers to add some vegetables to your dinner. Really, you can add just about whatever you want to it, it’s your chili.
Notes
It’s important to avoid seed oils in everything you buy. Seed oils are highly processed and inflammatory (read here for more information). They are found in highly processed foods and these items are not sustainable for a long-term low-budget vegan diet because they will end up causing you health problems down the line more than likely.
Conclusion
As you can see, it is absolutely possible to eat vegan on a budget if you are willing to eat some of the same things over and over again. Personally, there are so many different ways to season your food that I never got tired of what I was eating, but I was also on the go so much that I didn’t have much time to be that worried about what I eating.
If you are looking to get fit this summer on top of eating vegan, be sure to check out my post on staying fit this summer for free!
Sources
- “Seed Oils: Are They Truly Toxic?” Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, 30 Apr. 2024, health.clevelandclinic.org/seed-oils-are-they-actually-toxic.
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