The USDA established the Thrifty Food Plan in 1975 and updated it in 2021 in an attempt to model a healthy diet that hits all the food groups. The TFP, as we’ll call it here forward (to economize on words in these lean times), proposes different shopping lists for different genders and age groups. I took those 2021 numbers and adjusted them for 2026 inflation. As a man in his 50s, I was given a total allotment of $64.90 per week, and recently, I took to the weird yet familiar corners all over New York City at which I procure my groceries. Using my usual shopping list, I mostly beat those numbers across the board—without, as US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently suggested, resorting to a nutritionally suspect “$3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, you know, a corn tortilla and one other thing.”
However, the experiment raised a deeper question: Should I have to? But first, here’s how I did it.
1. Proteins and Dairy: I Don’t Play Favorites
Out of habit or laziness, many of us have a favorite grocery store. In an era of rapacious capitalism that has pushed so many Americans toward insolvency, there can be no favorites. Rather, it pays to seek out places where merciless competition drives major chains toward a common bargain basement. In Manhattan, where I live, I call these places “golden corners”—spots where Trader Joe’s, Target, and the rising star of discount grocery chains, Lidl, cluster together around a single intersection.
I’m able to easily deduce which place offers the lowest prices and run between them in a single shopping outing. While I’ll occasionally venture elsewhere for my meat and dairy (see: Chinatowns, featured later in this article), I find a good cutthroat corner serves me best when looking for animal protein.
