Australian families are taking increasingly severe steps to keep up with grocery bills, with some parents skipping meals and cutting out entire food groups as supermarket costs continue to climb.
The extent of the pressure was exposed in a recent Reddit discussion on Ask An Australian, where one user asked, “How are you reducing your weekly grocery bill?” What followed was less a swap of money-saving tricks and more a stark picture of financial stress in households around the country.
The original poster said their family of four now spends “pushing $400 a week” on groceries, yet even that is not enough to last the full week.
They revealed they have had to “skip one meal a day” and sometimes serve Weet-Bix or porridge for dinner “when needed, to stretch food for the kids”.
They also said meat and fish are now served only to the children.
The family is not buying ready-made meals or pre-packaged products, instead making sauces and snacks such as muesli bars from scratch in an effort to save money.
The poster added that their children are “already noticing that they can’t have their favourite things anymore and need to eat what’s there vs what they want”.
“We’ve been talking about inflation and I don’t necessarily think this is a bad lesson for them,” they said.
Many others in the discussion shared their own strategies for cutting costs. One Reddit user said they rely on making “cheap” meals such as rice-based dishes and pasta.
Some suggested stretching meals further by adding lentils to spaghetti bolognese.
“If you’ve got the time, buying the cheapest cuts of meat (chuck steak) and mincing it yourself is not only cheaper, it tastes 100 times better,” one person wrote.
Another advised, “Boost everything with veggies and tinned legumes. Buy your veggies from the markets. Not the bougie farmers markets the cheap ones.”
Other suggestions included using a slow cooker, making better use of leftovers, shopping at Aldi, buying in bulk, and meal prepping. Some also recommended having a “pantry freezer and a large pantry” so households can stock up when specials appear.
