We only buy groceries once a month when the wife and I go in for doctor appointments.
To save money we tend to buy everything bulk. I buy 50# bags of potatoes for $9 each, I buy 50# bags of onions for $12.50 each. I buy 50# bags of flour for $12, 25# oatmeal for $12.50, 25# rice for $14, 50# sugar for $16 and 25# carrots for $11.50.
I buy all my spices in the bulk section as well as coffee creamer, beans etc.
We buy very little of anything that is processed, makes meals a little more work but keeps things a lot cheaper and healthier.
For meat we buy a couple turkeys each year and maybe 10 or 12 packages of chicken each year when it goes on sale for .98 cents a pound.
Most of our meat comes from over sized 600 to 1,000 pound hogs that I buy at the livestock auction 3 or 4 times a year. I pick them for anywhere from $1 an animal up to 1 cent a pound. I slaughter them and process the meat for us to eat. Some of the meat I trade out for venison, elk, moose, bear, beef etc.
We have a flock of chickens that we collect about ten dozen eggs from a month, then we buy 10 to 15 dozen more eggs a month in the five dozen packs at the store.
I have four ponds full of fish, three of them full of catfish and one full of large mouth bass so we fish often and use that as part of our meat. I also hunt some of the pheasant, quail, wild turkey, Canadian geese and chuckers that live on our farm.
We also have an orchard here on the farm where we have apple trees, plum trees and cherry trees that we harvest for food. We also drive the old torn out railroad tracks and collect apples and plums from the wild trees growing alongside the old tracks.
I grow a large garden each year which supplies us a lot of food in the late spring through the fall. I can up a lot of things like turnip greens, beet greens, mustard greens, Swiss chard, spinach and radish greens for winter use. For the roots crops and veggies I cook them in vinegar and make a fermented kimchee style mixture for winter use.
I also collect a lot of wild plants from dandelion leaves and flowers, lambsquarters, Oregon grape, elder berry, huckleberry, service berry, black caps, thimble berry and black berry.
I also collect wild mint, lemon mint, peppermint, wild rose hips, and St Johns wort growing here on the farm for teas.
My forests grow a great quantities of slippery cap boletus mushrooms in the fall. I have never been able to collect them all as I could easily 200 to 300 pounds of them, but I commonly collect and process 50 to 75 pounds a year.
Our monthly food bill including our hog processing averaged out is around $250 to $275 a month for a family of six. Some times in the summer we squeeze it out a bit to save a little money and we drop our monthly food bill to $175 a month for the summer months.