Some of my friends and colleagues go out for lunch daily. Sometimes, I join them. My typical lunch meal is $15. With tax and tips, the average meal is around $19. When considering the cost of transportation to and from the restaurant, at 5 km away (10 km round trip) and an average automobile operating cost of $0.40/km, the lunch outing cost me $23 – for a sandwich. If I did this daily, my yearly lunch cost would be nearly $6,000. Instead, meal planning can not only save you thousands of dollars, but it can also be much healthier. For several years, I have prepared the same meal that I eat for lunch almost every day when at work. Each Sunday, I prepare my week’s batch of pasta. There are 5 servings of pasta in a large Rubbermaid container that I bring with me to the office on Monday morning. Every day at lunchtime, I pull out the container from the office fridge and serve myself one portion of the pasta. Every week, at least one of my colleagues will comment on the large container of pasta – “wow, that’s a lot of pasta”, or “you’re still eating the pasta, huh!”. And I happily explain to them that not only is it healthy, but it is also cost-effective. In the Table below, I show the three key ingredients that go into my pasta – whole wheat pasta, tomato sauce, and lean ground turkey – and their commonly reported nutritional values. Although I am not a nutritionist, I believe that this daily lunch meal is healthier than eating out daily at restaurants. It is also much more cost-effective, at $2.92 per meal with the benefit of eating in the office and not needing to drive to get your meal. Now, I understand that eating the same thing every day is not for everyone, and not everyone enjoys pasta with ground turkey tomato sauce, but this is an example of how meal preparation can save you money and be healthier than eating out. As a cost evaluation, eating this meal every workday for lunch will save me around $5,000 per year compared with eating out!

Whole Wheat Pasta with Ground Turkey Tomato Sauce