Three Meals, Four People, $10

If you’re the sort of person who sacrifices money for time when you’re shopping and cooking, it’s hard to believe that anybody could possibly feed a family of four on less than $10 a day. If you rely on large cuts of meat or fillets of fish to feed your family, just the main course for dinner probably sets you back more than $10. And if you routinely rely on convenience foods--frozen waffles, packaged pizzas, pre-cut vegetables--your weekly bills are likely to be astronomical.

We decided to see how far we could stretch a $10 budget. We created an imaginary family of four--Mom, Dad, a 13-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl--and then each person in the Food section set off to market. These were the rules:

1. Each of us had to feed our family for a day--three balanced meals.

2. Other than staples such as flour, sugar and oil, everything used during the day had to be paid for. If you bought bread, you had to consider the entire loaf as part of your budget. While smart shoppers would undoubtedly take advantage of the economies of scale and invest in large quantities of foods such as rice, potatoes and the like, many people have neither enough money nor adequate storage space for the most prudent sort of shopping.

3. We could shop in as many stores as we liked, provided they were within a couple of miles of each other. Driving long distances to get bargains was not permitted.

4. The use of coupons was permitted, but shopping in membership stores was not.

The results surprised us. There’s certainly nothing luxurious about these menus, but we’d gladly eat all of these dishes--even if money were no object.