Having just come off 4 months doing a student life... I can't give you a fullout breakdown, but the cheapest way to get your meat is to buy all the parts that takes at least an hour to cook. No jest. Brisket, flank, legs, w/e. If you can stomach it, get to know a butcher, and then ask for animal heads.

Needless to say, I stopped at the flank/brisket stage. Head is a bit... nuts to deal with.

That's interesting. Completely agree about the cuts that take a long time being cheaper. I tried cooking brisket for the first time a couple of days ago. It only took 30 mins in the pressure cooker. BTW a pressure cooker saves time and money and energy and lets you eat cheaply and healthily. All students and entrepreneurs should have one IMHO. The entire population of India can't be too far wrong on the merits of pressure cookers. As for the brisket, well it was good, but didn't seem cheaper or better than lean(ish) minced beef, and didn't go as far as we hoped. So maybe we'll stick to making spaghetti bolognaise...

I live on ~9AUD per day, AUD being roughly equivalent to the USD.

$3 of that goes towards a coffee, $3 goes towards meat, and the other $3 goes towards vegetables and other foodstuff (rough estimates).

The only issue I have is that most of the meat I buy is cheap - frozen chicken pieces, ground beef/pork, sausages, chuck steak, etc. - and cheap meat can be pretty horrible until you know how to cook it properly. You'll find yourself doing a lot of pot roasts, goulashes, ragùs, etc.

Some types of meat have great nutritional value but are for some reason overlooked or considered "second class". Things like chicken/beef/pork hearts, ox tongue (was a rare treat in USSR!), chicken/beef liver are very cheap (like $4 AUD per kilo or even less) and can be eaten without literally anything going to waste (no bones etc.)

I was considering organ meats at one point, but unfortunately there's a bit of an ick factor to get over when you haven't been raised on the stuff. (Saying that, I used too eat liver as a child.)

You spend 33% of your food budget just for coffee? Have you thought about doing something about your caffeine addiction?

Haha. $3.00 is how much one flat white costs at the local cafés. Guess I should have mentioned that I'm not downing 10 or 20 cups of instant coffee per day.

33% of a food budget sounds like a lot.

33% of $9 hardly does...

And yet, if 9$ is your food budget, they are the same.

The point is that when you realize that the food budget is equivalent to $9, the only way you can make the coffee expenditure seem unrealistic is to conveniently not mention that fact and say something like "You spend 33% of your food budget just for coffee?".

Accusing someone of having a caffeine addiction for spending a mere $3 a day on it is just silly.