Cooking Your Own Meals: Where the Money Goes
A hostel kitchen in North Thailand, a market haul of bread and cheese in France, a bottle of natural wine in Georgia for $5–15. The maths of feeding yourself on the road is not complicated, but it is specific. The numbers below are what travellers actually report spending, and they make a decent case for learning to cook in a room you are renting by the week.
Start with the most obvious saving. Making your own breakfast — bread, cheese, fruit from a local market — saves $5–10 a day in most countries. That is one meal, not three. Hostels with kitchens exist for a reason, and the reason is not the atmosphere.
The Supermarket Luxury
There is a middle path between cooking every meal from scratch and eating in restaurants twice a day. Call it the supermarket luxury approach: visit a local Monoprix in France or a Mercadona in Spain, buy fresh baguettes, local cheeses, and an $8 bottle of wine. That combination can save you $50 a day on dining. Fifty dollars. The baguette and the cheese are not a compromise. They are the thing you came for.
Georgia is the clearest example of how far this stretches. A bottle of excellent artisan natural wine from a family winery costs $5–15 in a shop. Supermarket wines start at $3. Borjomi mineral water, the famous stuff, costs 80 tetri in a supermarket — that is $0.30. Beer averages $1–2 in a bar. You can eat and drink extremely well in Georgia on very little, and the wine is not a lesser version of restaurant wine. It is the highlight of the whole food and drink experience.
When Street Food Wins
Cooking is not always the cheap option. In El Salvador, a hearty dinner of pupusas, the local specialty, regularly costs $1–2. Groceries in some areas can actually be more expensive than eating local street food, and they are certainly more time-consuming. The same logic applies in Bosnia, where street food — especially ćevapi, the national dish — is excellent, ubiquitous, and extremely cheap. Local guesthouses, known as sobe, offer home-cooked breakfasts and a genuine insight into Bosnian family life. Accommodation is very affordable throughout the country, which changes the arithmetic: when a bed costs little, the pressure to cook every meal to justify a kitchen disappears.
Soft drinks in Albania run 55 lek in a supermarket, which is $0.50. That is a useful benchmark. If a supermarket soft drink is fifty cents, the grocery basket is probably cheap enough to be worth the effort.
The Real Numbers
Some travellers in North Thailand spend around $15–20 a day between two people. They rented a huge house with three bedrooms for a little more than $150 a month. They always cook at home, buying at the market. Read that again: $15–20 a day for two people, in a three-bedroom house, because the food came from a market and the kitchen was theirs.
The cheapest destinations on the standard budget lists can be travelled for as little as $10 a day if you are able and willing to free camp and cook for yourself for the whole trip, and skip excursions. That figure assumes no tours, no restaurant meals, no paid activities. It is a real number, not a hypothetical one, but it comes with conditions attached.
Eating Out Is Not the Enemy
A month of travel might include $600–700 of eating out. Broken down, that is roughly $300–400 at restaurants and $100–200 on groceries. Notice the ratio. Even a traveller who cooks is likely spending more at restaurants than in shops, because cooking is a tool, not a rule.
Museums cost $2–5 and are free on Sundays. Mezcal tasting runs $10–20. A cooking class costs $25–40. In Japan, plan $50–150 per person for gifts alone, mostly omiyage — boxed sweets bought as presents. Tokyo Banana, eight pieces for ¥1,188, and regional cookies add up fast when you are buying for a dozen people. That is a category most budgets forget entirely.
You do not have to cook every meal. The travellers spending $15–20 a day in Thailand are not eating out never; they are eating at home mostly. The ones saving $50 a day in France are not skipping restaurants forever; they are buying baguettes and cheese and $8 wine on the days between. The kitchen is one line in the budget, and in the right country it is the line that moves the most.
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