Foods for Poor College Student!

Canned beans, tuna, frozen veggies, granola bars.

I basically bought all of these for my sister who just went away to college.
Oh and poptarts and ramen noodles (not healthy but oh well)

If you have a freezer buy frozen or can vegetables, cans of tuna, fruit, salad mix, can bean, low at waffles w cream cream cheese. Buy generic brand foods tend to be lower in price. Hope yo can stay with the fight in spite of your deficits.

Most college students spend the $ they do have on junk, including fast food. If that's you, STOP doing that at all and buy chicken breasts and cook and keep on hand. Also, boiled eggs ready and waiting in the fridge are a good choice. Or, try whole wheat pasta with tuna. If you add it up, it really isn't a lot more expensive to buy healthy food. You'll probably notice that you stay fuller, longer on the healthy stuff. The empty carbs in the crap food leaves you hungry and unsatisfied which adds up the bucks when you reach for more. Good luck to you!!!

Some staples in my house are:

Instant brown rice
Beans (black beans, garbanzo beans, red beans, any kind really)
Eggs
Canned tomatoes
whole wheat pasta
Any kind of fruit
Big tub of quaker instant oats (NOT the package. Buy the big one for like $5... I promise it will last you awhile and you can flavor it any way you like!)

Also look into making some, if not all of your foods from scratch. Pancakes, for example.. all you need is flour, baking soda, milk, eggs and butter. Cheaper and it tastes WAY better than the boxed stuff.

I'm like the queen of cheap healthy food! I am currently addicted to tofu egg salad, though real egg salad would be cheaper. I can get 6 whole wheat pitas at Kroger for a buck or $1.50 (or make them myself when I have time for cheaper), then I stuff them with tofu egg salad and some thinly sliced zucchini or some lettuce. Some other ways to make pitas awesome:
-Spread a thin layer of natural peanut butter on, sprinkle on a few raisins, almonds, or apple slices, then sprinkle with cinnamon and cut into wedges.
-Make peanut butter hummus and toast some pita wedges in a dry pan and have pita chips and sliced veggies with hummus.
-Spread refried beans on a pita and top with salsa (which I make out of a can of tomatoes and half an onion and some garlic, plus some seasoning), then whatever else you like on tacos, then heat in the oven or a microwave and bam, Mexican pizza!

I also like whole wheat (I get sprouted) and whole corn tortillas (Whole Foods has the cheapest whole grain corn tortillas, 3 packs for 4 bucks). A couple tortilla faves:
-Peanut butter or reconstituted peanut flour on one side, and Tofutti (or low fat cream cheese) on the other, then crushed almonds and fold it over.
-PBJ quesedillas! The peanut butter is so melty and perfect.
-Bean and brown rice (or another grain, like barley, quinoa, or millet) burrito stuffed with some steamed broccoli as well.
-Refried bean quesedillas. Or cheese if you eat it/can afford it. I like to add salsa and veggies most of the time.
-Toast tortilla wedges and serve on top of a plate of lettuce, and add some healthy nacho fixin's. I top with a nutritional yeast sauce, but you can sprinkle a little cheese and some refried beans or chili.

Some other things I really like:
-Indian food! Sooo cheap to make. Just google some dal (my favorite, just a bean pulse, basically) or other Indian recipes.
-Baked sweet potato with peanut stew ladled over (I halve the peanut butter because the amount added is usually a little excessive, and I'm a serious peanut butter addict).
-Oatmeal waffles: Blend 2 cups of oats, 2 cups of water, a banana, a pinch of salt, a little vanilla, and a tiny bit of a sweetener (optional), blend, and make waffles! I like mine topped with sliced banana, cocoa powder, and cinnamon
-Tofu (or egg) scramble with a variety of frozen veggies ($1 a bag at Kroger!) and some chickpeas.
-TVP is a super cheap meat replacement and super high in protein and fiber (if you don't have a problem with soy). I like to make little patties with okra or some other binder and make chicken nuggets. But I use it in tons of other things, too.
-Roasted veggies. Chop up anything in season (cheaper that way!) and toss in a little olive oil or earth balance and season however you want. Carrots are /super/ cheap so I add them to bulk up a lot of things.
-I make oatmeal raisin snack bars for when I'm at school out of raisins soaked in water and drained, and pulsed in a food processor with oats, cocoa, cinnamon, and some peanut butter. Before I had a food processor I had to blend the oats, dump them out, then did the raisins with extra water in the blender, then mix everything else in a bowl. It was a nightmare before my food processor.

Check the dollar store and Big Lots for food, too. I can get frozen fruit for a buck at the dollar store and my friend just told me his Big Lots has a bunch of healthy food, but I haven't checked it out yet.

Eggs are cheap and you can make a wide variety of things with them. Such as omelettes, faux-pancakes, faux-muffins, quiche, boiled eggs for snacks, eggs baked in avocado.

I feel like an Egg salesman but now that I know I don't know how I survived without them previously.

I get a lot of my foods/ snacks at big lots.

Do you live near a Trader Joe's? I'm a poor grad student and I find that I can buy a healthy week's worth of groceries for about $50. I love making a big batch of ground turkey pasta sauce, freezing the sauce in individual servings and pouring it over spaghetti squash (which, depending on the size can give you about 3-4 servings that you can eat over the week) or steamed broccoli slaw. Your freezer is your friend. You can buy food in bulk, prepare it and freeze it into individual portions (which makes great and healthy convenience food--instead of ordering pizza). I have lots of good freezer ideas so feel free to message me if you want more!

Cheap student essentials:

Tuna
Soup
Carrots
Bananas
Apples
Lettuce
Brown rice
Canned fruit/veg/beans
Oatmeal

At uni I lived off spaghetti bolognese, tuna pasta bake, protein+salad sandwiches and fruit snacks (and instant noodles...) find the cheapest veg you can and get creative with adding them into things to make them bulkier and healthier (carrots in spag bol, red onion and peppers in pasta bakes etc). Frozen veg and meats are cheaper.