Ah I misunderstood, thought you were trying to say yours was expensive rather than the other way around. Thought the $450 was for an individual. No clue how I got to that.

Anyway, yeah $8 a day is fine. I'm at about $4 a day or so, but if the euro had been stronger like two years ago it'd be closer to $6 a day, not much different from you.

Anyway you asked about real prices so I looked them up. So here's a typical meal with prices from the most expensive large supermarket chain in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with the less expensive ones cutting prices by about 10-20% across the board:

Protein wise: 100g of Chicken: €6 per kilo, so €0.60. Fish is a bit cheaper unless it's salmon, about €5.50 a kilo, as is ground beef at €5.50.

I tend to eat 2x chicken, 1x beef, 2x fish, 2x veg. Looking to replace a chicken with another veg at some point. The vegetarian meal is mostly lentils, beans, soy etc.

Then there's veggies, it's about €1.80 for a kilo of broccoli or spinach or zucchini. A 100g serving is about 18c.

Then there's some form of carbs. Rice or potatoes at about €1.80 and €0.70 per kilo respectively. So a 100g serving averages about 14c.

So that gets you a €0.92 meal, which is about $1. It's the type of serving size I used while lifting heavy years back with a pretty muscular lean build, with a decent oatmeal breakfast, two pieces of fruit, a salad with dinner and a light lunch and plenty of water. Nowadays I have a pretty normal build, 6'2, not muscular or fat, not skinny either.

The salad I always eat with dinner is a tomato, part of a cucumber, a carrot and some lettuce and an olive oil, vinegar, garlic and onion dressing with some S&P. It's about $0.70 or so all together.

So my dinner, with all the extra dressing, seasoning, oils etc, comes out around $2, with the option of shopping cheaper by 10-20%. The vegetarian meals are even cheaper, which I eat 2/7 days. It's basically $0.25 of lentils with a ton of extras like a few tomatoes. Hard to top $1 - $1.50 on these meals.

Again breakfast is really cheap for me. Liter of milk is about €0.60, oatmeal is €0.80 a kilo. A banana is about €0.20. So we both have half a banana, 10c of oatmeal, 10c of milk and we get a €0.30 breakfast. It's just a really great meal, the banana and oatmeal both don't spike sugar so they'll sort of give off sugar for hours until lunch, despite filling you up.

Lunch is usually pretty light for me. A sandwich or two with peanut butter. Tend to eat another piece of fruit, like an orange, around 4, sometimes a sandwich if my lunch was light. I can't really be bothered doing something fancy. That gets me to dinner around 7 where I go with a decent meal and a salad, and that lasts me until after 12 as I tend to sleep late.

So yeah $100 a month is possible, but I tend to do 180 a month in dollars if the euro is stronger like it usually is, or about $6 a day. Girlfriend likes to buy tons of the small things like dried tomatoes or olives that you tend not to buy in bulk. So 1 kilo of olives is €14, as opposed to say brocoli at €1.80. Those orders of magnitude more expensive small items that barely fill you up end up being almost half the budget. But it's what makes food fun and nice and not some kind of factory work :p