How much food to buy per person
The weight on the label is not the weight on the plate, and the gap is larger than most people assume. A rack of ribs is nearly half bone. A pound of spinach becomes about a cup. Brisket loses close to half its weight between the butcher and the table. Buying well means knowing which number you are actually looking at.
Two different losses
Everything below is a combination of two things, and they are worth keeping separate in your head.
Trim loss happens before cooking: bone, skin, rind, peel, cores, stems, stones. It is fixed by the cut and you can see it in the package. Cooking loss happens in the pan and is mostly water and rendered fat. It varies with how you cook and how far you cook it — a steak taken to well done loses roughly twice what the same steak loses at medium-rare.
Meat: what a pound becomes
These are rough figures for cooked, edible meat from a pound as purchased. Every item page on this site carries the specific numbers for that cut.
- Boneless, trimmed cuts — chicken breast, boneless chops, sirloin: about 12 oz cooked. Roughly a quarter goes.
- Ground meat: 11 to 13 oz depending on fat content. Lean grinds keep more weight, which partly offsets their higher price.
- Bone-in chicken pieces — thighs, drumsticks, leg quarters: 7 to 10 oz. Bone is 30 to 35%.
- Whole chicken: about 10 oz of cooked meat per pound of bird, so roughly 60%. You also get a carcass worth two quarts of stock, which is a real part of the value.
- Braising roasts — chuck, pork shoulder: 10 to 11 oz. The loss is high but the meat shreds, so it stretches further per ounce than a steak does.
- Ribs: 5 to 7 oz. The worst ratio in the meat case, and the reason ribs look cheap by the pound and are not cheap by the serving.
- Whole brisket: about 8 oz, a loss of roughly 45%.
- Bacon: about 6 oz, plus half a cup of usable fat. It loses more than half its weight.
Per person
For a main course, aim for 4 to 6 oz of cooked meat per adult. Working backwards through the figures above, that means:
- Boneless cuts: 6 oz raw per person.
- Bone-in chicken: 10 to 12 oz raw, or one leg quarter, or two thighs, or two to three drumsticks.
- Braising roasts: 8 oz raw, which is the figure people overestimate most — an 8 lb pork shoulder genuinely feeds a dozen.
- Ribs: a full pound per person, or half a rack of baby backs.
- Whole chicken: a 4 lb bird serves four to six.
Produce: what a pound becomes
Produce loses less to trim than meat but far more to cooking, and the cooking losses are wildly uneven.
- Almost no waste: green beans, zucchini, cabbage, berries, grapes, bananas by their own pricing. Under 10% trim.
- Moderate: bell peppers 18%, apples 25% peeled and cored, onions 10%, oranges 25%.
- Heavy: broccoli 25 to 30% if you discard the stalk (do not), cauliflower a third, kale a third to the ribs, artichokes over half.
- Heaviest: sweet corn is 60% cob and husk, pineapple 50%, melons around 50%, avocado 30% to stone and skin.
The shrinkage that catches people out
Leafy greens are in a category of their own. Ten ounces of raw spinach cooks to about one cup — roughly a tenth of the volume. Kale collapses to about a quarter. Mushrooms cook to a third. If you are cooking greens for four and the pile does not look absurd, you have not bought enough.
Per person
- Vegetable side: 4 to 6 oz raw per person for most things, which is a pound for a family of three.
- Salad: 2 oz of leaves per person. A pound of lettuce is eight servings.
- Cooked greens: 5 oz raw per person, so a pound of spinach is three servings, not eight.
- Potatoes as a side: 6 to 8 oz per person. A 5 lb bag serves eight to ten.
Staples
Dried goods roughly triple, which makes them the cheapest way to add volume to a meal.
- Rice: 2 oz dry per person, becoming about a cup cooked.
- Dried pasta: 3 to 4 oz dry per person as a main.
- Dried beans: 2 oz dry per person, which becomes roughly a cup cooked and is close to a fifth the cost of the tinned equivalent.
Why this changes what you buy
The practical payoff is that it makes per-pound prices comparable. Two examples that come up constantly:
Bone-in against boneless chicken. Split breast at $1.99/lb with 30% bone works out to $2.84 per pound of meat. Boneless breast at $4.99/lb is $4.99, with no stock bones. The bone-in is comfortably cheaper even after the loss, and it cooks into better meat.
Ribs against shoulder. Baby backs at $4.99/lb with a 35% yield are about $14 per pound of cooked meat. Pork shoulder at $1.99/lb with a 55% yield is about $3.60. They are from the same animal and one is four times the other.
Every produce and meat page here has a “what you actually get” note with the specific figures for that item, and every beef cut ranked by what you actually get works the whole beef case through on this basis.
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