Thats his total contents, which is like 20 or so meals. Maybe not good meals, but 20 or so things.

I probably have $300-$400 bucks of "stuff" in my cupboard but I don't eat all of it every week. I do "too much" amazon subscribe and save and I like spices so maybe a "normal" cupboard only has $200 or so of stuff.

I think the idea is to promote creative thinking. So I'd fry up about a 1/10 of a bag of frozen broccoli and cook the mac n cheese and then add a can of tuna and mix all that stuff up into a tuna casserole and bake it, maybe broil it to brown the top which is WAY more than one meal for one single dude even accounting for the long term effects of food inflation (like mac n chee used to be a pound in the 90s, now its only like one cup in the 2010s). Maybe the day after tomorrow when the casserole is finally eaten up, a dash of oil in the wok with a bag of mixed veg and those meatballs and then some kind of homemade sauce, I bet you get two meals outta that at least.

Dude needs to buy more fruits and veg and more spicy stuff. I see vegetarian burritos and tacos and spring rolls in his future.

Absolutely. Even when you amortize the cost of condiments, oils, spices, and vegetables, that would go over budget. Along with the eating out and more expensive items like chicken shu mai, this is not going to fit within the $35/week budget. What he needs to do is to cut out anything over $35/week to get a realistic picture of what it really means to survive on $35/week. I would like to see his meals and response to that situation, otherwise it's not realistic enough and he can't really make the case that you can eat well for $35/week.