You're probably planning or purchasing wrong. First, get a club membership like BJ's or Sam's Club. 100/12 $8.33 a month. Bulk Chicken Thighs as an example, on sale for 5 pounds for 8 bucks last time I bought them. Ground beef, 3 pounds for 6. Cheap flank steak, 2 pounds 10 bucks or so. 2.5 Pound pork loin, 7 something on sale. Cheap sausages like hotdogs or similar, 1 pound 3 to 4 bucks not on sale. That's easily 2 weeks of meat alone for a single guy. It will freeze for a month easily, more if you portion it first then freeze individually. All for less than 40 bucks including the cost of the membership. Most of those are sales of course, but meat tends to run in cycles of "this week chicken, then pork, beef, preserved, chicken".

Second, find at least 2 different grocery stores, Week 1, buy everything you need from the first. Week 2, buy everything you need from the second. Week 3, do the math and decide which staples you'll get from the first, which you'll get from the second. Be careful to take into account sales, and I reccomend keeping an eye on their sales if you can like if you get a weekly flyer. I personally do most of my dry and canned goods from the first, then most/all my perishables and meats I'm not buying in bulk (mostly breakfast stuff like bacon eggs milk) from the second. I went to the grocery store twice a week, one on weekends, one on way home from work. Every 2 weeks to a month I would go to a wholesale club.

Basically, find what's a good deal, buy in bulk when it is, portion out over time. I was feeding 5 people easily for about 50 bucks a week 2 meals a day. Every meal had meat, every meal had leftovers for the 3rd meal if anyone wanted it. Some weeks was 60-70 while the next were 40-30, so I am averaging a bit. And this isn't to say it was the exclusive food, still ordered pizza's and whatever else occasionally. But the core food bill was still 50 for 5. The second thing is, it will ALWAYS be cheap and easy to make more than less. A 2 pound box of macaroni noodles will be literally under 2 bucks. Tossing in enough meat and veggies to make it decently tasty, nutritionally balanced, and healthy will cost way less than just trying with the meat and veg alone. Can do it with rice, potatoes mashed or cut, etc. It takes less time overall to prepare too.

The longest part was boiling water in most cases, and for that you just cover a pot and leave on medium when you get home, by the time it's boiling you have done whatever you wanted, and when it's actually time to cook you just turn it up and uncover. The longest it took to cook of "involved time" was usually under 30 minutes unless it was something special.

Second huge thing a lot of people don't think about for cheap tasty food is "turn the rest into soup". Say you make the cheap pork roast. You add the potatoes, carrots, celery, onion etc and cook it, maybe using some stock to add flavor. You spice it and let it go. Meals done, you toss the meat and veg in a container, clean the pan and done. Why? You were already half way to soup anyway. Instead I say put it all in a slow cooker, start it on low go to work or whatever. After you get back you have a lovely slow cooked roast, eat that and are happy. Then just shred the rest of the roast, add some canned things like corn or green beans etc, maybe some extra carrot or celery, top the rest with stock, and leave it. Now you have an extremely easy, extremely tasty, and extremely cheap soup to eat by itself or as part of something else that maybe wasn't going to go as far. The base roast was already going to cost whatever it would cost. You throw maybe 5 bucks more into it, and you have at least 2 days of extra for no cost.