It's possible to live on $1/meal ($3/day), even in the US, but it'll be bland and utterly devoid of variety, and it requires a cool, dry, secure place to store your bulk purchases and energy to heat it with, which is an additional cost.
But for the purposes of this conversation, there's a wide middle ground between a $1 bowl of rice and beans and a $50 restaurant steak. For someone in the US, if you're prudent with your grocery shopping and willing to cook at home, a person can eat luxuriously for $10/day.
And that’s about what we do - I love to cook, and grocery shopping is kind of fun, especially when I spot a particularly good-looking steak. I end up spending about 500 EUR/mo on groceries for my family of 3, and at least 100 of that is very elective.
I’ll go out to eat for the sake of socializing, but we rarely go out to eat as a family, because cooking at home is easier, along with being cheaper and frankly better than most restaurant meals that cost well over double what I paid for higher-quality ingredients. I’d rather have a friend come over and make lasagna with her than go out to a restaurant where it’s too loud to talk and the waiter comes over to see “if there’s anything we need” every 15 minutes.
Preferences can be cultivated. A preference for cooking and reading library books is less expensive than one for going to restaurants and the movies and maintaining the range of streaming subscriptions required to have access to all the currently-popular shows. I’ll leave more subjective judgments out of it.
I cook at home a lot. I'm no chef but I've been cooking for decades so I'm not terrible at it. I can and typically do about $10/day per person. It's not what I'd ever describe as luxurious. Good yes, healthy yes, but luxurious no.
But you're not wrong there's a wide gulf between a $50 restaurant meal and a $10 home cooked meal. That gulf shrinks when you account for your time cooking and cleaning.
Which gets back to the original point, the value of a subscription isn't a function of the raw cost of it but the delta between the alternative and the subscription.
A $50 dinner costs more than a home cooked $10 dinner. But if the inconvenience of cooking and cleaning "costs" you $15 worth of effort because your time is worth something then it's only twice as much as the home cooked meal. So the actual additional "cost" of the restaurant meal is $25 because you need to spend $25 of time and materials for dinner anyways.
That calculus changes depending on how you charge yourself for time spent cooking and cleaning. In terms of subscriptions if a subscription costs you $10 a month but you'd spend $5 a month doing that thing by hand a subscription might be worthwhile if it offers $5 or more of convenience of time saving. You need to judge the subscription on the delta between it and doing the thing yourself.
But for the purposes of this conversation, there's a wide middle ground between a $1 bowl of rice and beans and a $50 restaurant steak. For someone in the US, if you're prudent with your grocery shopping and willing to cook at home, a person can eat luxuriously for $10/day.