You're quite right of course, news reporting is notoriously incapable of presenting the whole story. So I have looked into it. I found this on the official website for the university:
DOCUMENTING YOUR FUNDING ARRANGEMENTS
If you receive an offer of a place, your college will require you to complete a College Financial Guarantee form providing evidence that you have sufficient funding to cover your fees and living expenses for the duration of your programme; for some part-time non-matriculated courses, the Department for Continuing Education may also require you to provide satisfactory evidence of funding arrangements.
No mention of any sums, but it does direct you to the Fees, Funding and Scholarships calculator for a "personalised estimate of the amount of funding you will need per year". I am not sure that my definition of personalised is the same as theirs, because no matter what information you enter, it informs you that your living costs will be £12,900. It even gives a breakdown of that figure:
Minimum spend per 12 months
Accommodation £6,200
Utility bills £1,050
Food £2,950
General living costs (clothes, books, socialising, etc) £2,700
TOTAL £12,900
£2,950 for food. That is £56.73 per week. That is more than my parents spend each week to feed two people, three cats and a dog.
And when I click for more information on this flabbergasting sum, it informs me:
The cost above is based on a mixture of eating meals in college and self-catering. Meals in colleges are subsidised and can be significantly cheaper than purchasing meals outside. Self-catering can also minimise food costs.
Self-catering can also minimise food costs. Yes. Yes it can. I, for example, spend about £10 a week on food. Usually less, although I do have an initial outlay of about £40 a term to get in freezer staples.
Oxford, you are out of your mind. Off to find out whether Cambridge is similarly insane.
Edit: interestingly, the sum cited for undergraduates is £1,800 per year on food. It states that the figures only apply to undergraduates who live in college during term and go home for vacations. Assuming that the Oxford terms are the same length as Cambridge ones (three eight week terms, generally 30 weeks in residence per year) that is
£60 a week. Do people seriously live like this at the age of 18?!
Additional edit: Cambridge specifies its minimum maintenance amount (as in, the amount graduate students have to show they have to live on) as £11,750. I'm genuinely staggered. Am I really in the minority? Does everyone spend this much a week on food and I just hadn't realised?