I started leveling up Culinarian last night, and drained about 5,000 3800 gil from my wallet just buying ingredients from the NPC vendor to get to Lv.15 . This got me to thinking how I can sustain myself, because it seems very expensive to try and hit Lv.50 with a crafting class due to cost of materials.

I had a friend make me some HQ crafting armor for Lv.12 so that saved me some gil and time, and I'm not really interested in the gathering classes, so am I only left with trying to sell the food I make? Would the food I make even sell?

edit: I included the cost of buying some crafting jewelry which was about 1200, so the actual cost of ingredients I bought was around 3800.

editt: Thanks everyone, your advice has been really helpful. Turns out that the early levels for CUL aren't that easy to sustain, but now that I've unlocked some of the leves, it should go a lot smoother. Endgame seems tricky as well since it's not that profitable but that's okay since I'm just doing it for the love of the class.