A working-poor friend also used to buy steel-cut oats, to eat breakfast for pennies.
If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you.
With canned soup, instant ramen, and a lot of other packaged foods, pay attention to the sodium. (I avoid a lot of those, or end up diluting it, or, say, using only half the seasoning packet.)
Where you shop matters to budget. Where I live, WFM has bought out, or driven out, most of the other grocery stores (and one of the remaining stores prices similarly, but without the cachet), but a Market Basket is just a short hike over the train tracks.
For specialty groceries, a small grocery store serving some ethnic group for which that's a staple, can be cheaper than most broader grocery stores.
Don't get scurvy, or other nutritional deficiency. If you can't make sure all your nutrients are covered, I've guessed (I'm not a nutritionist) that a mainstream multivitamin pill can't hurt.
You should also count your calories, to make sure you're getting enough. Once you start being more penny-pinching with eating, you might find yourself getting hungry less, rather than more, and it's not hard to slip into caloric deficit that will make you sick. There are calculators on the Web for how much you should intake.
Here in San Francisco, we have a plethora of Farmers Markets. The thing about produce is: once harvested, the clock starts on it going bad. So the farmers have a ticking timebomb on their hands: if they can't sell the produce at the end of the day, (in most cases) it will go to waste. Some of the enterprising ones take a trip to Chinatown and offload their leftover produce for pennies.
So when I was in a situation of hardship where I was living on a few dollars per day, I would go to the farmers market near closing time, and over time developed friendships with them, so they would sell me their remaining produce for dirt cheap. I would take it home, turn some of it into stock and freeze that.
Over several months, I survived on about $100/month in groceries.
While there are long-term health issues with that, more acutely, you can end up in a low energy brain fog, that might make it hard to get enough protein to get out of said brain fog. I got stuck in that zone a few times when poor.
Dried beans are a bit of a pain, but if you are looking to cut funds then you really can't do much better than dried beans.
Also, unsaturated fat is an important part of the diet. You need fat in the diet to absorb many nutrients. Skimping out on it can really negatively impact you. Olive oil and Avocado oil are my go tos. But you really wouldn't go wrong with peanut oil or canola.
Moreover, you actually need to count mostly only the protein intake, because when your food does not have enough calories that becomes obvious, because you lose weight.
Obtaining enough calories for a day requires spending only a small fraction of a dollar per day, for buying enough wheat flour or corn flour.
When you attempt to minimize the cost of food, most of the money will go for ensuring an adequate amount of protein, with an acceptable amino acid profile, and also for ensuring adequate amounts of essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals.
Ensuring enough calories is by far the easiest part.
This is surprisingly easy.
Back at university, 20 years ago now, I was living on about £0.5/day, in the form of two big bowls of oats, 500ml semi-skimmed milk, a bit of sugar and dried raisins for breakfast; no lunch; and 108g pack of instant ramen for dinner.
In retrospect, this was about 1100-1200 kcal/day.
You can absolutely sustain that for a single university term at a time — it was so easy, so simple and devoid of negative sensation, that it didn't even occur to me to calculate the calories until someone here on Hacker News expressed disbelief because it was so little food.
0 - loosely, in a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend way
And then I wondered how I could hit the gym almost every day, yet not build much muscle bulk.
I accidentally did that low kcal/day again, many years later, when I had happened to have excess non-muscle bulk to support.
And then I wondered why I felt like total crud.
The US medical guidelines I've heard, from doctor and elsewhere, are minimum 1200 for XX female, 1500 for XY male. That minimum is regardless of how fast you want to lose weight.
Frozen vegetables are OP here. Cheap, frozen at peak freshness, still nutritious.
A pound of leafy greens is dirt cheap and won't go bad for months.
Frozen fruits are great too, especially for smoothies. Really easy way to get nutrient-dense carbs in.
I will note, the hard limit is you can't actually use it in a salad... but hey, tradeoffs
Weirdly where I live steel-cut oats are the pricey ones even thought they're processed less than, e.g., rolled oats. That said they do need to cook longer than rolled, so wondering if energy cost might make those a bit more expensive.
Usually, prepared cut oats have a lower glycaemic index that can also be very helpful if you are trying to maintain a constrained diet.
Fun fact, frozen vegetables and fruits are both nearly immortal and (often) a higher quality than fresh. They are generally pretty cheap as well.
Grab a 5lb back of frozen veg and throw it in the freezer. You can whittle them away for months with no spoilage or loss in quality.
> Don't get scurvy, or other nutritional deficiency. If you can't make sure all your nutrients are covered, I've guessed (I'm not a nutritionist) that a mainstream multivitamin pill can't hurt.
If you do a primarily vegetarian diet, it's both cheap and pretty hard to get most nutritional deficiencies. Throw in some foods that give you B12 (nutritional yeast/fortified soy milk if you want to stay vegitarian/vegan. Chicken or turkey otherwise). Veg is packed with vitamins and minerals. You might need to watch for protein, but soy products, beans, and or lean meats are relatively cheap and can cover that.
> Once you start being more penny-pinching with eating, you might find yourself getting hungry less, rather than more, and it's not hard to slip into caloric deficit that will make you sick.
Two things that really help with this.
1. You do actually need fats in your diet, so use fats. Ideally things like olive oil or avocado oil. Most nutrition stuff I've seen recommends a 33/33/33 calorie split. 33% from carbs, 33% from fats, 33% from proteins.
2. There are cheap and healthy high calorie foods. Potatoes are (in most regions) some of the cheapest high calorie foods. Pasta would be the number 2 to go for, rice probably last (though it is cheap, it's just not super healthy. Grab some fortified rice and don't wash it)
Dried Beans (like chili) can be cooked in the Instant Pot without problem. Not sure if anyone's tried a Chef IQ.
Most children won’t eat beans and rice for a long time without lifelong trauma that yields strong reactions at mealtimes in adulthood.
There’s also that study where they feed a mother cat with food that contains brocolis perfume When then kitties got weaned they prefer brocolis than fish. (I can’t find it back on google sorry, perhaps it was another legume)
I can stock up on 900g bags of pasta on sale for CAD$1.25 (~US$0.87). Used to be CAD$1.00 was the good deal, but c’est la vie. Quicker and imo easier to prepare pasta on the stovetop.
Pasta has almost double the protein content of rice by dry weight (13% vs 7%), more fibre (3.2% vs 1.3% for white rice), more of a fat component (1.5% vs 0.7%) and is always fortified (at least here).
(And yeah, Canada grows a ton of pulses, mostly for export, so they’re cheap here but not locally favoured as much for protein)
For rice, something like parboiled rice, or brown rice, or enriched white rice will be more nutritious than some other kinds.
Oh, for beans, in addition to chick peas, lentils, and the various colors, there's also chana daal from an Indian grocery. (Which I'm told isn't the same thing as yellow split pea, though some stores might say it is.)
I remember it being available at $1.00 quite consistently, but I can't recall seeing it even at $1.25 during 2024. Maybe for the 750g bags.
Also damn, CADUSD has been sliding further... (Why does Google's chart show a giant temporary spike on Dec 21?)
>Canada grows a ton of pulses, mostly for export, so they’re cheap here
And yet it seems like what I see on shelves is mostly imported... ?
That's funny reading oats as being described as a cheap breakfast here, while in the fitness/sports community, oats are "the GOAT" of breakfast, without a focus on cost.
Even if you're serious about sports / weighlifting etc, you don't actually need the specialised protein foods and shakes. Just have an extra bowl of yoghurt or low-fat cottage cheese and you've got a big chunk of extra protein in your diet already without spending extra or messing with calorie intake.
The problem is that people look at e.g. oats or anything branded for "their" group and go all-in on it.
When you're dieting, once you know the amount of what foods you need to eat, its much easier to stick to that plan vs trying to re-balance your macros and calories with a new food item.
If I recall correctly, you get complete nutrition from: potatoes, a small amount of dairy (vitamin A, calcium, fatty acids), and a small amount of ... oats? (or maybe some vegetable? I forget.) to cover the few trace nutrients potatoes don't have. I think selenium is one.
They're cheap, and dried/flaked potatoes last forever. The Incas already solved this problem for us (:
https://tools.myfooddata.com/protein-calculator/171203/100g/...
https://tools.myfooddata.com/protein-calculator/170030/100g/...
Plug 4 large potatoes and 6 Cups of whole buttermilk into a site like Cronometer. 2000 Calories and 100+% of everything but Vitamins E and K, which you might get from foraged greens.
Potatoes are low in protein and various Vitamins. I ended up eating protein powder and regular Multi, C, D and B vitamin pills.
There's a simple and intuitive answer, and I am still surprised that even rational people are conditioned to dismiss it (as I used to be).
What are you made of?
Animal flesh provides exactly all the nutrients required for your own flesh, in exactly the perfectly balanced proportion. Just think about it for a second. So, the simple answer is just fatty meat. As a good extra, you can use some liver/kidneys, a good idea is to also throw in some cartilage and skin into your ground meat for perfect nutrients balance. Eggs/fish/cheese for variability.
Imagine the careful measured portioning and chemical purification required to collect necessary nutrients from soy and vegetable stems — to make them right for building and sustaining your own animal flesh. Imagine how many things we didn't know 50 years ago about what nutrients are required for our flesh, and how many non-obvious things we will discover in the next 50 years from now, which would completely re-define best practices for synthetic vegetable food many times.
Most people should probably cook their own food, avoid most ultra-processed foods (twinkies, not flour) and eat a healthy balance of food types.
Animal flesh also doesn't contain all of the nutrients. Just plug 2000 calories of steak into Cronometer.com and look.
So making a supply of this nutritionally complete food isn't the hard part, it's basically getting it to people who would eat it.
The other sad and ironic thing is that in America, both food insecurity and obesity basically exist side by side. It's definitely not the composition of the food that contributes to those issues.
The CEOs would rather waste food than not make a few pennies profit on it.
His meals are essentially a massive variety of vegetables + some sardines. It's fascinating work even if I wouldn't replicate it myself.
https://www.lalizas.com/product/174-liferaft-equipment/6413-...
https://www.lrse.com/products/seven-oceans-emergency-ration
They taste what they look like. 5 years shelf life.
Also Claude gave this idea:
Complete Nutritional Meal Recipe Single Portion (700 calories) Base Ingredients: Red lentils (split): 70g Brown rice (finely ground): 60g Ground flaxseed: 15g Coconut oil powder: 10g Sweet potato powder: 20g Seaweed powder (nori or wakame): 2g Nutritional yeast: 5g Moringa leaf powder: 5g
Seasonings & Preservatives: Iodized salt: 2g Black pepper (ground): 0.5g Dried thyme: 1g Citric acid: 0.5g Onion powder: 2g Garlic powder: 1g
You know you can also enjoy life a little.
Refrigeration can be costly if you are on a budget, and can be a non marginal factor in the total expenditures.
Other ways to save are:
- buy large bags of rice, flour, lentils, which last for a long time.
- forage mushrooms (they're online communities for this), or grow.
- grow vegetables and fruit. Lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries are easy to grow.
- hunt or buy an animal, get it butchered and store it in a freezer.
- farm animals.
If your budget is $2.50 per day for food (or $3.30 adjusted for inflation) that's significant.
I saw an interview with a poor Brit a year or two ago, who had an electricity meter which took coins. He said the main reason to eat microwave meals is the energy cost: a few minutes of microwave is far cheaper than half an hour of cooking plate or an hour of oven.
> Other ways to save are:
> - buy large bags of rice, flour, lentils, which last for a long time.
If you’re living in a place where the general weather is quite cold, you may be able to manage this. But in all other places, buying large bags of rice, flour and lentils is a recipe for infestation by insects (rice would have rice weevil eggs in it).
Buy large enough bags that you’re sure you can consume within a month, and you may probably be able to avoid infestation. The other option would be to get foods that are heavily sprayed with insecticides, which is likely to be bad for one’s health.
Though frankly, we just leave big bags of rice out, open, in a kitchen in California, and weevils have never infested it.
Whilst it costs a bit more, you save so much time and possibly money. It allows you to not have any dishes -> no dishwasher needed -> no cupboard space needed -> no kitchen needed -> no fridge needed -> cheaper rent. You don't need to go grocery shopping (no car needed), food never gets wasted, you take out significantly less trash. There's 0 "mental load", you never have to think/plan about how you're going to eat/cook/whatever.
If you're willing to adopt a bit of an "ignorance is bliss" attitude, you can happily pretend that you're eating a perfectly balanced diet ;).
I have no affiliation with Huel, just an extremely happy customer. Now that I'm traveling around the world, it's pretty much the only thing I miss from my old life. If I could get it shipped anywhere in the world for a reasonable price, I'd probably still be eating it right now.
Surely even in the UK food is a bit more than just a way of not dying.
It definitely is. Most people I know care about having good food. It does vary a lot with income and region. The biggest problem is long working hours and people not having time or energy to do anything more than buy ready meals.
While people in the UK tend to eat worse than people in the rest of Europe, we eat better than Americans and food here is "rich and varied".
I am puzzled by GP's comment about having cheaper rent by not having a kitchen. I have never even heard of anywhere you could rent here that did not have a kitchen - its really must be bottom end room rental (and even there shared kitchens are normal).
You need to get your view of UK food from somewhere other than American comics' jokes about UK food.
When traveling, I eat plenty of local and varied food. The problem of cooking at home is exacerbated when traveling though. Having an adequate kitchen for cooking is even more troublesome.
Going out to eat every meal gets pretty tiresome after doing it for years. The food available for takeaway isn't great. Fine for a few weeks or months, but eating it for years definitely kills you faster.
Having a healthy, 0 effort meal available at a moments notice is great.
Huel.com is quite expensive in US https://huel.com/products/huel-instant-meal-pots
$2.21 per serving is deal, did it fill you up?
That's the page I got the $2.21 per serving figure. I wasn't hungry when I ate Huel, but I was never "full" like after eating a pizza.
To be honest I don't like the new Huel offerings like the pot or the premixed shakes. They generate too much rubbish, part of the appeal of Huel was how little garbage I created per meal.
- Natto on rice with scallions, egg, and kimchi
- Chicken curry with daal and spicy raita
- Chicken fajitas with refried beans
- Hummus and carrots
I spent ~$50 for everything delivered via Instacart not counting spices and staples like rice and lentils and I live in southern California... not as cheap as this gentleman but not too shabby all things considered. I need to start cataloguing my recipes so that I can make them more repeatable and share them easily with friends when they ask.
For me, it’s the opposite. I’m never very happy with anything I make but when somebody makes something for me, it tastes amazing.
https://archive.nytimes.com/query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage-9...
I find I'm a mix. I'll never make a sandwich at home that tastes as good as a deli, no matter if I use the same ingredients. I can smoke one hell of a brisket that IMHO is better than anything around me.
I hope people learn how to use spices and can source them for cheap; we have a source that is bascially a big rack that sells things like paprika powder for €2 for a relatively big bag, it's the basis for a lot of premade sauces / seasoning mixes and a lot of familiar flavours (italian, mexican). Learning to make bolognese sauce from scratch is great. Hummus can also be made from scratch, iirc it's just ground chick peas.
Chef is French for "chief". It's a position in the kitchen. So, unless you happen to work in a kitchen that has a chef, you are the chef by default!
That is definitely a testament to your skill! I struggle with cooking, and it took a long time for me (year+) where I could make a specific easy dish comfortably, in a reasonable time, and to a texture / taste where I actually like it, and not just kind of not hate it.
One thing you might try is signing up for a meal kit service using their introductory offers. You can go a month or two doing this while never paying full price via the discounts and it's a good way to try a bunch of different dishes. Save the recipe cards for the stuff you like then contrast them with other internet recipes or ask an LLM for ideas. Once you've done this enough you'll build up an informal database of things you like to make and a framework for how to do it without having to resort to step-by-step instructions.
They also offer mealplans for an entire week but iirc that is a paying service (pay once).
Optimising for economic cost with the only requirement being "fill your belly" and "be palatable enough", tends to result in poor nutrition. This is roughly how the industry optimises food - minimise economic cost, maximise yield, and maximise sales (make everything artificially hyper palatable), with terrible results.
In the long term this is partly covered by the economic cost on a personal basis because of the cost in health care and loss of ability to produce income due to deteriorating health. But this is displaced in time, and you do not want to do this experiment on yourself, it's not reversible.
Calories are not equal, as a general rule, buying cheap food often means cheaping out on nutritional value. If you want to frame it in terms of money, buying good quality food now is an investment in your future.
Good even, in comparison to a lot of people.
Either way you can weigh both factors and 90% of diets can be easily and cheaply improved by just adding a hefty dose of frozen veggies to every meal.
Plenty of variety these days too, lots of premixed medleys.
Trying to gather a cheap and healthy nutrition profile from random items in a grocery store is a task doomed to fail.
The first day is an outlier because it was on a day of fasting among many Christians.
>3. Be Safe! Maintain and track nutrition, get enough calories, and don't eat rotten food.
I live in Southern California in a high cost of living area but the produce and meat is very cheap at ethnic stores like Ranch 99 and SuperKing that actually compete on price. These kinds of stores are only present in areas with dense immigrant populations. Even in urban areas so many people default to shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joes that it’s easy to get a distorted view of prices. Much of it is that Americans ostensibly choose to pay more for convenience and availability.
As an example, the Halal grocery that I usually buy my meat from has ribeye steaks for $5-8/lb while Costco - normally considered cheaper than most other stores (in bulk) - has them for $20-25/lb. Now the former isn’t as high quality as prime Costco steaks so I still buy the latter for special occasions, but for day to day food it’s a much better deal. A little smart shopping goes a very long way.
I doubt that convenience and availability is a US only thing. Prices in budget grocery stores like Aldi and Lidl in Europe are still 50-70% cheaper than US prices.
Americans just don't eat seasonally and that ups the cost. We also have the problem where some states over specialize on particular foods, so everything beyond that has a baseline higher expense.
But it is pretty great for their customers, and for their direct employees (for which I respect them a lot).
For day 1
1/2 can Campbell's Tomato Soup - 135 Milk, half of 10.7 floz - 133.75 4 slices white bread - 600 Tillamook Italian 3-Cheese, 58 g - 186.43 Butter, 32 g - 228.57 Homemade Kimchi (73 g) - 25.75
135 + 133.75 + 600 + 186.43 + 228.57 + 25.75 = 1,309.5 calories which is generally well under weight maintenance levels for anyone moderately active.
That said, the rest of the days didn't look much better. I'm quite a skinny dude, but what he prepared for an entire day was like one meal and a snack for me generally. I suspect the amount of calories on these meals would be well below maintenance level for most people.
(Which was a half-goal of the challenge, iirc.)
The amount of spice you use in most dishes is so small that it's stupid to pinch pennies here.
Ditto for non-organic oats. If you live in North America, there's a good chance your oats came from Canada, where farmers figured out they could spray Roundup right before harvest so heavily that it desiccates the oats on the plant. They harvest, and the dried oats last longer in storage. It's literally soaked in Roundup. You couldn't pay me to eat anything containing oats that isn't certified organic.
We had regulations against the maximum amount of roundup allowed in grain. The Canadian farmers lobbied and had it changed. Anything to make another dollar in profits.
Vegetable oil? No; it's a mix of basically anything oil-like that came out of any sort of seed or vegetable, whatever was cheapest. Canola (which is rapeseed oil) or safflower oil.
Overall this blog post feels like there's this between-the-lines unspoken commentary that really, people on foodstamps should be able to do just fine on $2.50/day, and they should stop complaining.
Among other things, people who are poor generally don't have much free time to do all sorts of meal prep. That's one big reason they go for cheap, ultraprocessed foods. It's fast, it's calorie dense, it's (somewhat) cheap.
The nutritional content of these meals is meh on quick inspection. There can't be nearly enough calories - a bowl of oatmeal and that's it, for breakfast? Then one hot dog?
He seems to heavily rely on ultraprocessed foods, but in general it seems to be 'meat+carb+flavor". I did see potatoes, which is decent, but sweet potatoes have a better glycemic index and more nutrients.
I guarantee if you plugged a couple of these days into Cronometer you'd see numerous missing macro and micronutrients and minerals. And, like I said, lots of ultraprocessed junk.
Legumes and rices will help substantially with nutrition and are very inexpensive. What's expensive? Red meat...
I think vegetable oil is often soy/palm.
This is depressing considering they're still much more expensive than rice and even more expensive than wheat.
I'll have my eye peeled for some sort of happy medium, like $20/day, but this feels too much like the masochistic version of frugal-jerk.
I grew up comfortable. My wife and I each make six figures. But I still think it's bewildering that eating $140/person/week is considered "medium", not by you personally, but by a lot of people. Clearly I'm biased because I experienced what I consider "normal" - my mother cooked for my family nearly every day, and I continue that in a pale imitation - but it is genuinely concerning to me that so few people seem to be home-cooking simple, delicious meals consisting mostly of chicken, fish, pork, pasta, rice, vegetables, etc; with variety in preparation/sauces/spices.
If you're cooking, $20/day is very high.
Rice, beans, vegetables, fruit and nuts in moderation, produces a relatively inexpensive diet.
Beef and chicken always tend to be more expensive, of course, but you'll be pretty sad if you like food and stick to only things that are "cheaper than meat".
For baking, chia or flax "eggs" are easy.
For omelettes, chickpea flower can be a good base. Easy to find recipes online.
For scrambles, tofu is a good option.
The fact that they eat it in quarters is wholly irrelevant, and your plainly obvious smear attempt against Engineer has not gone unnoticed.
Then, you could add binary variables for each food type and add big M-constraints to ensure these correspond to whether the food is actually used in the diet or not, modifying the objective to favor either variety or simplicity. One could then add constraints on these variables to ensure foods are not used in too small quantities (too large ones are even simpler).
If I didn't enjoy food too much, I would do this now, solve the MILP and strictly follow this diet. The Wikipedia article does not name any modern applications or improvements upon his principle, did. nobody actually follow through this at all as LP exploded?
- Sweet potatoes. I eat one almost every day. I live in NC and can buy bulk local-grown ones in the fall and they last a very long time, but even at the grocery store it's only like 1.50 for 3 good sized ones. Eat them cooked in oven at 400, wrapped in foil for 1.5hrs depending on size, with butter or just salt.
- Sardines - I just eat from the can or over toast. Can also be good mixed with mayo. Lots of good deals available here, but try to prefer Morroco or Poland sourced ones vs the bottom tier ones from China. Bonus is sardines are lower in mercury than bigger fish like tuna.
- Goat cheese from Aldi - It's like $2/8oz there, my regular store is more than double that
Then I pair it all up with toast. The toast part isn't very healthy, but it's cheap.
I don't have a real cost reason to prefer cheap eating, but I'm the kind of person who would happily eat the exact same meal my whole life if given the option. So it's fun to optimize a little.
I don't know how much is electricity at your place, but in some places in Europe this could cost you 1.50 euros or so.
Microwaving is much more cost-efficient.
I wasn’t as cheap as this post, but my groceries with fresh produce, rice, and beans cost about $40/week. Eliminating meat made it pretty easy to keep costs low. After I got a job, I began hitting the gym and bulking up. Getting rid of all my excess fat during that previous period proved to be pretty worthwhile, and now I’m in better shape than ever.
It looks to me like the majority of the things made started unprocessed (cabbage, pork shoulder, salmon, lettuce, chicken, bananas, eggs), some was processed (mayo, tortillas, white bread, flour) with only a smattering of ultra-processed (brownie mix, campbell's tomato soup, blue cheese dressing)
I wonder what would be the budget for all this today.
- great protein source stuffed with fibers, minerals vitamins and probiotics. Your nutritionist and sport coach loves it.
- intrinsically cheap, doesn’t need tarif or subsidies to make it affordable.
- only two steps from raw beans, you can make it at home if you wish: 1.cook 2.incubate.
- soy beans can be replaced by many others bean. Chickpea tempeh taste like banane popcorn.
- can be adapted to almost any "salty" recipe, like you’ll do with beaf minces. Sauces, woks, lasagna, soups, burger, pizza, sauerkraut, you name it. Even some desserts.
That weird white brick can go from disgusting to delicious depending on how it was cooked. If you don’t like tempeh, it probably wasn’t cooked well.
Trader Joes seems to be the cheapest source of it if you live near one. $2.30 per block or so.
But he isn't honestly accounting for the cost of the salmon, even by his own rules ("Food that I don't use needs to be factored into my costs.", "if it goes to waste, I have to charge myself for it.").
The salmon, at $1.99/lb, costs $4.48 for 2.25lbs (36oz) of whole fish. From that, he's only able to extract 3x 6.25oz portions (19oz total) of meat.
Despite consuming everything he could/would from $4.48 worth of fish, he only charges himself $0.77 * 3 = $2.31, ignoring the cost of the waste that he was required to purchase in order to obtain the meat.
IMO a fairer accounting for 3 equal servings would be $4.48/3 = $1.49 per serving. Nearly double.
https://leannebrown.com/good-and-cheap-2/
It uses a lot more whole ingredients than the link above, although it doesn't talk as much about food conservation as this does. Combined I think you can get some amazingly cheap and amazingly fresh food.
While we're at it, I bake bread and each loaf costs about 20 cents per loaf and tastes great.
However, if I had to save the most money, and the most time, I would definitely opt for something like Soylent or Huel. Except these are not available in Canada, and they cost way too much. I found a website where people share recipes for DIY soylent (completefoods.co) and tried one. I only bought a small batch of ingredients so the cost per day was around 3.30$, but if I had bought in bulk I'm sure I could get this down to about 2$/day. And technically, this would be the most nutritionally complete diet I ever had. If a multivitamin pill cost about 0.05$/day in bulk, so why would I spend so much on vegetables?
That said, the taste isn't great, there's no variety, and I'm sure it gets boring after a while. But it was a fun experiment, and it's enlightening to know how little one can spend to eat while the average spend for food is like 400$/month.
Most people probably have a lot of scope for some easy wins on reduction though.
I found that batch cooking and freezing is a remarkably easy win. Especially something that is lentil based. Bit bland but reasonably nutritious dirt cheap and entirely passable if you only substitute let’s say every 6th meal.
Some with beef stews. Beef is expensive but even a little bit of good quality beef in a mostly veg one can impart a lot of flavor.
Pressure cooker ftw
Over the past 3 years I have supplied around 30% of my diet from an 800 square foot garden and chickens. I can't say it's really "cheaper" (although there are times of bounty) but the food quality is excellent. We can and vacuum seal and dehydrate what is left.
I also eat much healthier than previously from looking for ways to utilize what is on hand (large amounts of produce). It does take some work and planning but is very rewarding.
Plenty of wild pigs and possums in Texas. Although possum are the easiest wild animal to catch by far (you can chase them down and pick them up by their prehensile tail), I don't know how to prepare a possum and am unwilling to experiment.
Get 2 Picnic Pork Shoulder roasts, ~9 pounds each. On a 'V' roasting rack (I found a strong one, no moving parts, in stainless steel) in a common turkey roasting pan, place the two roasts, skin side down. Roast in 210 F oven to internal temperature ~180 F, ~22 hours. This time and temperature is an example of the old rule "low and slow".
Three old food chemistry claims:
(1) For food safety, it is sufficient to cook meat to 165 F.
(2) Cooking meat much over 180 F for too long results in the proteins unwinding, expelling their water, and becoming dry and tough.
(3) Meat, not overcooked, is tough only due to collagen. If not overcooked, the meat fibers are always tender. Collagen melts at ~160 F. So low and slow achieves food safety and melts out the collagen without overcooking the fibers.
Once at ~180 F, separate skin, fat, bone, and lean meat. Can freeze the lean meat in 2 quart covered plastic containers. Freezes well.
To eat, one version: With one of the 2 quart containers unfrozen, weigh out some of the cooked pork, say 6 ounces. Add ~3 ounces (weight) of some BBQ sauce. Cover and warm in microwave. Then, with a knife and fork, the meat fibers will separate easily, and that will also mix in the BBQ sauce.
Serve on hamburger buns or toasted bread slices.
A cheap pizza recipe:
At Sam's Club can get Fleishmann's Active Dry yeast, 2 packages, each package 1 pound, $6.18, $0.19/ounce.
So, ~750 milligrams of water, 1 tablespoon of the yeast, and 1 kilogram of "bread and pizza flour" (Sam's), can make 8 small pizzas. To one of the 8, add tomato sauce, Mozzarella cheese, and pepperoni.
Novel way to cook, without an oven: Get e.g., Amazon, $7.59, a roll of sheet Teflon, and cut a piece to fit the bottom of a standard 10 inch top, inside diameter, cast iron frying pan, $7.88 at Walmart. Will want a cover, and I use one, perfect fit, from a glass casserole dish, but Amazon sells some such pans with covers. Place the raw pizza on the Teflon in the frying pan, add the cover, place over medium stove top burner heat, can be ready to eat in ~19 minutes.
About $1 and 750 calories.
I really don't think you can get enough protein for $2.50 a day (3.33 adjusted inflation.)
Just a block of Tofu costs $3.
https://leannebrown.com/good-and-cheap-2/
I get a hard bound copy for everyone I am friends with when they go out on their own. It’s a great resource!
It's technically a meal! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk4EC6-YFbs
Now I looked at those food cost number, I cant help but think certain Food in US are relatively cheap. ( Edit: Ok I only realise it is 2016 ).
It was hard, and not getting enough nutrients. Although I dont believe I have much of a choice at the time.
I wish we could have meal plans for different region across the world, where we have meals and ingredients for nutritious food with the smallest budget.
I really like Food. And out of all the important things in life Food and Water is number one on the list. But it is also the most neglected. Not a single Tech Billionaires invested or moved into Food industry.
https://efficiencyiseverything.com/food/
(No affiliation)
(By the way, if you think that a pound or an ounce is a unit of weight, and not mass, that's a common (but potentially dangerous) misconception. Read the full discussion of this in this Frink FAQ entry.)
Why is the pound a measure of mass, not force (or currency?)
Well, in the United States, the pound has been officially defined to be a unit of mass since at least 1893 (by the Office of Standard Weights and Measures, and later by its successor, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), which was formed in 1901. The National Bureau of Standards was renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1988.) It has had its current value since 1959, defined as exactly 0.45359237 kilograms (also a unit of mass,) both by official notice in the Federal Register, giving it the effect of official U.S. policy, and as an official refinement by the National Bureau of Standards.
The latter document is very detailed and authoritative, and shows the very slightly different values it had in 1893 (then defined as 1/2.20462 kg, a mass), the value from 1894-1959 (then defined as 1/2.2062234 kg, also a mass, which only differs from the current exact value of 0.45359237 kg by about 1 part in 10 million.) All are quite unambiguous on this point. No standards body has, as far as I can tell, defined pound as a unit of anything other than mass, at least since 1893. (Legislation before that was ambiguous about the distinction between mass and weight.)
In the United Kingdom, the pound has been officially defined as a mass since the Weights and Measures Act of 1878, which defined it as having a very slightly smaller value (equal to approximately 0.453592338 kg.) The value of the pound was unified to its current value in all countries by 1960.
The "pound-force" or "lbf" is a measure of force, though. But that's not the pound.
If you want the pound-force in Frink, use lbf or pound force (with no hyphen, which would be indistinguishable from subtraction.) The unit force is a synonym for the unit gravity, which is the standard acceleration of gravity, defined to be exactly 9.80665 m/s2. The "pound-force" is defined as the mass of a pound multiplied by the standard accleration of gravity as defined above.
More details from the (U.S.) National Institute of Standards and Technology:
Appendix B9 of the NIST Guide to SI Units. Please note that the pound is only listed in the mass section and not in the force section. This is from NIST Special Publication 811 which is considered authoritative. NIST Handbook 133, Appendix E. (This document and its predecessor, NIST Handbook 44, use italics or underlining to show the units that are defined in terms of the survey foot. (I'm glad to see that the 2007 version of this publication apparently contains fixes for most of the several errors that I reported and they acknowledged but sat on for 3 years since first reporting!) Official definitions from other countries:
From the United Kingdom's National Weights and Measures Laboratory (NWML), the definition of pound as a mass. Also see their FAQ. U.K. Weights and Measures Act part I, section 1.1, defines the pound as a mass of exactly 0.45359237 kilogram. Canada's Weights and Measures Act (this is rather fuzzy-headed; it defines the pound as exactly "45 359 237/100 000 000 kilogram" (a mass) but does so under the heading "Measurement of Mass or Weight".) It correctly defines the kilogram as a measure of mass earlier. If the pound is defined as a multiple of the kilogram, and the kilogram is mass, then the pound must be a mass also. This legislation should be amended to remove the misleading heading. Highly-regarded reference books like the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 83rd Edition (2002-2003) has the definition given above in terms of the kilogram. The pound is, again, a mass and nothing else. (This is also true in the 1960 edition, but the 1960 edition has some non-self-consistent uses of "foot pound" as a unit of energy which has been corrected in later versions, which cite only "foot pound-force" as a measure of energy. Thanks to Bob Williams for the historical research.)
I was surprised too when I first started researching the pound. I had been told it was a unit of force by one engineering professor, and I believed it. It turns out he was wrong, I was wrong, and I realized I had better unlearn my mistakes and start using the right terminology before I made a big, costly blunder. If you don't believe it, please do your own research and it might help change your mind. You don't have to believe me, but I think you should believe your own country's standards bodies (and probably comply with your country's legislative definitions if you don't want to breach contracts!) After all, if you don't use the units properly when they're unambigously defined by both standards bodies and law, then you're the one with the liability.
If you can find any evidence that a standards body in the United States or any other country has ever defined pound as anything but mass (well, at least in the past century,) please send it to Alan Eliasen. Please, authoritative references only--not some individual's webpage or old confused textbook.
Yes, I have this discussion over and over again.
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
If you want the British currency, use GBP or Britain_Pound, or, for the historical buying power of the pound in, say, the year 1752, try pound_1752.
