How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2 (opens in new tab)

1) Depends on what you're using it for. Personally I think it tastes foul in salad dressing type applications. Olive oil is the gold standard for homemade salad dressings. I would imagine if you're frying donuts or potatoes or something, you'd want the more neutral flavor of canola instead of olive.

2) Rancidity issues lead to three problems. First is massively excessive processing which turns the healthy omega3 oils into trans fats, and also contamination from processing chemicals make the oil smell/taste weird compared to a more natural/real oil. The second is failure of the extensive processing means the stuff goes rancid really quickly, meaning you either dump half the bottle making it more expensive than olive or you eat rancid oil which is really unhealthy. The third problem is you can solve post-purchase rancidity issues by getting tiny little containers and using them up quickly, but that boosts the cost per oz way beyond something tastier, healthier, and longer shelf life, like olive oil or frankly pretty much anything else.

3) Its exceedingly heavily processed compared to most other off the shelf oils. This is not necessarily bad other than as noted above, but the more they screw around with it, the more chance to screw it up. Its easier to purchase un-screwed up evoo than canola.

4) Probably all that matters is your own local shopping experience, but I'm just saying where I live pretty much only shit grade canola is widely available, but pretty good olive (and other stuff) is available. I'm willing to believe there might exist a place, perhaps where you live, where really good excellent fresh properly minimally processed canola is available and no decent olive (and other) is available, although I find it pretty unlikely. The only oil worse than canola on my oil pecking order is generic "vegetable oil". Now that's not exactly made out of cucumbers carrots and tomatoes. Very disturbing, like a package at the butchers which refuses to officially identify itself beyond "meat, animal".

Those are the real world reasons why it usually sucks compared to olive oil. Outside of the real science based world, you run into stuff like over 90% of the canola is non-organic and GMO, so people who don't know anything about science are trained by advertising to respond by freaking out about it. I'm not so worried about pseudo religious "beliefs" as I am about real world biochemistry above. Everything is genetically modified to some extent or another, and as a class of product oil is processed a lot more than, say, lettuce, so being organic probably doesn't matter as much relatively for oil as for apples.

TLDR is its overly vulnerable to rancidity, so it either is super over processed to the point of icky, or has to be consumed while rancid which is icky, or goes bad fast so small bottles are more expensive per unit volume than a big jug of something that doesn't rot so quickly.

That was my reaction to your last paragraph, as well. Every time there's a thread about dealing with certain challenges of poverty, someone comes along and accuses the rest of us of having unrealistic expectations of poverty, and makes some snarky remark about hybrids or hookers or macbooks.

Instead of dragging the thread down, why don't we elevate the discourse?

I personally have plenty of real case studies to go from. There was the divorced mom of 3 whose ex hid his assets so he could duck child support, who my wife and I helped move between 3 different shelters. There was the mentally ill guy on disability who I took to the hospital on occasion, and who thanked me for teaching him to shop because for the first time in his adult life he had food at the end of the month. There's the single mom, recovering from mental illness, and her son who live with me right now. There are over a dozen homeless guys who come to my church on Sunday mornings for free hot breakfast, and over 6000 families who come to our food bank each year.

Would the information in the original post, or the comment you were criticizing, help all of those people? No, but it could help some of them.

Knowing which foods give the best bang-for-buck in terms of calories and nutrients, and having some basic idea of how to combine them to make some viable meals, is a big deal for some people. Gaining the basic confidence to attempt actual cooking, instead of feeling like you must rely on pre-packaged convenience foods, is a big deal for some people. Learning certain time management skills, such as planning ahead and taking a few minutes to start beans soaking in the morning, is a big deal for some people. Yeah, this thread as a whole is a pretty theoretical exercise, but it does have valuable practical implications even for those dealing with real poverty.

We can continue the quibbling over narrow cases and solutions, but it all comes down to a phrase in a memorable HN thread: your life depends on it, so fucking figure it out. Some of us are trying to and doing pretty good at it; naysayers add nothing.

Also, this situation is atypical. About 3/4 of the poor do have a car. 1/4 have more than one.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

This is just as disingenuous as the parent and isn't even close to representing the most common situation. The majority of people don't live next to a market that has proper fresh produce, but demand drives supply and there's a reason they don't.

Most upper and middle class families have largely abandoned the concept of fresh produce. When the poor become not so poor, they follow the same pattern. Not because they don't have a choice, but because they choose to.

My parents live a very affluent area. Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Pathmark (large local grocer), Mitsuwa (large Japanese market). Four choices within 1 square mile. All walkable. Not a single one of them has any significant fresh food selection. Not one. Oh, they have a ton of prepared food that you can buy by the pound, but not a whole lot if you want to make it yourself.

I live in a less affluent area (putting it mildly) and there is a farmer's market 5 minutes walking distance from my house that has only fresh produce, absolutely no prepared food. It has more fresh produce than all the the other 4 combined. Why? Because the people who live here can't afford prepared food. It's that simple. They would, if they could.

Perhaps a better title would be "how to eat as healthily as possible for £1 per day", but I tried to find a balance between precision and clarity.

Yes, the primary energy source is starch, but this is simply a necessity on such a limited budget. Even if you were comfortable getting the majority of your calories from vegetable oil or lard, it would be extremely difficult to find a palatable diet that incorporated such large quantities without breaking the budget.

All the techniques you learn from simple knife cuts to measuring to cooking techniques like braising and roasting, all those are object oriented development methods that can be applied to objects, objects of food. There's a lot of object oriented analogies between programming and cooking. If you can apply the "Julienne knife cut" method to a potato object, you can do it to an apple object and probably a carrot too.

Its a big linear programming puzzle to scale recipes. Did I mention scaling? Cooking is a whole barrel of square/cube law scalability puzzles to get cooking rates of different ingredients to intersect at one completion time.

There are some pretty interesting software engineering principles WRT recipe and meal design. Do you "waterfall" your holiday dinner design, or "agile" it? There's the sheer queueing theory joy of arranging everything just so, such that its all just-in-time ready to be cooked, when it works its awesome and when you're stuck in the weeds its panic time, just like hacking something before a demo.

Its fun to iterate thru optimization getting the "design pattern" applied to the puzzle better and better. And there's so many design patterns, and if you stay out of pastry work, those design patterns are pretty flexible.

One point where you have me is most programmers hate testing, so I can see an issue with cooking.

I am kinda bummed that most "computer geeky" books about cooking fixate solely on gadgetry like liq N2 or molecular gastronomy, cool as that might be, there's a whole nother world of describing cooking with flowcharts and object oriented methods and development models and algorithms and "real computer geeky" stuff like that.

I have noticed that at least some people cook like they program, across a sample size of about 3. Here's to hoping that cooking something never becomes a technical interview fad stunt, although I suppose worse has happened in the past.

I worked in a kitchen for a bit and I learned how to cook meals the way that restaurants do:

1. Buy everything as fresh as possible. 2. Get your prep work done first. 3. Pre-cook what can be pre-cooked. 4. Don't let anything spoil. Cook what's about to turn. Don't buy more than you will consume or cook for later consumption. 5. Make stuff from scratch. It's cheaper in the long run. 6. Rotate your ingredients and buy what's in season. It's fresher (#1) and cheaper (#5).

If you are a smart chef, you cook on Sundays and Wednesdays. You make more than you need for that day's meal and assemble fresh meals from the cooked ingredients prepared on those days.

It's easy. Buy a pound of bacon and cook the whole pound in the oven at once. Now breakfast is an egg or two in a frying pan on the stove and some bacon reheated in the microwave. Vegetables? Buy a bunch of brocoli, blanch it and put it in the fridge. Buy a bunch of spinach, blanch it and put it in the fridge.

Lunch is precooked chicken breast over blanched vegetables reheated in the microwave. Add rice you've pre-cooked if that's your thing.

Dinner is a salad and protein that's reheated. Chicken/beef/whatever.

Food isn't hard. I spend less than 4 hours cooking per week and I eat super healthy using only fresh ingredients I buy at Whole Foods and the local natural market. Grass-fed beef, marinated chicken, etc.

The only reason people in their 20's haven't learned to live this way is because nobody has ever made it a priority for them. The plethora of fast-food, college meal-plans, and bar-food/takeout have made it possible for a 20-something to never be hungry but instead chronically malnourished.

Seriously, you can code C++ but Rachel Rae is better in the kitchen? WTF? This stuff isn't rocket science.

You take raw materials, in themselves nutritious but unappetizing, and create a final product that looks and feel completely different, and manages to be satisfying in addition to being functional and necessary to survival.

Making something like bread starting from flour, yeast and water... what a brilliant hack!

Since I have started looking at cooking from this point of view I have been hooked.

Perhaps -- assuming the cooking phobia does indeed exist -- it's something more specific to the kind of people who gravitate towards HN than it is an attribute of 20-something computer nuts.

Supplements would be an interesting v0.3 or perhaps appendix to her next plan. I am well aware of body builders consuming 500 grams of protein/day in the form of weird expensive powders. But I wonder as a supplement to the existing diet how it works mathematically to eat perhaps 5 grams instead of 500 grams of supplement "complete" protein powder per day and then maybe cheap out on the bulk plant protein by selecting some plant that's not a complete protein. Carried out to a logical extreme I wonder if it "works" financially and nutritionally at $1/day or whatever to just eat rice and pop a multivitamin and a very small protein shake every day.

A midget bodybuilder. The rule of thumb is 0.75-1g protein/lb bodyweight, 0.5g for maintenance.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fats-and-cholest...

http://www.livestrong.com/article/459116-can-you-replace-veg...

I think there's a perception of bad taste with canola oil, but in my experience, this is due to cooks inexperienced in cooking with canola oil. There are temperature and duration changes that must be taken to account. Some recipes need adjusting and calibration and that takes a bit of experimentation. Not everyone has the patience for that or is willing to research the differences.

I once read that a slow cooker that doesn't boil/simmer was dangerous and assumed with no evidence it was because of chicken salmonella and the other usual undercooked contaminated protein problems but that rule may have actually been due to this bean toxicity.

This could be a serious issue for people fooling around with sous vide rigs. I have not taken that plunge yet.