Costco - Food for a whole year - $799 Awesome | Hacker News Reader

Costco - Food for a whole year - $799 Awesome

costco.com

53 pointspitdesi50 comments

Let's say you don't care about the "lasts N years" part, but you want to construct a least-cost diet which is not significantly less nutritious than a more expensive food selection. What foods would be included? To keep it simple, presume shopping to be limited to Costco/Sam's/etc.

I did some math at Costco after examining a 50 lb bag of rice. Someone earning minimum wage must work five minutes to purchase 2000 calories of rice. While I know one can not live on rice alone, has there ever been a time or place in the world's history when so little effort was required for sustenance?

Beans are nearly as cheap as rice when bought in bulk. Beans and rice are a complete protein. Potatoes are cheap too, and are a complete protein by themselves. You could throw in some fish oil and a multivitamin and still be paying around a buck a day for food.

I would much prefer that diet to living off of canned goods.

So you've accounted for protein, but you need a lot more than that. For example, without vitamin C, you'll get scurvy. Without B12, your nervous system can be permanently damaged.

I'd highly recommend a diet of more than just beans, rice, potatoes, and fish oil. You need to include some fruit and vegetables, and if you're going to be totally vegan, some sort of B12 source (fortified foods or a vitamin pill).

Sure, that's why I suggested a multi. If you want to get the vitamins naturally I'd suggest some cabbage and the occasional egg to get your C and B12. Actually, eggs and cabbage will pretty much cover all your nutritional needs but aren't the cheapest way to bulk macronutrients. Still, 50 cents worth of cabbage and eggs a day would be enough to cover your vitamin and mineral needs.

I wouldn't eat that diet, personally. I'm a paleo guy and value quality veggies and meat. I'm on a student budget and I invest most of it in food. If I were raising a family of 6 on my current wage though, I think rice/beans/eggs/cabbage/fish oil would be a pretty solid, reasonable diet on the cheap, throwing in as much extra meat and veggies as I could afford.

Potatoes - PROTEIN?? 2% is hardly worth mentioning. They're mainly starch.

Don't forget eggs too. Eggs + beans + rice + salt/chili/other spices = tasty and fairly nutritious meal

The company that sells this is called Shelf Reliance. They are a MLM scheme with consultants all over the USA taking advantage of the general doomsday fear in the community.

The super-positive comments on the Costco website give it away - "i use it into my everyday cooking! the freeze dried fruits and veggies are oh my gosh...amazing!" -- (hint: they are all/mostly consultants posting).

Most consultants will beat or match Costco pricing, so if you are hungry-poor, can survive on ~800 calories a day and enjoy the taste of powdered donkey, or you are the paranoid type, contact your local Shelf Reliance(tm) consultant for an in-home consultation and party today!

http://www.shelfreliance.com/?affiliate=bl4k

Is there seriously a "general doomsday fear" in the US? I see small hints and mentions in news items that suggest a lot of people have their backs up, but what doom exactly are they expecting?!

I think there is always a high chance of 1-4 week regional disruptions (big storms, etc.).

There's also a pretty common fear that you may not have enough money to buy food in the future -- I think barely-middle-class people are not as familiar with the programs like food stamps, etc. which are going to usually prevent that as they decline in income. They may be homeless and out of work, but it's very unlikely that they will starve.

When I was in High School living in North Dakota, Dad always kept a week or so of food and propane for a heater / BBQ in stock all winter. It was not uncommon to have a storm that made travel bad for a couple of days at a time. We did have a couple of power failures that lasted into multiple days.

Fair point. I guess the population in the US is far more spread out than it is here in Australia (largely based around the capitals and coast).

Wouldn't people do well to just hold a larger stock of tinned food (for example)? Would dehydrated food require clean water to become edible?

Only time in my 30+ years that I've heard of any even remote survivalist/prepare-for-the-worst stuff in Australia was my parents filling the bath on NYE 1999 just in case utilities failed due to Y2k!

HN seems to think this is a good idea... it looks like TVP, Textured Vegetable Protein is the primary source of protein in this mix.

Have you eaten TVP? It was a staple of my childhood. It is not something I would want to consume more than once a week or so. You can turn it into something that almost passes for sloppy joes? but really, I'd place it a few rungs below tofu on the ladder of foods I'd like to eat.

I mean, to be clear, I'm sure it's fine food for when TSHTF or what have you. I'm just saying; if I had to eat that stuff every day? yeah, I'd go nuts.

From the product description: "The taste and texture of TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein) is consistent with real meat, making it a great addition to vegetarian diets"

Uh, this makes me wonder if the person writing that has either never tasted meat or never tasted TVP or both? Now, the TVP sloppy joes my mom used to make weren't bad (you know, maybe once a week) but nobody is going to confuse TVP with meat. even that mechanically separated meat that was featured in another article. TVP is another thing entirely.

Why would anyone feed their children TVP? Were your parents vegetarians, or cheap (and not very creative about food)?

let's just say a little bit of both. I ate a lot of tofu and rice plus nutritional yeast, too. My parents had me and then left the commune shortly thereafter (oh shit, we have a kid! we have to move out and get real jobs now!) with no real career experience, so they were raising a kid on 'entry level' state employee wages, which isn't much. (now, state employee retirement pensions, on the other hand? pretty nice. All my younger siblings got as much college as they wanted paid for.)

as far as health goes, TVP, as far as I can tell, is pretty okay. It's one of the few (single source) vegetarian sources of complete protein.

It sounds like you were probably a child of the 70's. It wasn't exactly a decade of plenty, and even with money, good eating often meant overcooked roast or steak and potatoes, or maybe stinky fish. The only garlic available in most places was a near delicacy, two small heads in an open fronted box wrapped in cellophane.

I was born in '80. (I'm weeks from turning 30.) rdl mostly had it, I think. My parents were mostly vegetarian, and they were poor, or at least wise enough to dump every penny they could get into real-estate.

I'm actually interested in this not for ramen profitability but for survival rations. I'm not some post-apocalyptic tinfoil hat wearing doomsday person, but I recognise that I live in an area that can (and has) had natural disasters from time to time. In those cases, food quickly becomes in short supply and sometimes transport isn't possible. I've been thinking about building a up a 'canned food reserve' but this is a much better solution because of the longer shelflife.

Note for the same reasons I'm investigating solar power, rainwater tanks and bottle propane for cooking/water heating.

What about rice and kimchi? You could even pound the rice into glutinous rice cakes for dessert!

satellite internet connection and dominos.com = solved.

Yuck! Dominos=cardboard http://lh6.ggpht.com/_IBXj-Mt28qU/SyXP2nBOiiI/AAAAAAAABrE/nq...

Dominos redid their entire standard pizza recipe (new sauce, crust, etc.) and pricing structure recently.

$6 for a 2 topping large carryout is reasonable, and their web ordering and status is quite good.

Give them another shot - you might be surprised, as I was.

http://goto11.net/youve-got-30-minutes-to-write-a-python-scr...

I use the Ready Store for this: http://www.thereadystore.com/

They have a good selection, with decent prices and sales.

On a practical note, seeing as most of the #10 cans contain 30-50 servings, you'd have a lot of open cans at a time if you wanted any sort of variety.

I wonder if the "6 Cans of Whole Eggs (236 servings per can)" are freeze dried or liquid.

I also think I'm overthinking this...

From the Costco comments:

"The contents of opened cans can be easily stored in glass mason jars, the ones used for canning, with a canning lid which is vacuum-sealed onto the jar with a food saver jar attachment. For jars which are in constant use, use a white plastic screw-on lid available with canning supplies."

Beats Ramen. However, "one year supply dehydrated & freeze-dried food profitable" doesn't have the same ring to it as "ramen profitable."

Yes, it beats ramen, etc, but where do you store it? Having space to store all those cans would have doubled my rent back in the day. I would however, have been a popular guy in 1999.

Replace your mattress with it: http://www.collapsenet.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=...

Yes, and it sounds a lot more complicated than ramen. While a box of ramen is a meal by itself (for a sufficiently loose definition of "meal"), you'd have to open a lot of these cans to cook anything, which would require a lot of plastic pots and storage place and shorten the shelf life.

But it's a cool idea for that nuclear bunker/zombie shelter in the backyard...

Completely ignoring nutritional need, storage costs, water to reconstitute food, etc, Ramen is much cheaper.

At $1.39 for 6 [1] it comes out to $253.68 [2]. That makes the Ramen only diet more than 3 times cheaper than the Costco food.

[1] http://www.walgreens.com/store/c/a/ID=prod6010665-product

[2] 365 * (3 *(1.39 / 6)) - Rounded up the cent

Ramen can be had for as little as 7 for a dollar, on sale.

However I think that a heavily ramen diet without veggies and meat would lead to serious health problems.

This is pretty clearly just emergency prep food; no sane person would eat it on a routine basis, unless you had extremely limited logistics. It's cheaper to just buy normal bags of rice, etc. than to get the canned form, plus, it would be a difficult decision between suicide and homicide if stuck eating this for an extended period by choice.

It's great to see mass-market retailers get into food security like this, but buying a pack of (IMO barely edible) food like this is probably not the most efficient way to solve the problem.

Generally what people do in places which are often subject to 1-4 week natural disasters (big snowstorms, usually) is to maintain an extra stock of storage-compatible foods that you eat on a daily basis. i.e. if you eat rice, buy a 50 pound bag. If you eat meat, buy a quarter cow and put it in a separate chest freezer (which can last through a few weeks if not opened, even without electricity). If you eat a lot of veggies, go for #10 cans, or ideally, grow and can your own.

The idea is to get the benefits of bulk-purchasing what you actually eat (so, lower cost per unit all the time), plus having an emergency capacity.

Once you have a month or so of ready stores in your pantry, then maybe consider the long-term 10 year storage stuff. Reducing your daily costs by buying your daily foods in bulk gives you enough left over to start accumulating other supplies.

I would be interested IF I could read the nutrition label and ingredients. Ah, here is the PDF: http://www.costco.com/Images/Content/Misc/PDF/443250n.pdf

The inclusion of freeze dried fruits and veggies sounds promising, but I do wonder how the TVP would taste after a while.

Also, the inclusion of "hard winter wheat" means either boiling it to make a mash, or having a hand-powered or electric grain mill present in order to bake bread.

Further, the idea that "1/4 cup" of white rice counts as a serving, is certainly an idea that is foreign to most Americans and I am sure, many Asians as well. I suppose "48 servings of white rice per can" sounds better than "each can contains 12 cups of rice".

As a reviewer points out, this year's supply provides about 1220 calories per day. If computed as 2000 calories per day, the supply drops to 223 days.

Seems lucrative at first, but I would subject myself to eating canned food for a year. This kind of diet is completely deprived from nutrients. I can only imagine the state of my health after a year. For a little more than that one could shop at Trader Joe's and eat fresh, organic and locally made produce.

This sounds like a better value than the food insurance companies Glenn Beck promotes. I would be interested in how many calories are in this package. I eat >3000 a day when training hard.

...training hard for the apocalypse?

I wish I had a cabin in the middle of nowhere in Northern California to stash something like this for when the world falls apart...

I'd like to see someone on here try this, ala JetBlue's Unlimited Flights for 30 days. It won't be me however...

Has someone tried this stuff? I don't know if I want to spend 800 bucks on something that I can't eat.

While I'm not arguing that you can get some nutrition from this there's no way it's healthy.

They could sell it with Dharma initiative labels.

Eat for $2 a day, spend the rest on your startup!

having only myself to feed i'd be concerned about the quantities of food per container. being obliged to consume the 236 servings of eggs after opening one of the 6 cans in that set would be a tall order.

i've always understood "ramen profitable" to be a figure of speech. does anyone seriously eat that filth?

i think a real hacker would be aware of their body and its various biological processes ("know thyself" in a sense), and know that putting crap like that into your "human experience system" is foolishness regardless of your budget or time constraints. i work 12-14 hour a day 6 days (minimum) a week and still cook for myself.

when my budget was tight my crock pot was my best friend. dried beans, frozen veggies, minimal cheap starches, cheap fresh fruits, onions, garlic, canned tuna/cheap lean meat, a few cans of seasoning and some olive oil were still under $100/month.

nowadays i eat like a king for $400/month and i'm eating the sort of meals i'd have to pay $20+ a plate for at a restaurant. if you're looking to cut your budget learn to cook. it's easy. it's a process-- optimize it. takes me 10 minutes. dont eat filth. crap in -> crap out.. neglect your body and live with the consequences. until we can grow replacements or figure out how to preserve them indefinitely, it's foolishness.

Digg and Reddit pander to this. Don't kill HN.

yep -_-

363 days ago

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

Yeah, think on it a couple of days. Then it will all become clearer.

They should add a guideline making the obvious observation that the age of any given account says nothing about the length of site use by the account holder. Maybe then we could can the typical "semi-noob illusion" junk.

There was an imgur link on the front page a couple of days ago. I believe that was the first time ever. Now the Costco Cavalcade (http://www.reddit.com/domain/costco.com -- these SEO clowns have learned that they can grow an account legacy by posting this Costco garbage constantly) has made its way here. Yay!

Protip -- Someone should post that TIL that Costco Sells Caskets! Instant front page!

Personally, I would have been much more amenable to an argument why this is not Hacker News versus why HN is Reddit.

I vote that all future bank bailout money gets spent on Costco "Food for a Year," and then let the banks fix themselves.

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