Engineer eats efficiently for $2.50 a day (2016)
futureboy.us
futureboy.us
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.
Dried Beans (like chili) can be cooked in the Instant Pot without problem. Not sure if anyone's tried a Chef IQ.
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)
> ...gluten is something that seems to be a culprit of IBS symptoms in certain people. That doesn't mean that gluten is bad, just that it causes a poor reaction in some people...
I've watched it first hand with my wife -- who is 1/2 Italian -- giving up pasta and bread in the last few years. It has made a huge difference in her daily quality of life with respect to digestive issues (mainly bloating and gassiness).
Gluten is a protein so it's not hard to imagine that either this protein is not easily digested by some folks or some byproduct of its digestion feeds some specific gut bacteria that produces inflammatory compounds. If Celiac is a full blown immune response to inflammation caused by gluten, then it seems reasonable that some folks would have a spectrum of reactions to barely registering it or somewhere in between (like my wife).
It's possible that it's some other compound that's prevalent in wheat, but avoiding wheat-based products has been life changing for my wife. I would add that this has developed with age similarly to how she has become lactose intolerant as well around the time she turned 40 so if you're in your 20's or 30's and you think this is malarkey, well, give it time (and really enjoy your lactose and gluten!).
Why folks downvoted the original comment, I don't understand; this is based on firsthand experience hacking her diet and observing how she felt. I'm not here on some anti-gluten crusade (my kids eat and enjoy plenty of gluten for the entire household!)
And don't forget to avoid Glyphosate :-)
> This describes my wife almost exactly. Developed gluten and lactose intolerance right around 40.
Her reactions are not as severe as your spouse's -- just gasiness and general abdominal discomfort (enough that it's not worth it for the satisfaction of eating pasta and dairy day-to-day). She will still occasionally indulge.
I, for one, still happily consume gluten and lactose (to her chagrin) despite being Asian.
Gene test?
Trying to avoid gluten?
Don't forget, first you have to suspect to have a gluten problem. There are many forms of celiac. And there are forms that are unlikely to be diagnosed by a doctor. They may even not know what you have if you tell them the name of the disease and have to google it.
No, it is not. It comes in a bunch of varieties and there is news: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3945755/
"Most gluten intolerance seems to be nothing but hypochondria"
Well, tell this to somebody who nearly died of it. First diagnosis when I walked into the hospital: HIV in the final stage! But I have a super rare form of it. Incidence 1:100000
From the abstract
>Fish exposed to glyphosate develop digestive problems that are reminiscent of celiac disease
The rest seems to be theorizing with no empirical evidence
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7545723/
Glyphosate exposure, either through active ingredient alone or commercial herbicide formulations, has the potential to induce dysbiosis by creating an imbalance between commensal members of the gastrointestinal microbiome and opportunistic pathogens. Glyphosate may be a critical environmental trigger in the etiology of several disease states associated with dysbiosis, including celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Glyphosate exposure may also have consequences for mental health, including anxiety and depression, through alterations in the gut microbiome. However, the research surrounding glyphosate’s effects on the gut microbiome also suffers from numerous methodological weaknesses including artificially high-doses, insufficient duration, proprietary ingredients and an over reliance on animal models. Future long-term studies examining physiologically relevant doses in both healthy and genetically susceptible populations are warranted to determine the real risk posed to human health.
It took a while for my wife to zero in on pasta and bread as one source of her bloating and gassiness (lactose being another). She grew up eating plenty of pasta, bread, and lactose. But cutting it out has helped reduce digestive discomfort now in her early 40's.
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... ?
Managed to find the 798ml cans of beans for 1.25 (I think it was) in the last few months at a No Frills. Def local production. Again, was the only weirdo stocking up for the next 1-2 years. Yeah dry beans are cheaper but I’m lazy.
You may also find me filling my cart when 798ml cans of crushed tomatoes go on sale, which is more common than the above sales.
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.)
More info:
Outlawing being poor/homeless, so the poor can be arrested just for not having housing. Or for debts.
Then, making laws that inmates can be provided to corporations to work.
Boom, some slavery.
[0] https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery
Then MAGA will be like "hey, wait a minute, this seems kind of like slavery. Isn't that something we stopped teaching in school".
Are the companies who profit from it really that influential?
I also don't understand why some HNer's insist on downvoting simple questions. Trying to silence questioning is not healthy for society.
What you have seen (whey without calves harm) is probably typical an old farming practice OR of some rural family production. That’s great for them and their cows, but have nothing to do with 99% of the milk consumed daily, even the best quality you can buy wherever else those farms are.
If HN is about the struggle for truth I expect a certain amount of intellectual rigor in comments.
I also read your explanation in sibling thread. IMHO you’re right about the calves not-killed if we only look for a specific time frame , but it can’t work on the long run. If you can please share some materials for us to learn more. Also, cows definitely needs a clave to start the milk production.
Then what happens to the calf? They raise it to the end of it's natural lifespan as a pet? Are male and female calves treated differently?
> Most Dairy cows don't need to have a calf to produce milk.
I can't find anything to corroborate this. Every source I find on the topic says dairy cows produce milk for up to about one year after giving birth, then they need to be re-impregnated to begin producing milk again. Do you have a source for this claim?
In a small dairy situation the calves are kept off of the cows for either the morning or the evening milking and so the cows' milk production remains high the entire time. The calf weans, but from the cow's udder's perspective the calf is still suckling like mad and so the cow keeps producing milk. The calf grows up and is bred themselves, doubling the milk output over the course of two to three years.
Now this isn't sustainable in a paperclip-optimizer kind of way, so only the best milkers are kept and the ones that either have a hard time getting pregnant, or are ornery, or produce less milk, or get sick regularly wind up getting harvested for their meat. But there's no need to kill the calves (at the local dairy scale).
Side note: on the other side of the calves killing scale, some farmers (in Swissland at least) started to kill male calves directly at birth because they found it more profitable at scale. Yummy Toblerone!
This is objectionable if you find any of the meat farming practices objectionable, but whey itself does not necessitate killing anything.
A replacement rate breeding program for cows that rotates dairy production is probably possible. It's just not what we seem to want.
This is assuming that people would eat calves if they weren't killed so that we can take their milk.
We _could_ (probably) figure out a way to not require killing them, I just don't know what that would be.
If god appeared and said that the Hindus were right all along and cows are sacred and milk is their gift to us - we'd do it just fine.
If AI means "Artificial Intelligence" I do not believe you.
Not sure I'd single out whey. It is really all dairy.
And, all chicken, all beef, etc... If you dig into the actual mechanisms of how harvesting is done, it is a horror show.
We do it anyway.
When I sit down and think about the amount of murder required to maintain any omnivorous or carnivorous creature, it's really a mindwarp. I (at least) have been quite separated from it my whole life, until I started hunting, really.
Wolves and large carnivores especially are just brutal. They will take your children down and eat them alive in front of you. Fair exchange we drive them off and kill you quickly, is at least one way of looking at it. But there's no "pleasant" way of looking at any of it.
For example, most people have some sheepishly held position against factory farming despite partaking in it. And they think it's wrong to kick a dog and a pig and a cow. And watching a documentary like Dominion or Earthlings makes them feel horrible so they'd prefer not to watch it.
Edit: man this irritates me. You brought up macros, when talking about being too poor to eat. Open your eyes.
The point was that you can't escape the need for food. Skipping a meal is not any kind of strategy, unless your plan is to slowly starve yourself to death. I guess if you literally have $0, and no credit card, and your paycheck is tomorrow, and there is zero food in your fridge or your cupboard, and you have no friends that would give you a bite to eat, and there are no soup kitchens near you, then skipping a meal could make sense. Was that your circumstance?
But, if you have 1500 calories in your fridge for today, skipping breakfast and eating 750 for lunch and 750 for dinner is one way to do it. You could also eat 500 for breakfast, 500 for lunch, and 500 for dinner.
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.
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.
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.
And that's if you can even process a high joghurt diet without issues which isn't the case for plenty of people.
Plenty of people exist who aim for >200g of protein daily - but that’s objectively overkill. There’s very little benefit, if any, to going over a half gram of protein per pound of body weight.
https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
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.
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.
There was a pretty well covered case something like 15 yrs ago of someone massively obese that completely stopped eating and only consumed supplements to keep the bodys micro nutritions In order (which was continuously monitored by doctors). Iirc, he kept it up for 2 years until he got his target weight.
It's definitely a solid advice to keep to that rule of thumb though, albeit it'd say it's mostly a caloric delta you've gotta worry about: don't go beyond a sustained deficit of ~1k (consumed calories - used calories). It's fine too spike it occasionally in both directions, but going beyond will likely get you in trouble unless you're monitoring your health very closely
"Angus Barbieri (1938 or 1939 – 7 September 1990) was a Scottish man who fasted for 382 days,from 14 June 1965 to 30 June 1966. He subsisted on tea, coffee, sparkling water, vitamins and yeast extract while living at home in Tayport, Scotland, frequently visiting Maryfield Hospital for medical evaluation. Barbieri went from 456 pounds (207 kg) to 180 pounds (82 kg), losing 276 pounds (125 kg) and setting a record for the length of a fast."
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat%2C_Sick_and_Nearly_Dead
0 - religion causes you to do strange things sometimes.
0 - loosely, in a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend way
Friend thought they wouldn't have gotten scurvy, if they prepared the instant ramen with the seasoning packet, but they ate only the noodles brick. I don't know what brand ramen it was, but the Maruchan and Nissin nutrition info I looked at just now doesn't show any Vitamin C currently.
I love ramen as much as the next person, but I wouldn't try to make it the entirety of my diet.
[0] low salt levels in your blood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia
The cheap baked beans from the same supermarket are just under 1/3 that price per tin: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/299669062
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.
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.
I think what you'd find as you scaled it is that you'd turn into ConAgra.
What we need is 1000s of solutions that don’t.
Every case is a special case if you treat enough variables, nothing is close in high dimensional space.
Precisions farming and decentralised housing and transport are steps in that direction.
Its too circumstantial to scale to even a dozen people in a locality. It isn't that it doesn't scale to the masses, its that it doesn't really scale at all
Of course, when you're trying to get by on $3/day, you can't be picky: you can't demand organic produce, for example.
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.
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
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)
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)
I believe potatoes still end up winning in terms of healthiness/vitamins/cost but that will depend a bit on region.
Where I'm at, you can get 5lbs of russets for $3.
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.
Trying to gather a cheap and healthy nutrition profile from random items in a grocery store is a task doomed to fail.
>3. Be Safe! Maintain and track nutrition, get enough calories, and don't eat rotten food.
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.
The first day is an outlier because it was on a day of fasting among many Christians.
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.)
For me, I like to eat my calories than drink them if I had to pay attention.
I liked this challenge and think it presented a lot of solid merits.
Most peeled know what they should or need to do but finding out own path to do the things no one can do for us evens little at a time is huge.
I'm sure that the calorie intake could be increased without costing too much extra though, by padding things out with rice and/or beans.
Thank God, they don't let kids do that dumb sh_t anymore, but this was over 30ya.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.unicef.org.au/stories/plumpy-nut-peanut-butter#:....
That comes down to a little over $1.50 a day, that's great!
Seems like it comes in packets of about 500 calories each, containing 40grams of carbs, 30.3 grams of fat and 12.8gram of protein.
Unsure what fiber contents are like but Wikipedia does list that it includes vitamins and minerals.
> as of 2018 Plumpy'nut patents have expired in the US, UK and the European Union
Also says it's manufactured in the US, I wonder if these are available at food banks and such, maybe even in schools and if parents know about it.
Edit: additional fiber is included as well according to Wikipedia.
Example most people don't know about: Sudan. There is a civil war there, for two years now, millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands dead, terror, whole villages wiped out. And now the refugees starve. And why?
Because the fighting sides don't let aid trucks across their lines.
Compassion is the cure, but not passive compassion, active ass-kicking WWII-Allies-style compassion.
I mean Soylent's naming couldn't be more on the nose. At least it's not made of people (as far as I know).
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 (:
Industrial food drying is usually done fast (ie: high heat). Vacuum/freeze drying might retain more nutrients but it’s a more $$$ process.
(Before was just mentioning the C getting destroyed).
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.
His meals are essentially a massive variety of vegetables + some sardines. It's fascinating work even if I wouldn't replicate it myself.
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.
OTOH, either system could be structured to be based upon compassion, if the people in charge made the choice to do so. Any human system could be altered to incorporate compassion into its motivations and mechanisms.
I'm a fan of fettered capitalism with socially-conscious citizens, but that requires the wealthy, middle class, and poor to be compassionate. What is important is to internalize the currently external costs corporations impose upon the environment and populace to make their profit.
For now, it's 'by the wealthy for the wealthy', no matter which system is dominant, no matter which religion is in power, no matter which ethnicity to ruling class represents. That is because compassion is sorely lacking in this world's peoples, especially its rulers.
The British stood by and allowed the Irish to starve, whilst Ireland was exporting record amounts of food that wasn’t potatoes, as they were concerned about charity being a corrupting influence on the Irish wretches.
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.
So you think your gut is meant to digest human flesh? Fun worldview
> eat anything but conscious beings
"conscious" here means "possessing consciousness" not "conscious right now".
> include eating people who are asleep or passed out, or dead
The point is we eat what we think is acceptable to eat not just any random thing we can digest. Because we have some norms about what is OK to eat. Most norms say eating humans (dead or alive) is bad. Other norms say eating animals is also bad. QED.
The original question was about a "meal that provides all the essential nutrients the average person needs to stay healthy over the long term"
The simplest, easiest, and the most correct answer is "just eat animals".
Of course, one can be "smart" about their diet, spend a lot of time on carefully balancing vegetables, fruit, grains and tofu, while also making sure to consume proper blend of vitamin and mineral pills and doing regular blood tests. BUT that's far from a "single meal", far from "easy" and "simple", and consumes a lot of time and mental capacity which many humans might not have a luxury to allocate in order to be fellows with farm animals, I think.
> The simplest, easiest, and the most correct answer is "just eat animals".
Stop right there. This is playing switcharoo.
You devised a hypothesis that elegantly goes like "healthiest simplest diet is what is closest to your own body". (And that you used as a justification to eat other animals)
But hey I guess the closest to your body is other humans. So seeing as you now backtrack and are not suggesting humans eat humans, thankfully you understand that the original question implies some norms about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable to eat even if it is contains all you need.
Now you just need to see why growing numbers of people think about eating not only fellow humans but fellow animals who are conscious, feel pain and suffer, especially the ones who grow up for consumption and suffer entire life tortured as unacceptable and you're all set.
In addition there is another "little problem" with your argument and that is that humans don't eat through by absorbing stuff like some sort of amoeba. It goes through complex digestive process that extracts some stuff from other stuff. And a bunch of stuff a human body can/should synthesize. Remember healthy eating is also NOT getting stuff you don't need and synthesize. And if you find the closest thing to what's in your body, that'll be a whole lotta stuff you do not need.
So no "just pick what's the same as your body" is not the most "simple healthy meal". On more than one level. It's just an excuse to justify a existing taste for meat.
Okay, maybe a single food source won't give you all your nutrition.
Okay, maybe "just eat fatty meat" is insufficient.
Okay, maybe it's not just the food with the most similar composition that is best.
Average nutrition discourse on social media.
Am I saying it's what you should do? No, primarily because I am not your mother, and also I don't know your current focuses in life.
As I understood your argument, you primarily don't like the idea of eating animals based on your beliefs, and you would oppose it even if animals were the healthiest food available ever. So I don't think we contradict each other here — I've heard you, and I understand your ethical position.
> And a bunch of stuff a human body can/should synthesize
You're 100% correct here, I am aware of that. For example, if you only eat meat, your body will synthesize glucose which it would be otherwise lacking (which technically means that meat does not contain the "optimal amount" of sugars).
> Remember healthy eating is also NOT getting stuff you don't need and synthesize
And also getting stuff that a body cannot synthesize enough. Like the notorious B vitamin pills that vegans pop like candy.
> It's just an excuse to justify a existing taste for meat
No excuse needed, god (or nature) made cows delicious — what do you think is the reason for that?
Again elegant but broken theory to justify a taste. Have you tried eating cow as it appears in "nature"? Let me know how delicious raw meat is. If you manage to kill it mano el mano as "nature" intended of course ;)
And of course apples are delicious. Beans. Avocado. Nuts.
Stuff can be very bad for you but taste very good. How do you know this is not that case with animals? If you think "god" made them tasty check maybe it was the satan actually? Animal conditions make me think of that guy more;)
The simple healthy meal is not eating animals. Coincidentally not the most tasty by a long shot but taste is subjective and always changes depending on what you get used to
Anecdotal like a lot of this but I take a single 2000mcg B12 pill once per week and have never been deficient in 19 years as a vegan. Once a week is pretty far from popping like candy.
Most people should probably cook their own food, avoid most ultra-processed foods (twinkies, not flour) and eat a healthy balance of food types.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't eat veggies. I am just saying that staying long-term healthy on a vegan diet seems to me much more complicated than just eating meat. Of course, eating a single product all the time is unhealthy, no matter what product — every living organism requires variance.
Much like a cow, I don't think about my digestive system -- I let the parasympathetic system take care of that :-)
> Of course, eating a single product all the time is unhealthy, no matter what product — every living organism requires variance.
This is a very different statement than "the simple answer is just fatty meat," which is what you originally claimed.
It's a different statement, but it's not contradictory. Simple answer is: eat fatty meat. Complex answer is: just like everything in this universe, it depends on many factors, and no single answer is correct in every single context - but eating fatty meat will get you 90% where you want to be for 10% of effort.
They had a hilarious setup, a cow with a plastic flap attached to the side. They would open the flap to get instant access to the guts of the cow to collect samples of food.
Animal flesh also doesn't contain all of the nutrients. Just plug 2000 calories of steak into Cronometer.com and look.
But only in diet camps (usually "carnivore"/"keto" camps) on social media do people tell you that research on saturated fats is debunked because it condemns the foods they wish to eat. We know that, for example, saturated fat increases apoB concentration in the blood which is independently causal in atherosclerosis.
We have converging lines of metaanalyses that show this connection which is why reducing saturated fat and LDL cholesterol are unanimous guidelines, not social media fringe positions. ;)
I have tried the hyped-up "carnivore" diet myself for over 1.5 years and counting (started at a tender age of 35), with different levels of strictness (diary/no diary, no cheat days / once a month / twice a month / once a week), while doing blood tests every month. My wife thought I would die, but I was curious whether I would die, or how quickly my health would deteriorate.
Happy to report that you're wrong (based of my own anecdata), and not only fatty meat (even without diary) does provide enough nutrients and energy, but it noticeably _improves_ the blood work results and _lowers_ blood cholesterol.
> apoB concentration in the blood which is independently causal in atherosclerosis
I am pretty sure you're unintentionally mixing up 'causal' and 'correlated'. Correlation is not causation. For example, atherosclerosis might be causal in in increased apoB concentration, or something else completely might be causal in both atherosclerosis and increased apoB concentration, but apoB concentration by itself could be independent from atherosclerosis, or even inverse causal.
> We have converging lines of metaanalyses that show this connection which is why reducing saturated fat is a unanimous guideline.
If you're a US resident, I'd like to let you know that your newly elected administration is allegedly going to change the unanimous guidelines soon. Not saying whether it's a good or bad thing, just that your argument from authority is much weaker in our discussion than you think it is.
You can healthily live for years just consuming cow parts (see "carnivore diet" — it works for most).
If one just eat potatoes or some other single plant, most are likely to lose their health in the long run.
1) Socially, not good idea. We are social creatures, and want to be accepted as a part of healthy group of our own species.
2) Eating your own kind more likely to transmit diseases, so less healthy.
Also cows and sheep have 99.99% same chemical composition as you, you don't really need to go that far, and any additional benefits (if any) are below statistical noise, but two downsides above are huge.
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.
- 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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
The fact that they eat it in quarters is wholly irrelevant, and your plainly obvious smear attempt against Engineer has not gone unnoticed.
This is why hard assets, like gold, housing increase in price at approximately the same rate that the banks increase the money supply (historically the number of dollars doubles every decade, other currencies are even worse).
If people saw the same increases in consumable prices as hard assets then they would be become aware of the falling value of the currency and the currency would quickly collapse in value as they stored their wealth in other things (hyper-inflation). However, the continuous optimisation of production through efficiencies of technology and associated automation means that consumables take less and less human time/effort to produce and so are going down in value at rate of around -5% year. This offsets the 7% devaluation of the dollar to give an overall price increase of consumables of 7-5 = 2% which is a level that the population finds acceptable without losing faith in their currency.
However, in recent decades the recent struggle and failure to keep devaluation of the dollar at 7%/year means that the official inflation figures need to be massaged, and so hard assets are removed from the basket goods used in the algorithm (e.g. housing related costs) and more consumables that have benefited from increased automation and reduced value are added.
If you run the algorithm used say 15 years ago, you'll find that it produces a much higher inflation figure than the one used today.
Official food inflation numbers put out by the US gov after Covid rocketed up to (a very unflattering) over 11% by mid 2022, and have only very recently gone back down to reasonable numbers, meaning you saw large increases in food prices that have only recently stopped increasing. (I don’t think the current administration would want to put out those numbers before the midterms if they were cooking the books).
If inflation tended to match to wage inflation then the scheme would be valid, but it doesn't. The newly printed money ends up unequally distributed over the economy, tending to end up with asset owners.
I don't understand why people even pay attention to the CPI. There are direct measures of how much money is being created, we can all just use that rate instead.
Because it's more obvious how one might try to use CPI to project future expenses.
"you saw large increases in food prices that have only recently stopped increasing" as quickly
Inflation is still happening, just not as fast. It doesn't compensate for the fact that prices are still up significantly from what they "should have been".
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm
>The CPI frequently is called a cost-of-living index, but it differs in important ways from a complete cost-of-living measure. We use a cost-of-living framework in making practical decisions about questions that arise in constructing the CPI. A cost-of-living index is a conceptual measurement goal, however, and not a straightforward alternative to the CPI. A cost-of-living index would measure changes over time in the amount that consumers need to spend to reach a certain utility level or standard of living. Both the CPI and a cost-of-living index would reflect changes in the prices of goods and services, such as food and clothing that are directly purchased in the marketplace; but a complete cost-of-living index would go beyond this role to also take into account changes in other governmental or environmental factors that affect consumers' well-being. It is very difficult to determine the proper treatment of public goods, such as safety and education, and other broad concerns, such as health, water quality, and crime, that would constitute a complete cost-of-living framework. Since the CPI does not attempt to quantify all the factors that affect the cost-of-living, it is sometimes termed a conditional cost-of-living index.
Many things, the majority of which are not food.
While I also find grocery prices in the US extremely bewildering/concerning (why are they so damn expensive!?), I think it does make some sense to benchmark more than just food.
For example, consider a hypothetical world in which grocery prices doubled but cost of housing for some reason halved – would you say that that's high or low inflation?
That is grocery inflation and housing deflation. These are just words that mean "the prices are going up" and "the prices are going down" respectively. There's no spiritual or metaphysical meaning behind them, and they don't say anything about the causes of prices going up or down. One can argue why the prices are changing, and maybe some or all of the answer is money supply, but one cannot argue if prices are up "because of inflation" or not -- if prices are up, there is inflation, regardless of the "root" (scare quotes because it's unclear that there can be such a thing as a root cause in something as complex as the global price system, which is a strange loop if there ever was one) cause.
USD? Wow, you're getting ripped off big time.
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.
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?
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
- 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'm not very up on the details of electricity prices, as I live in a place where it's cheap, but using a tiny air fryer to cook the sweet potatoes suits me just fine. Both are wrapped in foil and cut into chips or cubes. Kids love it for breakfast.
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.
Maybe if you bought it in 2005.
Which one?
I'm guessing that American refrigerators are like American cars?
Once you know where patches are (at least for mycorrhizal fungi which are some of the best) it is easy to go back and get them each year. But, it still takes time to find all the locations and there is competition from other foragers, humans as well as other animals.
Actually this is a bit of a myth. Pigs aren't very good truffle hunters. Dogs are used to find truffles. I suspect this is what the GP was thinking of.
Forage them (safely!) in the fall, dry them out (I stick them on a wire rack over a radiator for a few days), then into an airtight jar. Toss a few into soups/sauces the rest of the year.
> 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.
Airtight jars will only contain the pests within a single jar, not avoid them entirely.
If you're buying grain in large quantities, you can freeze it (in batches if necessary) for a day or so, after which you can keep it in those airtight jars. Large-scale de-pesting can be done with dry ice (floods the container with CO2 gas, asphixiating pests.
US-domestic / EU-domestic goods are generally fairly reliably moth-free. I've had issues with imported products from elsewhere.
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.
Cooking usually requires one to transform matter somehow, which takes longer or requires a few steps. Plus, as said, much energy is lost one the stove or oven. E.g. boiling a pot of rice (most energy lost on evaporating water) on gas (more than half of all energy shoots out from under the pot directly into the extractor) is, apart from not just heating the rice but also speeding up the absorption of water, wasting a lot.
I actually make it a low key sport to use my stovetop efficiently (switching to induction is one!).
It's more efficient to not generate and emit that heat at all but use the energy in your regular home heating system.
Rice, beans, vegetables, fruit and nuts in moderation, produces a relatively inexpensive diet.
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.
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".
It isn't that good reasonably priced vegetarian and vegan lifestyles aren't possible. The problem it's when you set "cheaper than animal products" as the bar to get under, it becomes very boring very quickly.
I do limit the amount of animal products I consume myself, and unless everything is in season somewhere somewhat local, I don't find myself saving a ton of money.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
IME that may be true for Bucharest or Prague, but definitely not Paris or London. Budget US grocers are much cheaper than nominal US prices so I don’t know why you’re comparing the cheapest in Europe to the average in the US (which, again, has a much less concentrated population leading to less competition). Average prices are higher but the floor in the US is significantly lower.
But I was just in Germany and was comparing prices to the HCOL coastal US city I live in.
That subreddit is not a reliable source of data or even anecdata.
To see Aldi's prices, you need to use a mobile application called instacart. It lets phones see the prices in-store at Aldi for the purpose of making shopping lists. It also has another set of prices for those that have food delivered or do "curb side pickup". Those are higher than the in-store prices.
If you compare the prices, do you still believe that food is more expensive in the US than in Europe?
But it is pretty great for their customers, and for their direct employees (for which I respect them a lot).
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.
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.
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/hig...
This is depressing considering they're still much more expensive than rice and even more expensive than wheat.
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.
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.
If you're cooking, $20/day is very high.
I may go try Kimchi in a burger, but... there will be some sort of protein.
Sorry I didn't enunciate it in the early morning haze, but 20/day would be for two of us. As was the sushi :)
We're DINKs and cooking is a time luxury. Green Chef is our current "exactly the ingredients we need, nothing wasted" source -- and it's not exactly cheap.
First world probs, I know.
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.