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?
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.
> 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.
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.