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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Big bag of rice, and big bag of dry beans. Or cheap canned beans, if you're not up to cooking beans properly (I wasn't).

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.

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> If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you.

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.

This approach doesn't scale though. Its great that it worked for you, truly, but it unfortunately doesn't scale as a reliable way to budget for groceries

do things that don't scale

https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

That doesn't work for broad societal problems.

Paul meant his comment in the sense that that is a good way to START -- but then you have to figure out how to SCALE it.

I think what you'd find as you scaled it is that you'd turn into ConAgra.

The problem of modern society that we want one solution that scales.

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.

If I agree with you can I still be part of modern society?

We can both be part of post modern society, the answer is not to return to the old but embrace the new possibilities.

Precisions farming and decentralised housing and transport are steps in that direction.

I don't disagree, but this isn't it.

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

It can scale a bit more than one might think. For example, the Wikipedia page for Boston Haymarket even mentions that produce goes to super-cheap near weekly closing.

Still won’t scale to solve the problems at hand, even if you can find counter examples, it simply isn’t broadly applicable enough

The vendors hate that guy and won't sell off the stuff at the stalls out of general principal.

It is OK, they don't have to. It's a free market.

Of course, but the point is the idea isn't generalizable, therefor terrible advice.

Seriously? All advice is contextual.

Farmers markets are in no way cheap. I live here as well and they are luxury

Have you tried the Alemany Market? It is the best by far.

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.

They might not be affordable everywhere but they're definitely not unaffordable everywhere either.

Don't just count your calories. Count your protein, too. The beans aren't optional on this kind of diet. It's relatively common for people trying to stretch a budget to start substituting more grains instead of beans/eggs/tuna/peanuts/etc. and become protein deficient.

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.

Chickpeas, in particular, are both very cheap and very nutritious. If you are trying to save money, you can get 1 lb of dry chickpeas for ~$2.50 in the US which translates into ~4 cans of chickpeas (1/2 a cup == 1 can).

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.

How are dried beans a pain? You cook them in water with some salt and baking soda and they'll be perfect every time.

A lot of people don't soak overnight or know how to use pressure cookers and assume cans are the secret to tender, delicious legumes.

Interesting, I never soak them myself, just put them in a pot, cover with water, add salt and baking soda and let it simmer for an hour or so until tender.

Correct.

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.

Exactly the list I had when eating as a poor student. I still eat plenty of oats with plain yogurt for breakfast - they are an excellent breakfast food. The great thing is you can also scale their cost to your wallet, i.e. 100g of plain rolled oats plus 400g of full-fat yogurt comes out to around 1USD (0.25c for the oats, 0.75c for the yogurt here) and delivers about 600kcal total with very good macro profile. As your budget increases you can get increasingly fancy with olive oil, nuts, spices, cheese, etc. It's a very versatile food. Just don't fall into the trap of eating it with sugar when you're poor - you want to pair the oats with a lot of savoury fats so it keeps you feeling full for longer.

When I was poor I skipped breakfast. $0 cost.

The cost is 600 calories or so that you'd need to make up elsewhere.

So like, 2 20oz cokes?

Or a couple spoonfuls of sugar.

Sure, if that's the kind of macros you're looking for

My point was: your point was useless. How many poor people care about fucking macros?

Edit: man this irritates me. You brought up macros, when talking about being too poor to eat. Open your eyes.

You need to relax a little bit. Maybe if you ate some breakfast you wouldn't be so grumpy.

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.

> 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.

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.

I did about the same kcal/day, in grad school, when I was very trim.

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.

That minimum is just a rule of thumb for people that don't want / can't have medical supervision.

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

Maybe you're thinking of Angus Barbieri [0]:

"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/Angus_Barbieri's_fast

Joe Cross did a similar thing in his documentary "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead" [0] in 2010 when he went on a 60-day juice fast during which he lost 100 lbs.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat%2C_Sick_and_Nearly_Dead

Fasting is a funny thing, because the definition is highly variable. As a teenager I fasted a few times[0] while doing construction work —- mostly carpentry. How the hell does a 17 yr old get the energy to move lumber, swing a hammer, etc while fasting? The answer is liquid calories. Juice fasts feel the same to me, I’m going to guess that someone could easily gain weight on a juice “fast” if they drink enough.

0 - religion causes you to do strange things sometimes.

My cousin did the same thing - eat nothing but a vitamin for a month monitored by a doctor. He ended up in the hospital with type I diabetes which he probably could have held off for several more years if he had eaten more normally (genetics were against him so diabetes was probably in his future regardless, but he could have gone longer)

I wonder what the mechanism for that would be or if it was just coincidence. The medical consensus seems to be that T1D is triggered by a viral infection.

Who knows. This was 30 years ago and I'n not up on the latest. His family history though say he was susceptable

Fasting is a great way to induce massive muscle loss. In almost every case, cutting weight loss by 60% in order to preserve muscle is desirable

I knew a woman[0] who ate nothing but ramen noodles for six months during her freshman year at college. She collapsed in class and had to be taken to the ER. I forget what all was wrong with her, but she was at least severely malnourished and, if I recall correctly, had also developed a proper antique disease like scurvy.

0 - loosely, in a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend way

I actually mentioned scurvy because a friend of a friend had this happen to them in college. (Maybe we're talking about the same person.)

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.

What's sort of crazy is it takes a very small amount of vitamin C occasionally to avoid scurvy. Basically, if once a month you get the RDA of vitamin C you are unlikely to get scurvy. Throw some broccoli or brussels sprout into a meal rotation and you'll be scurvy free.

What was wrong with her almost certainly wasn't hyponatremia[0].

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

If living on Ramen, you are definitely not having a problem with low salt. Maybe opposite, high blood pressure from excessive salt.

I heard that the only known case of scurvy in the US in the past few decades was one such student who lived only on Top Ramen.

A friend of mine doing pre-med about 20 years ago said there were a couple of cases of scurvy at her university from the ramen/vodka diet some had chosen. I think the student union started handing out juice boxes and the problem was solved™

Friend of a freind got scurvy studying architecture. Senior year was so intense that they basically spent the entire time inside eating vending machine snacks.

Apparently in the UK baked beans are fortified with vitamin C because baked beans on toast is such a common staple food for college students.

This was a compelling idea, so I looked it up. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be true: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/253034146

I don’t know that they’d need to be, though. British-style baked beans come in tomato sauce. I just checked my tins, and they’re 36% tomato according to the ingredients list. Unfortunately they’re not that cheap anymore. We pay over CDN$2+tax per tin these days if you buy the multipack. A far cry from the CDN$1.50 all-in those Tesco beans would be.

It's worse than you think — those are the more expensive brand in that supermarket.

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

Interesting, it's something I heard from a co-worker who grew up in the UK. So perhaps its some sort of urban legend there. Thanks for the check!

> If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you.

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.

The secret has always been frozen chopped spinach. Absurdly cheap, doesn't go bad, blends/melts away into EVERYTHING! (Pasta, soups, beans for tacos, whatever).

I will note, the hard limit is you can't actually use it in a salad... but hey, tradeoffs

Frozen spinach is the least appetizing frozen food in existence. Soggy mush. Much better frozen choices for vegetables.

You missed the point that you put it in other things where it has minimal impact on the texture and taste.

Yeah, I don't think you are going to taste much of that in a stew (which is by definition a soggy mush). As noted you don't want to use this for anything fresh where mostly fresh vegetables will be superior.

> A working-poor friend also used to buy steel-cut oats, to eat breakfast for pennies.

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.

Steaming and rolling is much easer then cutting hard groats. I don't have insights into how this is done at scale, but it is easy to see the same remaining true.

Usually, prepared cut oats have a lower glycaemic index that can also be very helpful if you are trying to maintain a constrained diet.

He probably was buying them at a feed store. It used to be much much cheaper to buy steel cut oats and big bags of wheat berries as livestock feed. We ate them as kids in the 70s and 80s. We ground the wheat with a hand mill. Not sure if its cheaper now. Soy and corn are primary feed stock produced these days.

Depending on the time when you did this, those feed store oats may have been handled in a way that wasn't as safe. Regulations change all the time (and differ by country), but often livestock feed is held the looser handling regulations.

> If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you.

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)

Are you comparing white rice with white wheat pasta? In my experience whole rices (white, red, brown…) are as much nutritious as whole pasta but way tastier and often cheaper. Maybe it depends on the region. A plate of whole rice + some oil will last you hunger free for the entire afternoon.

You are right. I was under the impression that brown rice had less vitamins than enriched white but that appears to not be the case. Brown rice/whole rice would definitely be the best choice.

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.

Nice list - learning to vaccum seal with a foodsaver and freeze things helps too.

Dried Beans (like chili) can be cooked in the Instant Pot without problem. Not sure if anyone's tried a Chef IQ.

I like to buy 50 lbs bags of beans, rice, flour, lintels, etc on the cheap from restaurant supply stores and keep store them in 5 gallon buckets and make large batches of chilli, curried splitpea soup, daal, blackbean soup etc it cheap healthy easy to reheat later and I can throw it in a crockpot before work and it be done when I get home, this with a side rough chopped root vegetables and squash tossed in herbs and sprinkled with olive oil and roasted on a baking sheet makes a great meal.

Now make this feasible for family with kids.

Most children won’t eat beans and rice for a long time without lifelong trauma that yields strong reactions at mealtimes in adulthood.

Sometimes there's no choice. If it's between beans and rice or nothing at all, then it's going to be beans and rice. Soup kitchens, school lunches, etc are a great help too.

I respectfully doubt that: many east Africans grown with their traditional meal loves rice and beans if cooked well. I think there’s a lot about habits and parents mimicking. Sure they loves chicken, but beans too.

There’s also that study where they feed a mother cat with food that contains brocolis perfume When then kitties got weaned they prefer brocolis than fish. (I can’t find it back on google sorry, perhaps it was another legume)

I’m kinda anti rice in Canada. We grow lots of wheat but not rice.

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)

One downside: wheat has gluten and a lot of folks are gluten intolerant to degrees (from mild gassiness to full blown celiac).

Celiac is a very clear cut medical condition. Most gluten intolerance seems to be nothing but hypochondria, with along with your standard "restrictive diets work until people figure out how to eat highly processed garbage with the new restriction" effect.

Seconding the fact the celiac is it's own condition, but 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. Avocados are another one of these things. Some doctors like to call these "digestive allergies" to give patients an idea of how they can vary in severity and that they're for all intents and purposes a misdiagnosis from the immune system.

    >  ...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...

This is also my take on it.

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!)

"well, give it time (and really enjoy your lactose and gluten!)."

And don't forget to avoid Glyphosate :-)

This describes my wife almost exactly. Developed gluten and lactose intolerance right around 40. She was one of those people who had to have at least one glass of milk a day and a gallon of ice cream a week and that had to be cut out 100%. She reacts to very small amounts of milk and gluten products. Even top ramen flavor packets in a pasta salad contain enough wheat and milk to give her a miserable day. Much like HFCS, dairy and wheat are fillers in SO many products that it's become a chore to shop and almost impossible to eat out spontaneously anymore.

    > This describes my wife almost exactly. Developed gluten and lactose intolerance right around 40.

Anecdotally, I've heard this from other women in my wife's peer group so I also wonder if some of this is related to hormonal changes from child birth or maybe even pre-menopause.

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.

I think the high level theory is that women have stronger immune systems/immune responses (protective evolution for childbirth) so foods that cause inflamation or gut irritation result in a disproportionate reaction.

I'm not sure what you mean by "clear cut medical condition" other than that it is easy to test.

ROTFL. How? Enzyme test? There are three different ones. All of them are unreliable, hence normally doctors do all of them at once.

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.

And in many cases it's also necessary to provoke the problem in order to test properly. I've been on a gluten free diet for ten years (my skin kept falling off, stopped when I quit gluten, father had celiac) and always test negative because I won't gorge on gluten for the two weeks necessary for antibodies to show up (simply as I don't have a month spare to be ill).

"Celiac is a very clear cut medical condition."

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

>No, it is not. It comes in a bunch of varieties and there is news: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3945755/

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

The is no proof (there is never proof in science) but there is reason to be suspicious.

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.

I assume those folks are smart enough not to eat pasta then.

It's not that simple for most folks because, as I said, it seems to be a spectrum of intolerance and doesn't manifest as some step function.

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 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.

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... ?

$1.25 was a few months ago at a Toronto Freshco. 900g Italpasta. I seemed to be the only weirdo stocking up for the next 1-2 years.

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.

Giant Tiger has 900g go on sale for this price pretty regularly. Unfortunately it's only for penne, spaghetti, and sometimes macaroni, they don't seem to sell the other shapes in the 900g format.

Pasta is also good.

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.)

Chana daal is split mature chickpea. Yellow split pea is from mature pea, unless it is from pigeon pea. All three are commonly eaten in India, along with many other kinds of legumes including daals and beans.

More info:

https://pipingpotcurry.com/indian-pulses/

Do mind that the body can only use about half the protein in wheat, compared the somewhere in the 90s % for whey, for example.

Maybe, but how does wheat protein compare to rice protein?

Very well in general. As a protein whey is unbeatable on bioavailibity and completion, especially considering cost per kg.

Biggest problem is that it has an absolutely disgusting texture, for me at least.

Also involves killing calves

That's how our civilization's relationship to cows has worked for millennia.

Our civilisations also kept slaves for millennia.

They still do, mechanisms and messaging are just smarter.

Not sure there isn't a group bringing it back.

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.

It's not being brought back. There is slavery today[0].

[0] https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery

Not sure the US will realize it until everyone has an uncle or cousin working as an indentured servant in a prison workforce.

Then MAGA will be like "hey, wait a minute, this seems kind of like slavery. Isn't that something we stopped teaching in school".

I’m really confused why congress doesn’t outlaw prison labor of this kind. No one supports it anywhere on the political spectrum.

Are the companies who profit from it really that influential?

Our civilisations also drank water for millennia.

I'm aware of the is-ought problem with my statement, but my point is that that is the role calves play when we want cow dairy products. The problem with it as it exists today is the barbarous nature of factory farming.

You mean western civilisation I guess? After those millennia, still 75% of the human population didn’t start or finish their milk adaptation.

Whey is a milk product why do calves die?

It's the dead calves' milk.

One can have whey without the calf dying. I have personally seen whey produced without harming calves.

I also don't understand why some HNer's insist on downvoting simple questions. Trying to silence questioning is not healthy for society.

I agree with the downvote think.

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.

Do you think all dairy cows need calves to create milk? I don't care if someone disagrees with my posts I agree that they engage in conversation. Downvoting without explanation is my complaint. Finally the comment that whey production results in dead calves is pretty simplistic and not based on any analysis that I can discern.

If HN is about the struggle for truth I expect a certain amount of intellectual rigor in comments.

I meant "I agree with you about the downvote think".

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.

So what did they do with the calf?

Wait until it is done weaning to start using it's mother's milk. Most Dairy cows don't need to have a calf to produce milk.

> Wait until it is done weaning to start using it's mother's milk.

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?

The mother very quickly starts producing more milk than the calf can drink. In the wild the milk production levels off to the level of the calf's intake (and then slowly rises to match their needs as they age and then tapers off as they age further).

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).

What about male calves?

Raise them up to a steer if you don't need breeding stock and use / sell them as a bull if you do.

Okay, so most of calves are still killed, but maybe after they grow up rather than while they're calves?

I still don’t understand how you keep the calves alive. Ok for one or two year but if you want to maintain a regular production over the years, at some point you’ll have a bunch of male cows (not sure the right English word for that) and a bunch of "bad milker cows". I mean I totally agree what you describe is possible and even the reality in a few ranch but it has nothing to do with what’s happening for the vast majority of cows.

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 isn't clear to me. Whey is a byproduct of milk->cheese production.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11142983/

Milk production is performed by making cows pregnant repeatedly (about once per year I think) throughout their lives and then killing most of their calves. Once the mother cow is worn out from all the births, they too are killed.

Male calves are usually sold for meat (veal). Cows that cannot produce sufficient milk are sold for beef.

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.

> whey itself does not necessitate killing anything.

This is assuming that people would eat calves if they weren't killed so that we can take their milk.

You're right, but I think about it the other direction. We currently _do_ eat the calves that _are_ killed so 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.

Back of the envelope math: cows live for about 20 years, but dairy cows are killed after about 4 years when their milk production slows. Assuming they are impregnated 4 times, that's (5 cows * 20 years per cow) / (4 years) = 25 times as costly. And this 25 times as costly milk has to compete with the 1 times as costly milk in a market that's already so competative that milk is sold below cost with government subsidies. It's impossible for practical purposes.

If you're comparing today's market, practices, and subsidies (which are all just measurements of the same signal) to a fictional world where we didn't want to kill any calfs, but using today's subsidies and prices, then I think that's not a fair comparison.

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.

Milk cows are not generally used for meat. That is a different breed of cows. Milk cows almost never have male offspring - with AI we can control to ensure only female calf's are born (IIRC this is about 97% accurate so a few males are born). A few great milk producing mothers will be given sperm that is male only thus ensuring enough bulls to provide fathers and improving genetics for the next generations.

If AI means "Artificial Insemination" I believe you.

If AI means "Artificial Intelligence" I do not believe you.

The first.

All factory farming has some horrific stories to tell.

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.

Mass killing is bloody and horrific.

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.

Not a problem for most people, except vegans.

It is a moral problem for many people, however changing delicious, traditional and healthy habits is not so evident. I don’t blame them.

I'd wager most people actually do inconveniently hold some vegan ethics, but there's a blind spot due to tradition, culture, and habit.

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.

The poster you're replying to was asking about wheat vs rice protein, not whey.

I think you're misinterpreting whatever metric you got those numbers from (bioligocal value[1] maybe?).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value

When I look up human ileal digestibility of wheat protein, I see 90% absorption with the same nitrogen retention of milk (65%).

Not that you'd buy organic pasta on a tight budget, but organic wheat products are not fortified, at least in the U.S. Just FYI to anyone wanting to exclusively eat pasta.

That price for pasta can't be beat. I'm in BC and pasta goes for $0.37/100g here.

Rice is cheaper. Especially if you go to somewhere like an Asian market. With a rice cooker, rice is brain dead to make too and IMO it's far more versatile and I can eat it plain, while plain pasta is IMO disgusting.

> A working-poor friend also used to buy steel-cut oats

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.

Oats can be very expensive, depending on where you are. When I was actively body building and on a business trip to Singapore, I couldn't find any reasonably priced oats at the the grocery store.

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.

Obviously you have to consider where the hell you're living. In the UK I eat oats all the time and they're dirt cheap. I knew a guy when I was in japan who ate oats every day. I thought he was absolutely insane. You could barely buy oats there. I ate brown rice mixed with barely to get nutrient rich grains because it was actually readily available and affordable. Let's not be stupid out here and act suprised when our ideal diet in one country is too expensive in a totally different climate - there are many plants in the world, use something else. Oats are only so revered in the west because they're a good thing that is AVAILABLE.

Sounds like gymrat gentrification of staples, like how cheap / mass produced dairy (by) products are now "fortified" with proteine (and in Dutch they make sure to use the fancy sounding "protein" instead of the colloquial "eiwit") and given black-and-white branding in their own section, sold for 2x the price. And the sellers are laughing all the way to the bank.

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.

A bowl of yogurt would help but is not really that much extra protein. Definitely not near the extra protein serious gym people attempt to consume.

And that's if you can even process a high joghurt diet without issues which isn't the case for plenty of people.

> Definitely not near the extra protein serious gym people attempt to consume.

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...

In various types of training eating is the hardest part. Because you say "just have an extra bowl of yogurt" it lets me know you don't understand how hard it is to eat all of this food. This is the main reason protein powder is so prevalent.

trying this with dietary restrictions and an aversion to glyphosate has been very difficult.

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