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Comment by qwerta | Hacker News Reader

On $4/day you should avoid being vegetarian, get cheap food with as many calories as possible. Better value for money.

EDIT: I get lot of down votes, so just to clarify:

I am objecting to being _exclusively_ vegetarian. People on $4/day have other problems. I am not saying you should buy junk food. There is lot of reasonable quality meat, for example fish if you live near sea. Also vegs such as rice or potatoes are cheap and high on energy

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Do you have any references on how eating meat is more affordable than things like dry beans and other grains?

http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/HHFS_BEANS_KIDNE... http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/HHFS_RICE_WHITE_...

That seems like a pretty affordable meal to me. Maybe you have some information I don't and would like to share it?

Practical experience, I lived on $4/day for most of my life. Energy is important if you are moving a lot. Also sleeping outside (in cold) drains energy very quickly.

Obesity and related problems are usually associated with lifestyle, medication (antibiotics!) and lack of physical activity, not the food itself.

Meat has horrible calories/$ value. People end up eating more calories when they're eating carbs though.

Sure, you need balanced died, I objected about being vegetarian. Meat is important because it gives fat and other important nutrients, it would be expensive to get those exclusively from vegetarian food.

Checkout rabbit poisoning for some interesting read.

I don't eat this stuff for my own dietary reasons, but even I know Soy and Quinoa and old fashioned rice -n- beans and hummus (aka mushed up chickpeas) and plain old peanut butter sandwiches are cheap complete protein sources.

If you want fat intake, which is good as long as your carb intake is low, disgusting and unhealthy as it is, factory produced vegetable oil can fry nearly nutritionally vacant potatoes. Dip them in corn syrup ketchup for extra vegetables or at least empty calories.

If you are diagnosed allergic to soy like my son, or think the stuff on the above list is "gross" life gets complicated and expensive rapidly if you subsist entirely on the weirdest of vegetarian supplements and prepared meals and prepared snacks.

Also I'm locked out "submitting too fast" but:

A non paleo diet of nothing but rice will probably kill you in the long term. Lets run with it anyway.

Depending on how badly you got screwed and how many middlemen stand in the way and the size of packaging, 50 cents per pound is (was?) not totally out of line for rice. So at $4/day you can afford 8 pounds of uncooked rice. After cooking it, it'll be a whole lot more than 8 pounds due to water adsorption. But the nutrient content of the uncooked rice (not much washes away) is about 3 cal/gram somewhat pessimistically aka about 1200 calories per pound of uncooked rice. And you'll be consuming 8 of those pounds... per day. so thats 9600 calories of cooked rice per day.

Given an intake of 9600 calories per day, I checked out some basal metabolic rate online calculators. I got about 9000 calories per day BMR for a 30 year old male 6 ft tall weighing a mere 1300 pounds. For out metric readers, 1300 pounds is almost exactly 1/2 the mass of my new commuter car. So pretty freaking huge.

On a very long scale, given a mere $4/day to live on (I spend $6/day long term average and eat like a king, so WTF about that) and only eat rice and somehow don't die of a deficiency or diabetes, your weight will eventually stabilize at a mere 1300 pounds given that monetary intake in the form of 100% rice.

So yeah, vegetarians probably are not going to starve to death on a mere $4/day unless they're really screwing up.

(my apologies, I checked Amazon Prime and its hard to get rice shipped to my door for less than $1/pound, although it seems like mere years ago I saw 50 pound sacks for $25 at the grocery store... At any rate, $4/day is enough to be obscenely morbidly obese)

Rabbit poisoning is caused by having very lean meat make up too large of a portion of your diet. It has no connection to vegetarianism. In fact it's necessary to eat almost exclusively meat.

Of all the causal factors for obesity that science has isolated -- and there are many -- I've never heard of any evidence for obesity being among those factors. Do you have any evidence to support that claim?

> I've never heard of any evidence for obesity being among those factors.

I think you mis-typed the wrong word there, but I'm not sure what to substitute it with.

This is targetted for people on SNAP ("food stamps") in the US -- there, the problem doesn't seem to be calorie deficit (obesity in poverty is quite common), so confusing calories/$ with value is a serious error.

While the book is quite nice, I think it really misses it's target demographic. Many people in poor areas end up buying a lot of their food from the local convenience store where there's just a selection of low quality and unhealthy food (and not anything fresh). Kids also tend to be left to fix their own meals, which will be mostly junk food or something that doesn't require any preparation. It's a very challenging problem to address. Even when you have programs to get fresh and healthy food to these neighborhoods, it's a challenge to get people to take advantage of it.

Rice, lentils, beans, vegetables (corn, potatoes in particular), soy/tofu/tempeh, oats are all stupidly cheap and healthy.

That depends largely on who you ask. I don't eat most of those foods. And corn?

The OP's comment said "you should avoid being vegetarian" so your comment applies to his as well.

Also, isn't corn healthy unless you process and concentrate the sugars or powder it? I doubt one can gain weight by eating lots of raw or cooked corn unless you slather it in butter or something.

Corn contains cellulose and our bodies aren't built to break it down. Eat some corn and wait until you have to go to the bathroom. You'll see.

You're doing it wrong, apparently. Humans are not meant to swallow corn whole. Cook, chew. Eat popcorn, corn-on-the-cob, tortilla chips, corn-flakes.

Corn is stupidly cheap and a fairly caloric, which directly addressed my parents point. It's also high in protein, fiber and Bs. Movie popcorn and or the corn syrup in pop aren't healthy.

movie popcorn is also way above $4/day

Poor communities and cultures in the USA have been eating the cheaper, undesirable cuts of meat for a long time. Pig and chicken feet, turkey necks, beef tails, intestines, carp and catfish.

Food quality is really important, though. Eating low quality food can have an adverse affect on your performance and health, costing more maybe immediately and definitely in the long run. When you're really poor in any way, your health is the most important thing to take care of.

You can make quality food cheap (assuming that you mean something along the lines of "not processed crap"). I learned to cook as a student as a big bag of potatoes was more value for money than a frozen pizza.

Is this true? I was always under the impression that meat was considerably more expensive than basic vegetarian food. I know some vegetables can be expensive but I'm pretty sure cereals and pulses are cheaper than any meat.

This isn't always true, you can buy packs of small porkchops that work out to be about 1.25 per chop.

While this book is interesting it seems to go to great lengths to create new dishes when many compatible traditional dishes exist. For example you can make Schnitzel, Spaetzle, Blaukraut and Brussel sprouts for 5 for around $10.

I live in Europe, so I can not really say for US. For 1 burger you need like 4 pounds of vegs, so the meat is cheaper here.

> For 1 burger you need like 4 pounds of vegs

In terms of calories, this is technically correct, but the metric of calories is not at all useful in a first-world context. At my local market, £1 gets you about 10,000 kcals of rice or pasta. In other words, any budget above $1 / £1 per day will be able to provide plenty of kcals. Kcals are not the problem.

What matters are the other things the body needs. I eat vegetables to provide fiber, vitamins and phytonutrients. I eat meat to provide protein and certain types of fat. In this regard, they're not fungible, because leafy green vegetables are a poor source of protein and meat is a poor source of phytonutrients.

Given energy constraints and the economics of things, meat should be more expensive everywhere. But the US also has massive agriculture subsidies, so what determines the cost of food here is Congress more than any market.

Dried beans (my favorite) tend to be much cheaper than just about any other source of protein, but I don't think I've ever seen tofu being sold for less than hamburger. Ground meat in this country tends to be really cheap, thanks to agricultural subsidies, filler, "pink slime" and the like.

I think there might be a misunderstanding about a typical vegetarian or vegan diet. Do you believe that most vegetarians and vegans eat primarily vegetables like broccoli and cabbage? Myself and others I know tend to eat a large amount of beans, grains and root vegetables as this is typically necessary to get the required daily amounts of protein and calories.

I'm vegan and I eat super cheap. Lentils / black beans in a soup or burrito gets you very far. My luxury meal items are fresh bread or tortillas.

I don't think you're doing a fair comparison, which would mean comparing the cheapest meat with the cheapest non-meat foods.

Of course mince meat is cheaper per calorie than lettuce, it's probably cheaper than tomatoes, but it's not cheaper than rice or lentils.

BTW - I live in Europe too.

Again, I am arguing against being EXCLUSIVELY vegetarian, I also think rice potatoes etc are good value for the money.

Back in my old days in post communist Europe, the cheapest eatable meat was horse (kind of like a beef). Most vegetables were imported (and expensive) or scarce outside of season (and expensive) . People usually loaded their cellars with 1000 pounds of vegs for winter, but students did not had this option.

I think your point is, when resources limit you, you should focus on a hierarchy. In the case of food, the hierarchy is diet optimization > basic balanced diet food > cost/calorie efficient food > any food > no food. Don't start worrying about the higher parts of the hierarchy until those below it are taken care of. None of which prevents diet optimization while resource limited, but you need to make sure you don't miss some of the more basic stuff.

My wife and I have been living on a $100 a month grocery budget for a few years now and are having no problems with it. Plenty of calories.

I'll upvote you because as my mother has said, "being a hippy is expensive."

(I say that as a vegetarian who recycles nearly everything and drives a Nissan Leaf. However, I still get haircuts and work for The Man, so what do I know?)

Is it really though? I think it depends on accessibility.

Every week I dry 40 minutes round-trip to a grocery store that specializes in raw foods (vegetables, fruits, cheeses, etc) and get enough food for about $60 to feed myself and my friend for the full week.

Those prices just aren't available to someone without a vehicle and those in the city are probably paying more for less (for instance, the Shaw's across the street from me in Boston sells lettuce for 2.50 and I pay 98 cents for organic outside the city).

I believe that you are mistaken here. The first cookbook listed is all vegetarian while the cookbook this post is referring to is the second one listed and includes various non vegetarian dishes such as roasted chicken.

I can't flag this enough

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