$35/Week – Eating well on $35 a week

I usually just dice up garlic and throw it inside a partially filled bottle of olive oil. IIRC olive oil is actually cheaper than butter.

OP here - thanks for the fantastic resource. I plan on incorporating some of those recipes into the fold.

I just bought an Indian pressure cooker which is great for cooking them even faster (can even skip the pre-soak if you want) and uses less energy. So far I've tried "split red lentis", "whole black urad dal", and dried kidney beans. They are super cheap and come in huge bags for $5 or so. 1 cup of these makes many servings. I started making some Indian dals using them. It's a great way to eat them, with tons of Indian spices.

The pressure cooker I bought: Hawkins 5L classic: http://www.hawkinscookers.com/1.1.1.hawkinsclassic.asp

You can get seriously ill cooking and eating dried beans from Phytohaemagglutinin if you don't do it right.

Beans like most seeds contain specific toxins that are aimed directly at mammals to prevent them from being eaten. This is why you can't eat just about any seed in quantity without processing it; they don't want to be eaten and conduct chemical warfare to prevent it.

Even once processed you are still getting a huge amount of toxins, just not enough to be sick enough to notice. I don't know why anyone eats beans, ignorance I guess.

Beans are also loaded with carbohydrates, peeled potatoes are a much safer source of starch if you just want to load up on starch.

Last batch of dry beans I prepared I started to wonder if it's really cheaper for me to pay for the energy needed to cook them well versus just quickly heating a can.

Fresh beans though are definitely great, and with homegrown ones you can cook the pods too.

A book that has been fascinating me lately is How to Cook a Wolf[0] by MFK Fisher[1], which is absolutely lovely, inspiring and amazing. A sort of home ec., slice of life bunch of anecdotes, ideas and story-telling.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Wolf-M-Fisher/dp/0865473366

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._F._K._Fisher#Books

As long as you avoid dented cans (risk of botulism) and strain off the liquid before using the contents (too much salt, risk of high blood pressure and kidney failure), canned foods are perfectly healthy.

Are you on a paleo-and-wino diet?

Under this system, I'd just eat out for every meal and net a budget of $0/week.

What are you expecting, duck confit and beef wellington?

Eating well in this case means being satisfied and healthy. A peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat bread is surprisingly healthy (although I personally loathe whole wheat). It's not classy but it's a highly cost-efficient source of calories.

Also, it turns out that even if you are willing to lower yourself to peanut butter sandwiches, getting 2500 calories of nutritionally well-rounded and healthy food for $5 a day takes quite a bit of planning (if not cooking). If you "imagine it is easy", it's only because you have not given a fig's worth of actual thought to the process.

Pretty much any food is euphoric after hard exercise.

But, while it doesn't look like this fellow eats the most delicious diet, it doesn't look unhealthy.

The biggest issue to eating well for $35 a week is being single, if you have a partner, or kids it's pretty easy to average $35 a week per person.

Step 1) Buy a freezer Step 2) Buy meat by the side Step 3) Buy in season produce from the poor areas of town and/or drive out to an actual farmers market.

maybe if you lack creativity.

with a few spices and a bit of thought, you can come up with much better meals for the same price per serving.

Yes and I bet that the author of that blog will be fighting all the early symptoms of metabolic syndrome in no time eating all that garbage and wearing their body out with excessive repetitive running.

It's almost what cutting edge nutrition and health science would consider the perfect storm of bad advice.

Who said anything about jelly?

I agree and I don't consider a "Frozen" box of anything to be "Eating well". It's a blessing to have these things (or is it?). I prefer keeping things organic and fresh when possible.

Eating healthy and not having to cook seem to be conflicting ideas, as far as I can tell :)

Places like http://www.blueapron.com or https://www.plated.com will send you fresh ingredients pre-portioned, and then you spend < 30 minutes preparing your meal. And you can get decently healthy snacks through something like https://naturebox.com that are more "feed me like a hamster".

But if you're not rolling in the dough, then learning how to make a handful of quick/easy meals is going to be the healthiest/cheapest option. Cooking doesn't have to be hard or time consuming, especially when you consider leftovers :)

Define "cook".

Will you tolerate ripping open a bunch of plastic bags and dumping everything onto a plate or is that too "cook"ish? I'm kind of embarrassed to admit how many of my bachelor era meals were like that. Too busy/lazy to even go to the store, and I keep a stash of those salad bags like alcoholics hide liquor bottles. They don't keep fresh for more than a couple days, unfortunately. The supermarket is full of "salad bags" of various flavors. I wasn't a vegetarian but more of a paleo guy and the lazy paleo mans meal outta the fridge is a salad bag. When you're too lazy or in a hurry to pan fry a steak or bake some chicken or steam a fish filet, there's always salad bags.

When/if you advance beyond "dump everything in the bag on a plate and eat it" you can buy bagged lettuce and vegetables and canned salsa as a topping and maybe even a salad dressing and the "cooking" becomes dumping reasonable quantities of each on a plate. Hopefully not too much like "cooking".

The next step up in "cooking" is adding stuff to the salad which creates salad++, and maybe putting the salad++ in other containers. So take strips of (cooked) chicken, ranging from you took precooked breaded pieces out of a deli container up to you butchered the chicken yourself and then cooked it, and throw that into the salad, and then possibly scoop the salad into a taco/burrito shell with some extra salsa, lots of extra medium spicy salsa and maybe sour cream and maybe some sprinkled cheese, I think I had seasoned feta out of a package. Add some sliced jalapeno peppers if thats not too "cooking". Cheese and sour cream aren't necessarily good for you from a paleo perspective, but they taste good enough to be condiments and my ancestry is lactose tolerant unlike most adult people. Anyway that was my lunch on Saturday. Fitting in with the $5/day theme it was probably like 50 cents, maybe a buck, and most of the money went into the single chicken piece I split with my whole family. It was very filling and tasty. And now I'm feeling hungry. Its not really "cooking" it is just slopping salad out of a bag, salsa out of a jar, and chicken out of a deli container into a taco shell out of a box, and toss in some other stuff out of a jar or bag as you see fit. If that counts as cooking, making a PB+J sandwich or microwave popcorn must be being a chef.

Next thing you know, you're putting salad++ between slices of bread and calling it a sub sandwich. Maybe even seasoning and cooking some fresh meats or fresh veggies. You can make a decent sandwich or wrap in a couple minutes, so if you can afford a potty break you can afford to make a sandwich. Just don't do both at the same time.

If you descend into frying precut frozen bagged veggies in a wok and slopping sauce outta a bottle on it when its done, I'm sad to report you've descended into the depths of hell ... er ... cooking. Tastes really freaking awesome, and cheap and fast too, but it is technically cooking so ... The fresh veggies are usually cheaper than frozen if you can afford 1 or 2 minutes to prep them (rinse, chop...)

Better be careful, cooking is dangerously addictive, and you might end up with pressure cooker, sous vide rig, electric smoker, who knows where the madness might end.

WRT subscription service, if you can get peapod to deliver produce department salad bags, I guess that's close? When my kids were little I had peapod deliver every week, at that age it was a huge epic PITA to take a small herd of little kids out to the store. Like LOTR expedition, just to buy some food, the little hobbits getting into all kinds of trouble. Now they're grown and its more recreational than something to be avoided, otherwise I'd probably still peapod.

The subject is eating well, not avoiding eating entirely. You don't eat Soylent, you drink it. A lot of people still would like to eat.

Thats his total contents, which is like 20 or so meals. Maybe not good meals, but 20 or so things.

I probably have $300-$400 bucks of "stuff" in my cupboard but I don't eat all of it every week. I do "too much" amazon subscribe and save and I like spices so maybe a "normal" cupboard only has $200 or so of stuff.

I think the idea is to promote creative thinking. So I'd fry up about a 1/10 of a bag of frozen broccoli and cook the mac n cheese and then add a can of tuna and mix all that stuff up into a tuna casserole and bake it, maybe broil it to brown the top which is WAY more than one meal for one single dude even accounting for the long term effects of food inflation (like mac n chee used to be a pound in the 90s, now its only like one cup in the 2010s). Maybe the day after tomorrow when the casserole is finally eaten up, a dash of oil in the wok with a bag of mixed veg and those meatballs and then some kind of homemade sauce, I bet you get two meals outta that at least.

Dude needs to buy more fruits and veg and more spicy stuff. I see vegetarian burritos and tacos and spring rolls in his future.

Absolutely. Even when you amortize the cost of condiments, oils, spices, and vegetables, that would go over budget. Along with the eating out and more expensive items like chicken shu mai, this is not going to fit within the $35/week budget. What he needs to do is to cut out anything over $35/week to get a realistic picture of what it really means to survive on $35/week. I would like to see his meals and response to that situation, otherwise it's not realistic enough and he can't really make the case that you can eat well for $35/week.

"well" is used in a different sense than you are using it. They mean enough calories with a reasonable amount of nutrition. From a feed-your-body perspective, peanut butter on whole wheat bread is pretty decent food (it's even protein complete).

To me the silliest part of the article was Food is one of the few true necessities in life, yet overlooked in mainstream thought. I would say that mainstream culture is obsessed with food.

I bet you eat less well than this guy.

Eating well means eating nutritionally complete, balanced, and tolerably palatable foods. When you maximize for the taste experience, without concern for nutritional completeness or balance, you are not eating well.