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.
I'm expecting an article about "eating well" to be about eating well, not just merely subsisting.
> 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.
I don't know about you, but I would absolutely not be satisfied with a diet made up mainly of things like peanut butter sandwich. Like I said, I've eaten on that level, and I didn't feel very satisfied with it.
How much further beyond PB&J do you expect to go? How much further CAN you go?
It's also going to be relative... What's the best you can do for $35? It sure as ___ won't be steak (unless you go hungry the rest of the week)...
But, while it doesn't look like this fellow eats the most delicious diet, it doesn't look unhealthy.
So many people here will go to the ends of the earth to find good science to report when it comes to just about any other issue except food and nutrition and exercise (things they owe their basic continued existance and well being to, things you would think they would take a lot of time and effort to find the best possible sources of information on...).
However, time after time all I see are comments and attitudes that espouse the best available knowledge of 1996.
AFAIK, it has just been fad after fad.
The reality is that people can and do thrive on a wide variety of diets.
1) you are spreading FUD with your fad after fad comment, it's simply not true. There is a lot of crap info out there but it's trivially easy to sort it out with the internet at our fingertips. News headlines are not the best way to get your nutrition and exercise information.
2) A whole hell of a lot has changed in just the last 10 years or so, never mind 1996. Pretty much every single bit of "conventional wisdom" about diet and nutrition has been tossed out now that there are actual controlled double blind studies being done on things that were previously taken for granted like "fat makes you fat" or "whole grains are healthy" food pyramid nonsense that was never, never, based on any good science at all.
3) You know so little yet are so willing to comment on it. That just makes me sad, I expect that on other sites and discussion forums but supposedly we are all smart people here.
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.
Don't forget to factor in the cost of the difference in gas used when driving to farmer's markets/the poor areas of town.
Also, don't forget that poor areas of town might actually have MORE expensive produce (http://www.foodispower.org/food-deserts/).
For the rest of the country, I'm assuming they already have a car / drive to get groceries. Generally speaking outside of the urban core driving saves you far more time than it costs in money.
eg. If you're making $15/hr you can't burn $15/hr in gas, and bringing home a weeks worth of groceries for a family on transit is a PITA. (Again, buying for multiple people saves tonnes of money)
with a few spices and a bit of thought, you can come up with much better meals for the same price per serving.
Keep in mind is that indentured servants had restrictions on how often they could be served lobster... how food tastes is extremely subjective.
I'm a fan of http://allrecipes.com, playing around on that site for a while will give you a lot of good meal ideas. They even have categories for quick and easy meals, many of which are under $2 a serving. Or pick your recipe site of choice, they all should have similar tools to help cooking newbies or people on budgets :)
BTW, I'll have to take your word that that site has a $2 meals section, because I just spent five minutes clicking around and couldn't find one.
Programming isn't practical, either. And yet, here we are.
The skills and effort pay off.
Depends on location, season... I bought 4 last thursday for 79 cents a piece. Two make about "one meals worth" guacamole for four hungry people as a condiment so that's about 40 cents per person not $1.66 or whatever. Possibly in the depths of winter avocados are $2 each.
Take that guacamole, smear some on a tortilla, shove something into the tortilla like shredded carrot and heavily seasoned fried green beans, and its pretty tasty. Of course the stuff that goes into guacamole isn't free. Still a decent meal for maybe $1.50 or so, maybe $2.
Lately I've been using spicy guacamole as a condiment on meats. Strangely tasty on a burger.
I'm not saying that cooking everything somehow magically makes things affordable (as a matter of fact, now that I like cooking I spend more on food than I used to). But cooking the same meal as you'd buy somewhere is definitely more affordable. And it's a LOT easier to eat well when you're cooking your own food instead of eating frozen meals or going out.
If you're trying to keep it to $2 a meal, then it's not that hard to eat well either. When I was a poor college student my routine was something like:
Breakfast: eggs and bacon
Lunch: Sandwich and some veggies (I like broccoli or carrots)
Dinner: Whole chicken and potatoes
Overall it costs more than $2 to get the ingredients for each of those meals, but once you average it across the number of servings you're well under $2.
It's almost what cutting edge nutrition and health science would consider the perfect storm of bad advice.
It might, perhaps, border on being an exercise in asceticism, but there is nothing shockingly absent from what he is eating. Nothing weird about it just labor (cooking), savvy shopping, and will-power.
I've been eating like this for over 3 months. I'm about ~10 percent body fat. I've lowered my cholesterol from 223 to 171.
What I see is a toxic diet loaded with carbohydrates which is not sustainable by most people.
While anyone can survive on just about any food for 3 months most people will (not might, will) get very sick over time eating that way.
About the only thing that can be said about it is it doesn't have much processed food so at least you're not adding much in the way of man-made toxins.
Get back to us when you've spent a year or more eating this way.
But the part that is the very worst to me is all that running, you are taking years off your life with chronic cardio like that.
None of this is an off the cuff opinion or personal bias, it's all quite well known if you keep up on quality nutrition and exercise science and the latest double blind studies, here's a good place for you to start when you get sick from all this and want to do the right thing: