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Comment by hayksaakian | Hacker News Reader

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.

Absolutely. If you're short on money and want to get the best bang for your buck then you'll want to learn how to cook. It's not that hard, I think it's pretty fun actually, and it will pay you back for your time spent learning/doing tenfold. You just have to be willing to do the legwork!

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 :)

I hope this doesn't come across like I'm attacking you, because that isn't my intent, but I find this "Oh, just cook and everything is affordable" idea that people keep throwing around to be kind of condescending and dismissive. Cooking isn't magic. I do cook, but I still don't feel like eating well on $5 a day is practical. A single avocado would blow a third of the budget for the whole day!

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.

Nothing that takes skill-building and effort is practical.

Programming isn't practical, either. And yet, here we are.

The skills and effort pay off.

I don't understand what you're talking about in the context of my comment. What skill are we talking about?

Cooking and meal-planning, obviously.

"A single avocado would blow a third of the budget for the whole day!"

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.

Probably true. I bought four yesterday for $1.50 apiece, which is the number I was thinking of. Pricy, but they can really make a meal, so I feel like they're worth it. Incidentally, either your avocados are a lot heftier than mine or your friends get a lot less hungry than my wife and I do, because two make barely enough guacamole to go with our quesadillas.

The meals section in question: http://allrecipes.com/menus/16262/quick-and-easy. That's in their menu planner though, you might have to be a member to access it. Kind of lame, in that regard...

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.

Exactly, just read up on recipes from poor countries, the ingredients are dirt cheap and usually taste delicious.

Keep in mind is that indentured servants had restrictions on how often they could be served lobster... how food tastes is extremely subjective.

I bet their lobster wasn't buttered up, though.

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