I rather like it. I wouldn't live on it (one tires of it quickly) but it's really nice to have healthy, cheap, easy meals available when there's no time to cook (pre-work breakfast) or when I've forgotten to shop (late night dinner).
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 :)
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.
I imagine it is easy to eat well on $35 a week if you consider a PB&J sandwich to be a "euphoric" experience. This does not match my idea of eating well, nor that of most people I know. This seems a bit like an article on how to become rich working at McDonalds defining "rich" to mean "earns at least $5000 a year."
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.
Well in this case is designed to mean healthy. Despite popular misconception organic and fresh food aren't necessarily healthier than frozen foods as many fresh foods lose significant nutritional value when stored/transported at room temperature.
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.
> What are you expecting, duck confit and beef wellington?
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.
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.
"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.
I didn't mean to imply that it was unhealthy, just that most people's idea of "eating well" requires actually enjoying the food. This nutrition-only view of good eating reminds me of The Matrix: "It's a single-celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs."
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.
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.
Oh, what is fad is it now, the "paleo" diet? (you linked to a "primal" diet website in another response) If anything the general population is still gotten fatter and fatter in the last 10 years. This makes me think that there is no "breakthrough" in nutritional knowledge and if there was it is being poorly communicated. To be fair, there are some voices of sanity lately. In particular I am thinking of Michael Pollan's advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
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.
Yeah for sure in SF terms I'm saying go to the mission (produce stands), not the tenderloin (liquor stores).
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)
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.
Looking at the cupboard inventory, it does not appear that he is eating "garbage".
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'm really sorry you posted this, I think it's going to hurt people and make them sick if they take any of it seriously.
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:
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.
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.
Have you tried cooking dry beans? It is really easy and cheaper than canned. I bring them to a boil, can the water and then put them in the oven. They last for days in the fridge.
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.
If you use a pressure cooker, it takes less energy apparently. The more energy efficient method would be to pre-soak them for a long time, then cook on a pressure cooker (on low heat, hot enough for the pressure cooker to keep at full pressure though...but it doesn't take much heat to do that). I have a Hawkins classic pressure cooker. Apparently the Hawkins Futura line is even more efficient.
Aside from the pressure cooker comments elsewhere...
Dry beans really do need a soak. When you bring a pot full of cold water legumes to a boil (assuming you haven't presoaked over night in cold water) turn them off the heat and let them sit for 1-2 hours. Even though they are off of direct heat, the cooking time is similar to if you had left them boiling that whole time.
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.
I'm guessing you already know this, since you're referring to "urad dal" by its native name and buying it in large quantities, but others might not:
Here in NYC at least, foods like beans, lentils, rice, spices, etc. are much cheaper when bought in Indian food stores (where they're everyday staples sold in large packages) rather than in regular supermarkets (where they're sold in much smaller packages).
There are similarly good deals to be found in Chinese and other ethnic grocery stores.
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.
And if you're really serious about living on less than that then I can only recommend Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" for the wonderful tip of smearing garlic on a knife before you put butter on bread to convince your body you've eaten a hearty meal.
I personally lived a couple of years on http://www.complan.com which is about as close to Soylent as you get when you're homeless and broke in 1994 and holding on to the hope that it might stave off whatever the next illness is going to be.
My personal tip: Stale bread, old tomatoes, old cheese = pizza for less than 20p.
"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.
Good call - that was a vague statement - I've refined it a bit: "Food is one of the few true necessities in life, yet alternatives to junk food and eating out are often overlooked in mainstream thought." At least closer to what I mean, anyway. Thanks for checking out.
I think there is a good chance you are taking an observation from your life, something about lots of people being uncertain about cooking, and (falsely) translating that into a lack of consideration for cooking. Even something crassly commercial like "The Food Network" spends an awful lot of its time on real actual cooking (and there are dozens of cooking shows on other channels).
And it just goes on from there. What could be more mainstream than Rachel Ray and her talk show? And she is big on ingredients and cooking them.
Or do a survey of "food section"s in print. The HuffPo, of all things, focuses on recipes:
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.
Pretty great cookbook I've taken a few meals from:
http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks/
Rather than cheap food that happens to be edible, she tried to focus on actually good food that happens to be cheap. Really well done. Free electronic copies are always a plus 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.
35$ are about 26€ - it's definitely possible in Germany. You can buy 1kg oatmeal for 1€, 1kg yoghurt for 1.50€. 2kg whole-grain bread for 3€, 2kg potatoes or pasta or rice for 2€, 10 eggs for 1€, Then you have plenty of possibilities and still 17€ to add vegetables/oil/spices and other ingredients and create tasty meals.
The difficult part is planning meals for 1 or 2 weeks in advance and keeping variations alive.
Also avoid soda of all kinds and only drink tap-water and coffee/tee to safe the money. Also preparing sandwiches in advance while travelling saves a lot of money...
It's surely possible to live healthy on the cheap but it takes a lot of effort and time and structure to do so..
I grew up eating lots and lots of rice, beans and frozen vegatables and I'm still pretty fond of them - cheap and tasty, cheaper if you do your own seasoning and cheaper still if you buy dry beans and aren't particular about your rice.
Personally, my big issue in weekly food cost is eating out at work - paying $10+ per day for worse versions of stuff that could be made for 1/5 that price with the right discipline.
Shopping at Trader Joes is a good start for keeping within budget, but you can't really make the case for eating well on $35/week if you go out occasionally and DON'T count that in your budget.
Is "bought from a store" a requirement here? I've built a small garden on my balcony, and it seems that such could meaningfully supplement a $35/week budget; especially given an objective of "organic".
> I will likely spend up to 20% more to buy organic.
I am happy to see this. Coincidence is that I am on €49 budget right now (training self discipline).
Thats €7 a day.
BUT - I do not eat anything from cans or anything pre-made.
All fresh meat, veggies and self made food - for 2 people. No bread and avoiding packaged food.
Sure - you wont get any Whiskey or Cola for it. You wont be able to go to restaurant. Or buy crisps. But thats the point - living healthy.
I dont like how author lives off cans - its not that healthy. You can make most of food much cheaper at home. Cans are mostly unnecessary. I propose to all to try this. Leaving for udner $10/€10 a day out of all healthy and self made foods.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadBetter yet, feed me like a hamster :P
Has anyone tried soylent?
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 :)
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.
There's this product called Soylent[1] that's supposed to be pretty healthy and costs less than $4 per meal.
[1]: http://www.soylent.me/
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)...
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.
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)
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:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
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.
Fresh beans though are definitely great, and with homegrown ones you can cook the pods too.
Dried black beans, $1 - $2/pound.
Can 15oz black beans containing 1 1/3 cup drained beans, about $2.
2 cups dried beans yields 5-6 cups cooked drained beans.
1 pound dried beans = 2 cups dried beans.
Rinsed, un-presoaked black beans cooking time: 25 minutes, after maybe 5-6 minutes of bringing it to boil and reaching pressure level.
Cooking time for can of beans: 5 minutes.
Dry beans really do need a soak. When you bring a pot full of cold water legumes to a boil (assuming you haven't presoaked over night in cold water) turn them off the heat and let them sit for 1-2 hours. Even though they are off of direct heat, the cooking time is similar to if you had left them boiling that whole time.
The pressure cooker I bought: Hawkins 5L classic: http://www.hawkinscookers.com/1.1.1.hawkinsclassic.asp
Here in NYC at least, foods like beans, lentils, rice, spices, etc. are much cheaper when bought in Indian food stores (where they're everyday staples sold in large packages) rather than in regular supermarkets (where they're sold in much smaller packages).
There are similarly good deals to be found in Chinese and other ethnic grocery stores.
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.
And if you're really serious about living on less than that then I can only recommend Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" for the wonderful tip of smearing garlic on a knife before you put butter on bread to convince your body you've eaten a hearty meal.
I personally lived a couple of years on http://www.complan.com which is about as close to Soylent as you get when you're homeless and broke in 1994 and holding on to the hope that it might stave off whatever the next illness is going to be.
My personal tip: Stale bread, old tomatoes, old cheese = pizza for less than 20p.
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.
And it just goes on from there. What could be more mainstream than Rachel Ray and her talk show? And she is big on ingredients and cooking them.
Or do a survey of "food section"s in print. The HuffPo, of all things, focuses on recipes:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/food/
Lots of real papers have lots of recipes and content that is not restaurant reviews.
Sorry for focusing on one small point and being cranky about it.
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.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Wolf-M-Fisher/dp/0865473366
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._F._K._Fisher#Books
The difficult part is planning meals for 1 or 2 weeks in advance and keeping variations alive.
Also avoid soda of all kinds and only drink tap-water and coffee/tee to safe the money. Also preparing sandwiches in advance while travelling saves a lot of money...
It's surely possible to live healthy on the cheap but it takes a lot of effort and time and structure to do so..
I grew up eating lots and lots of rice, beans and frozen vegatables and I'm still pretty fond of them - cheap and tasty, cheaper if you do your own seasoning and cheaper still if you buy dry beans and aren't particular about your rice.
Personally, my big issue in weekly food cost is eating out at work - paying $10+ per day for worse versions of stuff that could be made for 1/5 that price with the right discipline.
> I will likely spend up to 20% more to buy organic.
7 * 1lb Grass Fed Angus Beef $6 = $42, 2 * 8oz Kerrygold Unsalted Butter $3.25 = $6.50, 2 * 12oz Kerrygold Dubliner Cheese $4.50 = $9, 2 * 12 Cage Free Eggs $3.25 = $6.50, 2 * Charles Shaw Cabernet $3 = $6
Sure - you wont get any Whiskey or Cola for it. You wont be able to go to restaurant. Or buy crisps. But thats the point - living healthy.
I dont like how author lives off cans - its not that healthy. You can make most of food much cheaper at home. Cans are mostly unnecessary. I propose to all to try this. Leaving for udner $10/€10 a day out of all healthy and self made foods.