Big bag of rice, and big bag of dry beans. Or cheap canned beans, if you're not up to cooking beans properly (I wasn't).
A working-poor friend also used to buy steel-cut oats, to eat breakfast for pennies.
If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you.
With canned soup, instant ramen, and a lot of other packaged foods, pay attention to the sodium. (I avoid a lot of those, or end up diluting it, or, say, using only half the seasoning packet.)
Where you shop matters to budget. Where I live, WFM has bought out, or driven out, most of the other grocery stores (and one of the remaining stores prices similarly, but without the cachet), but a Market Basket is just a short hike over the train tracks.
For specialty groceries, a small grocery store serving some ethnic group for which that's a staple, can be cheaper than most broader grocery stores.
Don't get scurvy, or other nutritional deficiency. If you can't make sure all your nutrients are covered, I've guessed (I'm not a nutritionist) that a mainstream multivitamin pill can't hurt.
You should also count your calories, to make sure you're getting enough. Once you start being more penny-pinching with eating, you might find yourself getting hungry less, rather than more, and it's not hard to slip into caloric deficit that will make you sick. There are calculators on the Web for how much you should intake.
> If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you.
Here in San Francisco, we have a plethora of Farmers Markets. The thing about produce is: once harvested, the clock starts on it going bad. So the farmers have a ticking timebomb on their hands: if they can't sell the produce at the end of the day, (in most cases) it will go to waste. Some of the enterprising ones take a trip to Chinatown and offload their leftover produce for pennies.
So when I was in a situation of hardship where I was living on a few dollars per day, I would go to the farmers market near closing time, and over time developed friendships with them, so they would sell me their remaining produce for dirt cheap. I would take it home, turn some of it into stock and freeze that.
Over several months, I survived on about $100/month in groceries.
This approach doesn't scale though. Its great that it worked for you, truly, but it unfortunately doesn't scale as a reliable way to budget for groceries
The problem of modern society that we want one solution that scales.
What we need is 1000s of solutions that don’t.
Every case is a special case if you treat enough variables, nothing is close in high dimensional space.
I don't disagree, but this isn't it.
Its too circumstantial to scale to even a dozen people in a locality. It isn't that it doesn't scale to the masses, its that it doesn't really scale at all
If I agree with you can I still be part of modern society?
We can both be part of post modern society, the answer is not to return to the old but embrace the new possibilities.
Precisions farming and decentralised housing and transport are steps in that direction.
do things that don't scale
That doesn't work for broad societal problems.
Paul meant his comment in the sense that that is a good way to START -- but then you have to figure out how to SCALE it.
I think what you'd find as you scaled it is that you'd turn into ConAgra.
The vendors hate that guy and won't sell off the stuff at the stalls out of general principal.
It is OK, they don't have to. It's a free market.
Of course, but the point is the idea isn't generalizable, therefor terrible advice.
Seriously? All advice is contextual.
Farmers markets are in no way cheap. I live here as well and they are luxury
Have you tried the Alemany Market? It is the best by far.
Of course, when you're trying to get by on $3/day, you can't be picky: you can't demand organic produce, for example.
They might not be affordable everywhere but they're definitely not unaffordable everywhere either.
Don't just count your calories. Count your protein, too. The beans aren't optional on this kind of diet. It's relatively common for people trying to stretch a budget to start substituting more grains instead of beans/eggs/tuna/peanuts/etc. and become protein deficient.
While there are long-term health issues with that, more acutely, you can end up in a low energy brain fog, that might make it hard to get enough protein to get out of said brain fog. I got stuck in that zone a few times when poor.
Chickpeas, in particular, are both very cheap and very nutritious. If you are trying to save money, you can get 1 lb of dry chickpeas for ~$2.50 in the US which translates into ~4 cans of chickpeas (1/2 a cup == 1 can).
Dried beans are a bit of a pain, but if you are looking to cut funds then you really can't do much better than dried beans.
Also, unsaturated fat is an important part of the diet. You need fat in the diet to absorb many nutrients. Skimping out on it can really negatively impact you. Olive oil and Avocado oil are my go tos. But you really wouldn't go wrong with peanut oil or canola.
How are dried beans a pain? You cook them in water with some salt and baking soda and they'll be perfect every time.
A lot of people don't soak overnight or know how to use pressure cookers and assume cans are the secret to tender, delicious legumes.
Interesting, I never soak them myself, just put them in a pot, cover with water, add salt and baking soda and let it simmer for an hour or so until tender.
> You should also count your calories, to make sure you're getting enough. Once you start being more penny-pinching with eating, you might find yourself getting hungry less, rather than more, and it's not hard to slip into caloric deficit that will make you sick. There are calculators on the Web for how much you should intake.
This is surprisingly easy.
Back at university, 20 years ago now, I was living on about £0.5/day, in the form of two big bowls of oats, 500ml semi-skimmed milk, a bit of sugar and dried raisins for breakfast; no lunch; and 108g pack of instant ramen for dinner.
In retrospect, this was about 1100-1200 kcal/day.
You can absolutely sustain that for a single university term at a time — it was so easy, so simple and devoid of negative sensation, that it didn't even occur to me to calculate the calories until someone here on Hacker News expressed disbelief because it was so little food.
I knew a woman[0] who ate nothing but ramen noodles for six months during her freshman year at college. She collapsed in class and had to be taken to the ER. I forget what all was wrong with her, but she was at least severely malnourished and, if I recall correctly, had also developed a proper antique disease like scurvy.
0 - loosely, in a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend way
Friend of a freind got scurvy studying architecture. Senior year was so intense that they basically spent the entire time inside eating vending machine snacks.
Apparently in the UK baked beans are fortified with vitamin C because baked beans on toast is such a common staple food for college students.
This was a compelling idea, so I looked it up. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be true: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/253034146
I don’t know that they’d need to be, though. British-style baked beans come in tomato sauce. I just checked my tins, and they’re 36% tomato according to the ingredients list. Unfortunately they’re not that cheap anymore. We pay over CDN$2+tax per tin these days if you buy the multipack. A far cry from the CDN$1.50 all-in those Tesco beans would be.
I heard that the only known case of scurvy in the US in the past few decades was one such student who lived only on Top Ramen.
What was wrong with her almost certainly wasn't hyponatremia[0].
I love ramen as much as the next person, but I wouldn't try to make it the entirety of my diet.
[0] low salt levels in your blood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia
If living on Ramen, you are definitely not having a problem with low salt. Maybe opposite, high blood pressure from excessive salt.
I actually mentioned scurvy because a friend of a friend had this happen to them in college. (Maybe we're talking about the same person.)
Friend thought they wouldn't have gotten scurvy, if they prepared the instant ramen with the seasoning packet, but they ate only the noodles brick. I don't know what brand ramen it was, but the Maruchan and Nissin nutrition info I looked at just now doesn't show any Vitamin C currently.
What's sort of crazy is it takes a very small amount of vitamin C occasionally to avoid scurvy. Basically, if once a month you get the RDA of vitamin C you are unlikely to get scurvy. Throw some broccoli or brussels sprout into a meal rotation and you'll be scurvy free.
I did about the same kcal/day, in grad school, when I was very trim.
And then I wondered how I could hit the gym almost every day, yet not build much muscle bulk.
I accidentally did that low kcal/day again, many years later, when I had happened to have excess non-muscle bulk to support.
And then I wondered why I felt like total crud.
The US medical guidelines I've heard, from doctor and elsewhere, are minimum 1200 for XX female, 1500 for XY male. That minimum is regardless of how fast you want to lose weight.
That minimum is just a rule of thumb for people that don't want / can't have medical supervision.
There was a pretty well covered case something like 15 yrs ago of someone massively obese that completely stopped eating and only consumed supplements to keep the bodys micro nutritions In order (which was continuously monitored by doctors). Iirc, he kept it up for 2 years until he got his target weight.
It's definitely a solid advice to keep to that rule of thumb though, albeit it'd say it's mostly a caloric delta you've gotta worry about: don't go beyond a sustained deficit of ~1k (consumed calories - used calories). It's fine too spike it occasionally in both directions, but going beyond will likely get you in trouble unless you're monitoring your health very closely
Maybe you're thinking of Angus Barbieri [0]:
"Angus Barbieri (1938 or 1939 – 7 September 1990) was a Scottish man who fasted for 382 days,from 14 June 1965 to 30 June 1966. He subsisted on tea, coffee, sparkling water, vitamins and yeast extract while living at home in Tayport, Scotland, frequently visiting Maryfield Hospital for medical evaluation. Barbieri went from 456 pounds (207 kg) to 180 pounds (82 kg), losing 276 pounds (125 kg) and setting a record for the length of a fast."
My cousin did the same thing - eat nothing but a vitamin for a month monitored by a doctor. He ended up in the hospital with type I diabetes which he probably could have held off for several more years if he had eaten more normally (genetics were against him so diabetes was probably in his future regardless, but he could have gone longer)
I wonder what the mechanism for that would be or if it was just coincidence. The medical consensus seems to be that T1D is triggered by a viral infection.
Who knows. This was 30 years ago and I'n not up on the latest. His family history though say he was susceptable
Joe Cross did a similar thing in his documentary "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead" [0] in 2010 when he went on a 60-day juice fast during which he lost 100 lbs.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat%2C_Sick_and_Nearly_Dead
Fasting is a funny thing, because the definition is highly variable. As a teenager I fasted a few times[0] while doing construction work —- mostly carpentry. How the hell does a 17 yr old get the energy to move lumber, swing a hammer, etc while fasting? The answer is liquid calories. Juice fasts feel the same to me, I’m going to guess that someone could easily gain weight on a juice “fast” if they drink enough.
0 - religion causes you to do strange things sometimes.
Fasting is a great way to induce massive muscle loss. In almost every case, cutting weight loss by 60% in order to preserve muscle is desirable
> If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you.
Frozen vegetables are OP here. Cheap, frozen at peak freshness, still nutritious.
A pound of leafy greens is dirt cheap and won't go bad for months.
Frozen fruits are great too, especially for smoothies. Really easy way to get nutrient-dense carbs in.
The secret has always been frozen chopped spinach. Absurdly cheap, doesn't go bad, blends/melts away into EVERYTHING! (Pasta, soups, beans for tacos, whatever).
I will note, the hard limit is you can't actually use it in a salad... but hey, tradeoffs
Frozen spinach is the least appetizing frozen food in existence. Soggy mush. Much better frozen choices for vegetables.
You missed the point that you put it in other things where it has minimal impact on the texture and taste.
> A working-poor friend also used to buy steel-cut oats, to eat breakfast for pennies.
Weirdly where I live steel-cut oats are the pricey ones even thought they're processed less than, e.g., rolled oats. That said they do need to cook longer than rolled, so wondering if energy cost might make those a bit more expensive.
He probably was buying them at a feed store. It used to be much much cheaper to buy steel cut oats and big bags of wheat berries as livestock feed. We ate them as kids in the 70s and 80s. We ground the wheat with a hand mill. Not sure if its cheaper now. Soy and corn are primary feed stock produced these days.
Depending on the time when you did this, those feed store oats may have been handled in a way that wasn't as safe. Regulations change all the time (and differ by country), but often livestock feed is held the looser handling regulations.
Steaming and rolling is much easer then cutting hard groats. I don't have insights into how this is done at scale, but it is easy to see the same remaining true.
Usually, prepared cut oats have a lower glycaemic index that can also be very helpful if you are trying to maintain a constrained diet.
> If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you.
Fun fact, frozen vegetables and fruits are both nearly immortal and (often) a higher quality than fresh. They are generally pretty cheap as well.
Grab a 5lb back of frozen veg and throw it in the freezer. You can whittle them away for months with no spoilage or loss in quality.
> Don't get scurvy, or other nutritional deficiency. If you can't make sure all your nutrients are covered, I've guessed (I'm not a nutritionist) that a mainstream multivitamin pill can't hurt.
If you do a primarily vegetarian diet, it's both cheap and pretty hard to get most nutritional deficiencies. Throw in some foods that give you B12 (nutritional yeast/fortified soy milk if you want to stay vegitarian/vegan. Chicken or turkey otherwise). Veg is packed with vitamins and minerals. You might need to watch for protein, but soy products, beans, and or lean meats are relatively cheap and can cover that.
> Once you start being more penny-pinching with eating, you might find yourself getting hungry less, rather than more, and it's not hard to slip into caloric deficit that will make you sick.
Two things that really help with this.
1. You do actually need fats in your diet, so use fats. Ideally things like olive oil or avocado oil. Most nutrition stuff I've seen recommends a 33/33/33 calorie split. 33% from carbs, 33% from fats, 33% from proteins.
2. There are cheap and healthy high calorie foods. Potatoes are (in most regions) some of the cheapest high calorie foods. Pasta would be the number 2 to go for, rice probably last (though it is cheap, it's just not super healthy. Grab some fortified rice and don't wash it)
Are you comparing white rice with white wheat pasta? In my experience whole rices (white, red, brown…) are as much nutritious as whole pasta but way tastier and often cheaper. Maybe it depends on the region. A plate of whole rice + some oil will last you hunger free for the entire afternoon.
You are right. I was under the impression that brown rice had less vitamins than enriched white but that appears to not be the case. Brown rice/whole rice would definitely be the best choice.
I believe potatoes still end up winning in terms of healthiness/vitamins/cost but that will depend a bit on region.
Where I'm at, you can get 5lbs of russets for $3.
Now make this feasible for family with kids.
Most children won’t eat beans and rice for a long time without lifelong trauma that yields strong reactions at mealtimes in adulthood.
I respectfully doubt that: many east Africans grown with their traditional meal loves rice and beans if cooked well. I think there’s a lot about habits and parents mimicking. Sure they loves chicken, but beans too.
There’s also that study where they feed a mother cat with food that contains brocolis perfume When then kitties got weaned they prefer brocolis than fish. (I can’t find it back on google sorry, perhaps it was another legume)
Sometimes there's no choice. If it's between beans and rice or nothing at all, then it's going to be beans and rice. Soup kitchens, school lunches, etc are a great help too.
Exactly the list I had when eating as a poor student. I still eat plenty of oats with plain yogurt for breakfast - they are an excellent breakfast food. The great thing is you can also scale their cost to your wallet, i.e. 100g of plain rolled oats plus 400g of full-fat yogurt comes out to around 1USD (0.25c for the oats, 0.75c for the yogurt here) and delivers about 600kcal total with very good macro profile. As your budget increases you can get increasingly fancy with olive oil, nuts, spices, cheese, etc. It's a very versatile food. Just don't fall into the trap of eating it with sugar when you're poor - you want to pair the oats with a lot of savoury fats so it keeps you feeling full for longer.
When I was poor I skipped breakfast. $0 cost.
The cost is 600 calories or so that you'd need to make up elsewhere.
So like, 2 20oz cokes?
Sure, if that's the kind of macros you're looking for
My point was: your point was useless. How many poor people care about fucking macros?
Edit: man this irritates me. You brought up macros, when talking about being too poor to eat. Open your eyes.
You need to relax a little bit. Maybe if you ate some breakfast you wouldn't be so grumpy.
The point was that you can't escape the need for food. Skipping a meal is not any kind of strategy, unless your plan is to slowly starve yourself to death. I guess if you literally have $0, and no credit card, and your paycheck is tomorrow, and there is zero food in your fridge or your cupboard, and you have no friends that would give you a bite to eat, and there are no soup kitchens near you, then skipping a meal could make sense. Was that your circumstance?
But, if you have 1500 calories in your fridge for today, skipping breakfast and eating 750 for lunch and 750 for dinner is one way to do it. You could also eat 500 for breakfast, 500 for lunch, and 500 for dinner.
Or a couple spoonfuls of sugar.
I’m kinda anti rice in Canada. We grow lots of wheat but not rice.
I can stock up on 900g bags of pasta on sale for CAD$1.25 (~US$0.87). Used to be CAD$1.00 was the good deal, but c’est la vie. Quicker and imo easier to prepare pasta on the stovetop.
Pasta has almost double the protein content of rice by dry weight (13% vs 7%), more fibre (3.2% vs 1.3% for white rice), more of a fat component (1.5% vs 0.7%) and is always fortified (at least here).
(And yeah, Canada grows a ton of pulses, mostly for export, so they’re cheap here but not locally favoured as much for protein)
Do mind that the body can only use about half the protein in wheat, compared the somewhere in the 90s % for whey, for example.
I think you're misinterpreting whatever metric you got those numbers from (bioligocal value[1] maybe?).
Maybe, but how does wheat protein compare to rice protein?
Very well in general. As a protein whey is unbeatable on bioavailibity and completion, especially considering cost per kg.
The poster you're replying to was asking about wheat vs rice protein, not whey.
Biggest problem is that it has an absolutely disgusting texture, for me at least.
Also involves killing calves
That's how our civilization's relationship to cows has worked for millennia.
Our civilisations also kept slaves for millennia.
I'm aware of the is-ought problem with my statement, but my point is that that is the role calves play when we want cow dairy products. The problem with it as it exists today is the barbarous nature of factory farming.
They still do, mechanisms and messaging are just smarter.
Our civilisations also drank water for millennia.
Not sure there isn't a group bringing it back.
Outlawing being poor/homeless, so the poor can be arrested just for not having housing. Or for debts.
Then, making laws that inmates can be provided to corporations to work.
Boom, some slavery.
I’m really confused why congress doesn’t outlaw prison labor of this kind. No one supports it anywhere on the political spectrum.
Are the companies who profit from it really that influential?
It's not being brought back. There is slavery today[0].
[0] https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery
Not sure the US will realize it until everyone has an uncle or cousin working as an indentured servant in a prison workforce.
Then MAGA will be like "hey, wait a minute, this seems kind of like slavery. Isn't that something we stopped teaching in school".
You mean western civilisation I guess? After those millennia, still 75% of the human population didn’t start or finish their milk adaptation.
This isn't clear to me. Whey is a byproduct of milk->cheese production.
Milk production is performed by making cows pregnant repeatedly (about once per year I think) throughout their lives and then killing most of their calves. Once the mother cow is worn out from all the births, they too are killed.
Male calves are usually sold for meat (veal). Cows that cannot produce sufficient milk are sold for beef.
This is objectionable if you find any of the meat farming practices objectionable, but whey itself does not necessitate killing anything.
A replacement rate breeding program for cows that rotates dairy production is probably possible. It's just not what we seem to want.
Milk cows are not generally used for meat. That is a different breed of cows. Milk cows almost never have male offspring - with AI we can control to ensure only female calf's are born (IIRC this is about 97% accurate so a few males are born). A few great milk producing mothers will be given sperm that is male only thus ensuring enough bulls to provide fathers and improving genetics for the next generations.
If AI means "Artificial Insemination" I believe you.
If AI means "Artificial Intelligence" I do not believe you.
The first.
> whey itself does not necessitate killing anything.
This is assuming that people would eat calves if they weren't killed so that we can take their milk.
You're right, but I think about it the other direction. We currently _do_ eat the calves that _are_ killed so we can take their milk.
We _could_ (probably) figure out a way to not require killing them, I just don't know what that would be.
Back of the envelope math: cows live for about 20 years, but dairy cows are killed after about 4 years when their milk production slows. Assuming they are impregnated 4 times, that's (5 cows * 20 years per cow) / (4 years) = 25 times as costly. And this 25 times as costly milk has to compete with the 1 times as costly milk in a market that's already so competative that milk is sold below cost with government subsidies. It's impossible for practical purposes.
If you're comparing today's market, practices, and subsidies (which are all just measurements of the same signal) to a fictional world where we didn't want to kill any calfs, but using today's subsidies and prices, then I think that's not a fair comparison.
If god appeared and said that the Hindus were right all along and cows are sacred and milk is their gift to us - we'd do it just fine.
All factory farming has some horrific stories to tell.
Not sure I'd single out whey. It is really all dairy.
And, all chicken, all beef, etc... If you dig into the actual mechanisms of how harvesting is done, it is a horror show.
Mass killing is bloody and horrific.
We do it anyway.
When I sit down and think about the amount of murder required to maintain any omnivorous or carnivorous creature, it's really a mindwarp. I (at least) have been quite separated from it my whole life, until I started hunting, really.
Wolves and large carnivores especially are just brutal. They will take your children down and eat them alive in front of you. Fair exchange we drive them off and kill you quickly, is at least one way of looking at it. But there's no "pleasant" way of looking at any of it.
Whey is a milk product why do calves die?
It's the dead calves' milk.
One can have whey without the calf dying. I have personally seen whey produced without harming calves.
I also don't understand why some HNer's insist on downvoting simple questions. Trying to silence questioning is not healthy for society.
I agree with the downvote think.
What you have seen (whey without calves harm) is probably typical an old farming practice OR of some rural family production. That’s great for them and their cows, but have nothing to do with 99% of the milk consumed daily, even the best quality you can buy wherever else those farms are.
Do you think all dairy cows need calves to create milk? I don't care if someone disagrees with my posts I agree that they engage in conversation. Downvoting without explanation is my complaint. Finally the comment that whey production results in dead calves is pretty simplistic and not based on any analysis that I can discern.
If HN is about the struggle for truth I expect a certain amount of intellectual rigor in comments.
I meant "I agree with you about the downvote think".
I also read your explanation in sibling thread. IMHO you’re right about the calves not-killed if we only look for a specific time frame , but it can’t work on the long run. If you can please share some materials for us to learn more. Also, cows definitely needs a clave to start the milk production.
So what did they do with the calf?
The mother very quickly starts producing more milk than the calf can drink. In the wild the milk production levels off to the level of the calf's intake (and then slowly rises to match their needs as they age and then tapers off as they age further).
In a small dairy situation the calves are kept off of the cows for either the morning or the evening milking and so the cows' milk production remains high the entire time. The calf weans, but from the cow's udder's perspective the calf is still suckling like mad and so the cow keeps producing milk. The calf grows up and is bred themselves, doubling the milk output over the course of two to three years.
Now this isn't sustainable in a paperclip-optimizer kind of way, so only the best milkers are kept and the ones that either have a hard time getting pregnant, or are ornery, or produce less milk, or get sick regularly wind up getting harvested for their meat. But there's no need to kill the calves (at the local dairy scale).
I still don’t understand how you keep the calves alive. Ok for one or two year but if you want to maintain a regular production over the years, at some point you’ll have a bunch of male cows (not sure the right English word for that) and a bunch of "bad milker cows". I mean I totally agree what you describe is possible and even the reality in a few ranch but it has nothing to do with what’s happening for the vast majority of cows.
Side note: on the other side of the calves killing scale, some farmers (in Swissland at least) started to kill male calves directly at birth because they found it more profitable at scale. Yummy Toblerone!
What about male calves?
Raise them up to a steer if you don't need breeding stock and use / sell them as a bull if you do.
Okay, so most of calves are still killed, but maybe after they grow up rather than while they're calves?
Wait until it is done weaning to start using it's mother's milk. Most Dairy cows don't need to have a calf to produce milk.
> Wait until it is done weaning to start using it's mother's milk.
Then what happens to the calf? They raise it to the end of it's natural lifespan as a pet? Are male and female calves treated differently?
> Most Dairy cows don't need to have a calf to produce milk.
I can't find anything to corroborate this. Every source I find on the topic says dairy cows produce milk for up to about one year after giving birth, then they need to be re-impregnated to begin producing milk again. Do you have a source for this claim?
Not a problem for most people, except vegans.
I'd wager most people actually do inconveniently hold some vegan ethics, but there's a blind spot due to tradition, culture, and habit.
For example, most people have some sheepishly held position against factory farming despite partaking in it. And they think it's wrong to kick a dog and a pig and a cow. And watching a documentary like Dominion or Earthlings makes them feel horrible so they'd prefer not to watch it.
It is a moral problem for many people, however changing delicious, traditional and healthy habits is not so evident. I don’t blame them.
When I look up human ileal digestibility of wheat protein, I see 90% absorption with the same nitrogen retention of milk (65%).
Not that you'd buy organic pasta on a tight budget, but organic wheat products are not fortified, at least in the U.S. Just FYI to anyone wanting to exclusively eat pasta.
Pasta is also good.
For rice, something like parboiled rice, or brown rice, or enriched white rice will be more nutritious than some other kinds.
Oh, for beans, in addition to chick peas, lentils, and the various colors, there's also chana daal from an Indian grocery. (Which I'm told isn't the same thing as yellow split pea, though some stores might say it is.)
Chana daal is split mature chickpea. Yellow split pea is from mature pea, unless it is from pigeon pea. All three are commonly eaten in India, along with many other kinds of legumes including daals and beans.
More info:
That price for pasta can't be beat. I'm in BC and pasta goes for $0.37/100g here.
Rice is cheaper. Especially if you go to somewhere like an Asian market. With a rice cooker, rice is brain dead to make too and IMO it's far more versatile and I can eat it plain, while plain pasta is IMO disgusting.
One downside: wheat has gluten and a lot of folks are gluten intolerant to degrees (from mild gassiness to full blown celiac).
Celiac is a very clear cut medical condition. Most gluten intolerance seems to be nothing but hypochondria, with along with your standard "restrictive diets work until people figure out how to eat highly processed garbage with the new restriction" effect.
Seconding the fact the celiac is it's own condition, but gluten is something that seems to be a culprit of IBS symptoms in certain people. That doesn't mean that gluten is bad, just that it causes a poor reaction in some people. Avocados are another one of these things. Some doctors like to call these "digestive allergies" to give patients an idea of how they can vary in severity and that they're for all intents and purposes a misdiagnosis from the immune system.
> ...gluten is something that seems to be a culprit of IBS symptoms in certain people. That doesn't mean that gluten is bad, just that it causes a poor reaction in some people...
I've watched it first hand with my wife -- who is 1/2 Italian -- giving up pasta and bread in the last few years. It has made a huge difference in her daily quality of life with respect to digestive issues (mainly bloating and gassiness).
Gluten is a protein so it's not hard to imagine that either this protein is not easily digested by some folks or some byproduct of its digestion feeds some specific gut bacteria that produces inflammatory compounds. If Celiac is a full blown immune response to inflammation caused by gluten, then it seems reasonable that some folks would have a spectrum of reactions to barely registering it or somewhere in between (like my wife).
It's possible that it's some other compound that's prevalent in wheat, but avoiding wheat-based products has been life changing for my wife. I would add that this has developed with age similarly to how she has become lactose intolerant as well around the time she turned 40 so if you're in your 20's or 30's and you think this is malarkey, well, give it time (and really enjoy your lactose and gluten!).
Why folks downvoted the original comment, I don't understand; this is based on firsthand experience hacking her diet and observing how she felt. I'm not here on some anti-gluten crusade (my kids eat and enjoy plenty of gluten for the entire household!)
"well, give it time (and really enjoy your lactose and gluten!)."
And don't forget to avoid Glyphosate :-)
This describes my wife almost exactly. Developed gluten and lactose intolerance right around 40. She was one of those people who had to have at least one glass of milk a day and a gallon of ice cream a week and that had to be cut out 100%. She reacts to very small amounts of milk and gluten products. Even top ramen flavor packets in a pasta salad contain enough wheat and milk to give her a miserable day. Much like HFCS, dairy and wheat are fillers in SO many products that it's become a chore to shop and almost impossible to eat out spontaneously anymore.
> This describes my wife almost exactly. Developed gluten and lactose intolerance right around 40.
Her reactions are not as severe as your spouse's -- just gasiness and general abdominal discomfort (enough that it's not worth it for the satisfaction of eating pasta and dairy day-to-day). She will still occasionally indulge.
I, for one, still happily consume gluten and lactose (to her chagrin) despite being Asian.
"Celiac is a very clear cut medical condition."
No, it is not. It comes in a bunch of varieties and there is news: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3945755/
"Most gluten intolerance seems to be nothing but hypochondria"
Well, tell this to somebody who nearly died of it. First diagnosis when I walked into the hospital: HIV in the final stage! But I have a super rare form of it. Incidence 1:100000
>No, it is not. It comes in a bunch of varieties and there is news: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3945755/
From the abstract
>Fish exposed to glyphosate develop digestive problems that are reminiscent of celiac disease
The rest seems to be theorizing with no empirical evidence
The is no proof (there is never proof in science) but there is reason to be suspicious.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7545723/
Glyphosate exposure, either through active ingredient alone or commercial herbicide formulations, has the potential to induce dysbiosis by creating an imbalance between commensal members of the gastrointestinal microbiome and opportunistic pathogens. Glyphosate may be a critical environmental trigger in the etiology of several disease states associated with dysbiosis, including celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Glyphosate exposure may also have consequences for mental health, including anxiety and depression, through alterations in the gut microbiome. However, the research surrounding glyphosate’s effects on the gut microbiome also suffers from numerous methodological weaknesses including artificially high-doses, insufficient duration, proprietary ingredients and an over reliance on animal models. Future long-term studies examining physiologically relevant doses in both healthy and genetically susceptible populations are warranted to determine the real risk posed to human health.
I'm not sure what you mean by "clear cut medical condition" other than that it is easy to test.
ROTFL. How? Enzyme test? There are three different ones. All of them are unreliable, hence normally doctors do all of them at once.
Gene test?
Trying to avoid gluten?
Don't forget, first you have to suspect to have a gluten problem. There are many forms of celiac. And there are forms that are unlikely to be diagnosed by a doctor. They may even not know what you have if you tell them the name of the disease and have to google it.
I assume those folks are smart enough not to eat pasta then.
It's not that simple for most folks because, as I said, it seems to be a spectrum of intolerance and doesn't manifest as some step function.
It took a while for my wife to zero in on pasta and bread as one source of her bloating and gassiness (lactose being another). She grew up eating plenty of pasta, bread, and lactose. But cutting it out has helped reduce digestive discomfort now in her early 40's.
>I can stock up on 900g bags of pasta on sale for CAD$1.25 (~US$0.87). Used to be CAD$1.00 was the good deal, but c’est la vie.
I remember it being available at $1.00 quite consistently, but I can't recall seeing it even at $1.25 during 2024. Maybe for the 750g bags.
Also damn, CADUSD has been sliding further... (Why does Google's chart show a giant temporary spike on Dec 21?)
>Canada grows a ton of pulses, mostly for export, so they’re cheap here
And yet it seems like what I see on shelves is mostly imported... ?
$1.25 was a few months ago at a Toronto Freshco. 900g Italpasta. I seemed to be the only weirdo stocking up for the next 1-2 years.
Managed to find the 798ml cans of beans for 1.25 (I think it was) in the last few months at a No Frills. Def local production. Again, was the only weirdo stocking up for the next 1-2 years. Yeah dry beans are cheaper but I’m lazy.
You may also find me filling my cart when 798ml cans of crushed tomatoes go on sale, which is more common than the above sales.
Giant Tiger has 900g go on sale for this price pretty regularly. Unfortunately it's only for penne, spaghetti, and sometimes macaroni, they don't seem to sell the other shapes in the 900g format.
> A working-poor friend also used to buy steel-cut oats
That's funny reading oats as being described as a cheap breakfast here, while in the fitness/sports community, oats are "the GOAT" of breakfast, without a focus on cost.
Sounds like gymrat gentrification of staples, like how cheap / mass produced dairy (by) products are now "fortified" with proteine (and in Dutch they make sure to use the fancy sounding "protein" instead of the colloquial "eiwit") and given black-and-white branding in their own section, sold for 2x the price. And the sellers are laughing all the way to the bank.
Even if you're serious about sports / weighlifting etc, you don't actually need the specialised protein foods and shakes. Just have an extra bowl of yoghurt or low-fat cottage cheese and you've got a big chunk of extra protein in your diet already without spending extra or messing with calorie intake.
The problem is that people look at e.g. oats or anything branded for "their" group and go all-in on it.
A bowl of yogurt would help but is not really that much extra protein. Definitely not near the extra protein serious gym people attempt to consume.
And that's if you can even process a high joghurt diet without issues which isn't the case for plenty of people.
> Definitely not near the extra protein serious gym people attempt to consume.
Plenty of people exist who aim for >200g of protein daily - but that’s objectively overkill. There’s very little benefit, if any, to going over a half gram of protein per pound of body weight.
https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein...
In various types of training eating is the hardest part. Because you say "just have an extra bowl of yogurt" it lets me know you don't understand how hard it is to eat all of this food. This is the main reason protein powder is so prevalent.
Oats can be very expensive, depending on where you are. When I was actively body building and on a business trip to Singapore, I couldn't find any reasonably priced oats at the the grocery store.
When you're dieting, once you know the amount of what foods you need to eat, its much easier to stick to that plan vs trying to re-balance your macros and calories with a new food item.
Obviously you have to consider where the hell you're living. In the UK I eat oats all the time and they're dirt cheap. I knew a guy when I was in japan who ate oats every day. I thought he was absolutely insane. You could barely buy oats there. I ate brown rice mixed with barely to get nutrient rich grains because it was actually readily available and affordable. Let's not be stupid out here and act suprised when our ideal diet in one country is too expensive in a totally different climate - there are many plants in the world, use something else. Oats are only so revered in the west because they're a good thing that is AVAILABLE.
trying this with dietary restrictions and an aversion to glyphosate has been very difficult.
Nice list - learning to vaccum seal with a foodsaver and freeze things helps too.
Dried Beans (like chili) can be cooked in the Instant Pot without problem. Not sure if anyone's tried a Chef IQ.
I like to buy 50 lbs bags of beans, rice, flour, lintels, etc on the cheap from restaurant supply stores and keep store them in 5 gallon buckets and make large batches of chilli, curried splitpea soup, daal, blackbean soup etc it cheap healthy easy to reheat later and I can throw it in a crockpot before work and it be done when I get home, this with a side rough chopped root vegetables and squash tossed in herbs and sprinkled with olive oil and roasted on a baking sheet makes a great meal.
Keep in mind this is a dangerous route to go down long term.
Optimising for economic cost with the only requirement being "fill your belly" and "be palatable enough", tends to result in poor nutrition. This is roughly how the industry optimises food - minimise economic cost, maximise yield, and maximise sales (make everything artificially hyper palatable), with terrible results.
In the long term this is partly covered by the economic cost on a personal basis because of the cost in health care and loss of ability to produce income due to deteriorating health. But this is displaced in time, and you do not want to do this experiment on yourself, it's not reversible.
Calories are not equal, as a general rule, buying cheap food often means cheaping out on nutritional value. If you want to frame it in terms of money, buying good quality food now is an investment in your future.
I'd agree if you're talking about alternating ramen and cereal, but the diet prescribed here seems pretty reasonable.
Good even, in comparison to a lot of people.
Either way you can weigh both factors and 90% of diets can be easily and cheaply improved by just adding a hefty dose of frozen veggies to every meal.
Plenty of variety these days too, lots of premixed medleys.
I don't think your premise is true, that cheap food means poor nutrition. Also the actual website doesn't have anything remotely unhealthy or lacking in nutrition, on the contrary, with the exception of the first day, it's actually quite healthy and balanced.
The first day is an outlier because it was on a day of fasting among many Christians.
You bring up a great point, and the article linked does indeed mention this in on of it's core goals:
>3. Be Safe! Maintain and track nutrition, get enough calories, and don't eat rotten food.
Still, it's at odds with the premise. A more compatible goal would be to minimise cost of nutritional value rather than cost of calories. Unfortunately this is very hard to measure, so the best we have is to gauge it by proxy.
Did the engineer end up malnourished? If not...
check back in 30 to 40 years. Also good luck measuring quality of life in the interim, and establishing a controlled baseline.
How about frozen fruits, veggies, potatoes, nuts, canned beans and canned beets?
frozen fruits and veggies or frozen fruits and frozen veggies?
yes, both. sorry I wasn't clear. Assuming frozen fruit and frozen veggies are much cheaper compared to fresh.
same difference nowadays with everything being flash frozen
Absolutely not, where do you live where you don’t have access to non-frozen foods?
I’d argue this as well. I eat mainly meat and other animal products, and get by on less than $10 a day just fine while hitting optimal nutrition.
Trying to gather a cheap and healthy nutrition profile from random items in a grocery store is a task doomed to fail.
yeah every now and then i think about bringing my food bill down like i used to in uni but i just know now that that food was literally fake nutrients and i can't do that to myself - my health is the cornerstone of everything else i do.
I'm surprised at how few calories per day this was
For day 1
1/2 can Campbell's Tomato Soup - 135 Milk, half of 10.7 floz - 133.75 4 slices white bread - 600 Tillamook Italian 3-Cheese, 58 g - 186.43 Butter, 32 g - 228.57 Homemade Kimchi (73 g) - 25.75
135 + 133.75 + 600 + 186.43 + 228.57 + 25.75 = 1,309.5 calories which is generally well under weight maintenance levels for anyone moderately active.
Note that he said day 1 was Ash Wednesday, which is traditionally a fasting day, and thus he decided to only eat one meal.
That said, the rest of the days didn't look much better. I'm quite a skinny dude, but what he prepared for an entire day was like one meal and a snack for me generally. I suspect the amount of calories on these meals would be well below maintenance level for most people.
I could probably pull that off playing video games from my bed
Quantity, composition and quality of calories are all important.
Yes, but quantity of calories is what ends up determining whether you're gaining or losing weight over time, and at 1300 calories a day, most adults would be losing weight.
(Which was a half-goal of the challenge, iirc.)
That is generally true, minus any plateaus that require assistance like exercise to break through.
For me, I like to eat my calories than drink them if I had to pay attention.
I liked this challenge and think it presented a lot of solid merits.
Yeah weight loss or whatever aside, this challenge is awesome!
True, but at 1300 calories you'd also end up in a lower metabolism state (famine mode), undoing any benefits. You'd still lose weight of course but at a cost. I read that kicks in at 1200 calories or lower, but it's close enough.
I'm sure that the calorie intake could be increased without costing too much extra though, by padding things out with rice and/or beans.
The way to defeat 'famine mode' is to exercise anyway. That's how I lost weight to wrestle at my minimum. It's tortuous, for sure, but vigorous exercise can raise your metabolism for IIRC 24hrs.
Thank God, they don't let kids do that dumb sh_t anymore, but this was over 30ya.
From that perspective, it's even worse: it's a fat heavy diet with very low protein.
For quite a long time, I ate only Huel at home. At $2.21 per serving (a bit cheaper in the UK - £1.51, where I am from), and 5 servings per day, it's $11.05 per day. 4.5x what the author did, but I think it's worth it.
Whilst it costs a bit more, you save so much time and possibly money. It allows you to not have any dishes -> no dishwasher needed -> no cupboard space needed -> no kitchen needed -> no fridge needed -> cheaper rent. You don't need to go grocery shopping (no car needed), food never gets wasted, you take out significantly less trash. There's 0 "mental load", you never have to think/plan about how you're going to eat/cook/whatever.
If you're willing to adopt a bit of an "ignorance is bliss" attitude, you can happily pretend that you're eating a perfectly balanced diet ;).
I have no affiliation with Huel, just an extremely happy customer. Now that I'm traveling around the world, it's pretty much the only thing I miss from my old life. If I could get it shipped anywhere in the world for a reasonable price, I'd probably still be eating it right now.
This has to be the most UK response ever. Even sad you have to eat the rich and varied foods of your host countries during your travels.
Surely even in the UK food is a bit more than just a way of not dying.
> Surely even in the UK food is a bit more than just a way of not dying.
It definitely is. Most people I know care about having good food. It does vary a lot with income and region. The biggest problem is long working hours and people not having time or energy to do anything more than buy ready meals.
While people in the UK tend to eat worse than people in the rest of Europe, we eat better than Americans and food here is "rich and varied".
I am puzzled by GP's comment about having cheaper rent by not having a kitchen. I have never even heard of anywhere you could rent here that did not have a kitchen - its really must be bottom end room rental (and even there shared kitchens are normal).
Absolute shoeboxes yes. Think 250sqft (23ish square meters) or so. One room, maybe a closet, and a bathroom, much like a basic hotel room in the US.
> Surely even in the UK food is a bit more than just a way of not dying.
You need to get your view of UK food from somewhere other than American comics' jokes about UK food.
I did say "at home", I still ate out plenty. I just don't find the effort/cost/reward of being able to cook at home worth it.
When traveling, I eat plenty of local and varied food. The problem of cooking at home is exacerbated when traveling though. Having an adequate kitchen for cooking is even more troublesome.
Going out to eat every meal gets pretty tiresome after doing it for years. The food available for takeaway isn't great. Fine for a few weeks or months, but eating it for years definitely kills you faster.
Having a healthy, 0 effort meal available at a moments notice is great.
Food culture has (in general) moved on in the UK from that period!
I practice a miniature version of this by having protein bars for breakfast everyday. It saves so much time over cooking anything in the most time-valuable moments of the day.
One of the true pleasures of WFH is being able to cook whatever I want for any meal of the day.
? I'd rather get up a little earlier than stress about how much time I spend on breakfast to be honest. Mind you my breakfast is usually a sandwich, not exactly time consuming.
For me, getting up earlier because of breakfast is stressing over how much time I spend on breakfast.
You had the shakes or the instant pots?
Huel.com is quite expensive in US https://huel.com/products/huel-instant-meal-pots
$2.21 per serving is deal, did it fill you up?
I had the powder: https://huel.com/products/huel
That's the page I got the $2.21 per serving figure. I wasn't hungry when I ate Huel, but I was never "full" like after eating a pizza.
To be honest I don't like the new Huel offerings like the pot or the premixed shakes. They generate too much rubbish, part of the appeal of Huel was how little garbage I created per meal.
Something articles like these make me wonder is what would a single "perfect" meal look like? Perfect as in a meal that provides all the essential nutrients the average person needs to stay healthy over the long term? The goal would be to make it as cheap as possible, easy to mass-produce, and have a decent shelf life. It might not be the most exciting food, but it could address serious issues like malnutrition and food insecurity. Food banks could always have something reliable to offer, combine it with a supplement to make up for any lack of micro nutrients and no one would have to worry about not having access to basic nutrition. It feels like a solvable problem, but it's likely harder than I imagine.
Interestingly, potatoes contain almost everything a person needs (all essential amino acids, carbs, etc).
If I recall correctly, you get complete nutrition from: potatoes, a small amount of dairy (vitamin A, calcium, fatty acids), and a small amount of ... oats? (or maybe some vegetable? I forget.) to cover the few trace nutrients potatoes don't have. I think selenium is one.
They're cheap, and dried/flaked potatoes last forever. The Incas already solved this problem for us (:
Comparison of essential amino acid, to meet the Total Recommended Daily Intake: about 100g of beef or about 2 kg of Baked Russet Potatoes, according to:
https://tools.myfooddata.com/protein-calculator/171203/100g/...
https://tools.myfooddata.com/protein-calculator/170030/100g/...
I did a potato diet a while back. Lost significant weight (which I've sadly put back on).
Potatoes are low in protein and various Vitamins. I ended up eating protein powder and regular Multi, C, D and B vitamin pills.
Big negative (or maybe positive) of potatoes is that they’re 300 cal/lb, so you’d need to purchase/harvest/store/eat like 7lb/day/person
https://www.livescience.com/10163-man-eating-potatoes-2-mont... : twenty potatoes per day. That's more than I expected.
Must have been small potatoes
"dried/flaked potatoes" will solve this
But then you loose a lot of nutrients
How does it lose nutrients? It is still potato
Which ones? Drying only removes the water content, what else is lost when drying foods?
Probably Vitamin C
Industrial food drying is usually done fast (ie: high heat). Vacuum/freeze drying might retain more nutrients but it’s a more $$$ process.
Would probably add the water soluble vitamins (B and C) and minerals might evaporate away too
(Before was just mentioning the C getting destroyed).
Just entered in 2 potato's and a litre of milk into chronometer. I think the last ingredient is probably gonna need to be 2 things, a dark leafy green for vitamin K, and something for vitamin E, tho I honestly can't find any good candidates besides like sunflower oil (and you'd need like 3 tbsp worth)
Buttermilk and potatoes can get you close to 100% nutrition.
Plug 4 large potatoes and 6 Cups of whole buttermilk into a site like Cronometer. 2000 Calories and 100+% of everything but Vitamins E and K, which you might get from foraged greens.
Colcannon can keep you going forever.
Afaik almost all of the actual malnutrition in the world now comes from political causes rather than literal lack of volume of food (and actually a lot of historical famines were politically caused as well- the great leap forward, Irish potato famine)- there's probably some underlying political condition that prevents the normal functioning of the infrastructure needed to grow food and get it to people- water, roads, etc., because of war or simple mismanagement of money or resources.
So making a supply of this nutritionally complete food isn't the hard part, it's basically getting it to people who would eat it.
The other sad and ironic thing is that in America, both food insecurity and obesity basically exist side by side. It's definitely not the composition of the food that contributes to those issues.
This is a natural product of a system that prioritizes profit over compassion.
The CEOs would rather waste food than not make a few pennies profit on it.
The great leap forward happened in communist china. Probably communism and centrally planned economies have starved at least as many people as capitalism. Neither system seems particularly concerned with feeding poor people.
It’s not a feature of any specific political system. It’s a function of power.
The British stood by and allowed the Irish to starve, whilst Ireland was exporting record amounts of food that wasn’t potatoes, as they were concerned about charity being a corrupting influence on the Irish wretches.
You are correct. The reason is that neither has any compassion, to this very day.
OTOH, either system could be structured to be based upon compassion, if the people in charge made the choice to do so. Any human system could be altered to incorporate compassion into its motivations and mechanisms.
I'm a fan of fettered capitalism with socially-conscious citizens, but that requires the wealthy, middle class, and poor to be compassionate. What is important is to internalize the currently external costs corporations impose upon the environment and populace to make their profit.
For now, it's 'by the wealthy for the wealthy', no matter which system is dominant, no matter which religion is in power, no matter which ethnicity to ruling class represents. That is because compassion is sorely lacking in this world's peoples, especially its rulers.
If you're serious about this, US military MRE's are probably a good place to start researching.
> meal that provides all the essential nutrients the average person needs to stay healthy over the long term
There's a simple and intuitive answer, and I am still surprised that even rational people are conditioned to dismiss it (as I used to be).
What are you made of?
Animal flesh provides exactly all the nutrients required for your own flesh, in exactly the perfectly balanced proportion. Just think about it for a second. So, the simple answer is just fatty meat. As a good extra, you can use some liver/kidneys, a good idea is to also throw in some cartilage and skin into your ground meat for perfect nutrients balance. Eggs/fish/cheese for variability.
Imagine the careful measured portioning and chemical purification required to collect necessary nutrients from soy and vegetable stems — to make them right for building and sustaining your own animal flesh. Imagine how many things we didn't know 50 years ago about what nutrients are required for our flesh, and how many non-obvious things we will discover in the next 50 years from now, which would completely re-define best practices for synthetic vegetable food many times.
It occurs to me that this “exactly balanced proportion” argument doesn’t explain how animals turn vegetables into the meat you crave. The argument would dictate that cows should be fed meat, which regresses into absurdity.
Most people should probably cook their own food, avoid most ultra-processed foods (twinkies, not flour) and eat a healthy balance of food types.
From a documentary: cows are about 30% carnivore. They grow bacteria in their guts, on low quality food (grass) and then that bacteria gets devoured with the rest of the food when it's pushed in the next stomach (or intestine).
They had a hilarious setup, a cow with a plastic flap attached to the side. They would open the flap to get instant access to the guts of the cow to collect samples of food.
Cows have huge digestive system, and chew all day long — to be able to extract nutrients from plants. You, as a human, probably have more productive uses of your day.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't eat veggies. I am just saying that staying long-term healthy on a vegan diet seems to me much more complicated than just eating meat. Of course, eating a single product all the time is unhealthy, no matter what product — every living organism requires variance.
> You, as a human, probably have more productive uses of your day.
Much like a cow, I don't think about my digestive system -- I let the parasympathetic system take care of that :-)
> Of course, eating a single product all the time is unhealthy, no matter what product — every living organism requires variance.
This is a very different statement than "the simple answer is just fatty meat," which is what you originally claimed.
> This is a very different statement than "the simple answer is just fatty meat," which is what you originally claimed.
It's a different statement, but it's not contradictory. Simple answer is: eat fatty meat. Complex answer is: just like everything in this universe, it depends on many factors, and no single answer is correct in every single context - but eating fatty meat will get you 90% where you want to be for 10% of effort.
We could look at the diet of the species most closely related to us chimps which is mostly fruit nuts, tuberous roots, insects, and opportunisticly meat (about 2%). You could bump the meat up a few percent to avoid bugs or add more nuts/legumes and acheive a healthy diet.
It's a good point. As I understand, it is still debated whether increased meat consumption allowed our bigger brains — though I agree that a balanced and varied diet of natural unprocessed ingredients is likely the healthiest, although not the easiest to maintain, I think.
This doesn’t pass a basic sniff test. We mostly don’t eat food to replace our physical form. We mostly eat food to fuel the processes of our physical form. Big difference. Like trying to put steel, rubber, and plastic into a car’s gas tank.
If cars were constantly 3d-printing themselves from the inside to replace every single part with a new one every day (as living multi-cellular organisms do), I'm pretty for them consuming other running cars as a source materials would be best (as cars would contain the necessary rubber and steel in proportions that are perfect for cars). You don't even need to consume fuel separately — your car would re-cycle fuel from the consumed car's tank — sorry for continuing your metaphor.
After I posted, I wished I hadn’t added the car metaphor. You’re right that it doesn’t map to the body well. That said, it’s still true that most of what food is doing is fueling activity and not replacing parts of the body. Carbs work really well.
Carbs do work well as a powerful supplement, but as a single source of nutrients, animals are the best.
You can healthily live for years just consuming cow parts (see "carnivore diet" — it works for most).
If one just eat potatoes or some other single plant, most are likely to lose their health in the long run.
This is a hypothesis, but it doesn't bear out in human out come research no matter how popular it might be on social media. No "perfect meal" would be high in saturated fat.
Animal flesh also doesn't contain all of the nutrients. Just plug 2000 calories of steak into Cronometer.com and look.
What's wrong with saturated fats though? You're probably thinking of the same debunked papers which said that sugary cereals are the healthy way to start your day
Well, instead of getting into that, the simpler debunk is that fatty meat only gives you a fraction of your daily nutrition. Even when you add in eggs and dairy.
But only in diet camps (usually "carnivore"/"keto" camps) on social media do people tell you that research on saturated fats is debunked because it condemns the foods they wish to eat. We know that, for example, saturated fat increases apoB concentration in the blood which is independently causal in atherosclerosis.
We have converging lines of metaanalyses that show this connection which is why reducing saturated fat and LDL cholesterol are unanimous guidelines, not social media fringe positions. ;)
> the simpler debunk is that fatty meat only gives you a fraction of your daily nutrition
I have tried the hyped-up "carnivore" diet myself for over 1.5 years and counting (started at a tender age of 35), with different levels of strictness (diary/no diary, no cheat days / once a month / twice a month / once a week), while doing blood tests every month. My wife thought I would die, but I was curious whether I would die, or how quickly my health would deteriorate.
Happy to report that you're wrong (based of my own anecdata), and not only fatty meat (even without diary) does provide enough nutrients and energy, but it noticeably _improves_ the blood work results and _lowers_ blood cholesterol.
> apoB concentration in the blood which is independently causal in atherosclerosis
I am pretty sure you're unintentionally mixing up 'causal' and 'correlated'. Correlation is not causation. For example, atherosclerosis might be causal in in increased apoB concentration, or something else completely might be causal in both atherosclerosis and increased apoB concentration, but apoB concentration by itself could be independent from atherosclerosis, or even inverse causal.
> We have converging lines of metaanalyses that show this connection which is why reducing saturated fat is a unanimous guideline.
If you're a US resident, I'd like to let you know that your newly elected administration is allegedly going to change the unanimous guidelines soon. Not saying whether it's a good or bad thing, just that your argument from authority is much weaker in our discussion than you think it is.
Another commenter already said it; closest to you is other humans, so simple, eat other humans.
Obviously don't do that for two obvious reasons (which I am highlighting just to be technically correct and to entertain ourselves):
1) Socially, not good idea. We are social creatures, and want to be accepted as a part of healthy group of our own species.
2) Eating your own kind more likely to transmit diseases, so less healthy.
Also cows and sheep have 99.99% same chemical composition as you, you don't really need to go that far, and any additional benefits (if any) are below statistical noise, but two downsides above are huge.
Yeah, but you have to go all the way to a farm to find cows and sheep. People are right next door, ready to be eaten.
I reject this line of reasoning because by it the best meal is other humans. If you accept that eating other animals is OK and eating fellow humans is bad then you are halfway to the next step, where eating fellow animals is bad and eating non-animals is OK. Just be smart about your diet. Call yourself sapiens not for nothin'!
> Just be smart about your diet
The original question was about a "meal that provides all the essential nutrients the average person needs to stay healthy over the long term"
The simplest, easiest, and the most correct answer is "just eat animals".
Of course, one can be "smart" about their diet, spend a lot of time on carefully balancing vegetables, fruit, grains and tofu, while also making sure to consume proper blend of vitamin and mineral pills and doing regular blood tests. BUT that's far from a "single meal", far from "easy" and "simple", and consumes a lot of time and mental capacity which many humans might not have a luxury to allocate in order to be fellows with farm animals, I think.
> The original question was about a "meal that provides all the essential nutrients the average person needs to stay healthy over the long term"
> The simplest, easiest, and the most correct answer is "just eat animals".
Stop right there. This is playing switcharoo.
You devised a hypothesis that elegantly goes like "healthiest simplest diet is what is closest to your own body". (And that you used as a justification to eat other animals)
But hey I guess the closest to your body is other humans. So seeing as you now backtrack and are not suggesting humans eat humans, thankfully you understand that the original question implies some norms about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable to eat even if it is contains all you need.
Now you just need to see why growing numbers of people think about eating not only fellow humans but fellow animals who are conscious, feel pain and suffer, especially the ones who grow up for consumption and suffer entire life tortured as unacceptable and you're all set.
In addition there is another "little problem" with your argument and that is that humans don't eat through by absorbing stuff like some sort of amoeba. It goes through complex digestive process that extracts some stuff from other stuff. And a bunch of stuff a human body can/should synthesize. Remember healthy eating is also NOT getting stuff you don't need and synthesize. And if you find the closest thing to what's in your body, that'll be a whole lotta stuff you do not need.
So no "just pick what's the same as your body" is not the most "simple healthy meal". On more than one level. It's just an excuse to justify a existing taste for meat.
I've explained why you shouldn't eat humans here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42611868
As I understood your argument, you primarily don't like the idea of eating animals based on your beliefs, and you would oppose it even if animals were the healthiest food available ever. So I don't think we contradict each other here — I've heard you, and I understand your ethical position.
> And a bunch of stuff a human body can/should synthesize
You're 100% correct here, I am aware of that. For example, if you only eat meat, your body will synthesize glucose which it would be otherwise lacking (which technically means that meat does not contain the "optimal amount" of sugars).
> Remember healthy eating is also NOT getting stuff you don't need and synthesize
And also getting stuff that a body cannot synthesize enough. Like the notorious B vitamin pills that vegans pop like candy.
> It's just an excuse to justify a existing taste for meat
No excuse needed, god (or nature) made cows delicious — what do you think is the reason for that?
> No excuse needed, god (or nature) made cows delicious — what do you think is the reason for that?
Again elegant but broken theory to justify a taste. Have you tried eating cow as it appears in "nature"? Let me know how delicious raw meat is. If you manage to kill it mano el mano as "nature" intended of course ;)
And of course apples are delicious. Beans. Avocado. Nuts.
Stuff can be very bad for you but taste very good. How do you know this is not that case with animals? If you think "god" made them tasty check maybe it was the satan actually? Animal conditions make me think of that guy more;)
The simple healthy meal is not eating animals. Coincidentally not the most tasty by a long shot but taste is subjective and always changes depending on what you get used to
That person has backtracked or weakened all of their positions under scrutiny so far.
Okay, maybe a single food source won't give you all your nutrition.
Okay, maybe "just eat fatty meat" is insufficient.
Okay, maybe it's not just the food with the most similar composition that is best.
Average nutrition discourse on social media.
As I mentioned in the other place, I've tried the carnivore diet, and I think you 100% can just eat fatty meat for months (and likely years), and you will feel great, and you blood work will improve.
Am I saying it's what you should do? No, primarily because I am not your mother, and also I don't know your current focuses in life.
There is no logic in GP. It's just typical bioscience.
I think you misspelled "broscience"!
I did. Ironically it made the whole comment the opposite of what I meant to say.
To continue this, the next step is eating fellow life is bad and eating non-life is OK. Just use an Instagram filter to recolour your face away from grey.
Define life;)
Tricky! I'll go for "Anything your gut is meant to digest that isn't classed as a vitamin."
Cool! So unless you think your gut is meant to digest conscious beings that feel pain your previous comment is just empty trolling right?
It's meant to digest anything it can digest. Morally I would disagree with someone who says "eat anything but conscious beings" because that would include eating people who are asleep or passed out, or dead.
You might be interested in Michael Lustgarden, a scientist whose hobby(?) is extending his healthspan by optimising biomarkers. In practice he mostly tests and tweaks his diet extensively: https://michaellustgarten.com
His meals are essentially a massive variety of vegetables + some sardines. It's fascinating work even if I wouldn't replicate it myself.
Like Soylent?
You know you can also enjoy life a little.
My main concern is people having to skip meals and kids facing developmental issues due to malnutrition. I get that the idea of feeding people something like Soylent isn’t exactly appealing, but if we could bring the cost down to nearly free for those in need, it could be a really effective safety net, (maybe not Soylent as it exists now but a product like that).
We don't really have a problem with quantity, or quality, of food. We have a logistics problem. Which is nice way of saying that starvation can be a policy.
Example most people don't know about: Sudan. There is a civil war there, for two years now, millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands dead, terror, whole villages wiped out. And now the refugees starve. And why?
Because the fighting sides don't let aid trucks across their lines.
Evil has many faces, many motives, many methods.
Compassion is the cure, but not passive compassion, active ass-kicking WWII-Allies-style compassion.
There is a peanut butter thing like this that has been very successful in the developing world.
https://www.unicef.org.au/stories/plumpy-nut-peanut-butter#:....
> just $65 can provide a child with six weeks' worth of this therapeutic food.
That comes down to a little over $1.50 a day, that's great!
Seems like it comes in packets of about 500 calories each, containing 40grams of carbs, 30.3 grams of fat and 12.8gram of protein.
Unsure what fiber contents are like but Wikipedia does list that it includes vitamins and minerals.
> as of 2018 Plumpy'nut patents have expired in the US, UK and the European Union
Also says it's manufactured in the US, I wonder if these are available at food banks and such, maybe even in schools and if parents know about it.
Edit: additional fiber is included as well according to Wikipedia.
As the sibling comment says, that's a distributional poverty issue which is downstream of a lot of other policy, rather than something fundamental to food.
You're presenting it as a solution, but if dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything it'll become the cheap standardised food for the poor while the rich get to eat proper food.
I mean Soylent's naming couldn't be more on the nose. At least it's not made of people (as far as I know).
World hunger is not caused by lack of food. It's caused by lack of will.
I shared this site below... but https://efficiencyiseverything.com/food/
This was the idea behind soylent if I’m not mistaken.
This has been around for a long time, enjoy and invest:
https://www.lalizas.com/product/174-liferaft-equipment/6413-...
https://www.lrse.com/products/seven-oceans-emergency-ration
They taste what they look like. 5 years shelf life.
Soylent
Also Claude gave this idea:
Complete Nutritional Meal Recipe Single Portion (700 calories) Base Ingredients: Red lentils (split): 70g Brown rice (finely ground): 60g Ground flaxseed: 15g Coconut oil powder: 10g Sweet potato powder: 20g Seaweed powder (nori or wakame): 2g Nutritional yeast: 5g Moringa leaf powder: 5g
Seasonings & Preservatives: Iodized salt: 2g Black pepper (ground): 0.5g Dried thyme: 1g Citric acid: 0.5g Onion powder: 2g Garlic powder: 1g
Have you heard of Huel?
Sooner suck start a shotgun than try live off Huel or similar products again tbh.
I'm sorry, but Huel is the most digusting meal replacement powder I've tasted. It's sooooo sweet and gritty.
Yeah I hate it too. But it's exactly what the OP asked for.
Haha yes. To each his own, as they say. :)
I'd never call myself a chef but I'm something of a gourmand and do love cooking. Even if it's mediocre food seems to taste better when you make it yourself :D. I also read someplace that people with desk jobs and busy minds should have a hobby that produces tangible results and involves working with your hands and cooking fits the bill perfectly. As a matter of fact I just finished meal prepping for this coming week and made:
- Natto on rice with scallions, egg, and kimchi
- Chicken curry with daal and spicy raita
- Chicken fajitas with refried beans
- Hummus and carrots
I spent ~$50 for everything delivered via Instacart not counting spices and staples like rice and lentils and I live in southern California... not as cheap as this gentleman but not too shabby all things considered. I need to start cataloguing my recipes so that I can make them more repeatable and share them easily with friends when they ask.
> food seems to taste better when you make it yourself
For me, it’s the opposite. I’m never very happy with anything I make but when somebody makes something for me, it tastes amazing.
"When you make your own sandwich, you anticipate its taste as you're working on it. And when you think of a particular food for a while, you become less hungry for it later. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, for example, found that imagining eating M&Ms makes you eat fewer of them. It's a kind of specific satiation, just as most people find room for dessert when they couldn't have another bite of their steak. The sandwich that another person prepares is not ''preconsumed'' in the same way."
https://archive.nytimes.com/query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage-9...
I find I'm a mix. I'll never make a sandwich at home that tastes as good as a deli, no matter if I use the same ingredients. I can smoke one hell of a brisket that IMHO is better than anything around me.
I also have to balance foodie obsessions with being economical and healthy. (Growing up, my extended family had a culture of "living to eat" and they ran several restaurants as a trophy thing, i.e., with negligible profit but acclaimed food.) I'm now an experienced home cook who likes throwing somewhat elaborate dinner parties, but when on my own it still makes sense to just batch cook and freeze. When it comes to that, what I notice is that I'm still making the same dishes I did as a poor student, just augmented. The base dish is quite tasty to start with, but now I can afford to use a few nicer or speciality ingredients that take it up a level. If you're making a cauldron of risotto or tomato sauce or whatever that will yield dozens of servings, it doesn't cost that much more per serving to add the extra thing or perform the extra technique that makes it really delicious or interesting (and compensates for the fact you're freezing it). The same applies to everyday things that I whip up to eat fresh, in terms of keeping a well-stocked pantry of somewhat pricey powders and potions that only get used up slowly.
All of those can be made on a relative dime, too; you mention things like rice, chicken, beans, carrots, all of which can be bought in bulk or from a freezer.
I hope people learn how to use spices and can source them for cheap; we have a source that is bascially a big rack that sells things like paprika powder for €2 for a relatively big bag, it's the basis for a lot of premade sauces / seasoning mixes and a lot of familiar flavours (italian, mexican). Learning to make bolognese sauce from scratch is great. Hummus can also be made from scratch, iirc it's just ground chick peas.
>food seems to taste better when you make it yourself
That is definitely a testament to your skill! I struggle with cooking, and it took a long time for me (year+) where I could make a specific easy dish comfortably, in a reasonable time, and to a texture / taste where I actually like it, and not just kind of not hate it.
How do you find your recipes? Looking to get into meal prepping but I don’t really want to wing my meals for a whole week
https://www.budgetbytes.com/ . All the recipes are easy enough and most of them do not require any special spices etc.
They also offer mealplans for an entire week but iirc that is a paying service (pay once).
This isn't a good answer but I don't have a single spot. I usually think "huh, I'd like to make X" then try and find what I believe to be the most traditional/classic recipe that I can via search engine. From there I'll make it (possibly with a few modifications) and it usually takes a few tries at most to get something that's at least a 7/10. I'm also in the somewhat unique position of being a single dude that's looking tasty food in bulk with good macros which are goals that are sometimes at odds with each other - recipe sites usually don't target all three.
One thing you might try is signing up for a meal kit service using their introductory offers. You can go a month or two doing this while never paying full price via the discounts and it's a good way to try a bunch of different dishes. Save the recipe cards for the stuff you like then contrast them with other internet recipes or ask an LLM for ideas. Once you've done this enough you'll build up an informal database of things you like to make and a framework for how to do it without having to resort to step-by-step instructions.
Thanks for the suggestions! I’m fairly comfortable cooking so this sounds great. I’m also looking to prep meals with good macros, which seem to be pretty hard to find unless it’s something simple like chicken on rice. Some people on instagram have really nice looking high-protein meals, but I’m not sure how well these would prep or if the listed macros or even right. I’ll try out the meal kit service- i never thought of it as a way to just try out a lot of different types of food! Super good idea
How did you get used to eating natto? Did you like it immediately?
> I'd never call myself a chef
Chef is French for "chief". It's a position in the kitchen. So, unless you happen to work in a kitchen that has a chef, you are the chef by default!
3/4 of an egg for egg salad sandwich? What the hell…I usually put two whole eggs in mine
I will not stand for this hideous misrepresentation of Engineer's diet. Engineer uses 3 whole eggs for their egg salad, clearly stated under Day 3.
The fact that they eat it in quarters is wholly irrelevant, and your plainly obvious smear attempt against Engineer has not gone unnoticed.
They made three eggs, but they say they ate 1.5 sandwiches and that each sandwich contains 3/4 of an egg. This means they ate 1.125 eggs, which is still a small sandwich even if made into a single dish.
Would you say you use more or less mayonnaise per egg than Engineer?
The mayo amount does seem higher, but it's in grams and I usually use tablespoons. I would do about 1 Tbsp/egg.
One of the more intense things I pulled off was greatly reducing my calories when I made my career switch into software engineering. I saved up enough money (and sold my car) to take a year off from work to study computer science full time. Since I didn’t have income, I significantly reduced my caloric intake. I lost quite a bit of weight and got pretty skinny. But I was mainly studying at home most days and didn’t need the extra weight at the time. I optimized for getting the appropriate nutritional values and took a B12 supplement to ensure I stayed healthy during that period.
I wasn’t as cheap as this post, but my groceries with fresh produce, rice, and beans cost about $40/week. Eliminating meat made it pretty easy to keep costs low. After I got a job, I began hitting the gym and bulking up. Getting rid of all my excess fat during that previous period proved to be pretty worthwhile, and now I’m in better shape than ever.
What were your daily caloric intake on average?
(2015) At the time (no comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9316050
Considering this is from 2015, I wonder how much does inflation bring $2.5 a day to.
$3.37 per CPI Inflation Calculator, though it may be even higher given food has increased above the average.
Sure, but I'm not inclined to believe that number on its own. Practically, even the cheapest grocer like Aldi could turn out to be expensive than the quoted $3.37.
Rice and beans - been my staple for most of my life - isn't too much more than this. Two cup dried rice + two can beans is around $4 and that is generally enough for me. Although it is much better with a few eggs and some hot sauce or salsa as well.
>Two cup dried rice + two can beans is around $4
USD? Wow, you're getting ripped off big time.
Get those beans dry and you'll have $ for salsa :D
The CPI is, for largely good reasons, primarily tracking things other than groceries, so it's arguably indeed pretty useless in comparing these over time.
I'd bet it's closer to $5 now to buy equivalent food in practice.
It's also important to consider where they live, the price of food can vary wildly depending on where you live, so adjust accordingly to your local general food-prices.
I’m always intrigued by the apparent total disconnect between official inflation figures and observed cost of living. Our weekly groceries have doubled over the past 3-4 years but inflation is in the low single digits so what’s it measuring, exactly? The answer, of course, is “whatever the current administration wants it to.”
Inflation is a tricky measure to understand intuitively because, as a rate of change it can compound faster than you think, and, as measured it is basically always a lagging number. 9-10% inflation compounding over 3-4 years is going to be nearly 50% increases in prices, and 100% in something like 7 I think.
Official food inflation numbers put out by the US gov after Covid rocketed up to (a very unflattering) over 11% by mid 2022, and have only very recently gone back down to reasonable numbers, meaning you saw large increases in food prices that have only recently stopped increasing. (I don’t think the current administration would want to put out those numbers before the midterms if they were cooking the books).
They "cook" it by substitution of their basket of items - swapping steak for mince. It makes sense on the one hand, because it's actually what people do in real life, when things get expensive, they substitute. But the CPI measure doing the same means the quality of the basket dropped?
The situation is complex, but I suspect that is the mechanism that anchors inflation to wage inflation rather than monetary inflation. Prices are the signal for when something should be consumed less - so anything with a price rising faster than wage inflation tends to be downweighted and anything with a price rising slower than wage inflation is kept in the basket.
If inflation tended to match to wage inflation then the scheme would be valid, but it doesn't. The newly printed money ends up unequally distributed over the economy, tending to end up with asset owners.
I don't understand why people even pay attention to the CPI. There are direct measures of how much money is being created, we can all just use that rate instead.
>I don't understand why people even pay attention to the CPI. There are direct measures of how much money is being created, we can all just use that rate instead.
Because it's more obvious how one might try to use CPI to project future expenses.
Correction:
"you saw large increases in food prices that have only recently stopped increasing" as quickly
Inflation is still happening, just not as fast. It doesn't compensate for the fact that prices are still up significantly from what they "should have been".
Inflation is the change in the Consumer Price Index, calculated by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. They explain the difficulty in representing accurate cost of living:
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm
>The CPI frequently is called a cost-of-living index, but it differs in important ways from a complete cost-of-living measure. We use a cost-of-living framework in making practical decisions about questions that arise in constructing the CPI. A cost-of-living index is a conceptual measurement goal, however, and not a straightforward alternative to the CPI. A cost-of-living index would measure changes over time in the amount that consumers need to spend to reach a certain utility level or standard of living. Both the CPI and a cost-of-living index would reflect changes in the prices of goods and services, such as food and clothing that are directly purchased in the marketplace; but a complete cost-of-living index would go beyond this role to also take into account changes in other governmental or environmental factors that affect consumers' well-being. It is very difficult to determine the proper treatment of public goods, such as safety and education, and other broad concerns, such as health, water quality, and crime, that would constitute a complete cost-of-living framework. Since the CPI does not attempt to quantify all the factors that affect the cost-of-living, it is sometimes termed a conditional cost-of-living index.
> what’s it measuring, exactly?
Many things, the majority of which are not food.
While I also find grocery prices in the US extremely bewildering/concerning (why are they so damn expensive!?), I think it does make some sense to benchmark more than just food.
For example, consider a hypothetical world in which grocery prices doubled but cost of housing for some reason halved – would you say that that's high or low inflation?
> For example, consider a hypothetical world in which grocery prices doubled but cost of housing for some reason halved – would you say that that's high or low inflation?
That is grocery inflation and housing deflation. These are just words that mean "the prices are going up" and "the prices are going down" respectively. There's no spiritual or metaphysical meaning behind them, and they don't say anything about the causes of prices going up or down. One can argue why the prices are changing, and maybe some or all of the answer is money supply, but one cannot argue if prices are up "because of inflation" or not -- if prices are up, there is inflation, regardless of the "root" (scare quotes because it's unclear that there can be such a thing as a root cause in something as complex as the global price system, which is a strange loop if there ever was one) cause.
I got tired of this so I started shopping at a local Aldi. It is amazing how much higher food prices are at other stores. They make Walmart look expensive, even when looking at Walmart’s store brand.
According to the White House, food inflation over the past year was just 0.3%, as that's the number they used to adjust SNAP (food stamp) benefits. Wonder how many low income votes that cost to keep rosy numbers in the press.
No, the Consumer Price Index for November 2024 showed inflation of 0.3% over the last month. CPI inflation for food over the last year is 2.4%.
Makes no sense to have a CPI that just confirms what consumers are already feeling. Rather it should serve as a rebuke to personal experience: data don't lie, you're imagining things.
to defend the op - the op is possibly experiencing a grocery monopoly in a food desert. there are no datapoints that track grocery competition per zip code, AFAIK.
Do you have any evidence for your claim or is it just a conspiracy theory? Of course the new administration will try to cook stats, hopefully the bureaucracy can resist them. Inflation measurements describe what they measure in detail. Food inflation isn't necessarily the same as overall inflation.
True inflation is money supply inflation. Doubling the amount of money (diluting the total value across more monetary units e.g. dollars), halves the value of each monetary unit, doubling prices.
This is why hard assets, like gold, housing increase in price at approximately the same rate that the banks increase the money supply (historically the number of dollars doubles every decade, other currencies are even worse).
If people saw the same increases in consumable prices as hard assets then they would be become aware of the falling value of the currency and the currency would quickly collapse in value as they stored their wealth in other things (hyper-inflation). However, the continuous optimisation of production through efficiencies of technology and associated automation means that consumables take less and less human time/effort to produce and so are going down in value at rate of around -5% year. This offsets the 7% devaluation of the dollar to give an overall price increase of consumables of 7-5 = 2% which is a level that the population finds acceptable without losing faith in their currency.
However, in recent decades the recent struggle and failure to keep devaluation of the dollar at 7%/year means that the official inflation figures need to be massaged, and so hard assets are removed from the basket goods used in the algorithm (e.g. housing related costs) and more consumables that have benefited from increased automation and reduced value are added.
If you run the algorithm used say 15 years ago, you'll find that it produces a much higher inflation figure than the one used today.
Confirming that this is how bureaucracy works.
The outgoing administration claims food inflation was 0.3% over the last year. Do you think that's accurate or do you think they were cooking the stats? Can you answer without partisan glasses on?
No, the Consumer Price Index shows (seasonally-adjusted) inflation of 0.3% over the last month. The increase for the food category over the past year is 8× higher than that.
Around $3.30
So in a few years this will be about $3.50.
Another good resource for cheap meals is this free book:
https://leannebrown.com/good-and-cheap-2/
It uses a lot more whole ingredients than the link above, although it doesn't talk as much about food conservation as this does. Combined I think you can get some amazingly cheap and amazingly fresh food.
While we're at it, I bake bread and each loaf costs about 20 cents per loaf and tastes great.
One of my fondest memories is from when I was in university and one Xmas break my stipend was late for a few weeks and I completely ran out of money. All my dorm-mates were away for the break so I had no one to borrow money from. I scrounged around my dorm and found a fistful of loose change — it came to around $2.30 iirc. Bought a bag of rice and frozen peas and managed to last about a week. “Free” takeout soy sauce packets were a big plus. Good times.
Can one reach such a low price level on a "carnivore diet" (meat, eggs, fish, milk products)? Would you have to be a hunter/trapper to do that?
Plenty of wild pigs and possums in Texas. Although possum are the easiest wild animal to catch by far (you can chase them down and pick them up by their prehensile tail), I don't know how to prepare a possum and am unwilling to experiment.
I was hoping for something more elaborate, algorithmic, and data-driven like the Stigler Diet.
Optimal in theory but totally uncookable.
Linear programming has become flexible enough to allow way more constraints. Take a thousand variables for each food type, and then not only impose constraints for each nutrient, but also for cookability, for example not allowing flour to be used in a much larger quantity than milk, if one desires. LLMs could probably figure half of this out.
Then, you could add binary variables for each food type and add big M-constraints to ensure these correspond to whether the food is actually used in the diet or not, modifying the objective to favor either variety or simplicity. One could then add constraints on these variables to ensure foods are not used in too small quantities (too large ones are even simpler).
If I didn't enjoy food too much, I would do this now, solve the MILP and strictly follow this diet. The Wikipedia article does not name any modern applications or improvements upon his principle, did. nobody actually follow through this at all as LP exploded?
My go-tos for cheap semi-healthy food:
- Sweet potatoes. I eat one almost every day. I live in NC and can buy bulk local-grown ones in the fall and they last a very long time, but even at the grocery store it's only like 1.50 for 3 good sized ones. Eat them cooked in oven at 400, wrapped in foil for 1.5hrs depending on size, with butter or just salt.
- Sardines - I just eat from the can or over toast. Can also be good mixed with mayo. Lots of good deals available here, but try to prefer Morroco or Poland sourced ones vs the bottom tier ones from China. Bonus is sardines are lower in mercury than bigger fish like tuna.
- Goat cheese from Aldi - It's like $2/8oz there, my regular store is more than double that
Then I pair it all up with toast. The toast part isn't very healthy, but it's cheap.
I don't have a real cost reason to prefer cheap eating, but I'm the kind of person who would happily eat the exact same meal my whole life if given the option. So it's fun to optimize a little.
> cooked in oven at 400, wrapped in foil for 1.5hrs
I don't know how much is electricity at your place, but in some places in Europe this could cost you 1.50 euros or so.
Microwaving is much more cost-efficient.
Microwaving ruins the skin for me, but does work much faster at least. A small toaster oven / convection oven might be a good trade off, and pressure cooker can do a good job too.
> convection oven might be a good trade off
I'm not very up on the details of electricity prices, as I live in a place where it's cheap, but using a tiny air fryer to cook the sweet potatoes suits me just fine. Both are wrapped in foil and cut into chips or cubes. Kids love it for breakfast.
That seems quite extreme.
Most people probably have a lot of scope for some easy wins on reduction though.
I found that batch cooking and freezing is a remarkably easy win. Especially something that is lentil based. Bit bland but reasonably nutritious dirt cheap and entirely passable if you only substitute let’s say every 6th meal.
Some with beef stews. Beef is expensive but even a little bit of good quality beef in a mostly veg one can impart a lot of flavor.
Pressure cooker ftw
When I was in college there was a Vietnamese place I could walk to from my dorm. I could get a big bowl of pho for $3.75 with noodles, meat and bean sprouts. I ate their so much the staff invited me to holiday parties which I though was pretty cool as a standard issue white guy.
Ah 2015 .... I was wondering where on earth he was finding chicken thighs for $0.88/lb
I got ham from Aldi for $0.99 per pound on December 29. I assume it was leftover stock from the Christmas season since the label on the ham said it was $2.39 per pound. I would not be surprised to see chicken thighs for that price at Aldi one week.
I was surprised at $0.99/lb for asparagus. My local Walmart has it for around $6/lb.
Asparagus is out of season. The price will half that in 6-8 months. I have seen it for close to $0.99/lb but only for like one week a year.
Welcome to the midwest? You can still get leg quarters cheaper than that
This is a small cookbook that I have used a lot. It’s designed around being able to feed a few people, and eating well, without being expensive.
https://leannebrown.com/good-and-cheap-2/
I get a hard bound copy for everyone I am friends with when they go out on their own. It’s a great resource!
Eliminating meat, eggs, cheese, and dairy often done for various reasons, also eliminates what are often expensive elements in the diet.
Rice, beans, vegetables, fruit and nuts in moderation, produces a relatively inexpensive diet.
Rice and beans are cheap enough. Around here, fresh fruit and veg tend to be pretty expensive though. It's not hard to find pork shoulder or turkey that's cheaper than many varieties of apples, or roughly on par with bell peppers and tomatoes, as an example.
Beef and chicken always tend to be more expensive, of course, but you'll be pretty sad if you like food and stick to only things that are "cheaper than meat".
Frozen fruits like berries are typically really budget friendly, as long as they get frozen shortly after harvesting they contain the same amount of anti-oxidants and taste fine in my experience, although might require a bit more planning.
There's cheap frozen veg too. The problem is largely variety and texture.
It isn't that good reasonably priced vegetarian and vegan lifestyles aren't possible. The problem it's when you set "cheaper than animal products" as the bar to get under, it becomes very boring very quickly.
I do limit the amount of animal products I consume myself, and unless everything is in season somewhere somewhat local, I don't find myself saving a ton of money.
For some veg frozen can be better than fresh anyway. My family much prefers frozen green beans to fresh. Fresh spinach is full of sand and cooks down so much you have to buy a ton, and after steaming I can’t tell the difference from the frozen block o’ spinach. But avoid frozen carrots, yuck.
Eggs are usually inexpensive for what you get, even if the prices are high right now.
Some egg substitutes for anyone considering:
For baking, chia or flax "eggs" are easy.
For omelettes, chickpea flower can be a good base. Easy to find recipes online.
For scrambles, tofu is a good option.
I used to drink Soylent drinks, but they cost way too much now a days and it took at least two to fill me up each meal. I just bought groceries at Walmart and got Yogurt, Chicken steaks, fish and hotdogs. Bannas and apple sauce for breakfast. Costed me like $110 a week. I have Autism, so I'm a very picky eater and only like simple food too.
Soylent used to be decent. But now they push the bottled drinks over the powders and it's lamentable.
This is nice, but also a somewhat horrifying array of processed foods.
Processed or ultra-processed?
It looks to me like the majority of the things made started unprocessed (cabbage, pork shoulder, salmon, lettuce, chicken, bananas, eggs), some was processed (mayo, tortillas, white bread, flour) with only a smattering of ultra-processed (brownie mix, campbell's tomato soup, blue cheese dressing)
Breakfast: fried potatoes. Lunch: nothing. Dinner: 9 day old pre-cooked spaghetti with tomato sauce, lettuce declared "going bad" the day prior, 10 day old homemade bread smeared with fried chicken coating.
It's technically a meal! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk4EC6-YFbs
> (2016) Albertson's had a dozen eggs for $0.99
I wonder what would be the budget for all this today.
Depends how much you want to avoid caged hens
Do big portions and share with others: I can feed 10 people for 17€ with curry and rice, I can’t do this for a single person using 1.70€
This meal plan is too much carbs. This may be efficient for economic but not for metabolism.
Carbs are great for metabolism! In fact high carb diets are about as good as a low carb diets for reversing metabolic issues. The real problem seems to be "balanced meals" that have moderate amounts of all macros.
Source? Nature usually doesn't follow uninverted parabolas... (except in ecology, but that's just diversification in a high-dimensional space)
Long time ago I was doing around £0.75 ( roughly today's $1 USD ) per day on food. At the time it was may be closer to $1.4 USD given how British Pounds have depreciated.
Now I looked at those food cost number, I cant help but think certain Food in US are relatively cheap. ( Edit: Ok I only realise it is 2016 ).
It was hard, and not getting enough nutrients. Although I dont believe I have much of a choice at the time.
I wish we could have meal plans for different region across the world, where we have meals and ingredients for nutritious food with the smallest budget.
I really like Food. And out of all the important things in life Food and Water is number one on the list. But it is also the most neglected. Not a single Tech Billionaires invested or moved into Food industry.
I re-discovered Tempeh (0) a week ago while trying a new recipe (tomato sauce pasta). Then read a bit about it and WOOOW!!!
- great protein source stuffed with fibers, minerals vitamins and probiotics. Your nutritionist and sport coach loves it.
- intrinsically cheap, doesn’t need tarif or subsidies to make it affordable.
- only two steps from raw beans, you can make it at home if you wish: 1.cook 2.incubate.
- soy beans can be replaced by many others bean. Chickpea tempeh taste like banane popcorn.
- can be adapted to almost any "salty" recipe, like you’ll do with beaf minces. Sauces, woks, lasagna, soups, burger, pizza, sauerkraut, you name it. Even some desserts.
That weird white brick can go from disgusting to delicious depending on how it was cooked. If you don’t like tempeh, it probably wasn’t cooked well.
Tempeh is awesome. It has kind of a funky taste at first but eventually I came to prefer its nutty, sometimes crunchy-ish taste. It's now the essential ingredient in my stir frys.
Trader Joes seems to be the cheapest source of it if you live near one. $2.30 per block or so.
Love this, cooking with limited ingredients is a true skill. Korea has a cook out of the fridge show that I like.
<click on inflation calculator> $3.30 a day now
Eating is the easy part. Now wash up
Washing up is part of cooking. When I cook my partner washes the dishes and cutlery, but I always wash the bowls, pots, pans and utensils as I go. Leaving a pile of stuff after cooking is the sign of a bad cook, as is having to scrub/scour any of your gear. But you can, and should, leave the pots soaking while you eat to make it easy to rinse after you eat.
Not mentioned is the cost of cooking and preservation. You can't eat any of this if you can't cook it. Water, heat, and again more water to wash up. Also the costs for running a refrigerator and freezer 24/7 is going to be a few cents per day.
Would like to see a calorie and protein breakdown.
I really don't think you can get enough protein for $2.50 a day (3.33 adjusted inflation.)
Just a block of Tofu costs $3.
i care much more about nutrients per dollar, than overall price
I had not seen this when it was released (2015).
Refrigeration can be costly if you are on a budget, and can be a non marginal factor in the total expenditures.
Other ways to save are:
- buy large bags of rice, flour, lentils, which last for a long time.
- forage mushrooms (they're online communities for this), or grow.
- grow vegetables and fruit. Lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries are easy to grow.
- hunt or buy an animal, get it butchered and store it in a freezer.
- farm animals.
I would also be looking at the energy cost of cooking dried beans everyone recommends because they are cheap. A decent refrigerator is incredibly efficient thanks to operating on a heat pump, but cooking is certainly not energy efficient, and many cheap dried beans require hours to properly cook. I wouldn't be surprised if the cooking of cheap beans ended up costing more than the beans themself.
It's kinda hearing this when the most impoverished people in other parts of the world just make a fire. Yet the only socially acceptable place for me to harvest wood + make a fire where I live in Texas is to drive out into the woods. I can't even walk there from where I am.
In the US, it's hard to be on such a budget that the energy cost of refrigeration is a major factor in food costs unless you have a really old fridge. A modern fridge probably costs less than $5 a month to operate. There are places with cheaper food and more expensive electricity though.
A french door refrigerator with ice maker costs about $25 per month to run.
If your budget is $2.50 per day for food (or $3.30 adjusted for inflation) that's significant.
If your budget is $2.50 per day for food then you are probably looking for much cheaper options for a refrigerator. I understand it's possible to buy small chest freezers and convert them to run at fridge temperatures and they're very efficient that way.
>A french door refrigerator ...
I'm guessing that American refrigerators are like American cars?
Of course, if you were trying to save money, you would get a chest-style fridge where all of the cold air doesn't fall out every time you open the door.
>A french door refrigerator with ice maker costs about $25 per month to run.
Maybe if you bought it in 2005.
> A french door refrigerator with ice maker costs about $25 per month to run
Which one?
> Refrigeration can be costly if you are on a budget, and can be a non marginal factor in the total expenditures.
> Other ways to save are:
> - buy large bags of rice, flour, lentils, which last for a long time.
If you’re living in a place where the general weather is quite cold, you may be able to manage this. But in all other places, buying large bags of rice, flour and lentils is a recipe for infestation by insects (rice would have rice weevil eggs in it).
Buy large enough bags that you’re sure you can consume within a month, and you may probably be able to avoid infestation. The other option would be to get foods that are heavily sprayed with insecticides, which is likely to be bad for one’s health.
No, the other option is to store your stuff in airtight jars.
Though frankly, we just leave big bags of rice out, open, in a kitchen in California, and weevils have never infested it.
Grain pests (worms, moths, etc.) are often in the packaged goods at the store, and once introduced to your home are all but impossible to exterminate.
Airtight jars will only contain the pests within a single jar, not avoid them entirely.
If you're buying grain in large quantities, you can freeze it (in batches if necessary) for a day or so, after which you can keep it in those airtight jars. Large-scale de-pesting can be done with dry ice (floods the container with CO2 gas, asphixiating pests.
US-domestic / EU-domestic goods are generally fairly reliably moth-free. I've had issues with imported products from elsewhere.
Foraging enough mushrooms to provide any real sustenance sounds like a real challenge (except for fall in the northwest).
That is an understatement. Mushrooms are one of the least calorie dense foods. It'd take something like 20 lbs. of mushrooms to hit 2000 calories.
On the flip side, they are absolute flavour bombs, and often on a budget you are short on flavour-enhancing ingredients.
Forage them (safely!) in the fall, dry them out (I stick them on a wire rack over a radiator for a few days), then into an airtight jar. Toss a few into soups/sauces the rest of the year.
I'm assuming the mushrooms are for micronutrients not calories. A couple of cremini (just the mushroom I buy most and speak to) have all your copper needs for the day
I have heard a dog can be used to find them more effectively, but they cannot tell if a mushroom is toxic.
It's not something I've ever seen, but I certainly believe it given their incredible noses. And of course pigs are often used for truffle hunting. If you are gathering mushrooms to eat, it's not too hard to learn which are toxic anyway.
Once you know where patches are (at least for mycorrhizal fungi which are some of the best) it is easy to go back and get them each year. But, it still takes time to find all the locations and there is competition from other foragers, humans as well as other animals.
During a hike I met a guy who said he was hunting for truffles underground with the help of his dog.
> And of course pigs are often used for truffle hunting.
Actually this is a bit of a myth. Pigs aren't very good truffle hunters. Dogs are used to find truffles. I suspect this is what the GP was thinking of.
Cooking costs is more important.
I saw an interview with a poor Brit a year or two ago, who had an electricity meter which took coins. He said the main reason to eat microwave meals is the energy cost: a few minutes of microwave is far cheaper than half an hour of cooking plate or an hour of oven.
Coin fed electricity meters are some sort of hate crime in and of itself
I agree, but it does give one pause to consider those costs as well.
I didn't realize microwaves were so energy efficient. I wonder how rice cookers compare bc on a budget, that'd be my cooking implement since they also require no supervision.
Microwaves directly heat the food so there's not much heat loss. Rice cookers lose a lot of energy by escaped steam and heat radiating out of the pot.
A microwave meal is prepared, it just needs to be warmed up.
Cooking usually requires one to transform matter somehow, which takes longer or requires a few steps. Plus, as said, much energy is lost one the stove or oven. E.g. boiling a pot of rice (most energy lost on evaporating water) on gas (more than half of all energy shoots out from under the pot directly into the extractor) is, apart from not just heating the rice but also speeding up the absorption of water, wasting a lot.
I actually make it a low key sport to use my stovetop efficiently (switching to induction is one!).
in the winter, the heat from a stove is valuable to help heat your house and boiling water works to humidify... in the summer or in a warm climate- not so valuable
If you have the space and time, growing much of your own food is the way to go.
Over the past 3 years I have supplied around 30% of my diet from an 800 square foot garden and chickens. I can't say it's really "cheaper" (although there are times of bounty) but the food quality is excellent. We can and vacuum seal and dehydrate what is left.
I also eat much healthier than previously from looking for ways to utilize what is on hand (large amounts of produce). It does take some work and planning but is very rewarding.
The parts may be very cheap for this plan, but you get killed on labor costs (prep time, food acquisition time, monitoring time, etc).
I found this part fascinating. Have I been wrong about it my whole life?
(By the way, if you think that a pound or an ounce is a unit of weight, and not mass, that's a common (but potentially dangerous) misconception. Read the full discussion of this in this Frink FAQ entry.)
Why is the pound a measure of mass, not force (or currency?)
Well, in the United States, the pound has been officially defined to be a unit of mass since at least 1893 (by the Office of Standard Weights and Measures, and later by its successor, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), which was formed in 1901. The National Bureau of Standards was renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1988.) It has had its current value since 1959, defined as exactly 0.45359237 kilograms (also a unit of mass,) both by official notice in the Federal Register, giving it the effect of official U.S. policy, and as an official refinement by the National Bureau of Standards.
The latter document is very detailed and authoritative, and shows the very slightly different values it had in 1893 (then defined as 1/2.20462 kg, a mass), the value from 1894-1959 (then defined as 1/2.2062234 kg, also a mass, which only differs from the current exact value of 0.45359237 kg by about 1 part in 10 million.) All are quite unambiguous on this point. No standards body has, as far as I can tell, defined pound as a unit of anything other than mass, at least since 1893. (Legislation before that was ambiguous about the distinction between mass and weight.)
In the United Kingdom, the pound has been officially defined as a mass since the Weights and Measures Act of 1878, which defined it as having a very slightly smaller value (equal to approximately 0.453592338 kg.) The value of the pound was unified to its current value in all countries by 1960.
The "pound-force" or "lbf" is a measure of force, though. But that's not the pound.
If you want the pound-force in Frink, use lbf or pound force (with no hyphen, which would be indistinguishable from subtraction.) The unit force is a synonym for the unit gravity, which is the standard acceleration of gravity, defined to be exactly 9.80665 m/s2. The "pound-force" is defined as the mass of a pound multiplied by the standard accleration of gravity as defined above.
More details from the (U.S.) National Institute of Standards and Technology:
Appendix B9 of the NIST Guide to SI Units. Please note that the pound is only listed in the mass section and not in the force section. This is from NIST Special Publication 811 which is considered authoritative. NIST Handbook 133, Appendix E. (This document and its predecessor, NIST Handbook 44, use italics or underlining to show the units that are defined in terms of the survey foot. (I'm glad to see that the 2007 version of this publication apparently contains fixes for most of the several errors that I reported and they acknowledged but sat on for 3 years since first reporting!) Official definitions from other countries:
From the United Kingdom's National Weights and Measures Laboratory (NWML), the definition of pound as a mass. Also see their FAQ. U.K. Weights and Measures Act part I, section 1.1, defines the pound as a mass of exactly 0.45359237 kilogram. Canada's Weights and Measures Act (this is rather fuzzy-headed; it defines the pound as exactly "45 359 237/100 000 000 kilogram" (a mass) but does so under the heading "Measurement of Mass or Weight".) It correctly defines the kilogram as a measure of mass earlier. If the pound is defined as a multiple of the kilogram, and the kilogram is mass, then the pound must be a mass also. This legislation should be amended to remove the misleading heading. Highly-regarded reference books like the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 83rd Edition (2002-2003) has the definition given above in terms of the kilogram. The pound is, again, a mass and nothing else. (This is also true in the 1960 edition, but the 1960 edition has some non-self-consistent uses of "foot pound" as a unit of energy which has been corrected in later versions, which cite only "foot pound-force" as a measure of energy. Thanks to Bob Williams for the historical research.)
I was surprised too when I first started researching the pound. I had been told it was a unit of force by one engineering professor, and I believed it. It turns out he was wrong, I was wrong, and I realized I had better unlearn my mistakes and start using the right terminology before I made a big, costly blunder. If you don't believe it, please do your own research and it might help change your mind. You don't have to believe me, but I think you should believe your own country's standards bodies (and probably comply with your country's legislative definitions if you don't want to breach contracts!) After all, if you don't use the units properly when they're unambigously defined by both standards bodies and law, then you're the one with the liability.
If you can find any evidence that a standards body in the United States or any other country has ever defined pound as anything but mass (well, at least in the past century,) please send it to Alan Eliasen. Please, authoritative references only--not some individual's webpage or old confused textbook.
Yes, I have this discussion over and over again.
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
If you want the British currency, use GBP or Britain_Pound, or, for the historical buying power of the pound in, say, the year 1752, try pound_1752.
I did such an experiment in Canada, tracking calories and nutrients and found I could live on about 100$/month, or 3.30$/day. Although I did not reach 100% daily value for all nutrients, there were no catastrophic deficiencies (nothing under 50%).
However, if I had to save the most money, and the most time, I would definitely opt for something like Soylent or Huel. Except these are not available in Canada, and they cost way too much. I found a website where people share recipes for DIY soylent (completefoods.co) and tried one. I only bought a small batch of ingredients so the cost per day was around 3.30$, but if I had bought in bulk I'm sure I could get this down to about 2$/day. And technically, this would be the most nutritionally complete diet I ever had. If a multivitamin pill cost about 0.05$/day in bulk, so why would I spend so much on vegetables?
That said, the taste isn't great, there's no variety, and I'm sure it gets boring after a while. But it was a fun experiment, and it's enlightening to know how little one can spend to eat while the average spend for food is like 400$/month.
One cheap pork recipe: At US grocery prices, roasted pork for ~$0.33 an ounce -- 3 ounces makes a meaty sandwich:
Get 2 Picnic Pork Shoulder roasts, ~9 pounds each. On a 'V' roasting rack (I found a strong one, no moving parts, in stainless steel) in a common turkey roasting pan, place the two roasts, skin side down. Roast in 210 F oven to internal temperature ~180 F, ~22 hours. This time and temperature is an example of the old rule "low and slow".
Three old food chemistry claims:
(1) For food safety, it is sufficient to cook meat to 165 F.
(2) Cooking meat much over 180 F for too long results in the proteins unwinding, expelling their water, and becoming dry and tough.
(3) Meat, not overcooked, is tough only due to collagen. If not overcooked, the meat fibers are always tender. Collagen melts at ~160 F. So low and slow achieves food safety and melts out the collagen without overcooking the fibers.
Once at ~180 F, separate skin, fat, bone, and lean meat. Can freeze the lean meat in 2 quart covered plastic containers. Freezes well.
To eat, one version: With one of the 2 quart containers unfrozen, weigh out some of the cooked pork, say 6 ounces. Add ~3 ounces (weight) of some BBQ sauce. Cover and warm in microwave. Then, with a knife and fork, the meat fibers will separate easily, and that will also mix in the BBQ sauce.
Serve on hamburger buns or toasted bread slices.
A cheap pizza recipe:
At Sam's Club can get Fleishmann's Active Dry yeast, 2 packages, each package 1 pound, $6.18, $0.19/ounce.
So, ~750 milligrams of water, 1 tablespoon of the yeast, and 1 kilogram of "bread and pizza flour" (Sam's), can make 8 small pizzas. To one of the 8, add tomato sauce, Mozzarella cheese, and pepperoni.
Novel way to cook, without an oven: Get e.g., Amazon, $7.59, a roll of sheet Teflon, and cut a piece to fit the bottom of a standard 10 inch top, inside diameter, cast iron frying pan, $7.88 at Walmart. Will want a cover, and I use one, perfect fit, from a glass casserole dish, but Amazon sells some such pans with covers. Place the raw pizza on the Teflon in the frying pan, add the cover, place over medium stove top burner heat, can be ready to eat in ~19 minutes.
About $1 and 750 calories.
Can someone explain to me why groceries in the US are 3x more expensive than Europe?
It really depends on where you live in the US. A lot of people live in areas where there are very few competitors in the grocery business so they can charge obscene amounts of money; especially anywhere rural. On top of that, the major grocery stores like Safeway, Albertson’s, and Kroger try to keep their stock consistent year round instead of going more seasonal, which massively inflates the price of fresh food.
I live in Southern California in a high cost of living area but the produce and meat is very cheap at ethnic stores like Ranch 99 and SuperKing that actually compete on price. These kinds of stores are only present in areas with dense immigrant populations. Even in urban areas so many people default to shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joes that it’s easy to get a distorted view of prices. Much of it is that Americans ostensibly choose to pay more for convenience and availability.
As an example, the Halal grocery that I usually buy my meat from has ribeye steaks for $5-8/lb while Costco - normally considered cheaper than most other stores (in bulk) - has them for $20-25/lb. Now the former isn’t as high quality as prime Costco steaks so I still buy the latter for special occasions, but for day to day food it’s a much better deal. A little smart shopping goes a very long way.
> Much of it is that Americans ostensibly choose to pay more for convenience and availability.
I doubt that convenience and availability is a US only thing. Prices in budget grocery stores like Aldi and Lidl in Europe are still 50-70% cheaper than US prices.
Where are you getting your price data from?
IME that may be true for Bucharest or Prague, but definitely not Paris or London. Budget US grocers are much cheaper than nominal US prices so I don’t know why you’re comparing the cheapest in Europe to the average in the US (which, again, has a much less concentrated population leading to less competition). Average prices are higher but the floor in the US is significantly lower.
A good (albeit anecdotal) source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Grocerycost/
But I was just in Germany and was comparing prices to the HCOL coastal US city I live in.
Every one of the posts I looked at priced in Euros looked like they were significantly more expensive than any shopping trip I ever made at SuperKing or Ranch 99 (in Los Angeles no less). I then went and sorted by top posts for the year and the only post that looks similar to the prices I actually pay was from a shopping trip in Algeria. Only a few posts of people paying €4 for a bunch of pastries and breads are impressive, the rest is just overpriced.
That subreddit is not a reliable source of data or even anecdata.
Aldi (Süd) and Lidl are in the US. You can look up Lidl's US prices on its website:
To see Aldi's prices, you need to use a mobile application called instacart. It lets phones see the prices in-store at Aldi for the purpose of making shopping lists. It also has another set of prices for those that have food delivered or do "curb side pickup". Those are higher than the in-store prices.
If you compare the prices, do you still believe that food is more expensive in the US than in Europe?
As another poster said, it truly depends on where you live. In my state, grocery stores will be expensive for rural shoppers, but there are an abundance of farmer's markets and local mom and pops with cheap, but seasonal food. Even for national chains, things are just cheaper if you eat what's in season for your area. When apples are in season for my state, they're cheap. Then a little more expensive when they have to come out of state and then super expensive when they're imported because they're out of season in the US generally.
Americans just don't eat seasonally and that ups the cost. We also have the problem where some states over specialize on particular foods, so everything beyond that has a baseline higher expense.
It's definitely not 3x of Hungary, if anything it's the other way around.
Lower labor cost and heavily subsidized agriculture.
Speaking for the regions they compete in, Lidl and Aldi have marched down the "cutting margins to the bone"-learning curve for several decades now. It's... not great for their suppliers.
But it is pretty great for their customers, and for their direct employees (for which I respect them a lot).
Distance.
Eggs…
Just got back from the grocery store and still finding it incredible the prices people are apparently willing to pay for stuff. Especially all the incredibly overpriced single use disposably packaged food. Is everyone rich or just no one plans to have any money in the future?
What are you going to do, go on hunger strike?
Theoretically 10$ a day per person would get you some extravagant foods if you do it right and got the right tools(cap ex). UBI better take this blog into account when it happens
Do not buy cheap spices. The toxin levels in (for example) Cinnamon among non-organic brands are quite high, with Badia (the big cheap bulk containers in many supermarkets) being the worst of them all. The lowest toxin levels were in an organic brand sold by wholefoods but the other organics were really close.
The amount of spice you use in most dishes is so small that it's stupid to pinch pennies here.
Ditto for non-organic oats. If you live in North America, there's a good chance your oats came from Canada, where farmers figured out they could spray Roundup right before harvest so heavily that it desiccates the oats on the plant. They harvest, and the dried oats last longer in storage. It's literally soaked in Roundup. You couldn't pay me to eat anything containing oats that isn't certified organic.
We had regulations against the maximum amount of roundup allowed in grain. The Canadian farmers lobbied and had it changed. Anything to make another dollar in profits.
Vegetable oil? No; it's a mix of basically anything oil-like that came out of any sort of seed or vegetable, whatever was cheapest. Canola (which is rapeseed oil) or safflower oil.
Overall this blog post feels like there's this between-the-lines unspoken commentary that really, people on foodstamps should be able to do just fine on $2.50/day, and they should stop complaining.
Among other things, people who are poor generally don't have much free time to do all sorts of meal prep. That's one big reason they go for cheap, ultraprocessed foods. It's fast, it's calorie dense, it's (somewhat) cheap.
The nutritional content of these meals is meh on quick inspection. There can't be nearly enough calories - a bowl of oatmeal and that's it, for breakfast? Then one hot dog?
He seems to heavily rely on ultraprocessed foods, but in general it seems to be 'meat+carb+flavor". I did see potatoes, which is decent, but sweet potatoes have a better glycemic index and more nutrients.
I guarantee if you plugged a couple of these days into Cronometer you'd see numerous missing macro and micronutrients and minerals. And, like I said, lots of ultraprocessed junk.
Legumes and rices will help substantially with nutrition and are very inexpensive. What's expensive? Red meat...
What exactly does "anything oil-like" mean? What substance are you proposing canola oil is made of?
Maybe they were suggesting canola as a better alternative?
I think vegetable oil is often soy/palm.
>If you live in North America, there's a good chance your oats came from Canada, where farmers figured out they could spray Roundup right before harvest so heavily that it desiccates the oats on the plant. They harvest, and the dried oats last longer in storage. It's literally soaked in Roundup. You couldn't pay me to eat anything containing oats that isn't certified organic.
This is depressing considering they're still much more expensive than rice and even more expensive than wheat.
That is some scary-sounding information. Do you have any links where we could go to learn more about the toxins in spices and the oats?
Always valid to ask for sources! Hope this helps.
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/hig...
You get way more than 2.50/day on food stamps!
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Would suggest to multiply the spend by 20 to account for the recent inflation and to maintain good health … having to see a doctor instantly skyrockets the spend.
Really? You think you need to pay $50 a day on food to maintain good health?
Ya this is a crazy take. I spend ~20 per day on food, and $15 of that is eating out for lunch at work. I suspect I could easily cut this back to $10 daily total, and with some more effort maybe $5-7 total
They're including the medical expenses in it as well
You are supposed to eat at least one pound of uncooked vegetables daily to be healthy.
Source?
Would you trust a healthy guy?
This was interesting until I got to Day 2: Cabbage Burgers. That you can use as ready-meals by freezing them. Then I went out for a $65 meal of Sushi to put them out of my mind.
I'll have my eye peeled for some sort of happy medium, like $20/day, but this feels too much like the masochistic version of frugal-jerk.
>happy medium, like $20/day
I grew up comfortable. My wife and I each make six figures. But I still think it's bewildering that eating $140/person/week is considered "medium", not by you personally, but by a lot of people. Clearly I'm biased because I experienced what I consider "normal" - my mother cooked for my family nearly every day, and I continue that in a pale imitation - but it is genuinely concerning to me that so few people seem to be home-cooking simple, delicious meals consisting mostly of chicken, fish, pork, pasta, rice, vegetables, etc; with variety in preparation/sauces/spices.
20$/day when you're cooking is actually wild. Could have steak every night.
That’s funny because that’s the point where I left the article to go find a recipe for krautburgers cause they looked and sounded so good
Amusingly I was thinking about sauerkraut on a burger bun as I love sauerkraut, but then the author said that wasn't.. in budget? or available? I forget his reasoning, but that glimmer of hope was dashed :D
I may go try Kimchi in a burger, but... there will be some sort of protein.
Sorry I didn't enunciate it in the early morning haze, but 20/day would be for two of us. As was the sushi :)
We're DINKs and cooking is a time luxury. Green Chef is our current "exactly the ingredients we need, nothing wasted" source -- and it's not exactly cheap.
First world probs, I know.
> happy medium, like $20/day
If you're cooking, $20/day is very high.
A lot of the food looked pretty tasty. Fried chicken, pulled pork, homemade bread. Mostly he got his costs down by buying in bulk and cooking from scratch, not by eating weird stuff. Although, his diet was almost totally lacking fresh fruits and vegetables.
If you have any colleagues that went to University of Nebraska, ask them about Runza. They are basically these cabbage burgers and are pretty popular there. There’s a regional fast food chain based on the sandwiches: