Flavor does not matter, presentation does not matter but the food shouldn’t make you sick, and should ideally have enough calories per day for the average person to survive (2000 kcal min).
Edit: I am not in any danger of starving or malnutrition, nor am I insolvent. I’m mainly asking this question out of curiosity on how people would approach a solution :)
If we’re optimizing for cheap and nutritious a lot of the existing answers are probably pretty great, but if there’s no other restrictions on the diet I think we could optimize a little further.
The cheapest way I can imagine to get a nutritional meal is to find someone who eats fully nutritional meals, and then eat them.
But it’s per meal. Consistently finding people to eat and getting away with it sounds like a costly ordeal.
Try figuring out cheapest vegetables available year-round, from which you can make a salad. In the US, this probably includes corn. Where I am, it’s potato, carrots, and beets, which coincidentally make a traditional salad. I boil a pot of them once or twice a week, and chop them in large-ish cubes right before a meal, so preparation takes very little time. Of course, I typically add onions, mayonnaise, maybe herbs.
I’m currently spending about twenty bucks a week on food, and that’s only because I’ve been too lazy to prepare the vegetables, making sandwiches instead.
My guess would be live like an aboriginal. Your diet consists of all natural unprocessed food. You wake up with the sun every morning, hunt your prey with weapons made from sticks and sharpened rocks. You have fire so you cook the meat, and you have fresh picked fruits and veggies to boot.
Thats pretty good body nutrition and the cost per meal is only the energy that it takes to slaughter and cook the meat. And gather the fruits and veggies of course.
Oatmeal and rice in bulk is cheap as fuck and great foundations to build almost any style or cuisine type from. Add protein and/or fruit and/or veg that best fits your budget and nutritional needs. Meal prep the fuck out of your favorites and you’ll have a great system to tweak and fit to an adapting budget.
Beans, I love black bean burgers or pinto beans as a side. You can little bags of them from dollar tree but I think a bigger bag is a better deal. 3 bean salad. As for meats or fish, use your store apps to clip digital coupons, never buy meat that’s not on sale. That $40 roast will go on sale for 10.
Actually buy a small chest freezer. I usually buy proteins on sale and portion them out into the freezer.
Casseroles are cheap and filling. Buy two cans of green beans and a mushroom soup, fried onions.
Homemade granola is pretty simple.
Instant pot soup recipes are quick and cheap. I love beet soup, cabbage soup, chicken soup (from a whole chicken)
The pre seasoned meats from Aldi are usually a good price.
After Thanksgiving giving I usually purchase two turkeys, really cheap, they just want them out of the stores .
If you want lowest possible cost then canned stuff is out. Buy beans and rice in 20 lb bags. Hard to beat that!
For anyone lucky enough to have a WinCo foods in their area, they’re the cheapest I’ve been able to find for bulk dry goods. You can order 20-50 pound sacks of grains, beans, flour, etc., with a pretty decent discount on top of already low prices.
Beans and rice has been the poor man’s nutritional meal for millennia. Throw in a plantain or chicken or tofu occasionally for supplemental nutrients / protein. Add hot sauce for heat. Don’t forget to add salt to taste.
It’s cheap, nutritional and has the added benefit of being tasty.
Chili is another option - tomato, beans a can of pumpkin as filler, maybe a sweet potato. Pepper and onions for taste and some TVP or Beyond Meat crumbles for some chewiness…or ground Turkey if you eat meat. It’s simple and can sustain you for a week. Spice it up with chili powder and cumin, maybe some garlic salt and a lime. I made a crockpot full the other day. There’s a reason cowboys out in the prairie ate this stuff.
I have never heard of someone putting pumpkin and sweet potatoes into chili
Pumpkin is one of my favorite things to add to chili. It serves as a thickener and makes the flavor richer, more bodied.
Chopped Sweet potato is a vegetarian chili addition. I’m personally mixed on it, but it compliments the beans well.
The other dude is correct about proteins: legumes and cereals both have them, the issue is that they each have only some of the essential amino acids, while the body needs a certain proportion of them. But legumes and cereals combined have all those acids, so they supply the protein. That’s the whole idea of the legumes+cereals diet.
chili
I have a cookbook that suggests bulgur wheat for that chewiness. The author writes that her (vegetarian) daughters thought it was a ground beef recipe at first!
There is no need to supplement protein. If you are getting enough calories from beans or rice (either individually) you are automatically getting enough protein. Protein deficiency is not a real thing. The cultural obsession with protein is harmful. Chicken mainly contributes obesogens and antinutrients, you’re better off without it. To say nothing for the chicken.
Had to upvote because you’re entirely correct. Protein deficiency isn’t really a thing in the developed world, except for those who are eating exceptionally poorly. There is one amino acid that is absent or very low in most legumes, but it can be found in most grains or nuts, so the slightest effort can remove the risk of deficiency.
Most nutritional diseases in the developed world are due to excess, not deficiency.
Beans & rice would be my choice, and grow some greens (not marijuana. Collard greens, mustard greens, kale greens). If you can afford some onions, garlic, canned or fresh tomatoes, and spices, you are going to do fine. Cilantro grows in the winter here, basil in the summer.
Because flavor is important to me. If it was just for a week, I can do water and a bottle of electrolytes for like $5 total, not eat at all, but if it’s an ongoing situation I would need to enjoy the food at least enough to eat it.
With enough of a runway, buy one potato (if you are in the cold) or sweet potato (if you are in the heat) and plant it, those are not difficult to grow, don’t need fertilizer or anything. I do the Stokes Purple ones down here.
So yeah, I would buy beans and rice (and oil or nuts of some sort, can’t get around that, body needs fats). and try to grow some veggies to make it complete, if going for the lowest cost most healthy diet.
Idk why not cannabis. It’s very good nutritionally. Hemp seed has all proteins.
Go for it then! I was just thinking smoking pot wasn’t going to help you with nutrition. But you are right, it would have fats and protein in the seeds. Or could provide income.
Rice, lentils, cheap vegetables (vary a bit) and dry broth.
I ate this for every meal for a couple of months when I was really poor. I took vitamins and fish oil as well.
Got some meat and dairy when eating with friends and family.
Potatoes, eggs and oats reportedly have everything the body needs, even long term.
If that weren’t the case, Ireland wouldn’t exist today.For my government mandated starvation month I picked potatoes and rice, just 2 cups of rice and a potato or two a day helps me… enough… rice for a 50lbs bag is around 40 bucks and potatoes for 10 pounds is around 5 bucks.
SNAP.
…but for real, fortified short-grain rice, and dried beans are probably single best bang-for-buck you’re gonna find. Mix in whatever’s on the clearance wrack or provided by things like food pantries, and you should have no issues keeping yourself fed. Won’t always be good, but it’ll be dirt cheap.
the fuck is this all ai
…I mean…
Makes sense - I always heard of the ol’ rice and beans combo. I was just thinking in terms of avoiding things like vitamin deficiencies - I’m trying to think this from a desert island or fixed shopping price POV.
Not necessarily just rice. The thing is that both beans and cereals contain protein, but each has only some of the essential amino acids, while human body consumes these acids in a particular proportion. Well whaddayaknow, beans and cereals in combination have all of those acids, complementing each other. So wheat or other cereals also work instead of rice.
They even have about 10% protein, which is on par with sausages and such.
Back when I was just off of a stint of homelessness, I had an incredibly cheap rented room where I didn’t have to pay the utilities separately. I survived on 50¢/day… but this was fifteen years ago, so call it a 1USD in today’s money.
I ate popcorn for lunch. I ate either rice and beans or rice and lentils for dinner. I ate day-old bread for breakfast, with a tiny smear of peanut butter. Dinner would include some vegetable bought in bulk — always fresh, not canned or frozen, since fridge access was unreliable.
I spent about five hours a week on shopping, including the walk; cooking; and cleaning my one pot, cutting board, knife, and spoon (I generally ate straight out of the pot). If you want to add my labor cost in, I was making close to minimum wage at the time, so $8.4x5/7=$6/day… wow, really? huh. $6.50/ day, then, but I was having trouble selling my labor at the time and only had part-time work, so that cost may be inflated by the minimum wage or I’m calculating it wrong; I only had part time work, after all.
Optimal would be in-season local vegetables, in-season local fruit, and remaining calories from a variety of grains (and legumes) and occasional varied inexpensive meats.
You could make it cheaper with frozen vegetables, but you’d lose some nutrition (and taste if you did care), and by skipping fruit (losing some nutrition) and meat (again losing some nutrition)
Nutritionally, dried fruit is pretty ok if it’s not sweetened. Canned fruit is pretty worthless, and juice is worthless.
Canned vegetables are fine if cheap, but lose some nutrition over fresh. Fermenting in-season vegetables can preserve most nutrition to tide you over for when nothing is affordable.
Most calories would be from grains and legumes: lentils, peas, rice (brown has more nutrition, white is usually cheaper), beans, corn, etc. Whole grain breads are nutritionally great if they aren’t full of preservatives. If you dont have a local baker just skip bread altogether.
Avoid coffee, beer, wine (probably), cider, liquor, smoking, and drugs. Tea might be fine but it has no nutrition so it might also be avoided.
If you can afford it (and enjoy it), meat is very nutritious and calorie-dense in moderation, so a small reduction in starch for a proportionally small increase in meat can be beneficial for some lifestyles. Obviously you dont want to reduce fruit or vegetables since they have the most nutrition per calorie in general, but a diet exclusively of fruit and vegetables is expensive and unreliable (and possibly not nutritionally optimal). The type of meat depends on where you live: shrimp, anchovies, chicken, goat, beef, whatever is cheap and available.
Some spices, oil, and salt would make it all a lot better tasting, and wouldn’t add much to the cost. This is pretty much the diet of working people all over the world, just with different specifics.
This is some good information. Thanks.
Flavor does not matter, presentation does not matter
You will get sick of it pretty fast. You can do ok on rice and beans (protein combination) and a few spices though. Take some vitamin supplements if you can. Don’t stay on this diet for too long. Add some fats too, peanut butter is a decent source. For free food, no idea if dumpster diving is still a thing, but it was back in the day.
If you’re in a rural area maybe you can grow a small vegetable garden. If you’re in a city you are probably hammered by housing costs even more than by food costs, so that’s another thing to work on.
I’m a college student (so dumpster diving wasn’t on my mind lol), but I’m mainly asking this question out of hypothetical curiosity. I did wonder if there was a way to try to make it work through purchasing in volume - I bought a few cases of MRE’s last month for under $5 a pouch overall, and that felt cheap (but I was worried about the high sodium and lack of fiber).
The main goal for MREs isn’t to be cheap, it’s to be nutritious, shelf stable, and easy to prepare. There are certainly cheaper ways if your only goal is to be nutritious.
I made some burritos a couple weeks ago. Mainly rice and beans, with some beef, cheese, and salsa for flavor, seasoned to my liking in a flour wrap. The intent was to freeze them for quick meals, so no fresh veggies. One or two of those paired with a salad would be quite nutritious, and probably cost less than $1 each. If I skipped the beef and cheese, it would certainly cost less than $1 each.
The bulk of those meals would be rice and beans, and you can buy them in bulk, but they’re still cheap even if you don’t.
You should get a pressure cooker. It lets you cook dry beans in 45 minutes or so, instead of soaking overnight then cooking for hours. They have lots of fiber.
There’s someone on ebay selling MRE’s for way less than $5 a pouch. I can try to find the link if you want. But it’s not that great a plan imho.
There’s a youtube video of a prepper who survived on stuff like MRE’s for a month at home, just to see what it would be like. It was miserable.
See if chefstore.com has an outlet near you. It’s a good place to get bulk ingredients.
I think we’re thinking of the same seller - mine was 24 pack for ~$70. I do have a high tolerance for mundane foods and food preparation (was taught to not be picky and just make sure to eat balanced meals), so I wasn’t too glum when eating the MREs. It actually was nice to break them down and throw them into my lunchbox to eat between classes.
No luck with Chef Store unfortunately.
Look also for Grocery Outlet, Costco, and places like that. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=canned+foods+surplus looks interesting. There was once an actual store chain called “canned foods surplus” (there was one near my school) but I guess it’s gone now. The other hits from that search look promising.
I think as screwed up as the US currently is, there aren’t actual food shortages in most places, so you can get by one way or another.
The US is capable of self-sustaining food production, and I live in a state that produces a large portion of the overall nation’s food. I don’t think we’re in any danger of shortages in that regard at all.
Remember, I’m fine. I made this thread for curiosity, not necessity. I figured it’d be a good idea to try to think of ways to eat healthy on a budget to save money, but if I have to buy more than the minimum I can (and likely will).
I did find a Costco nearby to the campus, but I don’t have a membership card. There is a local grocery store though, and my roommates and I buy stuff as needed.
If you believe me, I bought the MREs as a reserve for the apartment (inspection dates were good and they were cheap enough to justify the purchase over alternatives), and I do enjoy them from time to time.
I’ve found Costco membership to be worth it, ymmv. If you have family at the same address (or maybe your non-campus address) you can put two people on single membership. That helps too.
When I was in college I managed to get by for 3 months on just egg fried rice and it cost me about £2-£3 a week (about $3-$4). I was only getting 1000 calories a day but I was getting the rest of the nutrients I needed from the eggs and a bag of frozen mixed veg.
(2000 kcal min)
A large segment of the population would get fat eating that much every day.
Dang, I wonder how outdated that standard is. I see it as the “daily value” in a lot of academic and packaging contexts.
It’s the general maintenance calories for a 180ish lb male if I remember correctly. I could be wrong
The standard was never really based on anything to begin with. Not scientifically speaking, anyway.
Interesting sidebar to this, I happened to notice both the authors are/were Master’s candidates when they drafted this. Would he interested to see more
i have heard eggs are pretty good for nutrition. Maybe not as good for cholesterol though.
They contain cholesterol but there’s practically no link between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol
