$20 a day is shocking.

Eat rice, beans, potato, tomato, cereals. That will be an order of magnitude cheaper while tastier.

Due to COVID, I put most of my food at home in a spreadsheet to track inventory so I could figure out how much I had to buy on each shopping trip to last for a week or two.

At the moment I have 54938 calories of food on hand (not counting tomatoes, lettuce, and onions that I do not track because I only use them as sandwich toppings or for small salads where they contribute negligible calories).

This cost $171.44. That works out to $7.49 for 2400 calories.

Most of this is heat and serve stuff. E.g., there are some mini deep dish pizzas, some frozen breakfast sandwiches (think Sausage McMuffin clones), Hormel "Compleats" entrees, instant rice cups, add water and nuke mashed potatoes, canned soup, and such. Another big group is things for sandwiches: bread, sliced meats, condiments. An assortment of things that don't require any cooking or prep, such as protein bars and potato chips. Finally, ham steaks, liquid egg substitute, and frozen mixed vegetables.

It turns out I'm spending somewhere between 1/2 to 1/3 of what I spent on food pre-COVID. The interesting thing is that it is not a hassle. I always knew I could eat a lot cheaper if I cooked at home, but that also took a lot more time. But for most of what I'm keeping now, cooking is really just putting it in the microwave or in a frying pan for a while. That doesn't really take much time at all.

When COVID is done I will go back to getting take out--but only now and then for variety. I don't think it will ever go back to being my main food source.

I will probably gradually add more things made at home from lower level ingredients, which should bring the cost down some more, and can probably be done without adding much more time.

>It turns out I'm spending somewhere between 1/2 to 1/3 of what I spent on food pre-COVID. The interesting thing is that it is not a hassle. I always knew I could eat a lot cheaper if I cooked at home, but that also took a lot more time. But for most of what I'm keeping now, cooking is really just putting it in the microwave or in a frying pan for a while. That doesn't really take much time at all.

I always cook more than I need and always have leftovers. This is a great way to cut down on the amount of time spent in the kitchen (I care more about the time lost than the money saved). You don't have to immediately eat the leftovers, you can freeze most of it and rotate what you made a week or two ago to keep some variety.

Thats just a crazy habit to have :)

I feel already bad when i order food twice a month.

It even never occurred to me to do takeout all the time. I have already feel guilty when i see all the packaging for take out and regret it at the moment.

The price for Soylent you quoted is for pre-prepared bottles.

You can get the add-water-only version for much cheaper. In fact, you can get a day's worth of calories for about $10 even with better quality formulation competing products such as Huel 3.0 or Plenny Active. You literally scoop the powder into the provided bottle with the provided scoop they give you, fill it with water, shake it up for 30 seconds, and it's ready to drink.

A bit more of a fair comparison just in case anyone reading this is curious on the development of this space.

$10 for a daily subscription to Ensure 2.0? You can eat eggs, slow cooker cuts of meat, seasonal fruit vegetables, rice, beans, flour, salt, yeast.. etc for $10 a day easy. As long as one is not too allergic to washing a few dishes, that is.

Soylent is too expensive. It's a very attractive solution for me but the price point is higher than real food. Soylent needs to be like $1 a meal, with super duper high protein, if it wants to compete with home cooking.

I can make a fine French dining quality 4-6 egg omelette, with a reheated beans and vegetables on the side, for like $2 a plate. A big plate, too.

Yeah, this. A couple years back I shifted my diet around to be more sustainable. I still eat meat, but stick to chicken and pork, and more occasionally rather than every meal. I use sous vide to batch cook and freeze stuff like chicken plus a curry base. Then per meal I can just thaw a portion and spend less than 10 minutes combining it with some fresh produce and final seasoning in a skillet. I costed out one of the thai curries I do this way out of curiosity the other day. Even using some more pricey seasonings like thai basil, kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass, and decent produce it still comes out below $2 per serving. Id say at this point I'm about 3/4ths of the way to the quality I get at local restaurants.

A basic rice, beans, and green veg meal comes out to less than $0.50, and that's including some pork sausage to flavor the beans. I do gumbo occasionally and it's at about the same price.

If you have the time/space/ability to cook, you can eat quite well shockingly cheap, even in places with relatively high cost of living.

For me the key was to just ban myself from takeout, period, for about a year. It worked. My cooking is good enough now I prefer it to takeout, whereas when I was in my 20s I was a pretty typical tech bro that ate out every single meal.

Key insight for me was learning how to use my freezer. So much stuff freezes well which most people wouldn't consider freezing. For example, I run my own small baked goods business and do a ton of baking. 95% of anything you could buy in a bakery can be frozen and no one can tell the difference. In fact, bakeries already freeze most of what they are selling to people and no one can tell the difference.

I don't expect normal people to make their own puff pastry or cronuts by hand but I really do think everyone should try to bake their own bread at least once a year. Most people don't want to make their own kneaded bread because you have like 15-30 mins active labour plus about four hours waiting time (mixing, kneading, bulk fermentation, proofing, baking, cooling). But you can make three loaves at once, and freeze them. The time and labour involved in making three loaves is very close to making one. But most people would turn their nose up at freezing bread, as though it completely destroys the crumb and ruins it. But most people's instincts are wrong, once again. Bread freezes extremely well.

I was thinking that we really need to teach children how to be poor. Poor people need to cook and be smart about buying and storing their own food, but most people do not know how to do this. We spend so much time teaching children how to find a job in the most shallow way (how to write a resume, etc) but kids need help with knowing what to do when the economy is bad or they just can't find a good job, even if they are trying to. This sort of thing is political suicide because of national pride and this unshakable notion in the mainstream that people are poor because they are lazy or on drugs, their fault basically.

Anyways, I agree with you on all counts. It is shocking when I realized that eating well is actually pretty cheap. If only I learned that at a younger age.

Yeah, I agree about the freezer. One of the things I love about using sous vide for batch cooking is the bags go from the cook to the freezer without being opened. The liquid in the bag acts as a sort of jacket that prevents freezer burn. Based on the science I know there's a texture change, but I'd be surprised if you could spot it in a blind test.

But the other big thing for me is convenience. It takes maybe 10-15 minutes for me to prep say 5 lbs of meat this way, depending how elaborate my marinade/base is. Then you just put it in the sous and ignore it for a couple hours. I can use the sous to thaw a frozen portion very fast with no worries about food safety or overshooting and overcooking. Past that making a plate is just getting the rice cooker going and then again maybe 10 minutes of active time to bring it all together with some fresh produce.

The convenience of all this is what really clinched it for me. At this point it'd take more active time for me to go get takeout.

I've tried bread a couple times, but so far all I've learned is I'm not a great baker. I intend to make another stab at it though.

Bread Baker's Apprentice is a great book which will teach you everything. Peter Reinhart, the author, in general is a great resource for bread making.

You kind of have to embrace the random factor in bread making and develop a feel for it. A cake recipe is a far more mechanical process, just follow the instructions and it will work. Bread is more chaotic for sure (like, maybe it's a very humid day and your flour is heavier with water than usual) but it's not like pulling a slot machine.

My first few loaves were mediocre, some were bad, but after about 5-10 it came together. And now, like I wrote earlier, I make money baking. Anyone can do it, just treat it like a weird little hobby with no pressure at first.

Thanks for the rec, I'll check it out.

I have the Ken Forkish book. I'm not his biggest fan based on personal interactions, though I'm honest enough to admit he makes amazing bread. But I pretty clearly need to start with something a little more low key.

I hadn't heard of Plenny Active before, looks like you're right about the price. I'll have to give that a try, thanks for the suggestion!

What about people who enjoy eating? Cheese, meat, vegetables, wine, etc? Let's not forget eating is a pleasurable activity, not only a source of energy and protein.

I don't get the people who jump straight to dystopian goo foods. There's no shortage of culinary traditions that relied on less meat and are actually food. Have they never seen a black bean taco?

I enjoy eating too, I don't think I would ever switch to meal replacements completely. But I would consider switching my default from my own terrible cooking to a meal replacement and eat out for my other meals.

Learn to cook, read some good cookbooks - for example anything by Madhur Jaffery - it really isn't difficult.

The thought of educated people eating crap like Soylent and paying for it, when they could be eating really good food, which completely uneducated people all over the world manage to cook easily, is quite upsetting to me.

I agree we have people here making 200+k a year eating chipotle burritos and soylent as meals. These people are truly missing out.

It also will wreck metabolic havoc since it's processed and often uses PUFAs, non bioavaiable versions of nutrients and and other such things.

You think we have an obesity crisis now? Wait until it's near mandatory to only eat things like cheap-edition soylent.

I'd be happy to eat Soylent if I wasn't allergic to it. Unfortunately my mom fed me soymilk as a baby and triggered a life-long reaction to soy protein. Too bad... I love tofu, but it does not love me.

One-size fits all meal approaches need to keep in mind that individuals have different needs and restrictions.

Why can't you get vegan Chipotle?

Huel is also cheaper