Eating cheaply is really difficult to do for the folks with the least amount of money to spend on food, as working is counter to the things that make eating cheaper: cooking your own meals, shopping or growing cheaper foodstuffs, having appliances to store items for longer periods or cook dried items, being able to plan meals out in advance, etc. That is the reason why convenience foods are popular. A lot of advice stories about eating cheaply often fail to achieve that goal because it is hard to do and requires a lot of effort.
A lot of advice stories about eating cheaply often fail to achieve that goal because it is hard to do and requires a lot of effort.
This is a recurring sentiment which speaks volumes about our culture. Complaints of "hard" and "a lot of effort" belies how incredibly rich this society is, that the notion of just making pasta or growing vegetables is somehow prohibitively difficult - not because it's inherently so hard, but because we're so used to "swipe a card, get a meal" at all levels of society. Even if you're officially "poor", just be at WalMart at midnight on EBT recharge day and walk out with convenience foods. For most of humanity through most of history, what so many today belittle as "hard" was "normal" on a daily basis.
On my "A Buck A Plate" blog I've addressed various forms of this complaint. Difficulty? boil some water, open a few cans, spaghetti dinner done. Cost of cooking system (stove, gas, etc.)? grandma's ancient cast-iron frying pan over burning wood scraps in the back yard, make a nice veggies-and-shrimp stir fry. No cooking space indoors or out? $4 crock-pot and an electrical outlet. Cooking your own meals? c'mon, it's not that hard, really. Shopping for inexpensive? look at every price tag in the store (Walmart, Aldi) and discount everything over $1 per pound. Appliances? thrift shops overflow with them dirt cheap. Dried items? throw 'em in water before going to work, ready to cook when you return. Planning meals in advance? you really have an issue with this?
Sure convenience foods are popular. You also pay for that convenience: instead of doing the work yourself, you work doing other things then exchange the money earned there. Do more yourself, and there's less need to be out doing other things.
Don't confuse "you have to do something" with "hard to do and requires a lot of effort". If you watch TV at all you have no excuse.
I think as software developers, many of us are very disconnected with the lives of the very poor in our society. There are people out there working multiple full time jobs, or working full-time while raising young kids by themselves. It boggles my mind that you would consider these people lazy because they're dead on their feet when they arrive home... probably even software developers can think of days when they're too tired to cook, is it really so hard to imagine having to work so hard that those days are every day?
I know it boggles your mind. I too shared the mindset susceptible to "I can't". Amazing how being dead for a few hours can change your perspective on such things.
It must be done. Do it. Eradicate "I can't" from your vocabulary. Cut out all superfluous activity & costs. Unless you're in fact passing out onto the floor, you have the energy and time to do it. Yes, every day. I'm so far past tired and overwhelmed that they're just not excuses any more - it all still needs doing, and the alternative is being where I've been and I'm not keen on going back there.
You're relying very heavily on this "well it's physically possible, that means if someone doesn't do it they don't really want to" trope.
It's pretty lazy, I've got to say. Stop using it like a sledgehammer. No, don't say "I can't help but use it like a sledgehammer": try to make a new, novel suggestion beyond "just try harder!"
Evidence that it's pretty damn lazy: you can use it anywhere. A Roman slave, upset about being worked really hard? "Well, other slaves have worked hard enough to buy their own freedom. Why don't you?" A poor person in rural India? "Well, at least one multibillionaire started out in the same position as you, and that was a couple decades ago in worse conditions. Try harder!"
Defacto it's a crutch to shift responsibility away from the social structures we live in.
Again, I'll acknowledge some people truly can't. I've found they're a fairly small subset of those claiming/imputed "can't".
We're not talking Roman slaves here. "Work 'til you drop or we'll kill you" isn't at issue.
A poor person in rural India really is poor. Under $2/day income (world median) is poor. My sympathies and help.
Blaming the social structures WE live in, no. Assistance, tools, opportunities, etc are prolific; if you're not using them, it's not because they're not available to you.
Yes I'm leaning on the "if someone doesn't do it they don't really want to" trope. That's largely the POINT in this thread, as pointed out by others too. I just see far too much "golly, going to Walmart and buying beef/beans/sauce/seasoning for $5 and cooking it for 10 minutes to feed 4 is just too hard", which a poor rural Indian or a Roman slave would look on at with sheer astonishment.
Required to make your own food everyday are both physical and mental abilities. Low-income Americans are certainly more than physically capable of putting together three meals per day, but they may lack the motivation, inspiration, knowledge, or skill required to do so. I certainly needed my sous-chef best friend living with me and teaching me the virtues of cooking for 3 months to really get the skills and habits down.
This is not something to argue about. The best you can do is empower people, so stop arguing on discussion forums – go forth and empower!
Do you know what happens when you break your leg but keep walking on it without going to a doctor? It keeps causing damage, until that damage is irreparable and there's a bone hanging out of your useless leg. That's pretty easy to visualize, yeah? It's harder to imagine the same thing going on but mentally. It's hard to see the true damage that repeated exposure to stressful situations causes to your mind and psyche. Sure, sugar bombs do damage. So does working until you're in fact passing out on the floor.
Your rah-rah attitude might work for you, and I'm glad for that. But before you go all motivational speaker on everyone else, maybe consider that other people aren't as mentally strong as you seem to be. Some people can't carry a 50lb weight 24x7 for days on end. Likewise some people can't carry the mental weight of two jobs, a family, and bills still being unpaid plus the thought of working for hours when they get home to make a meal.
I just got here in passing, and I have to admit I'm kind on the side of ctdonath here. Currently, I'm working 3 jobs (one is 6 hours a day, the other two are two projects I'm working on that are 2-4 hours a day, total.) In addition to this, I'm finishing my PhD (or trying, time is scarce lately) but I still find the 10-15 minutes it takes to open the gas stove and prepare some sauteed vegetables, the 10 minutes it takes to prepare a lettuce and lots-o-more-things salad, or the 5 minutes it takes to prepare crispy bacon.
The "cooking for hours" mentality is bullshit. With the rest of your points I can agree (as well as I agree with ctdonath's points,) since there is no universal truth in what people are doing with their time, and how much they can endure. But with the waste of time cooking takes, I just can't. It's false. I've cooked 3 course meals for 8 people on special occasions (so it's more elaborate than usual) and only in this case it took me more than 30 minutes to do it. It was 1h30. Of course this may seem like a lot, but I don't do custard everyday and it takes quite a long time.
Well it's kind of a false equivalency to try to say that 30 minutes cooking dinner is the same as 30 minutes preparing convenience food. Cooking meat, cooking beans, cooking rice, sauteing veggies, preparing a salad, whatever, is not the same as putting a frozen lasagna in the oven for 30 minutes while you veg out on the couch and unwind.
Sure, it's 30 minutes, but what really counts is what you're doing in that 30 minutes. If you're watching your food, you're working. If you're watching TV while your food cooks to the tune of the prepared directions, that's completely different. That doesn't even take into account the time spent at the store picking out individual ingredients vs just grabbing a frozen meal and running out the door.
I'm not defending poor eating habits, at least I'm not trying to. The point of my post was to point out how self-righteous ctdonath is being in the majority of his posts in this topic. "You're not tired unless you're passing out standing up" is just bullshit. Mental stress is a real thing, and it cannot be discounted. I don't know you, but I can guess that if you're doing a PhD, you have what it takes to handle significant amounts of mental stress. You have to, or you wouldn't have even gotten through undergrad with the will to pursue two more difficult degrees. Your single parent dual factory worker who grew up in a blue collar family and sees no prospect for future success might not have that same level of motivation, which is why I called out ctdonath for being a motivational speaker.
What works for you will not work for everyone. It's difficult to see mental injury and duress. Stress is not as visible as a broken leg, nor as easy to treat. People should eat proper, yes, but telling them "it's not hard, you're just lazy" is by far not the proper way to get them motivated.
I don't think 30 minutes preparing a meal is the same as having it done. It's really completely different... I'm not perfect at this either, and sometimes the tradeoff of 30 minutes to prepare something is too big and I just do something quicker (rarely prepared food, but I love bread with olive oil and cheese, so it feels great for me when I'm not in the mood for cooking.)
It all depends on how you value those 30 minutes. If there's something in TV you want to watch and will make you happier/more energetic, it probably is worth the extra cost prepared food has. If you are just watching some nonsense to disconnect your brain... Well, stirring a pot is also quite a zen experience, far better than most TV programs :D
I was a poor kid too. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is great if you can do it, but it's not a sustainable, universal solution. Whether you recognize it or not, we've had advantages that other poor kids didn't -- even if that just means a lack of disadvantages. Let's not pull up the ladder behind us.
Of course people used to work much harder to prepare their food. We've replaced harvesting your own food with working to pay for your food. The complaints of preparing a full meal being difficult are coming from a context of somebody who already spent 8+ hours working for their food that day, not somebody who is just being lazy.
This is the most useless comment you can possibly post. If your only contribution is "check your privilege" then your contribution is worthless and you shouldn't even bother.
"When you want something bad enough, you make the time - regardless of your other obligations. The truth is most people just don't want it bad enough. Then they protect their ego with the excuse of time."
I think virtually everyone in the UK has the means to eat healthy if they really want to.
The idea that everyone has time to do 'X' if they only wanted it bad enough is complete BS.
For people that work two jobs, have a family to take care of, commute several hours, have a sick spouse and sleep there is no more time in the day. No matter how badly you want it.
Unless you or the author of Rework know of a magical formula to make the day longer than 24 hours or how to operate on little to no sleep.
If surviving on that arrangement doesn't work, change the arrangement.
Move somewhere with a cheaper standard of living. Reduce expenses to where one spouse can stay home. Find another job closer. Unplug the TV already. Seriously.
Yes, if you want it badly enough you'll do it. I moved 1000 miles, changed jobs twice, worked 2 jobs at once for years, have a family to care for, cut the commute from 2 hours to 15 minutes, and operate on limited sleep. TV? about 4 hours a month. Every time I thought "I can't do this but I have to" I found a way. Now I work a dream job at a startup, support a family of 4, and live in a nice area.
Yes, we know of the "magical formula": use your brain and make it happen; you're the only one stopping you.
I'm not sure if you are just naive or intentionally contrary.
Please, explain to me how a family that can barely afford rent and meals can move 1000 miles away and find work. It's not really that easy to find a new job in a town you've never been to.
Or a couple in which one is handicapped or seriously ill can 'change the arrangement'
You made your situation better. Congratulations. I mean that. But assuming everyone can do it because you did is borderline arrogant.
There is no silver bullet solution and saying that anyone can do it if they want to bad enough is just stupid and ignorant.
Intentionally contrary, as I see a glaring over-application of "poor" and "can't".
This country was founded on people having very little walking very long distances to build homesteads from nothing.
I'll agree there are some people who truly can't make the changes I indicated; we have a social safety net for them, and I do put in a weekly effort to help them. Most who whine "I can't" can, they just won't.
Obviously there are exceptions, and a short aphorism of "you'll do it if you want it bad enough" is not expected to have encyclopedic thoroughness covering those few genuine cases who really, truly, can't; it's directed at the other 99.99% whose only real barriers to success is themselves.
My point is making declarative statements like "If you want to you can" isn't helping because it feeds into the perception that everyone is just being lazy and not trying hard enough.
Because sadly, that is the thought process of a vast majority of people. That poor people are poor because they want to be.
> This country was founded on people having very little walking very long distances to build homesteads from nothing.
You mean all those homesteaders that killed native people and stole their land with the backing the government?
> I'll agree there are some people who truly can't make the changes I indicated; we have a social safety net for them, and I do put in a weekly effort to help them. Most who whine "I can't" can, they just won't.
The social safety net is far from adequate enough to negate these problems, assuming one is even able to qualify and access those programs.
> Obviously there are exceptions, and a short aphorism of "you'll do it if you want it bad enough" is not expected to have encyclopedic thoroughness covering those few genuine cases who really, truly, can't; it's directed at the other 99.99% whose only real barriers to success is themselves.
Do you really believe that 99.99% of folks who have a shitty situation just can't muster the effort to change things? Do you really believe that people WANT to live that way? To constantly be uncertain if they are going to be able to work, to be able to get health care, to eat, to have a home, to not face imminent violence? Western society is not organized for the welfare of the people in it and there are social and institutional forces that actively keep people from the things we have been talking about.
Christ. Everyone in this entire argument sucks. You're trying to yell over each other and nobody can acknowledge that the other guy has a point.
There are millions of people in this country who are in a shitty situation and could do better. There are people who could do more to better themselves, but instead dick around on the Internet or watching TV and don't. They make excuses for why they can't do more to better themselves, but at the end they're a victim of their own rationalizations and justifications.
There are also people who might get up off the couch and improve their situation, except they simply don't know how to go about it. They've never cooked before, they don't know the first thing about gardening, and they aren't proficient enough with the Internet or learning in general to figure these things out from themselves except by expensive trial-and-error.
And finally, there are people who are right and truly fucked. They got stuck in a declining area of the country and there's nobody interested in buying their home at any price. Moving would be prohibitively expensive and disruptive to children and a spouse. They may even have to care for sick family members, completely eliminating the possibility of moving. They have crappy job skills, but are working 30 hours a week to make ends meet and have no time to learn new skills (which might not even be in demand in the area they live). They might live far enough away from job centers that the cost of the commuting farther would cost more than would be gained.
The fact that one of these groups exists does not disprove the existence of any other. There are hundreds of millions of people in this country, and they exist in a continuum in virtually every life circumstance one could imagine. To some of them, cbdonath's advice and stance could be absolutely spot-on. To many others, the advice is completely impractical and impossible to achieve.
cbdonath's main point seems to be that there are a ton of people who use their crappy situation to rationalize a mindset that keeps them where they are. This is true.
Everyone else's point seems to be that there are millions of people in this country who are so far beyond fucked, that no advice is enough to pull them out of the crapfest of a situation they're in. This is also true.
So congratulations. Everybody's right. Now stop fighting like children.
"I think virtually everyone in the UK has the means to eat healthy if they really want to."
For too many people this is simply not true.
People living in poverty face a number of challenges to eating healthily. For example:
- Cost. Fresh healthy food is becoming more costly due to exchange rate commodity price fluctuations. See [1][2].
- Access. If there are no shops nearby that sell fresh food (and this is becoming increasing common in some areas of the UK, see [3] or google "food desert") then time and/or transport need to be expended to get the food home. A person working 12+ hours a day on a couple of low paying jobs (say, factory work and then office cleaning)may not have the time to walk miles to a supermarket and do child care.
- Fuel. Gas and electricity are expensive in the UK. Cooking veg, pulses, grains, etc. requires fuel. Batch cooking to use-up cheap bulk-bought food also requires a freezer to store it, which in turn uses electricity that might not be affordable. Some people lack the resources to be able to afford a cooker and/or freezer.
A useful but rather depressing read on the situation in the UK is "Food Poverty and Health" from the Royal Colleges of Physicians Faculty of Public Health [4].
Cost: you're setting the standard of "fresh healthy" too high. I've got a can of assorted seeds, enough to sow an acre of all the veggies you need - $40, get busy. Assorted frozen veggies (flash-frozen minutes after picking, so yes they're fresh) are $1/pound; canned works too, and actual fresh is also available if you look with care.
Access: you can arrange transport a couple times a month to someplace selling healthy/cheap/durable food. If you truly are in a "food desert" (a wildly over-applied term), do what you would do if in a real desert: MOVE.
Fuel: canned & dried foods don't need refrigeration. Scrap wood burns. Yes I cook over a scrap fire on occasion. Electricity is cheap for a $4 crock-pot.
> I've got a can of assorted seeds, enough to sow an acre of all the veggies you need - $40, get busy.
Now all I need is an acre of land and time to tend it. Don't you think that's a bit ingenuous? It's like saying the parts for a laptop only cost $200. Now get them and start soldering.
Didn't continue reading I see. Frozen & canned foods are not bad alternatives. Market fresh is more available than you think. Drop the "getting optimal food isn't trivial so it's impossible so give up" mindset.
Don't have an acre? Start with one square foot. Seed packets are $0.10 at The Dollar Store this time of year. Grow a month's worth of carrots in a box. Add 1' boxes for lettuce, broccoli, cucumbers, beets, etc as time & space permit.
And yes, I've built computers from scratch. That's an option too, but you can buy a refurbished one complete for $190 at Best Buy.
Seed packets are $0.10 at The Dollar Store this time of year.
Yeah, that's a really easy mistake to make. Happened to me too, last year. "Zuchini seeds ten plants for ten cents? I'm going to save SO MUCH MONEY!" I thought. Then I realized: A box big enough to grow a single zucchini plant in: €7. Yep, big planters are crazy expensive. Enough soil to grow a healthy zucchini plant: €5. Yep, you do need the entire bag if you want actual fruits instead of a pretty but useless flower.
Time to drive to the garden market, buy planters, plant them, and water the plants: Maybe two hours altogether.
So now you're at €12,10 for, IDK, maybe a dozen zucchini over the season. Not really a steal, but hey, organic food! Still worth it, right?
Then my zucchini got bugs and died. €12,10 and two hours of effort wasted.
"Yep, that happens when you grow vegetables inside. Should have put them on the balcony", my gardener friends said, nodding wisely. Know many poor people with nice big south-facing balconies?
I've in the past also failed miserably at sunflowers, and let's not even talk about the slow miserable death of my tragic attempt at salad. Now, I keep trying to grow food because I have the time and money to waste, and a shed to store all those big planters in during the winter. But if I were trying to cheaply feed my family, this sure as hell isn't a hobby I could afford.
I did -- your thoughts are incongruent. If you're trying to improve health and food costs "in general", "generally applicable" ideas ought to be presented. If I said you can cut your power bill and improve your health by installing bicycle-generators in your house, it glosses over the facts
1) you're going to need a battery array
2) a collection of bicycles and the requisite generator equipment
3) ability and time to run the generator
4) can deal with the inconvenience of perhaps not having "instant-on" power
5) live in any place where this is both practical and desirable, for some definitions of "practical" and "desirable"
It's a throw-away "solution" that really doesn't practically add to the conversation.
> And yes, I've built computers from scratch
On HN this probably isn't so surprising, but in the general populace, I think this sort of thing is considered wizardry. It's not practical for most people.
> but you can buy a refurbished one complete for $190 at Best Buy
I agree enthusiastically. (though I'd personally hit up Craigslist for an old Thinkpad). I think this (and your above points) touch on something I'm passionate about too: I see what I think is a lot of entitlement and laziness in the world I live in. People want too much, and don't want to "work" for it -- not that they don't have jobs, but that they expect needs to be fulfilled by passing a credit card over the counter.
I think we may not be too different: My car is a 40 year old Volkswagen that I got for a fraction of the $$ that my friends pay for their autos. I happen to familiar with the air-cooled VW quirks and limitations and live within them. I also do my own engine work and maintenance. I feel good about keeping another car out of the landfill. The $$ cost, though, is a fraction of what I pay. Other costs include
2) Driving in a constant state of awareness wrt the machine that I'm operating; I listen to the engine, transmission, wheel hubs, and monitor my gauges more than any typical driver I know.
3) My car is slow. My trips take longer. I have to drop to second gear on steep hills.
4) I sometime have real mechanical issues. I've repaired a fuel injector on a road trip. On another, I ran on 3 cylinders until I found a garage and then helped the mechanic work on it, scavenging parts from an old Beetle behind the garage.
I happen to be pretty happy with my automobile situation, but would I recommend Joe Commuter do it to save $$ on the up-front purchase of an automobile? Never. I think it'd be insulting. It's overwhelming for the problem, and therefore doesn't really advance anything. It doesn't help Joe Commuter. Like when people discuss the cost of food and you suggest "Here's $40 worth of seeds. With this you've got vegetables for a year -- get to work."
That said, again, I think we're appreciating the same things.
I also need a tractor or an ox and a yolk with a plow. I also need the permit to farm on my acre lot (many towns/cities won't allow it without one). I can also only grow the things that will grow in my area (which might not be a lot).
Yes, buy an acre of land and start farming, problem solved. Quit your jobs and move to a more expensive area, problem solved. Cook over an open fire made from scrap wood in your apartment, problem solved.
A freezer, if you have one is likely to be running regardless of how much food you have in it... it runs more effectively when full, less air to seep out and replace with chilled air when you open the door, so a bit of a misnomer. For that matter, even if you cannot afford to fill your freezer with food at first, it may be worthwhile to fill the space with containers of water (for ice) which again will help offset open/close costs... This doesn't even compare to the fridge portion which tends to have much more open/close time than a freezer, and more likely to not be full. ymmv of course.
Personally, I find it very hard to eat healthy for under $10/day USD, I am full on insulin resistant so am taking in far fewer carbs with a fairly high fiber:carb ratio (well under 100g of net carbs a day), this means more green veg. and a few pieces of fruit a day. It also means I need to get more fat in my diet, which mostly comes from animal fat/protien (about 1/4-1/2 lb a day).. this gets pricey fast.
I can't imagine what I'd have to do if I didn't have a decent income with my dietary needs. I tend to average my intakes over the course of a 2-3 day sweep, some days will be more veg, some more meat... shifting my daily diet seems to work better for me losing weight consistently. In a solid week without bread/pasta/rice/potato I lose about 4#. I'm down about 45# from 8 months ago, with about a 5-10# daily variance (water weight).
In the U.S. a lot of the most calorie dense high glycemic index foods are what is subsidized.
That kind of comment can only be excused by lack of experience.
Try "making time" when, for example, you've got a job where you can't bring your food with you (and would have nowhere to heat it up even if you were permitted to bring it), a long commute and a family to spend time with.
And I'm talking about a middle-class example. Now add being poor on top of that.
What job is this that you can't bring your food with you? I've worked in some pretty remote places in some pretty shitty environments all the way to middle of a metropolis with a bunch of suits and I've been able to always plan ahead and bring something to eat if I can't go out.
If you can't heat your food up then don't pack something you need to heat up. If your food needs to be warm to eat and it doesn't go inside a Thermos then don't bring it or learn to eat it cold.
There seems to be a strange subconscious myth, in the US anyway, that you must have a "hot meal" every day or you are being nutritionally deprived somehow. I say subconscious because no one ever defends the point directly or explains what the benefit is.
This comes up a lot in political discussions of child hunger and school lunch programs. "X millions of children don't get even one hot meal a day!"
It's more about what cold meals stereotypically are--some processed cereal, two slices of wonderbread with some bread and ham in them--that drive that rhetoric. Sure, a cold corn and arugula quinoa salad is certainly much healthier than the vast majority of meals, hot or cold. But on average hot meals are likely slightly better.
You got me - I have never been poor and have always found time to eat healthily. But let me explain my thinking:
If I wanted to make more time -
- I would give up all TV.
- I would give up all internet, magazines and newspapers, except when commuting.
- I would approach all my neighbours to see if I could car pool to get to work quicker, or if my kids could car pool with theirs to get to and from school without needing me.
- I would try to move into a smaller, cheaper house that has a quicker route to work.
- I would try to move into a smaller, cheaper house that takes a little longer to get to work then cut down the hours I work.
- I would try to switch jobs to reduce my commute time.
- I would try to spend less money on clothes, kids toys, holidays, movies, furniture, TVs, etc and cut down the hours I work.
I think the vast majority of people in the UK - even poor people - have at least one of the above options available to them.
Have you ever tried to feed kids brussel sprouts? That alone would require more effort than it was worth to cook them.
I'm not poor, but I've definitely gone through a rough period or two in my past. During those periods I managed to eat pretty healthy, but it required a fairly decent amount of planning, and there were days when I had to make due with a cup of rice or nothing at all to make the budget work. I am talking about situations where I did not have enough money in the bank account on the day rent was due, and the credit cards were already maxed out. I was working, but the work was intermittent and unreliable (and very labor intensive). So I had time to ride my bike to multiple stores and get the cheapest food, and I had time to cook meals. I lived in a single room, shared house, so couldn't 'downsize' my living any more than it already was.
Once I got a 'real' job, things obviously improved dramatically, but keep in mind I had a college degree, so that was an easy transition to make. I look back fondly on that period, but have the luxury to do so because I always knew that it would be a temporary situation.
For the 'real' poor, they often live in areas where riding a bike to multiple stores to get the best deals is impossible. They often have to settle for fast food because their kids are hungry now, and they don't have enough money in the bank account to invest in groceries (i.e. spending $100 on groceries isn't possible, while spending $10 on fast food is, even if groceries are the better long term investment). Their employment situation tends to be fairly unstable, i.e. they work a lot some days/weeks, and little to no work on others. This means that they have to spend a LOT of effort trying to find work (and obviously, they are not getting paid while they do this).
Just to go through your points:
- TV is often the cheapest form of entertainment for their kids. So if they get rid of the TV, then what? Take the kids to Laser Tag?
- I didn't have internet when I was poor, somehow I have a feeling a lot of poor people are in the same boat.
-From my experience, almost every one is using public transportation. Cars are a huge risk and require significant financial overhead. One mechanical issue could break the budget. Carpooling is very much a middle class luxury.
- They probably live in subsidized housing already, so moving is not really something they can control.
- They also probably have very limited employment options, which is part of the reason they are poor to begin with. Also see my previous comment on unstable work situations.
-I think one of the biggest misconceptions about the poor, is that people see that they have a TV or an xbox or some kids toys and assume that because they can afford those 'luxury' items, that they must be able to afford other things. But the fact is, these durable consumer goods are fairly cheap when compared to the ongoing costs of shelter, food, insurance, etc.. But more importantly, credit companies and payday companies and financing schemes are overwhelmingly targeting the poor. They do this because they know they can get away with charging unreasonable rates. Often this results in a poor person making a few bad financial decisions, and subsequently getting trapped under the weight of the consequences (maxed out credit cards, debt collectors, etc..)
The fact is, on a micro level, any individual is capable of escaping poverty. If they work hard and make good financial decisions, and don't run into any bad luck, they can do it. But on a macro level, the poor as a whole face systematic pressures that make it very difficult to escape poverty. One or two financial missteps can put them in a hole that is nearly impossible to recover from. Telling people to 'work hard' or 'eat healthy' or 'be financially responsible' ignores the systematic pressures that they face that make all of these things extremely difficult if not impossible.
37Signals also sprinkle their stuff with "this works for us, we're not saying it's for everyone". They are outliers, and much as I love and am inspired by them, if what they said was so easy, why aren't we all working four day weeks from home, whilst racing multi-million pound sports cars?
Many poor are content with their condition, unwilling to take even basic steps to improve. Harsh as this sounds, and downvote-bait it seems, I've worked at helping the poor and found (to my dismay) most of them are in that condition because they refuse to choose to do better. Yes, they don't want it badly enough.
I've seen lots of people complaining about not having money to pay the rent (or mortgage)/food/textbooks for kids but going on holidays (or skiing, or binge drinking) every possible moment. It's not general, there are lots of people making as best as they can with the resources they have. But there are also a lot of people who don't even try and just say they can't.
Also, and this is true for many things, the poor are less capable of spending more money now to save money over the long term. E.g., if a pair of boots that will last 3 years is $150 and a pair of boots that will last 6 months is $30, the $150 pair of boots is a better deal because you'd have to buy $180 dollars worth of cheap boots to last 3 years. But if you only have $50 available to spend and you need new boots now, you have to choose the cheap boots.
So, forget buying everything in bulk, or buying a membership to a warehouse club.
I hear this alot, and it's bunk. Shopping at an overpriced bodega is still cheaper than eating out.
It takes 20 minutes to cook a hamburger or piece of chicken, pasta/potato and heat up a bag of green beans. There are very few people in the United States that lack the means to own a refrigerator and some sort of stove -- most localities codes require both for an apartment to be code compliant.
The total time it takes to start the rice cooker, slice a chicken breast (it can even be frozen, just slice it small), and give the chicken a quick fry in my cast iron pan (which I then rinse out and wipe clean, 10 seconds cleanup) is probably less time than you'll spend sitting in the drivethrough of McDonalds.
While you're waiting for the rice to cook, you can spend some time with your kids or watch the expensive cable service every "too poor to cook" person I've ever know has had.
One of my favorite "I'm too tire too cook" meals is to just chop up whatever veggies I have laying around or picked up at the corner store on my way home, and toss the whole mess along with some rice into a rice cooker. I usually include some other random other miscellaneous dried grains/seeds/beans I have in bags to add some taste variety (red lentils = incredible, they're like a spice and a staple at the same time!). You don't need to pay any attention to the actual cooking, because the rice cooker will do it perfectly every time, without attention or care.
Press the button, veg in front of the computer for a while, rice cooker beeps, and ... dinner! :D
Cleanup is just a 2 second wash of the the non-stick pot...
It's a bit more expensive, but I also like taking Zatarain's boxed black beans and rice ($2), getting it started, then tossing in some chunks of raw chicken as soon as it starts boiling. It's quick, you basically mix the ingredients together and stir occasionally until it's done. For about $3-4 (once you buy a chicken breast) you get a tasty dish with rice, beans, and chicken that'll serve two.
Then plan the meals, do the shopping, prepare and cook the food on weekends and stick it in the fridge/freezer for the coming week. Would reduce food preparation time to around 15 mins on a weekday.
Ridiculous. The average American watches hours of TV a day. Prepping a simple rice or potato based meal takes ten minutes; less time than the drive-thru. We have to stop pretending that the obesity epidemic is about something more than poor self control.
Potatoes and sweet potatoes are very cheap and you can practically live on them, in perfect health. Generations of Irishmen, Kitavans, and Peruvians have. This claim that you can't eat healthy on the cheap is silly. Eating just potatoes & butter & a few eggs a day and you could probably go years before having problems. The prep time argument is also silly. A sack of potatoes will keep for a month and you can boil or nuke a potato in minutes.
The "convenience" foods are about the taste and pleasure. It's not cost or convenience. Junk food and fast food are very tasty and offer variety, unlike plain potato, or some other reasonably nutritious gruel.
Indeed, the old Irish diet of milk and potatoes was pretty darn healthy. If you're trying to eat healthily, cheaply, and with a reasonable cognitive load, it's hard to go wrong with eggs, milk, and potatoes. Poor people can do this. Eggs and milk get you all the important macrominerals and fat soluble vitamins and potatoes are nature's multivitamin/multimineral. Nothing else can really touch these for depth and breadth of essential nutrients:
They scale well, so even if they're not the only things you eat, you're at least assured of not being acutely deficient of anything. Plus, it's easy to prepare lots of yummy things from them.
Now, if you're concerned with maximum longevity, you should try to add as many fruits and vegetables a day as you can to suck up phytonutrients/antioxidants.
I think the main weakness of the diet not listed on their weaknesses is they've made no attempt to break it down into a realistic 3x7 meal plan, because it doesn't really make one. Yeah, it's easy to put together a whole load of things cheaply that conform to predetermined values on a spreadsheet, but sometimes sum of the parts does not give you a realistic outcome.
Also, I can tell you as someone who grew up with parents that grew lots of our own fruit and veg, things like onions will survive weeks or months if they are hand-picked, strung and stored correctly but once they have been through delivery/storage/shelf stacking for a supermarket those dents a bruises start going bad quite fast regardless of your best efforts in storage so buying that far ahead may itself be a false economy.
> I think the main weakness of the diet not listed on their weaknesses is they've made no attempt to break it down into a realistic 3x7 meal plan, because it doesn't really make one. Yeah, it's easy to put together a whole load of things cheaply that conform to predetermined values on a spreadsheet, but sometimes sum of the parts does not give you a realistic outcome.
That's a very fair point, but it seemed like premature optimization to try to nail down a meal plan before all the kinks in the nutrition side of things were ironed out. I do plan on getting to that stage in a later version.
Perhaps I should have waited before publishing this post, but honestly, I tend to lose myself in projects like this, and without some indication that other people are interested I often end up leaving the work in an archive somewhere to finish later.
I hope that there's enough data there to be useful/interesting in its current state, but I agree, needs more work
No, I think you're right on for a 0.1 version. The basic nutrition (most important) is there, and you now have a good list of foodstuffs to go by. I think 0.2 should allow for some diversification (trade these two foods for these two, at an extra cost of xx). Version 0.3 can then work on some basic recipes. Also consider things like freeze-dried fruit (easy to rehydrate to put inside oatmeal) and vegetables (make good salad toppings) to add diversity.
I think most people would allow sale prices if you can prove they're on a cycle. For example, sacks of yellow onions go on sale every 3rd week at the store I frequent, which lines right up with my usage habits.
Forgot to mention: I spent 4-5 years in which I ate oatmeal every day (and some nights) while in the process of eliminating debt. It's highly versatile; you can change the flavor dramatically with the addition of different fruit, spices, and nuts/seeds. It stores in bulk for long periods of time. It is very easy to prepare. It is highly cost effective, is fairly nutritious alone, and easily keeps you full for hours on end. I really consider it a superfood in terms of cost vs. nutrition. Add some flax seeds, apples, cinnamon, and a bit of honey and not much can beat it.
I'm not criticising the article (I love seeing hackers/hacker like mentality applied to diet and cooking, check : http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/) but I hate when I read something as "healthy food".
Of course there are foods that are good for you and others that aren't, but somehow this always leads to the conclusion that in order to eat "healtily" you have to eat only "healthy" foods and avoid like the plague "unhealthy" ones.
Truth is, you can eat things like bacon, biscuits, jam, white breads, without any problems if in moderation and in the context of a diet rich in fruit and vegetables, and doing regular exercise (exercise != half an hour loitering in the gym).
The diet illustrated in the article, it's indeed healthy, it's cheap, and it's absolutely depressing.
I can't see too many people being able to stick to it for a reasonable time. Good food is one of life's pleasures and it doesn't have to be in conflict with "healthy" eating.
It would help a lot speaking about "healthy diet" or better "healthy lifestyle" rather than "healthy foods".
Now if only there was consensus what is healthy eating (it changes once a decade, cyclical fashion). Fat is currently returning with a vengeance, while sugar is the killer molecule. 10 years ago a spoonful of butter was considered slightly worse than cyanide.
The amounts of protein per day is also debated as are total calories, and carb/fat ratios.
And the number of meals per day and the optimal amounts of fasts.
You mention some things that are under debate. Those things are not part of "healthy" eating, they are important for "optimal" eating.
Fat is not returning with a vengeance.
Common sense advice has not changed particularly much over the past twenty years.
There are some things - dietary cholesterol isn't seen as evil (but the foods it's in are).
But other stuff - replacing fat for sugar (replacing a real salad dressing with a low fat (but high sugar) dressing) has always been seen as bad advice.
Of course, if people pay attention to wing-nuts pumping out crank advice then yes, everything changes every week. Peas cause cancer one week, red cabbage causes it the next.
Most people do not need "optimal", they need "good enough". Most people are not at "good enough", they're at high fat, high sugar, high salt, high poor quality foods, low exercise. Someone drinking 4 litres of cola a day and eating a jar of peanut butter on crackers doesn't need to know whether their total calories should be 2,000 kCalorie per day or 2,500 kCalorie per day. They just need to eat less than 7,000kCal per day.
"Common sense advice has not changed particularly much over the past twenty years. ...There are some things - dietary cholesterol isn't seen as evil (but the foods it's in are)."
No, definitely false. Dietary cholesterol has definitely been considered a bad thing and for the last 30 years people were told to avoid it, by heart doctors, in the form of avoiding cholesterol in your diet, in that specific terminology. It wasn't just that cholesterol was in "bad" things, the things were bad because they had cholesterol.
"But other stuff - replacing fat for sugar (replacing a real salad dressing with a low fat (but high sugar) dressing) has always been seen as bad advice."
Also complete tripe. Low fat diets have been advocated for decades now without a word given to what the fat was replaced with, because the fat was considered So Obviously Bad it didn't matter, anything was better.
The dietary consensus is in fact undergoing significant change (still in the early phases of penetrating the consensus but I'm pretty sure its inevitable at this point), but this is exactly how I expect the authorities to wiggle out from under the fact they were giving fatally-inaccurate advice for decades... straight-up historical revisionism. We never said cholesterol was bad for you, we never were universally against salt (just for certain at-risk people), we always said many fats were good for you, we certainly NEVER EVER EVER advocated transfats as a healthy alternative to fats how dare you even suggest that we did such a thing, and we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Please read my comment again. You rant about cholesterol. Cholesterol is an example I give of advice that has changed. You appear to misunderstand that very simple point I made.
> Low fat diets have been advocated for decades now without a word given to what the fat was replaced with, because the fat was considered So Obviously Bad it didn't matter, anything was better.
No, this is wrong. Calm dieticians have been suggesting that people cut down fats, but not replace those with weird sugar-foods. You'll be able to point to very many untrained, unscientific, 'clinical nutritionists' who give weird advice. But I've already said that cranks exist and have always given weird advice.
Salt is still harmful, btw.
> The dietary consensus is in fact undergoing significant change
It really really isn't.
"Don't eat too much. Eat less red meat; eat more fruit and vegetables. Reduce the amount of fats, sugars, and salt that you eat. Reduce the amount of processed foods (especially some processed meats). Try to eat more fresh food."
That's been the consistent message for many many years now.
Cholesterol... Please check how many milligrams or - actually - grams of cholesterol does your liver create every single day. Also note, that Vitamin D is naturally metabolized from cholesterol. Metabolism is not simple and it is not calories in and calories out.
I do not see how natural sea salt is harmful? For ages people had dried salt from the sea to be used in foods as well as cleanser for skin and balsam for hair. Just my 2 cents.
Fair enough about your point about the cholesterol.
However, I'd challenge you with this. Go back and look at how the cholesterol error was made. It's a instructive microcosm of how we got to having such bad advice about health, where a tiny little sample of the vast multidimensional space of health was taken because we happened to develop a test that could see cholesterol, and we radically, radically over-interpreted the results. (Arguably without even doing the test we could have done right then, which is to directly ask the question of whether eating cholestThen ask if you're really, really sure that's the only time that happened, in our set of health advice that largely was created in the same era (if not a decade or two before) and hasn't changed since. Because I do agree that consensus hasn't changed much over the past 50 years; what I am saying is that change is inevitably coming, and if you know where to look you can already see its shape.
"Salt is still harmful, btw."
There are significant studies that suggest it's only harmful if you already have hypertension. There's also some serious question in my mind about how salt can be harming the population when studies can also show that people actually maintain a very constant level of salt intake and have historically maintained that same salt intake for as far back as we have records that can reasonably answer that question.
"Calm dieticians have been suggesting that people cut down fats, but not replace those with weird sugar-foods."
And I still think this is revisionism. I've been reading recommendations from the government and other sources for my entire lifetime and I've only recently seen anyone making the point that replacing fat with sugar is a bad thing, and it is usually still people not in the scientific mainstream until very recently. (Sure, Atkins said it in the 1970s, but I'm sure you wouldn't count that.) The government has been pushing low-fat everything for a long time. If perhaps the point was being made in some academic journal somewhere, I don't really care, I'm talking about what the general population was told. The idea that low-fat itself might be bad can probably be dated to when it finally broke through that transfats (margarine) was worse than what it was replacing (butter), which was a relatively recent development (~10 years ago), and that's when it finally became politically viable to even ask the question of whether low-fat foods were actually better for you.
And I could quibble further (the badness of red meat is highly dubious from what I can see, fruit's virtues seem oversold), but it doesn't matter. The change is coming, because the advice we've been given for decades is unbelievably awful, "our grandchildren will ask us how we could believe that" awful. It won't stand, and when the authorities try to rewrite history to claim nothing has changed I will not forget that it's not what they told us.
You should see the weight loss and muscle gain pictures in the keto forums to really understand why (only some kinds of) fat is returning with a vengeance.
With these sustainable results, it's not going back. Now traditional dietitians seem quite outdated and retrograde (because of their results) in comparison.
Keto is the first weight-loss diet I've ever been on where I'm not constantly hungry. It's also the first diet where I've lost 15lb in the first three weeks, without actually trying that hard. (Clearly some water weight in there, but still.) Fancy coffees every morning and steak every night, if I want.
I don't know that this is an issue of HCLF vs LCHF diets as much as the previous dominance of HCLF diets though. I'm not a biologist/nutritionist at all, but it seems like HCLF and balanced diets work for some people, otherwise we'd all be obese or constantly hungry. But they definitely never worked for me. We already know that people's bodies differ in how well they process different foods (allergies, Celiac, alcohol flush, etc), so I wouldn't find it too surprising if different people had different ideal macro ratios.
The best reason to avoid carbohydrate-rich foods is exactly the reason they figure so heavily in the diets of many nations. Rice, bread, these things pack a ton of calories. This is not great for a computer programmer who sits on ass all day, converting the carbohydrate calories to weight, but goddamn if rice isn't a cheap way to power yourself when you're on a budget.
While it is a great article, and potentially useful info for those that fall on hard times, I don't share some of the other poster's views of this being aspirational.
Food is not just a mechanical source of fuel, surely? I couldn't abide eating the same stuff more than a couple of days in a row, let alone every day for weeks at a time.
I more or less live on pasta, cooking 1-2 kg at a time and then heating it up in a pan with tomatoes, ham and possibly eggs. Takes less than ten minutes, and less than twenty including the actual meal, and two meals (~250 g of pasta) get me more or less through a day.
And, yes, to me food is mostly a mechanical source of fuel. Sure, there are occasions where a good dinner with friends is a nice thing, but definitely not on a daily basis, and especially not in the morning when I’m short on time already.
But YMMV[0], of course.
[0] There should totally be a ‘YMWV’ for ‘Your mileage will vary’.
Ah, I don't eat in the mornings, so it's not much of concern. But lunchtime I like to vary (and not prepare myself, preferably) and in the evening I usually eat with friends or family, rarely alone so someone usually takes time and prepares something.
The urge to make celebration food every day is a hard one to resist, of course, and I'm sure not everyone enjoys preparing food.
> Food is fuel; it doesn't have to be a source of entertainment.
It doesn't have to be, but for many it is. I greatly enjoy making and tasting food. The true value of something is a combination of its physical and emotional cost to the purchaser. I think that gets lost in many budgeting articles.
Of course, if you're truly on a tight budget like this article proposes, luxury and entertainment aren't even parts of your budget. But if not, you're going to be miserable unless you can do things you enjoy, and often times those things take a bit of financial support (obviously not everything, again).
I love food. I adore it. It's part of my heritage, my family, part of our lives, our childhoods. Good food is up there with good sex, it's an overwhelming and amazing experience.
I absolutely understand that some people find food an annoying necessity and not something to take pleasure in, but many of us, I'd posit an overwhelming majority in fact, love and enjoy and relish our day to day meals. As such, living on the bread line can be a deeply depressing and dispiriting experience.
I didn't say it can't be a source of entertainment, I said it doesn't have to be. I take great please in many meals; but food is fuel and I require "just" fuel most of the time, every meal isn't an experience and doesn't need to be. Most meals are just fuel. That doesn't mean I don't take pleasure in meals intended for taking pleasure in; it isn't that black and white.
I could eat (and have done so as well) a simple cheese sandwich (slice of cheese, few veggies between two slices of bread) for lunch all the time.
When I lived by myself for a little over a year, I was quite happy with this arrangement. As fuel and as entertainment -- I really really love my simple sandwiches.
I think we're seeing just how huge a difference the genes for tasting make. A super taster vs a low taster will treat food (kind of a big deal if you want to stay alive) extremely differently.
I wonder which was a better evolutionary adaptation in the past? And which is better in the industrialized world today?
This is the definition of a foodie. For some people, food is simply fuel. For some, it is something to enjoy in it's own right, perhaps even a passion. And for some, like those who have had dietary or medical issues, it can be a frustrating experience at best.
I believe we should all try to have a healthy relationship with food, and learn enough about it to eat well, but some people will just eat whatever's easy instead of craving fancier feasts.
Before we start talking about "eat healthily", please visit http://nusi.org/ , apply critical thinking - ask for references to published research papers. Be aware of the difference between observational and clinical studies and of course, always remember correlation does not imply causation.
We, as in mankind, don't know very much about what really is healthy food.
It took me a little reading to figure out the agenda, but some key phrases like "obesity is a growth disorder" tipped me off. This is a Gary Taubes project. He is a writer of books in favor of low-carbohydrate diets, and he often badly misinterprets the scientific literature. He has a selection bias about which studies he thinks are worth talking about, so as to make it appear that low-carbohydrate diets are the answer to everything. No actual nutritional scientists think his "alternate hypothesis" is credible.
I wish I had seen your comment earlier. The "what is healthy food" discussions are just as bad as language- or editor-wars.
And they totally ground these discussions. Instead of offering a bunch of options of cheap food, the various posters insist that you have to follow their whatever-plan first or else fuck everything else.
Cheap foods: Bananas. Eggs. Brown rice. Brown pasta. Red beans. Carrots. Sweet potatoes. Peanut butter. Whole-wheat bread.
There are some foods on there that aren't allowed under certain diets. That's okay.
The latest review of all major trials of low carb diets show improved weight AND improvement of all major risk factors for heart disease.
There is no accepted explanation to why as of yet.
But the bottom line is that the advice on healthy food that "actual nutritional scientists" readily hands out today have very little real scientific support in clinical trials.
I think nusi has an approach that most of us will find acceptable. First we do real scientific experiments and then we base our recommendations on what is healthy food based on the data and knowledge we gather.
Thanks. I think a lot of them agree that low-carb approaches work for weight loss and some other outcomes, since that's what the science shows. But his "insulin hypothesis" is pure pseudoscience and I'm not aware of any papers about it.
If you want to save some money, save some time and eat healthy, try this:
Go to the grocery store, buy these 3 items:
1 bag of frozen vegetables.
3 chicken breasts
1 bag of dried lentils.
Sunday night:
Cook lentils in water, don't add anything
Slice chicken breasts down the side, add seasoning, no oil, just seasoning, don't bread it etc.
Bake the chicken breasts
Monday for lunch:
Microwave a bunch of the vegetables,
grab your chicken breast, and precooked lentils mix lentils in with vegetables and throw the chicken breast on top, cook together.
Repeat that 4-5 days a week. Your energy will be higher, you will start loosing weight, and you will save money. Its the only meal I have found that does all three.
[it should go without saying, but there is no dressing added, no butters, oils etc. once you start adding that stuff you might as well just grab a burger or some Chinese food]
[ADDED] I am not advocating this be your only meal. Its just a meal that replaces the normal garbage that I would eat if I didn't have a good, low-cost, delicious alternative.
If you are fully aware of your diet and are in good shape, then by all means, add whatever you think you want to make it taste better, but this meal really doesn't need it.
My comment about not adding butters/oils etc. is aimed at people who think they are eating healthy by having a salad with blue cheese dressing.
Also, for those of you in your early 20s who think you know how to eat well, prepare yourself. Once you get to your late 20s, early 30s, it starts getting much tougher.
My tips: get split, hulled lentils. Soak them in water for at least 20 minutes, washing and draining till the water runs relatively clear. When cooking, place them in boiling water and scoop off the the froth that bubbles up. This will reduces the saponins that some say are associated with leaky gut syndrome. For bonus points use a pressure cooker to destroy the phytate and lectins that are considered anti-nutrients by the paleo community.
There is nothing wrong with butter, oil, or dressing in moderation. If it makes a rather boring dish more interesting, it's worth it - none of those things up the calorie count too much.
I'd say satiating meals is a better goal than interesting meals. If you're completely satiated by reasonable portions then your energy levels will be solid and you'll lose/maintain weight without needing to think about calories at all.
We all have different goals, but interesting meals are certainly near the top of my priority list, especially since I eat with my family and meal times are more than just a way to fill a hole.
For most people, I imagine a decent-sized subset of appealing meals can be very satiating at the same time.
p.s. wtvanhest: Not sure what you have against blue cheese. Hopefully not "dietary fat makes you fat because it's calorie dense" because that would again be anomalous 80s thinking that ignores satiety effects and runs with a 1-dimensional model for something as complex as nutrition and aggregate consumption behaviour.
Calorie dense food "hiding" in salad needs small amount of caution.
So long as you're aware of what you're eating it's fine.
If you can't understand why you're still 17 stone you might want to look at whether you're having a blue cheese dressing on a salad but counting that snack as 0 calories, which is something a surprising number of people do. They have their 3 meals, which come to something like 2,000 kCal per day, but they don't count all the other snacks they eat.
Satiety is important, but it's still calories in vs calories out.
Yeah, and that's exactly why "calorie excess" is nowhere near the conversation ender it's so often used as. At best it's a conversation starter to use on those dummies to which it is not self-evident. The thorny part of overconsumption is WHY one is compelled to do so, not simply that one does.
I agree. I for one get a lot of joy and happiness out a great meal. It seems a lot of people in this thread are taking a very utilitarian approach to food, but for a lot of us, food is more than fuel. It's an experience to be enjoyed.
Help me understand. What does the smoke point itself have to do with the oils being bad for you? Assuming all the oils you mentioned are unrefined, their smoke points are all over the map, so it isn't clear whether you're saying that a low smoke point is bad or that a high smoke point is bad (palm: 455°F coconut: 350°F, sunflower: 437°F, corn: 352°F)[1]
What I do know is that the more refined an oil is (and therefore less rich in flavor and nutrients), the higher its smoke point will be. The implication being that you should pick virgin/cold-pressed/unrefined versions when you don't need the high smoke point for your cooking. Is that what you were getting at?
This is more suited to someone with regular working hours that needs a fast lunch, is someone who can eat meat, and has basic cooking skills and equipment. Hourly workers, those working multiple jobs, and those that do not have the money to purchase kitchen equipment would be hard pressed to follow this advice.
Before even going into the side-effects of such a diet let's just have a look at the numbers used:
Olive oil (extra virgin)(price per kg quoted) 3.30 (price per kg actual) 6.39 (weekly quoted) 1.96 (weekly actual) 3.80
Yellow split peas (dried)(price per kg quoted) 1.16 (price per kg actual) 0.98 (weekly quoted) 1.62 (weekly actual) 1.37
Bananas (price per kg quoted) 0.68 (price per kg actual) 0.68 (loose / leftover 2+ BBD) (weekly quoted) 0.38 (weekly actual) 0.50 (1)
Carrots (price per kg quoted) 0.46 (price per kg actual) 0.80 (loose / leftover 2+ BBD) (weekly quoted) 0.26 (weekly actual) 0.50 (1)
Onions (price per kg quoted) 0.42 (price per kg actual) 0.90 (loose / leftover 5+ BBD) (weekly quoted) 0.23 (weekly actual) 0.50
Red cabbage (price per kg quoted) 0.80 (price per kg actual) 0.96 (loose / leftover 3+ BBD 1 piece) (weekly quoted) 0.45 (weekly actual) 0.96 (1)
Tomatoes (chopped, tinned) (price per kg quoted) 0.78 (price per kg actual) 0.93 (3 400g cans est. BBD of opened can 4 days) (weekly quoted) 0.87 (weekly actual) 0.93
(1) this requires you to go to the supermarket twice a week for e.g. 3 bananas, 3 carrots + 1 cabbage - it also assume that the cheapest offers are always on sale (which is not the case) plus that none of the food goes bad.
weekly total quoted: 5.78
weekly total actual (no transport cost, cheapest goods always on sale) 8.56
at this point you're already far over the proclaimed budget and if I call this rightly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woyzeck) you're on a diet that the protagonist (Woyzeck) was put on to find out if he will be going crazy by just eating that kind of food (peas).
(update) sorry forgot the rice and oats
Long Grain Rice (price per kg quoted) 0.40 (price per kg actual) 1.39 (weekly quoted) 0.25 (weekly actual) 0.88
Oats (price per kg quoted) 0.75 (price per kg actual) 0.75 (weekly quoted) 0.42 (weekly actual) 0.42
2. Aside from bananas everything else will easily last a full week. If you wanted to say you are only shopping once a week then that means you either are willing to eat very ripe bananas by the end of the week (some people do this), or if you are like me then you would have to just eat bananas the first part of the week and not eat them the end of the week.
3. Including transportation costs is beyond the scope of a diet - the author already minimized costs by limiting things to a single supermarket (as opposed to the original article which would have required multiple trips to multiple stores to track sales and get deals).
4. The assumption that there is no waste is explicitly discussed by the author as a drawback that needs to be addressed in subsequent iterations
I have neither included transport cost nor sales nor waste.
If you live in the UK you might immediately know what including these in that completely unrealistic article would mean.
(1) You have to go to one of the superstores to get these prices - Tesco Express, Sainsbury's Local e.a. almost never store the cheapest goods and normally mark up all other goods by a substantial amount (30%+). Next cheapest goods on the list are often 100%+ more than the prices used in the article (that's the superstore price of course) - most extreme (from my own experience) with rice - the cheapest rice you most likely find in a Tesco Express is £4+ vs. 40p quoted, that's 1000%.
(2) Getting to a superstore can be rather costly - assuming about £3.2 for bus tickets (that's £6.4 per week uups just doubled your weekly budget by only adding the transport cost) - you might alternatively walk about 10-16 miles each time (both ways, can be more if you live on the countryside) - guess that's the healthy part of that diet - walking 32 miles each week (you should than of course also adjust you calories / fat / vitamin intake which gets us to about e.g. £12 actual vs £7 and 12 hours spent walking).
(3) To use sales most effectively you have to have a budget to vary your diet, buy larger quantities when available etc - neither of this is possible in the constraints of this assumption - hence I also did not use sales prices.
Project for someone: provide better sorting, ranking, visualization etc. for food nutrition info. You sometimes see these, not all of them are well done.
OP mentions use of the USDA National Nutrient Database. Here is where you can get a download, plus previous versions and updates from previous versions if you plan to maintain your own database copy over time: http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=8964
That's a really interesting idea. A potential problem is finding a similar, standardized source of food price data (if you want to include that). Some data are published by the USDA ERS [1], but it's far from comprehensive.
The same triple constraint nature of the project management triangle exists, I think, with food intake. Quality, cost, and ease/speed of preparation -- pick two.
Every two days, I cook up 2 lbs ground beef, boil 4 cups beans, and 4 cups rice. I let it cool off, and throw it in Tupperware, and into the fridge. I take from that whenever I'm hungry. It doesn't taste the best, but it fills you up, is cheap, and is good for you! If you're feeling the need for some extra veggies/fruit, avocado, frozen blueberries, and frozen kale offer the most nutritional content at the lowest price and least preparation time.
Like work, I don't think this will ever be 'optimal', but it's good for now, in that it saves me time, money, and waistline. Can tweak it as I go.
You can make that combination taste good. When cooking your beef, add some garlic, onion, bell pepper (if $$ allows), cumin, oregano, and chili powder. If they're black beans, add cilantro, onion, and garlic. In the rice, saute the dry rice in a few teaspoons of olive oil before adding water, and replace some of the water with lime juice. Now you basically have a simplified Chipotle burrito bowl. Garnish with avocado, cilantro, pico de gallo, etc.
It is also difficult and requires time and knowledge to be able to reliably do this, and even then some plantings will fail due to unforeseen reasons. Someone with time or budget pressure would have a hard time doing this on their own.
Yes, there's the cost of getting it and tending it, but there are advantages in positive mental health and exercise (with bigger yards) and some hippy "feeling connected to the world" stuff.
Eatings peas just off the plant is great.
Even herbs and spices can be grown if you just have a window sill.
But, yes, it's not for everyone. Some people just don't like that kind of thing.
I live in the suburbs but with a very small backyard. I have about 60 sq ft of space that provides 90% of my vegetables throughout the year. When I lived in an apartment I had two tomato plants and two squash plants on my deck and it would give me pounds of food a week (squash grows really quickly, tomatoes grow abundantly).
It's not impossible by any means for most people to do so, even in small quantities.
http://www.mypatriotsupply.com will send you a can of seeds, 20 varieties, enough to cover an acre, "heirloom" (seeds from plants are re-usable next year), for $40.
But in any case, if you can trade a few hours for $500 at will, you probably can spend more than £1/day in food. Most people can't just work a few more hours (if they have a job at all) though.
'Healthy' doesn't mean the same for all people. If you are not so young any more your cholesterol level becomes high priority. For me food that does not lead to a high cholesterol level is healthy food.
I think the biggest flaw is the assumption that each day must stand on its own. I'd say that its generally much cheaper to make one big meal than to try and make 3 individual meals, but there's no attempt to create large soups or chilis or something in which you CAN use fractional prices because the final product will last several days or can be frozen.
Am I the only one unduly annoyed by the ubiquitous slogan "fruits and vegetables"? Fruit is full of fructose AKA sugar. They are worth eating some of, but it's bizarre that they've come to occupy this front and centre position in diet advice.
There's some evidence to suggest that eating fructose in combination with fiber (as found naturally in fruits) is far less harmful than just sugar alone, and way less harmful than refined sugar.
I guess it is easier to convince people (and especially kids) to eat fruits than vegetables, as the former are often sweeter. And even sugar-laden fruits are still better than none at all.
I eat lots of Amy's low-sodium organic soup. I dunno, it's quick and easy, and tastes good. Doesn't seem like there are too many canned soup lovers around here.
I don't agree it's unquantifiable in this instance -- the diet is intended to meet the standards outlined by the UK Food Standards organization [1]. Whether or not you agree with the standards is a valid point, but a separate issue.
His point is that while the government can write into law what they believe the definition of healthy to be, that doesn't necessarily make it biologically accurate.
I see your point, though, you're not going to get drawn into a debate on that definition since your project isn't about the "true definition" of healthy but rather it assumes that the nutrition guide is adequate.
"Healthy" is a subjective descriptor, it cannot be quantified. There's a reason it differs from person to person, nation to nation, health organization to health organization.
It can be quantified, and it was. You are just arguing for the sake of arguing. You not liking the definition of healthy that she specified does not mean it can not be specified.
There is a lot of argument about what the best distributions are, without any real resolution at this point. The author reasonable chose to target a standard without claiming it was the only way to go.
No, the author simply repeated old stuff. If all those 'reasonable' diets worked, the current obesity epidemic would not be in its worst point, as it is.
I don't think that the videos you posted support your claims, at least not the first one.
In the suggested diet, almost 2/3 of the carbohydrates don't come from sugar. From the foods listed, most of these carbohydrates should come from the oats and the rice. In these foods, the carbohydrates come almost exclusively from starch, which the body splits into glucose. And glucose is the ideal power source for your body, as Lustig shows at 44:52 in the first of the youtube videos you linked.
Now, about the suggars, at 1:13:55 in the same video, he states that we "should eat our carbohydrates with fibers, and thats why fruits are ok". The diet in the article contains plenty of fibres, so that should be ok.
Any mention of calories in the article refers to large calories, hence the notation as kcals.
I agree it's confusing, but because almost everyone means a large calorie when they say "calorie", it seemed like the most readable and simplest solution was to refer to them as calories and use the kcal notation in the tables.
All of the tables indicate the use of kcal as the unit. The fact isn't spelled out in the text, but this comment seems more like a pet peeve in terminology than an accurate criticism.
It occurs to me, that if all the parts in a conversation understand the correct meaning pedant-ism can be left aside.
Whilst it is nice people try and point out cheap options they ignore the following:
1) cost of running a fridge and freezer
2) calorie intake and how people are all different
3) large supermarket nearby and only you hanging around the reduced counter
With that I'm sure a very short small inactive person could live well on this amount and intake but we are not all small inactive people.
A few years ago I was in hospital, I eat breakfast, dinner, evening meal and late night snacks and had seconds on every occasion. I was not overly active and bordering on totaly inactive. I slept lots as well. In short I eat almost twice the ` so called` reccomended calorie amount. I had nothing like worms or the sort and over a 2 week period I lost over a stone in weight.
Now I'm large frame, over 6feet tall and male and a active brain yet was phsicaly inactive, eating twice the so called daily calorie intake and had no medical issues like worms or digestive issue at all and I lost weight.
In short my my personal calorie intake is over twice what the so called average is and when I read articles like this it is hard not to feel persecuted as other read them, take them as fact and then think you are wrong. Yet the facts show, as well as common sence that not everybody is the same.
The acticale on the BBC was born out of benifit cuts and was showing how somebody could eat cheaply, it totaly ignores that a even the `so called` average daily intake is 2000 for a women and 2500 for a man and that men and women are paid the same amounts, with that most of the replies and posted menu's came from small frame short people and females (no offence intended btw). With that I'm jelous I'm not a small female and able to eat less to lead the same quality of life. Sadly that is not so and that is te case for many people. We are all different and there is no cookie-cutter way to say this will sort everybody as it won't, or shoe shops would have shoes the same size and that would be it for everybody.
What I find worrying is the mentality that some people have and wil impose based upon this and what might be good for them is not good for others and they will not know any better as the `reccomended intake` gets bastardised from being average to the normal for all.
That said, not everybody has a garden to grow their own vegtables and that helps hugely, sadly I can't but we all have windows and a small window ledge herb garden can help loads.
I would also say baking your own bread helps as well on many levels.
Beyond that your down to mapping out what time what supermarkets reduce items, keeping it to yourself and playing hit and miss that others not in the same situation as you as there are only so many reduced items.
I have found you can eat cheaply, or you can eat healthy, but as a non vegan/vegatarian it is extreemly depressing.
A few years ago I was in hospital, I eat breakfast, dinner, evening meal and late night snacks and had seconds on every occasion. I was not overly active and bordering on totaly inactive. I slept lots as well.
A few years ago I was in hospital, and they didn't let me eat at all for two weeks. No, not even [whatever gotcha you want to insert here]. Lost 10 pounds I didn't need anyway, and otherwise felt fine. Wasn't particularly hungry during that time. Did watch a ridiculous number of cooking shows though.
Sufficient calories are easy to come by. A 50 pound sack of rice or bread flour is $18, enough calories to keep a large male operating a normal schedule for over a month. Spend your limited money on nutrients.
Not eating for two weeks and watching cooking programs is bordering on sadistic, though if you have a strong will then I'd call you a hero.
Sadly in the UK such volumes of rice for such prices are not available at the consumer levels. As for bread flour, thats impossible, least in the UK. But you are right that rice and bread are the cheapest form of calorie intake. And yes nutients are extreemly important, though how many people right even when they have the money is probably another area and seperate issue of concern.
I would be interested in seeing a chart of a typical food shop compared country by country price wise, certainly would be extreemly interesting. I do know when I was in America that food was easily half as cheap and twice the size than what I could get in the UK and I utterly loved it.
But I'll will say it - you are a hero for being able to go two weeks without eating AND watch cooking programs, but after the first few days I suspect it was easier to endure as your bodies metabolism adjusts. But not many people could endure what you endured as it takes some extreeme willpower and not everybody has that, or even close, there again some people have no choice. There again everybody is different - even identical twins.
So +1 from me for being able to go that long and watch cooking programs, certainly something I would not want to entertain as would many others.
[EDIT ADD] I had a look at todays prices of rice, and for the cheapest, including amazon and ignoring shipping cost aspects and I truely envy you being able to get rice so cheaply as for the amount you can get 50kg for in the UK you would just about be able to get 10kg for that price and that is using a exchange rate of 2:1 $:£ ratio.
No I was not bound to a bed and wished it was muscle loss, I have legs like tree trunks and sadly they somehow stay the same from my sporting days -- think rugby player type build.
Though the part of the body that uses the most calories is in many respects the brain, and I know I think too much.
Also aware that my glicogen(probably spelling that wrong) levels can account for nearly 2 stone in my case - everybody different though and I'll admit due to my frame and size I'm not normal.
When I was doing competitive swimming and in peak form I could happily walk on the bottom of a swimming pool instead of being boyant and was due to muscle weighing more than fat. Just something I accept as normal too me.
You are absolutely, without a doubt, incorrect. Making up random guesses about your caloric intake is exactly why people think all sorts of crazy nonsense about metabolism like you do. You were eating less than your recommended intake, not double it. You just suck at estimating. Most people do. There is no way you were eating 5000 kcal in the hospital, they won't even let you.
Sorry are you saying you know me better than me, when you have not even met me!
This hospital in the uk I was and did, I have no need to lie about it. I know what I was eating and the volumes and I know what I eat when I'm not in hospital, so sorry if I completely and utterly disagree with your random asertion. There again I have been known to eat 3 full plated roast dinners in a day, we are all different, just accept it that I know myself better and I know I am not exagerating and not all hospitals are the same, let alone hospitals in different countries.
Though you have proven my concerns fully, sadly enough :(
>Sorry are you saying you know me better than me, when you have not even met me!
It has nothing to do with you, it has to do with physics. If anything you said was even remotely close to true, we would have already read about you in a medical journal, as you would be a first in history discovery of something completely new and amazing.
Sorry but you do not know what you are talking about - please troll elsewere.
In other words you are not me and as I said in the original post - EVERYBODY IS DIFFERENT, we come in all shapes and sizes and all have different metabolistic rates and ways of burning calories.
I just said how it was and with that you came along used your perspective based upon yoruself and saw something outside that template and assumed it was wrong and went into troll mode.
Though looking at your past comments you are keen towards doing that, hence you have sibmitted nothing!
With that I was there you was not, so this is not even a debate or argument or discussion, it is clear and outright trolling on your part, simple as.
Trying to dismiss opinions you don't like as "trolling" is simply childish. You are wrong. It is simple fact. There is no way for anyone to lose weight while consuming 5000 kcal/day while sedentary. No amount of "but I am such a special snowflake" will change that. The entire point is that we're not that different. Offer up an explanation for what magic difference you possess that burns 2000-3000kcal/day for you, don't just spew lazy rhetoric.
I have already covered this and you completely ignored it.
It is you who is spewing up rhetoric.
As for magic - seriously and as for being special - seriously!
I'm above average height, think alot and I can not get by on 3k calories a day, somebody smaller with a slower metabolism who thinks less can, you just come along and asume it is wrong and justify it on the basis that you know better and offer NO evidence.
Lets put this down to difference of oppinion and that you are not me and I am not you and as I have said everybody is different and it is those that impose such cookie cutter type attitudes that are the ones that concern me, thats you that is.
Your tone has been dismissive, insulting and frankly everything that a troll is, if it looks like one, talks like one and acts like one. Well you can see my point of veiw and choose to ignore it, which you did and then went on to support my concerns with perfect clarity in an example you can't make up.
Comming along and telling somebody that they are lieing because they don't fit the normal aspect is frankly not what these forums are about, sorry I don't have research paper written about me, but and this is the shocking news, not everybody does because we are all different. Applying an average against the top and bottom end of the scales is just silly and goes against what an average is meant to be.
As for people who need higher than everage intakes for many reasons there are many examples if you can be bothered to look, and I have no desire to let you near my medical records or indeed go into detail about my medical history at all for the sake of pandering to somebody who offers no proof. And no I have not had a gastoric bypass, so you can count that one out.
I wished I could eat what norms eat and maintain myself, I can't and I'm sorry I go against your hitleresk views off people.
>As for people who need higher than everage intakes for many reasons there are many examples if you can be bothered to look
Yes, reasons like running marathons. The mythological "fast metabolism" doesn't burn an extra 2000-3000kcal/day. If you want to act like your position is evidence based, then you need to supply evidence. There is no evidence of anyone in history having ever being able to burn 5000kcal/day while laying in bed. Your story is simply unbelievable. You would be a medical marvel if your story were true. Ask a doctor yourself.
Just from lazy google look from the first page search, there are medical conditions and let us not ignore that not everybody is the same size without being overweight.
Yes spoke to doctor, not common but not unheard of and no desire to go into my personal medical history to win a argument on the internets, sorry but the prize is just not worth it.
Like I said, I wished I was normal, truely I do. Now you have depressed enough out of me so I'm leaving it there before I start being made out too be a freak and should end my life because I don't fit into somebodies cookie-cutter template.
You explicitly stated that you did not have anything like a parasite or missing organs, remember? Pretending you are suffering and "being made out to be a freak" because someone pointed out that your estimate was wrong is incredibly childish and absurd. You are normal, you are just acting like a baby because you want to claim you have some one in a trillion undiagnosed (and mysteriously un-noticed by doctors while in hospital for weeks) condition.
Just reading Antifragile, and stumble on this seemingly immortal shitcliché: one need to eat "At least 55 grams of protein per day", "Around 50% of food energy from carbohydrate".
I do not even want to know what a carbothing is. This is plain proved horseshit. Our stomach has been prepared by Mother Evolution to handle a wide range of variation in the feed. And the risk of stomach boredom is very real.
So the real proper diet is: do not have a diet. Do know what is tasty, eat 1kg steack some days (rarely), eat stone soup other days. Don't eat things that have been invented in the last 50 years (from margarine to exctasy). Do never ever watch TV or other addicting ads carriers.
On the one hand, you have a point, and it's really tempting to give into this sort of ethos, as an approach to diet and nutrition, but at some point it becomes important to acknowledge that a very real and practical biology reigns over your internal organic processes. These processes can be measured and understood at a chemical level.
We don't understand them perfectly, and many people (maybe more than half the world?) don't actually measure out their hunger in grams and milliliters, or understand the fundamental building blocks of metabolism at the chemical level, and get buy just fine, purely trusting their guts.
One size doesn't fit all, and sometimes cravings are correct, but not all the time. Addictive substances and microbes show us that "what you want" isn't always "what you need."
Opiates have been around for centuries, and demonstrate that just because you might feel a hunger for something and find it satisfying doesn't mean it's good for you. You're body's understanding of the world around it can be distorted. Sometimes the things that distort it's intuition are odorless and colorless. Natural food does not come with labels (and even labels can be wrong), and if you're uncertain of the purity of the water you boil your meat in, well, maybe there could be something in it that is sapping and impurifying your precious bodily fluids.
Meanwhile, it might be counter-intuitive that bread mold can ward off infection, but then again we have penicillin which has proven to be a powerful and valuable anti-biotic.
So, feel free to operate on faith and emotion, but going through life with your blinders on, you might be caught off guard by things that you could have avoided if you hadn't chosen to ignore them.
> many people (maybe more than half the world?) don't actually measure out their hunger in grams and milliliters
You seem serious here, so I have to take it seriously. Then I'll break it to you: people who measure their hunger in grams are at most 1% of the world. Nobody does it in France and Europe, neither in China, India, Africa, etc.
What seems a rational and normal behavior to you is a crazy and facepalming waste of time.
Moreover, despite the down votes (thanks for explaining by the way), I still think this behavior is harmful and anti natural. The evolution gave us a stomach that, normally tuned, will react to hunger, good food, bad food, with sensations of pleasure or displeasure. Bypassing this is risky, increase your fragility.
Food is not chemistry, it is more ancient, more important in our daily lives, it is has a direct influence on health and mood, it should be taken with precautions, and it must be eaten with enjoyment.
