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I am struggling to understand how not having enough money for food is possible in a first world country. You can feed yourself for about $1 a day per person wit

• mzs 7y ago
  Where do you get it? How do you get it from there? Where do you keep it before cooking? How do you prepare it? Where do you keep it from spoiling? How do you keep it from being stolen?
• chipperyman573 7y ago
  >You can feed yourself for about $1 a day per person with careful budgeting, or $30/month. How?
  • Kluny 7y ago
    $30 worth of lentils. Mmm, tasty.
    • uptownfunk 7y ago
      Frankly lentils/beans/rice (cooked nicely with oil and seasoning of course) is way better than a lot of the garbage people eat for much more money.
      • ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
        Seasoning is something people seem to miss a lot. Just garlic powder, paprika, chili powder, and of course salt and pepper can bring a dish up to something you could see eating at a restaurant.
        • uptownfunk 7y ago
          Right? It's not even that hard. In Indian cooking the 'tadka' method is used for lentils and beans (also called chonk, chaunce, vaghar, etc.). It is basically heated oil with some spices thrown in and gently fried (not burnt), this tempering is then mixed in with the rest of food. Here is a good example: https://youtu.be/xEeoZYpa5wY?t=95 https://youtu.be/xEeoZYpa5wY?t=95 (it's in Hindi, but you don't really need to understand necessarily, looks authentic).
    • hombre_fatal 7y ago
      If you can't prepare lentils in a way that you'd describe as tasty, then you owe it to yourself to look up any of the thousands of youtube videos or recipes that prepare it a thousand different ways.
    • belltaco 7y ago
      You can make some extremely delicious meals with lentils, especially yellow and red split lentils, given the right spices, which are also pretty cheap.
  • joefourier 7y ago
    Going by UK prices as that was the subject of the article and what I'm familiar with, you can get 1 kg of long grain rice for £0.45 (~$0.60), which contains 3,650 calories. 1kg of lentils is £1.40 ($1.83) and contains 3,530 calories and a healthy amount of proteins, minerals and vitamins. A female needs 2000 calories per day, so for £0.67p ($0.88) you can get 1000 calories from rice and 1000 calories from lentils and meet your minimum requirements, and have some money left over to buy salt, spices and veg. Other staples such as oats, beans, pasta are at similar prices (1kg of oats can be found as low as £0.75 and contains 3650 calories) and can provide additional nutritional diversity, but there is no question that you can meet your minimum calorie requirements with $1/day, at least in the UK. This may not be the most appealing diet to some (although spices go a long way into making cheap palatable dishes), but if the alternative is going so hungry you are unable to move without grabbing on to furniture, you cannot afford to complain about the taste of a bland bowl of a rice.
    • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      So, how do you fight off scurvy? What does 12 cents worth of veg look like? That's, what, an 1/8th of an orange a day?
      • joefourier 7y ago
        You buy off whatever veg is on-sale (e.g. the Aldi Super 6) - citrus can be less than a pound per kg, so 12 cents can actually get you a whole medium-sized orange (you buy a pack for 50p and eat it over the next few days). Cabbage, broccoli and misc frozen veg are generally more cost-effective, however.
        • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
          Based upon that diet you'd get 0% of your Vitamin D, 5 % of your vitamin A, and 15% of your calcium. You'd get 4 grams of fat, no sodium, and barely any potassium. You'd be getting 180% of your recommended carbs for the day. I doubt that would be sustainable over the long term.
  • ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
    You can do $2 a day pretty easily in my opinion. Basically you want rice (or pasta) and beans to be the bulk of your calories, and anything else just adds flavor. Helps that in America you generally have access to $2/lb boneless chicken breast (and I've gotten drum sticks for 69c a pound before, but those are more of a pain) at one of your grocery stores, and rice and beans are almost free (25c-50c a day), even in smaller bulk sizes such as 5lb bags. Potatoes, carrots, bananas, and apples are examples of fruits and vegetables that are generally incredibly cheap. Once you get up to $5 a day per person it really feels like you can eat any thing, once you start following a budget. I've met people with budgets around $400 a month for one person, though that usually includes a lot of eating out. US currency, by the way.
• coralreef 7y ago
  Okay, I'll bite. Please describe how a person can eat for $30/month
  • mftrhu 7y ago
    Not quite $30/month, but someone decided to limit himself to $2.5 per day for 46 days and the results look delicious https://futureboy.us/blog/twofifty.html https://futureboy.us/blog/twofifty.html
    • sgift 7y ago
      I skimmed that post and it uses the classic technique of "if I have to buy something for 10$ but only eat part of it I count the amount it costs me for that day" - that only works if you have the money to buy in bulk, which is not the case for the majority of people who get dished out the "you can eat for almost nothing!" advice.
  • astura 7y ago
    If you limited your diet to rice, beans, oats, and lentils bought in bulk you can probably get close.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • woodandsteel 7y ago
      And have a stove, pots, and a refrigerator to store what you cook.
      • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        And don't mind missing a ton of vital nutrients (Vitamin A, D, Calcium...)
  • mtnGoat 7y ago
    search google, this experiment has been done a few times. You can get the required caloric intake for an adult for under $30 per month. it's not the tastiest of food and it'll be mostly the same, but it can be done.
• Human_USB 7y ago
  Please share how you are able to eat for $30 a month per person.
  • topspin 7y ago
    I doubt that $30/month figure is plausible for someone without high quality preparation and storage facilities and great discipline. But it seems like a pointless discussion to me; there is no place in the US you can't avail yourself of a SNAP card and an average of $126/person/month (www.cbpp.org figures.) If a kid isn't being fed it isn't for lack of funds, it's some other dysfunction. I have no doubt such dysfunction is indeed prevalent, but correcting it would involve a direct intervention of the day to day behavior of individuals. And while it may be easy to hypothesize about such a world from the comfort of your $5000/month Seattle apartment, in the real world people -- including both the parents and the kids you have in mind -- don't want it, will resist it and so the whole thing becomes another shit show at the end of which you'll still have kids going hungry.
    • fencepost 7y ago
      Hasn't there been a huge push since the 90s to make accessing SNAP and other "welfare" services harder to access (long complex enrollment processes) and harder to keep access to? Other than that sure you can eat fairly well on $4/day - if you have decent access to stores, storage to stockpile bulk purchases when on sale and appropriate pots/pans/knives, a stove, perhaps an oven, refrigeration, etc. There are a lot of people who lack several of those prerequisites.
      • rhinoceraptor 7y ago
        Not to mention having the cashflow to afford bulk food purchases in the first place to save money in the longer term.
      • topspin 7y ago
        > Hasn't there been a huge push since the 90s to make accessing SNAP and other "welfare" services harder to access There has been a huge push of a narrative to that effect. Actual USDA enrollment rate data doesn't reflect much success in these supposed policies however; current enrollment (over 40 million) is far above any point in the 90s (less than 30 million.)
• frgtpsswrdlame 7y ago
  Keep in mind that the working poor are not just poor in money they are poor in time. The often acknowledged downside to extremely cheap food budgets is that they offer little variety and don't taste that good - especially not to most kids. The often unacknowledged downside to extremely cheap food budgets is that they can be time intensive, meaning mom or dad needs to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner.
• slothtrop 7y ago
  I imagine in 1st world countries, the total amount of calories is less the issue, it's malnutrition. School lunches are garbage. Sometimes the food at home is garbage is the parent is ignorant enough.
• d4mi3n 7y ago
  I’d like to point out that while this is possible, it requires: 1. Cooking skills 2. Awareness of these cheap ingredients 3.Time I took basic nutrition and cooking classes as a kid. Many people in lower income areas do not have that opportunity.
  • ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
    >1. Cooking skills Cooking skills are hardly a skill. 10 minutes watching a youtube video once should give you all the knowledge you need to cook almost anything. Baking can be more of a challenge, but anything involving a frying pan or a pot? I'd be legitimately worried if you can't figure that out within an hour. I'll give you 2, and to a lesser extent 3, as knowing where to buy produce cheaply, and what meals can be cooked in under 15 minutes, does take a little more effort. But using "I don't know how to cook" as an excuse is more of a sign of raw ignorance to me. Putting a cup of rice in a rice cooker and a chicken breast on a stove is not difficult.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • lgessler 7y ago
      Whatever the cause might be, the fact remains that for some reason many impoverished people don't prepare the meals economists imagine they would. Calling this "raw ignorance" is a non-explanation. To say nothing of education and knowledge, impoverished people are also often dealing with an incredible number of problems spanning mental health and social issues, and it's not hard to imagine how these problems might individually or collectively keep a person from doing something so apparently simple.
      • ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
        >Calling this "raw ignorance" is a non-explanation. I called blaming cooking skills an act of raw ignorance. And I'll stand by that, even if people here feel the need to downvote me for it. There are thousands of meals that can be made with bare minimum skill, if you can cut a vegetable or put something in a pan. Knowing what meals to make is admittedly harder, which is why I said so in my comment. But saying "I don't know how to cook" is not a valid excuse.
• pseudonom- 7y ago
  Chronic hunger in (at least) the US appears to be essentially non-existent for children: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/11/26/hunger-here-vs-hunger-there/ https://blog.givewell.org/2009/11/26/hunger-here-vs-hunger-t...
• Kenji 7y ago
  Lmao, try that in Switzerland. A very cheap broccoli head almost costs $1 and has basically no calories. You would literally starve. Anything that contains meat or sugar is almost an order of magnitude more expensive for one meal.
• sethammons 7y ago
  Rewind about, jeeze, nearly 20 years for me. A dollar a day is pretty much what I narrowly avoided starvation on. I got by on about $20/mo (in addition to free food). I would heat a solitary potato in a toaster oven for breakfast. Just the potato. After bumming a ride to high school, I would wait until lunch. I had Free Lunch (I was poor). That was usually a hamburger, a milk, and something resembling some kind of vegetable approximation. I would steal one additional hamburger and sell it for $0.50 or $0.75 (don't recall which) which was a deal to the other person. On the way home, I would stop by the store and turn that profit into a single can of Campbell's soup. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes, I could not get a hamburger to steal, so no dinner. Nothing on the weekend unless I could bum food at friend's houses (worked out more often than it probably should have). When I got to university, I could reliably get closer to $2/day and that meant that I could get a Jumbo Jack and two tacos for lunch. If I chose to not eat for a few days, I could get a Little Caesar's pizza. There were periods of more food or less. Things got better over time. By my second year at university, my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I (and our small kid) were eating regularly. I think our budget was $30/week. I put on like 60lbs in two or three months. I had folks I barely knew tell me I was looking better. But man, I can recall just wanting enough liquidity to be able to afford a dang pizza. That lasted until well after getting my degree.
  • phaedrus 7y ago
    The vending machine at my college dorm malfunctioned so it would give your selection and give your change back. It went on for a couple days until, over the weekend, an acquaintance / former roommate used the trick to empty the machine. Most people were mad at him for "ruining it for everyone". I understood, though, why he did it: he had no money and no food.
  • oarabbus_ 7y ago
    If you don't mind me asking or answering, what put you in such dire circumstances growing up? Low income family, or were there other factors? Totally understand if you prefer not to discuss.
    • sethammons 7y ago
• maccard 7y ago
  This is the same as saying "I can't understand how people are overweight. Everything has a calorie label and 10 minutes on youtube will tell you how to figure out how much you need". You're ignoring the externalities - not knowing how to cook (sure it's easy, if you were shown. Otherwise, where do you start? ), not having (or properly prioritisng) time - shopping, meal planning, cooking, cleaning up all take time that these people currently can't see a way to get.
  • c0vfefe 7y ago
    To say nothing of a lack of cognitive energy to significantly alter the flow of cash/calories.
• kstenerud 7y ago
  This kind of comment can only come from someone well off. Poverty is not simply a problem of money, but of time and opportunity as well. When you're poor, you can't take advantage of opportunities to save money, because your needs are immediate, your coffers low, and your ability to store limited. You work long hours, hungry all the time, and then go home exhausted, unable to even think about spending time planning and preparing meals or dealing with the growing mountain of paperwork, or worrying about what broke that needs fixing. I've been in this situation, and it's not fun. At one point, I spent a month living on bean sprouts and instant ramen, because that was the only thing within walking range that was chaep. You get calories, yes, so you don't die. But your brain suffers, your judgment suffers, and you're tired all the time. I'm shocked I didn't get scurvy, tbh. When you're in the poverty spiral, it's almost impossibly difficult to pull yourself out.
  • d1zzy 7y ago
    While I haven't had to live with hunger all my life, I've been through some months of real hunger, with no money to buy food. Your description above comes very close to my (foggy) memories of the experience. It changed me. Things that I remember: - like you said, I was constantly tired because of the constant feeling of hunger. I was mostly one minded, thinking about how to get any food. - I was also grumpy (low blood sugar), didn't talk almost at all (although I was sharing my room with other people so there was plenty of opportunity to speak). Also made me feel like the lowest person around, useless, because I would just wait around until my room mates would prepare something to eat hoping that they'd invite me to share, that was really bad for self esteem. I was starting to think (could be real, but in my state of mind at the time I can't be sure) that my room mates were going hungry/delaying eating to avoid me being there so I started going out just to let them eat and not feel bad of not being able to share - it didn't help that I got fired from my first job after 2 weeks of work (and they didn't pay me anything) I got out of it by blind luck, a friend found someone that was looking to hire someone with my skills and told me about it.
• shambolicfroli 7y ago
  What about cheap functional vitamins? It used to be that the pills were small and you could buy a year's supply in one spicejar-sized bottle. Is there anything like this still available?
• 14 7y ago
  You are struggling because you have lived an easy life and don’t actually know what the true cost of eating every day is. I would offer up my next pay check to the local food bank to see you take 30$ and live a month off of it.