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The holy grail of cheap food is Italian. You can buy a large bag of noodles for pennies sometimes, and making sauce is cheap, but even pre made canned sauce is
by proverbialbunny 7y ago
The holy grail of cheap food is Italian. You can buy a large bag of noodles for pennies sometimes, and making sauce is cheap, but even pre made canned sauce is cheap enough to fit the $2 a day challenge. (If not $1 a day depending on where you shop.)
If you're desperate or just old fashioned, peanut butter goes a long way. Cheap day old sandwich bread or bagels found at a bakery, and cheese, like cheddar cheese slices, make $1 a day feasible. Bananas can sometimes be pretty cheap too.
Likewise, it's super cheap to bake food at home. This is how people ate during the great depression. They'd make pancakes, waffles, and other sorts of items. I don't know what the price of Bisquick is because I just make this kind of thing from scratch when I'm in the mood, but it's mostly the price of milk. Some items take an egg, but eggs tend to be optional when it comes to breakfast cooking, especially if you're making Swedish pancakes (so good!) or crepes or similar.
Then there is the standard:
- Rice
- Corn chips and beans
- Vegetables are cheap, and quite good steamed or as a stir fry.
- Potatoes. They can be had for cheap, are quite filling, and left over potatoes from dinner can be used for breakfast. eg, mashed potato biscuits.
- Chicken can be quite cheap, but you'd be using very little. You can make a soy chicken, veggy, rice dish on the cheap, for example.
- And as odd as it sounds, there are a lot of stack foods and dessert foods you can get in super markets that are filling compared to their cost. Eg, pretzels or Doritos. A larger bag is around $2 and can be broken up into multiple meals. Or, eg, at Trader Joe's they have a box of pralines for $2 that can fill one up for a day. These foods can add variety to the cheaper foods (like rice) by eating a bit a day.
And, possibly the most surprising bit, if you're living it up, at $3 a day: Trader Joe's has frozen pizzas for $2.95 that are not only quite good, one pizza fills me up for an entire day. They have tv dinners for $2 or $2.95 too, but most of the time I'll eat multiple meals a day, so this kind of premade food comes closer to $4 to $6 a day without necessarily trying to be cheap. Trader Joe's has good cheap food.
Ultimately, if you want to take on a challenge like this, be prepared to buy everything in bulk, and be prepared stop eating meat, or eating very little meat.
edit: Oatmeal and Cream of Wheat. A meal is ~20 cents and it will fill you up.
- Broken_Hippo 7y agoUltimately, if you want to take on a challenge like this, be prepared to buy everything in bulk, and be prepared stop eating meat, or eating very little. Agree on the meat, however: Most folks that are poor simply cannot buy in bulk. If you are lucky you get paid once a month, but getting paid once a month also limits how often you can eat fresh vegetables. Canned might be your only option. If you don't get paid once a month, it doesn't matter if it is cheaper to buy 12 rolls of toilet paper if you can only afford the 4-pack. Or you might be able to afford bulk at tax time, but as soon as an emergency comes up, you can no longer buy bulk. Not only this, but things like transportation and storage become an issue. You may or may not have cold storage, freezer space, or containers to store leftover/bulk food in. You may or may not have a vehicle of any sort to carry the stuff in. Even if you have transportation, you might not have the money to use it (or public transportation, if that is a thing where you live). I'll mention that the unfortunate bit of $2 per day doesn't actually include only groceries, but other necessities as well. I don't know what the amount is in the states, but wherever it is, it doesn't leave a lot of room for anything but the most basic food. No spices. No chips since you can buy beans (or lentils!) and rice that last for multiple days cheaper than you can buy the bag of chips.
- proverbialbunny 7y agoMost of the foods I mentioned above you can't buy in small quantity. Eg, you can't buy a single slice of bread. Bulk here meaning usually 1 weeks worth of food. Small enough the average person buys in that quantity, including people who are paycheck to paycheck. >'ll mention that the unfortunate bit of $2 per day doesn't actually include only groceries, but other necessities as well. I don't know what the amount is in the states, but wherever it is, it doesn't leave a lot of room for anything but the most basic food. No spices. No chips since you can buy beans (or lentils!) and rice that last for multiple days cheaper than you can buy the bag of chips. The $2 a day food challenge is just food, nothing else. It's a challenge, not a hypothetical for someone who is homeless. Food stamps give quite a bit more than $2 a day.
- Amygaz 7y agoPizza at Trader Joe’s are between 80 and 380 calories. And nutritional values are terrible. You might be able to survive on that for a few weeks, but you won’t thrive, you will get weak and sick easily.
- proverbialbunny 7y agoI didn't mean to imply only eating that every day and nothing else. Also, most pizzas they sell are around 1050 calories. eg, https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/trader-joes/pizza-margherita/1-3-pizza https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/trader-joes/piz...