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Big bag of rice, and big bag of dry beans. Or cheap canned beans, if you're not up to cooking beans properly (I wasn't). A working-poor friend also used to bu

• xattt 2y ago
  Now make this feasible for family with kids. Most children won’t eat beans and rice for a long time without lifelong trauma that yields strong reactions at mealtimes in adulthood.
  • CountHackulus 2y ago
    Sometimes there's no choice. If it's between beans and rice or nothing at all, then it's going to be beans and rice. Soup kitchens, school lunches, etc are a great help too.
  • aziaziazi 2y ago
    I respectfully doubt that: many east Africans grown with their traditional meal loves rice and beans if cooked well. I think there’s a lot about habits and parents mimicking. Sure they loves chicken, but beans too. There’s also that study where they feed a mother cat with food that contains brocolis perfume When then kitties got weaned they prefer brocolis than fish. (I can’t find it back on google sorry, perhaps it was another legume)
• j45 2y ago
  Nice list - learning to vaccum seal with a foodsaver and freeze things helps too. Dried Beans (like chili) can be cooked in the Instant Pot without problem. Not sure if anyone's tried a Chef IQ.
  • smegger001 2y ago
    I like to buy 50 lbs bags of beans, rice, flour, lintels, etc on the cheap from restaurant supply stores and keep store them in 5 gallon buckets and make large batches of chilli, curried splitpea soup, daal, blackbean soup etc it cheap healthy easy to reheat later and I can throw it in a crockpot before work and it be done when I get home, this with a side rough chopped root vegetables and squash tossed in herbs and sprinkled with olive oil and roasted on a baking sheet makes a great meal.
• Scoundreller 2y ago
  I’m kinda anti rice in Canada. We grow lots of wheat but not rice. I can stock up on 900g bags of pasta on sale for CAD$1.25 (~US$0.87). Used to be CAD$1.00 was the good deal, but c’est la vie. Quicker and imo easier to prepare pasta on the stovetop. Pasta has almost double the protein content of rice by dry weight (13% vs 7%), more fibre (3.2% vs 1.3% for white rice), more of a fat component (1.5% vs 0.7%) and is always fortified (at least here). (And yeah, Canada grows a ton of pulses, mostly for export, so they’re cheap here but not locally favoured as much for protein)
  • CharlieDigital 2y ago
    One downside: wheat has gluten and a lot of folks are gluten intolerant to degrees (from mild gassiness to full blown celiac).
    • wisty 2y ago
      Celiac is a very clear cut medical condition. Most gluten intolerance seems to be nothing but hypochondria, with along with your standard "restrictive diets work until people figure out how to eat highly processed garbage with the new restriction" effect.
      • BigGreenJorts 2y ago
        Seconding the fact the celiac is it's own condition, but gluten is something that seems to be a culprit of IBS symptoms in certain people. That doesn't mean that gluten is bad, just that it causes a poor reaction in some people. Avocados are another one of these things. Some doctors like to call these "digestive allergies" to give patients an idea of how they can vary in severity and that they're for all intents and purposes a misdiagnosis from the immune system.
        • CharlieDigital 2y ago
          > ...gluten is something that seems to be a culprit of IBS symptoms in certain people. That doesn't mean that gluten is bad, just that it causes a poor reaction in some people... This is also my take on it. I've watched it first hand with my wife -- who is 1/2 Italian -- giving up pasta and bread in the last few years. It has made a huge difference in her daily quality of life with respect to digestive issues (mainly bloating and gassiness). Gluten is a protein so it's not hard to imagine that either this protein is not easily digested by some folks or some byproduct of its digestion feeds some specific gut bacteria that produces inflammatory compounds. If Celiac is a full blown immune response to inflammation caused by gluten, then it seems reasonable that some folks would have a spectrum of reactions to barely registering it or somewhere in between (like my wife). It's possible that it's some other compound that's prevalent in wheat, but avoiding wheat-based products has been life changing for my wife. I would add that this has developed with age similarly to how she has become lactose intolerant as well around the time she turned 40 so if you're in your 20's or 30's and you think this is malarkey, well, give it time (and really enjoy your lactose and gluten!). Why folks downvoted the original comment, I don't understand; this is based on firsthand experience hacking her diet and observing how she felt. I'm not here on some anti-gluten crusade (my kids eat and enjoy plenty of gluten for the entire household!)
• Asooka 2y ago
  Exactly the list I had when eating as a poor student. I still eat plenty of oats with plain yogurt for breakfast - they are an excellent breakfast food. The great thing is you can also scale their cost to your wallet, i.e. 100g of plain rolled oats plus 400g of full-fat yogurt comes out to around 1USD (0.25c for the oats, 0.75c for the yogurt here) and delivers about 600kcal total with very good macro profile. As your budget increases you can get increasingly fancy with olive oil, nuts, spices, cheese, etc. It's a very versatile food. Just don't fall into the trap of eating it with sugar when you're poor - you want to pair the oats with a lot of savoury fats so it keeps you feeling full for longer.
  • dgfitz 2y ago
    When I was poor I skipped breakfast. $0 cost.
    • IncreasePosts 2y ago
      The cost is 600 calories or so that you'd need to make up elsewhere.
      • dgfitz 2y ago
        So like, 2 20oz cokes?
        • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
          Or a couple spoonfuls of sugar.
        • IncreasePosts 2y ago
          Sure, if that's the kind of macros you're looking for
          • dgfitz 2y ago
            My point was: your point was useless. How many poor people care about fucking macros? Edit: man this irritates me. You brought up macros, when talking about being too poor to eat. Open your eyes.
• wiether 2y ago
  > A working-poor friend also used to buy steel-cut oats That's funny reading oats as being described as a cheap breakfast here, while in the fitness/sports community, oats are "the GOAT" of breakfast, without a focus on cost.
  • itake 2y ago
    Oats can be very expensive, depending on where you are. When I was actively body building and on a business trip to Singapore, I couldn't find any reasonably priced oats at the the grocery store. When you're dieting, once you know the amount of what foods you need to eat, its much easier to stick to that plan vs trying to re-balance your macros and calories with a new food item.
    • helboi4 2y ago
      Obviously you have to consider where the hell you're living. In the UK I eat oats all the time and they're dirt cheap. I knew a guy when I was in japan who ate oats every day. I thought he was absolutely insane. You could barely buy oats there. I ate brown rice mixed with barely to get nutrient rich grains because it was actually readily available and affordable. Let's not be stupid out here and act suprised when our ideal diet in one country is too expensive in a totally different climate - there are many plants in the world, use something else. Oats are only so revered in the west because they're a good thing that is AVAILABLE.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Sounds like gymrat gentrification of staples, like how cheap / mass produced dairy (by) products are now "fortified" with proteine (and in Dutch they make sure to use the fancy sounding "protein" instead of the colloquial "eiwit") and given black-and-white branding in their own section, sold for 2x the price. And the sellers are laughing all the way to the bank. Even if you're serious about sports / weighlifting etc, you don't actually need the specialised protein foods and shakes. Just have an extra bowl of yoghurt or low-fat cottage cheese and you've got a big chunk of extra protein in your diet already without spending extra or messing with calorie intake. The problem is that people look at e.g. oats or anything branded for "their" group and go all-in on it.
• ben_w 2y ago
  > You should also count your calories, to make sure you're getting enough. Once you start being more penny-pinching with eating, you might find yourself getting hungry less, rather than more, and it's not hard to slip into caloric deficit that will make you sick. There are calculators on the Web for how much you should intake. This is surprisingly easy. Back at university, 20 years ago now, I was living on about £0.5/day, in the form of two big bowls of oats, 500ml semi-skimmed milk, a bit of sugar and dried raisins for breakfast; no lunch; and 108g pack of instant ramen for dinner. In retrospect, this was about 1100-1200 kcal/day. You can absolutely sustain that for a single university term at a time — it was so easy, so simple and devoid of negative sensation, that it didn't even occur to me to calculate the calories until someone here on Hacker News expressed disbelief because it was so little food.
  • neilv 2y ago
    I did about the same kcal/day, in grad school, when I was very trim. And then I wondered how I could hit the gym almost every day, yet not build much muscle bulk. I accidentally did that low kcal/day again, many years later, when I had happened to have excess non-muscle bulk to support. And then I wondered why I felt like total crud. The US medical guidelines I've heard, from doctor and elsewhere, are minimum 1200 for XX female, 1500 for XY male. That minimum is regardless of how fast you want to lose weight.
    • ffsm8 2y ago
      That minimum is just a rule of thumb for people that don't want / can't have medical supervision. There was a pretty well covered case something like 15 yrs ago of someone massively obese that completely stopped eating and only consumed supplements to keep the bodys micro nutritions In order (which was continuously monitored by doctors). Iirc, he kept it up for 2 years until he got his target weight. It's definitely a solid advice to keep to that rule of thumb though, albeit it'd say it's mostly a caloric delta you've gotta worry about: don't go beyond a sustained deficit of ~1k (consumed calories - used calories). It's fine too spike it occasionally in both directions, but going beyond will likely get you in trouble unless you're monitoring your health very closely
• crashingintoyou 2y ago
  > A working-poor friend also used to buy steel-cut oats, to eat breakfast for pennies. Weirdly where I live steel-cut oats are the pricey ones even thought they're processed less than, e.g., rolled oats. That said they do need to cook longer than rolled, so wondering if energy cost might make those a bit more expensive.
  • ZiiS 2y ago
    Steaming and rolling is much easer then cutting hard groats. I don't have insights into how this is done at scale, but it is easy to see the same remaining true. Usually, prepared cut oats have a lower glycaemic index that can also be very helpful if you are trying to maintain a constrained diet.
  • beauzero 2y ago
    He probably was buying them at a feed store. It used to be much much cheaper to buy steel cut oats and big bags of wheat berries as livestock feed. We ate them as kids in the 70s and 80s. We ground the wheat with a hand mill. Not sure if its cheaper now. Soy and corn are primary feed stock produced these days.
    • bluGill 2y ago
      Depending on the time when you did this, those feed store oats may have been handled in a way that wasn't as safe. Regulations change all the time (and differ by country), but often livestock feed is held the looser handling regulations.
• 1024core 2y ago
  > If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you. Here in San Francisco, we have a plethora of Farmers Markets. The thing about produce is: once harvested, the clock starts on it going bad. So the farmers have a ticking timebomb on their hands: if they can't sell the produce at the end of the day, (in most cases) it will go to waste. Some of the enterprising ones take a trip to Chinatown and offload their leftover produce for pennies. So when I was in a situation of hardship where I was living on a few dollars per day, I would go to the farmers market near closing time, and over time developed friendships with them, so they would sell me their remaining produce for dirt cheap. I would take it home, turn some of it into stock and freeze that. Over several months, I survived on about $100/month in groceries.
  • no_wizard 2y ago
    This approach doesn't scale though. Its great that it worked for you, truly, but it unfortunately doesn't scale as a reliable way to budget for groceries
    • adolph 2y ago
      do things that don't scale https://paulgraham.com/ds.html https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
      • organsnyder 2y ago
        That doesn't work for broad societal problems.
      • outside1234 2y ago
        Paul meant his comment in the sense that that is a good way to START -- but then you have to figure out how to SCALE it. I think what you'd find as you scaled it is that you'd turn into ConAgra.
    • niemandhier 2y ago
      The problem of modern society that we want one solution that scales. What we need is 1000s of solutions that don’t. Every case is a special case if you treat enough variables, nothing is close in high dimensional space.
• retrac 2y ago
  Don't just count your calories. Count your protein, too. The beans aren't optional on this kind of diet. It's relatively common for people trying to stretch a budget to start substituting more grains instead of beans/eggs/tuna/peanuts/etc. and become protein deficient. While there are long-term health issues with that, more acutely, you can end up in a low energy brain fog, that might make it hard to get enough protein to get out of said brain fog. I got stuck in that zone a few times when poor.
  • cogman10 2y ago
    Chickpeas, in particular, are both very cheap and very nutritious. If you are trying to save money, you can get 1 lb of dry chickpeas for ~$2.50 in the US which translates into ~4 cans of chickpeas (1/2 a cup == 1 can). Dried beans are a bit of a pain, but if you are looking to cut funds then you really can't do much better than dried beans. Also, unsaturated fat is an important part of the diet. You need fat in the diet to absorb many nutrients. Skimping out on it can really negatively impact you. Olive oil and Avocado oil are my go tos. But you really wouldn't go wrong with peanut oil or canola.
    • barbazoo 2y ago
      How are dried beans a pain? You cook them in water with some salt and baking soda and they'll be perfect every time.
      • washadjeffmad 2y ago
        A lot of people don't soak overnight or know how to use pressure cookers and assume cans are the secret to tender, delicious legumes.
        • barbazoo 2y ago
          Interesting, I never soak them myself, just put them in a pot, cover with water, add salt and baking soda and let it simmer for an hour or so until tender.
• sn9 2y ago
  > If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you. Frozen vegetables are OP here. Cheap, frozen at peak freshness, still nutritious. A pound of leafy greens is dirt cheap and won't go bad for months. Frozen fruits are great too, especially for smoothies. Really easy way to get nutrient-dense carbs in.
  • darkwizard42 2y ago
    The secret has always been frozen chopped spinach. Absurdly cheap, doesn't go bad, blends/melts away into EVERYTHING! (Pasta, soups, beans for tacos, whatever). I will note, the hard limit is you can't actually use it in a salad... but hey, tradeoffs
    • bagels 2y ago
      Frozen spinach is the least appetizing frozen food in existence. Soggy mush. Much better frozen choices for vegetables.
      • CobaltFire 2y ago
        You missed the point that you put it in other things where it has minimal impact on the texture and taste.
      • darkwizard42 2y ago
        Yeah, I don't think you are going to taste much of that in a stew (which is by definition a soggy mush). As noted you don't want to use this for anything fresh where mostly fresh vegetables will be superior.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• ToDougie 2y ago
  trying this with dietary restrictions and an aversion to glyphosate has been very difficult.
• cogman10 2y ago
  > If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you. Fun fact, frozen vegetables and fruits are both nearly immortal and (often) a higher quality than fresh. They are generally pretty cheap as well. Grab a 5lb back of frozen veg and throw it in the freezer. You can whittle them away for months with no spoilage or loss in quality. > Don't get scurvy, or other nutritional deficiency. If you can't make sure all your nutrients are covered, I've guessed (I'm not a nutritionist) that a mainstream multivitamin pill can't hurt. If you do a primarily vegetarian diet, it's both cheap and pretty hard to get most nutritional deficiencies. Throw in some foods that give you B12 (nutritional yeast/fortified soy milk if you want to stay vegitarian/vegan. Chicken or turkey otherwise). Veg is packed with vitamins and minerals. You might need to watch for protein, but soy products, beans, and or lean meats are relatively cheap and can cover that. > Once you start being more penny-pinching with eating, you might find yourself getting hungry less, rather than more, and it's not hard to slip into caloric deficit that will make you sick. Two things that really help with this. 1. You do actually need fats in your diet, so use fats. Ideally things like olive oil or avocado oil. Most nutrition stuff I've seen recommends a 33/33/33 calorie split. 33% from carbs, 33% from fats, 33% from proteins. 2. There are cheap and healthy high calorie foods. Potatoes are (in most regions) some of the cheapest high calorie foods. Pasta would be the number 2 to go for, rice probably last (though it is cheap, it's just not super healthy. Grab some fortified rice and don't wash it)
  • aziaziazi 2y ago
    Are you comparing white rice with white wheat pasta? In my experience whole rices (white, red, brown…) are as much nutritious as whole pasta but way tastier and often cheaper. Maybe it depends on the region. A plate of whole rice + some oil will last you hunger free for the entire afternoon.
    • cogman10 2y ago
      You are right. I was under the impression that brown rice had less vitamins than enriched white but that appears to not be the case. Brown rice/whole rice would definitely be the best choice. I believe potatoes still end up winning in terms of healthiness/vitamins/cost but that will depend a bit on region. Where I'm at, you can get 5lbs of russets for $3.