Some notes- At base, the recipes eat for ~21$/week/person. After I lost my job, I definitely got below 20$/week, less protein, more rice.
I have seen HN dispute 19k/yr living, so I also wanted to share with HN, the 3 things that allowed 2 people to live on $19,000/year. We lived like this for 3 years as my wife got her Doctorate.
>Health Insurance- Don't pick the wrong one. Too often I hear people choosing 'a good plan', but the reality is, the Payments(preimums) + Max Out Of Pocket exceed the cost of a Bronze plan.
>Used cars are better than new. Nothing quite like not caring if your car gets a ding. Nothing quite like not having a car payment.
>Stop eating out, the 6$ meal is 6x the cost of the meals in the cookbook. Doing a Calorie Per Dollar comparison is a wakeup call for value.
Thought this is useful for everyone. I'm planning to study another round of Calorie, Protein, and Nutrient Per Dollar data. Any requests?
I have lived on $20k/year when I was in grad school. I was also into body building, so my staple diet was rice, chicken, eggs, and veggies. If I was pressed for time, I would go for whole roasted chickens which I found quite tasty and full of protein. Other good sources of cheap protein I loved were greek yogurt and cottage cheese.
Organ meat is relatively cheap because people don't like it. But loaded with nutrients. Another good one is sardines. You are getting the whole fish and bones and people don't like sardines either.
Some keto diets are heavy on using coconut oil for fat, which is cheapish for the number of calories you are getting.
Nutrition per dollar numbers are a bit dubious.
https://efficiencyiseverything.com/food-nutrition-per-dollar...
Flour tends to beat everything since it is so cheap.
For example, flour has 83.3 mg of iron per dollar. However, if you tried to hit your DRI for iron using flour, you would greatly exceed your daily caloric intake.
One could argue just using a vitamin pill for micronutrients, and optimizing protein/dollar for macros.
The nutrient-price analysis sounds cool, let me know if you're looking for help or someone to bounce ideas off.
Here's my request - assuming data for a corpus of recipes with ingredients and ratings, plus food nutrient data and prices, I'd like to pull top n most nutrient-dense/price recipes and order by rating per regional cuisine.
I went further for myself and looked at protein per dollar and several others as well. This was 12 years ago and I no longer have the spreadsheet, but lentils and other beans were absolutely stellar, shrimp and turkey are great for protein and tryptophan.
Tailor your diet to your needs, are you exercising mentally or physically or both?
There are a number of reputable olive oils you can buy that aren't fake. I buy from the costco lineup personally. We prefer Ottavio, the one from Spain, but I believe the Kirkland Brand was also tested.
Also, can you elaborate more on why you don't use plant fats for cooking? We do the opposite here, so I'm curious.
Yup, Costco is a great source. I emailed them and asked about the fake oils. They said they do random testing of every shipment.
First, I avoid most of the m vegetable oils in general. Not just for cooking. The only exceptions is olive and coconut. Most oils are high in omega 6 fatty acids. This skews the ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 that our body desires. But cooking or heating the oils makes them even worse. It destroys good properties, oils become rancid / oxidizes during heating.
I just don’t see the reason to even use veg oils. Food tastes so much better cooked in butter or ghee, or bacon fat, or beef tallow.
I wonder why you don't have olive trees over there. Maybe a work in progress... it takes decades to grow them. Modern machines make harvest very cheap.
In Spain we have best quality for under 5€ l, so I guess globalization has not arrived to oil.
I would love sorted summary lists of their relevant statistics: active time, total time, cost/calorie, etc. Finding fast (=easy) meals is critical for me.
Fast+Easy always: stirfries. Soups. Salads. Blended fruits (and some vegetables like cucumber).
And since you're only using what you buy on sale, they taste different every time!
Learn what doesn't need peeling. Potatoes - don't peel. Cucumber - don't peel. I don't even peel carrots. Just rinse and scrub.
Being lazy, I buy frozen vegetables to bulk it up. Don't buy anything if it's not in a clear bag, otherwise you're buying expensive chopped carrots.
For things that are canned and "require" rinsing, rinse in the can.
Anything that involves an oven takes too long. Find out where you can use the microwave instead.
When I make a stirfry, I put the potatoes in the microwave first to mostly cook them, then finish them in the stir fry. Same for carrots if I'm feeling a softer texture.
If you're parking for work, invest in a good set of glass Tupperware-style containers that seal well. Don't buy a big set: you won't use 75% of them. I just buy plastic cutlery and keep them in my desk at work and dispose 50/50 (sometimes they'll fit in my container to take home, other times they won't and I don't want to deal with it).
We just got a set of the single-compartment version and they are absolutely fantastic. The flat top allows a small post-it note for the date the food was made and lets them be stacked in the fridge.
I dunno for sure as it was the work of my wife and daughter, but it was a fairly big box of `em. We rarely go out to eat so lots of food goes into them, from olives to butter to thawing blueberries to hummus to leftovers. It looks like they got the 24-piece Glasslock set for $25.
It would be interesting to see. My experience with meal prepping on Sundays has seen an hour of cooking eliminate “food seeking” behaviour and given me back a lot of time.
I didn’t realise how much of my day revolved around food until I planned out every meal in advance and eliminated the need to!
The whole used car thing is just flat out wrong. If you are a mechanic and you know how to asses the health of a car perfectly and you are able to actually find a car that she not unreliable then maybe buying a used car would make sense. But even then you are giving up backup cameras, good mileage/hybrid tech and most importantly you are giving up the HUGE amount of progress that has been made in safety that is designed into the structure of the car. And on top of that you have to drive around an old beater that you aren’t proud to be seen in. Just buy a new Toyota Corolla. It’s guarnteed to be as reliable as possible, has a backup camera and modern safety features. And it looks good. But if you pay in cash it’s only 17k so you won’t be worried about dings anyway. In my opinion thats worth ~8k.
But for the average person buying a used car will result in huge reliability problems, being stranded on the side of the road multiple times and you’ll end up paying thousands for repairs anyway. Yes, we all know that one guy who bought a used Toyota and never had problems. There’s a reason why it’s an anecdote about “that one guy I know.”
That's an order of magnitude more than people on the edge could dream of having all at once or hoping someone would loan them. 2k+ is an effort to save up.
Used cars are an amazing deal. It's riskier sure, but that is the reality of being poor. No one is paying thousands of dollars to get an old subcompact repaired, it's going right to the scrappers. I think you are underestimating the reliability of ~8-12 year old sub compacts/sedans. Fluids, pads and belts keeps most early 2000's Asian cars going well into the 300s.
In Europe, the situation is different (cars and gasoline is a lot more expensive here, and salary in tech is a lot lower), and your argument doesn't make much sense. A new Toyota Corolla is 25k euro, which is more than 28k dollar. That is more than my gross year income and about 8 years of rent (and I work as an IT consultant, which is not a particularly bad job), and I still completely neglected recurring costs (taxes, gasoline).
If you buy a new car, you're paying for the fact that it is new, even if you can't see it. I did a quick search, and found a gorgeous Audi A8 that looks like it's new for 6k. You can buy a crappy old car for about 1k. So anything in between should get you something modest. Most people I know buy used cars, and I rarely have heard anyone having troubles with them (IDK, are American cars less reliable?). If you buy a relatively new used car, you get all of the advantages you list, and none of the disadvantages.
Is your rent for 8 years really less than $28k? That's about $291 per month. I never thought Netherlands could be this insanely cheap. What region in the Netherlands do you live in?
My rent was about 8.5 times of that last year (for the whole year of 2018, I paid $28,800). I lived in Manhattan (in NYC). The salaries for programmers is higher though. The average base salary (in NYC) is around $144k[1]. With bonuses and stock though, it can easily reach $200k per year. And it gets even higher in the SF Bay Area.
The funny thing is employers are so desperate for programmers that they're willing to hire anyone who can code. You definitely don't need a degree, and you could even be a college dropout. Coding bootcamps have been sprouting like crazy all over the U.S. for the past few years. (And recruiters like Triplebyte helps people without degrees or CS backgrounds get high-paying jobs.[2])
So, if a new Toyota Corolla is reliable, surely a lightly used one ought to be too? I mean, provided the owner changed the oil regularly and what not. For the record, I have bought and driven a number of used cars and never had a significant reliability issue. Cars don't magically become unreliable when bought second-hand.
I don't know anyone who buys second-hand who has had significant issues. So if anything your claim about anecdotes would be inverted for me.
a used car is not the same as a beater. Getting a used car that is just a few years old will shave off a good chunk of the depreciation curve in many cases without sacrificing features/reliability.
This is correct - don't buy cars new, esp. if you're not using it as a status symbol. a low milage (but new-ish) used car is much better value for money.
I think it's more likely that we all know the one guy who bought a used Toyota or Honda and did have a significant problem. No one can assess the health of a car perfectly. You make a purchase with some broad averages in mind.
That's also what sets the used car market, of course. Is that specific Audi or Range Rover going to cost more in maintenance than that Honda or Toyota over the next 5 years and 50K miles? I can't say. Are those 20 Audis/Range Rovers going to cost more than those 20 Honda/Toyotas? I'd bet a large fraction of my net worth on it!
I'm not sure where the idea that most working-class people have $17K lying around to drop on a new car, so they can avoid carrying insurance/worrying about dings comes from, but it doesn't match my anecdotal experience with solid, working-class people.
Our family could relatively easily afford any non-exotic car, paying cash for new. The last 3 cars we bought were a 1998 Mercedes diesel with 188K mile on it, a 2005 CR-V with 167K miles on it, and a 2014 LEAF (new, with $10K in tax credits on it). Over that ~10 year period, I bet I haven't spent $4K on maintenance across that fleet and still have the Honda and LEAF. Only significant repair was Honda clutch ($1500), tires ($600), then a bunch of wear items (serpentine belt tensioner, brakes, a battery, an exhaust repair $400, wipers), and oil changes. The items with dollars above are farmed out; the routine wear items and oil changes I do in the driveway.
Your view is non-sense. Most used Toyotas, Hondas, lexus, and acuras are extremely reliable. Buy one that is 4 years old with around 40k mileage and you'll save 50% on the price.
You bring up some valid points, yet I remain a used car advocate. A used car does not mean an old car. The last car I purchased was two years old and in quite nice condition. It has a rear view camera, heated seats and steering wheel, and advanced stability controls. I enjoy it, and enjoy that I spent about half as much as if I brought new.
A two years used car may be a great compromise here: it still has another year of warranty left, so you're getting pretty much the same car for 30% off.
A couple of thoughts: The recipes are nice, but contain a lot of meat. This is very expensive. Where I live (the Netherlands), it would be closer to $10 per day (only counting dinners). Just the meat will be something like $4 for a single portion. Besides, I would first save money on bigger things like modest housing and not having a car before trying to save on food.
I usually make combinations with:
1. Vegetables (for vitamins): beans, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, tomatoes, bell peppers
2. Meat-like (for proteins): Ground beef, chicken, meat replacements
2. Filler (for carbs): Potatoes, pasta, rice
3. Optional extra's: Sauce, cream, cheese (cheese is expensive though!)
I’ve been cooking entirely plant based for three years now and cook almost all my own meals. At first I was following recipes but now I just keep a well stocked cupboard and improvise. The results are a little variable but I enjoy cooking this way more. But the basis of my diet is legumes and whole grains with as many fresh fruits and vegetables as I can handle. It’s very cheap to eat this way.
Open a bag of Fritos. Dump in a cup of melted Velveeta, some pickled jalapeños, half a can of black beans. Mix it up and eat it out of the bag. Then, loathe yourself and wonder how it came to this.
Most of the loathing probably comes from the month's RDA of sodium described in your proposal.
Substitute some sort of more traditional cheese and some roasted unsalted peanuts in the above recipe and you'll probably enjoy it about as much and feel better afterwards.
I find the highest cost item required for living is real-estate (both rent or mortgage).
Cutting food costs barely matters when 40% of your weekly cost is actually paying for a roof over your head. But living in a nice place, in a good neighbourhood, etc, can't really be substituted.
Estate agents in the UK will tell you the best value is to buy a cheap house in the best neighborhood. That may make financial sense in that you can gain some economic benefit by bringing the standard of your house up. The downside is every day you will feel like the poorest person in the area. Doing the opposite might give you a better sense of well-being.
> The downside is every day you will feel like the poorest person in the area.
You can offset some of that though by being able to brag about in which neighborhood you live.
This line of thinking reminds me of a tip on gift giving: if you have fixed amount of money to spend, go for the category of items in which you can afford the best item (vs. spending the exact same amount on a cheap item from a more expensive category). E.g. an expensive scarf instead of cheap coffee machine. The reasoning is that the recipient will look at your gift relative to the category it belongs to, and not evaluate what else could be bought with the same amount of money.
Hamburger mush - 1 lb ground beef, beef bouillon (enough to make ~2 cups of broth), 2 tbsp flour, water
Cook and drain ground beef, add bouillon + flour + enough water to be liquidy, let it cook on low until paste like consistency. Serve over rice with vegetables (mushrooms, broccoli, cabbage, zucchini, bokchoy in any combination are good)
I hate to come off as a snarky purist, but there isn't need to go to weird italofusion combinations if you want variable, vegetable heavy diet based around rice, pasta, or legumes. In South Italy we cook vegetable and olive oil based sauces in the time it takes to boil water and cook the pasta. Then you mix these together while finishing the cooking of the drained pasta. Every single vegetable is fair game. You just need a good source of fat, which is served by olive oil. The pasta or lentil base gives you protein enough that you only seek meat or heavier protein sources every fourth meal or so.
It would be nice to see a version of this using the metric system, otherwise international users will have to keep converting ingredients servings between systems all the time. That's boring and time consuming.
I like to optimise for 3 things: speed, cost, and health. In this case I have found recipe books to be generally pointless since they're not able to meet those specific requirements.
Speed: If I have to spend more than about 15-30 seconds in preparation, then it's out. Somewhat longer cooking time is ok if it's mostly unattended. I buy ingredients pre-cut/tinned and this tends to be location dependent.
Cost: This is entirely location dependent. I start meal design with what is cheap/good/suitable at my local supermarket. It has to be a regular item because I'm not going to waste time looking for deals each week. My average meal cost is less than 2 euros and that's with ingredients that are not the cheapest.
Health: This is dependent on what you want to believe, but I've gotten exceptional results from merely avoiding sugar and processed carbs of any sort. It's not extreme in any way but it ends up limiting your choices broadly because vendors sneak sugar and processed carbs into everything.
Lentils pack a huge nutritional bang for the buck and are very easy to cook. One of my favorite one pot meals is to toss some lentils and brown rice in a pot and simmer for 40 minutes. Just add your own choice of seasonings and some leafy greens on the side and a handful of nuts and you have a very cheap and healthy meal.
If you're in the US and the rice is from a former cotton state (not California), you could be getting a high dose of arsenic by using brown rice as a staple. A sane government would set limits on arsenic at least on par with China's, but that would be costly to American agriculture, and it's easy to ignore chronic arsenic poisoning because it causes cancer or heart disease, not an identifiable syndrome that would generate bad publicity for politicians. My favorite alternatives are millet (cheap, has flavor if you toast it) and quinoa (price on par with rice if you can find it not packaged for yuppies).
I did a quick glance at the recipes and the majority I would not consider to be very healthy. If you don’t have a choice, you can survive on these but it would not be my first choice.
After reading couples of recepies,
I rather use this book who is more "factory"/"cheap"/"delicious" in other word, "more efficient" to me. "Five Ingredients, Ten Minutes" by Jules Clancy.
Not a bad document, but not very researched either. I skimmed and noticed that for example, it is quick to assert that olive oil will smoke, even though it's hard to reach a temperature where even extra virgin olive oil will start smoking.
Edit: Wait no actually it's even worse, it implies extra virgin olive oil will not smoke?
> Vegetable oil – as mentioned, can be replaced with other high heat oils like peanut oil. Butter will
burn, olive oil will smoke. Extra virgin olive oil costs pennies more, I always get it over olive oil.
A lot of these recipes make sense to me, even if I wouldn't necessarily add them to my own tool belt. When my mom taught me and my brothers to cook, she wrote down her recipes for us, and I still have them. Most of them are of this nature, refined over years of feeding three hungry boys on a middle class wage. Also, she's a scientist by training.
There were quite a few recipes that started with browning hamburger and onions.
And I suspect that during my generation, families that still cooked had a lot of these kinds of meals, usually prepared from memory.
So the cookbook is hardly a shock to my sensibilities.
My wife and I spent a year not working and we got our grocery budget to about 30 dollars per day for a family of 3 without sacrificing anything. In fact that's not quite the right characterization, we actually _improved our diet_ compared to what it was before. More veggies, more meat, less sugar, less processed. And it doesn't even take that much time. About an hour a day is more than enough. Before this exercise we'd easily spend $2k+ per month for the same family.
I notice that sometimes non-tech people think that cooking eqipment is relatively unimportant, but having the right equipment on hand makes cooking so much easier and more enjoyable. It's also an investment that dramatically improves the quality of your life if you cook every day.
I'd say that is a matter of choice and preference though. I'm totally minimalist because I hate washing things up and that is a big quality of life factor. I'm close to zero wash-up because I use a single wok so often it's not required.
Sure, but if you already have both then tools make a huge difference to your enjoyment of the process. I could make a website starting from pure C if I really wanted to, but there's a reason I usually reach for Rails instead.
I think mostly flavor. Canned soup is some nasty stuff.
Here's my entry into the efficiency menu:
Take a crockpot/slow cooker, throw in stew meat, frozen peas/corn/green beans, a lemon, an onion, garlic, sriracha, cut up a few potatoes and carrots, a can of chopped organic tomatoes. Cook for hours. Done. Probably 5 minutes of prep.
You could probably live exclusively on that. Low salt.
I have seen HN dispute 19k/yr living, so I also wanted to share with HN, the 3 things that allowed 2 people to live on $19,000/year. We lived like this for 3 years as my wife got her Doctorate.
>Health Insurance- Don't pick the wrong one. Too often I hear people choosing 'a good plan', but the reality is, the Payments(preimums) + Max Out Of Pocket exceed the cost of a Bronze plan.
>Used cars are better than new. Nothing quite like not caring if your car gets a ding. Nothing quite like not having a car payment.
>Stop eating out, the 6$ meal is 6x the cost of the meals in the cookbook. Doing a Calorie Per Dollar comparison is a wakeup call for value.
Thought this is useful for everyone. I'm planning to study another round of Calorie, Protein, and Nutrient Per Dollar data. Any requests?