Eat for $1.50 per Day – Layoffs, Coronavirus Quarantine, Food Shortages

I ended up cooking for next to nothing by accident one time. I didn't notice it until I discover all my money was still in the bank end of the month.

To make things more ironic my goal was to create superior food which absolutely worked.

The main invention was this: For most meals we take a bunch of ingredients and mix them into a deliciously flavored mix and give it fancy names. The grand mistake we made is that the entire meal tastes the same. The second mistake is that every ingredient we use really is an experience to eat in it self. Every 2 ingredients offer 3 different experiences. A, B and A+B

With 3 ingredients you get A, B, C, AB, AC, BC! Thats 6!

With 4 ingredients you get A,B,C,D,AB,AC,AD,BC,BD,CD! Thats 10!

So I needed some kind of structured platform to carefully plan out this adventure. Pizza was my medium of choice but an oven dish should work too. (I make small 25 cm pizzas)

So I got the Gouda, the mozzarella, the camembert and the goat cheese. (there are many more of course) (4)

I got some varieties of mushrooms. (2)

I got some meat, chicken, bacon, salami, ham. (4)

I got some different kinds of fish. (3)

Some fruit is fine too. (2)

But the largest diversity of tastes are in the vegetables(!)(20?)

The "problem" the above presents is that you cant put a lot of anything on there. My pizza is only 25 cm or 490 cm2. Lets say there are 60 bites on it. The goal was to zone it into an adventure of identifiable tastes. More than 4 flavors per bite would ruin the experience.

With 35 different ingredients..., at least 1 slice of olive (or it isn't a pizza) oregano, thyme, basil, onion, garlic, slices of red pepper, black pepper, cayenne pepper.... you just have to many combinations to put everything on it.

Each pizza will have to be a sub set.

I know it instinctively feels weird and disgusting to put a slices of carrot on the pizza but in practice it really takes the journey of flavors some place else. You wouldn't want 3 bites of it but the single bite really creates an additional moment of "oh?" (hilarious note: guests feel the need to tell me the pizza is delicious roughly every 3rd bite)

I just buy different boxes of frozen vegetables but you could cook or bake and/or freeze your own.

We (there is a "we" now) (bake if needed then) sparsely spread the sub-selection of meat and/or fish over their own region. Take a hand full of vegetables mix and place each chunk strategically. Put a lot of thought into the adventure and improve it every time. Take the minimum amount of each cheese you've picked and spread it into similar regions as the meat so that they overlap.

Really put a lot of thought into it. It helps if you look at an ingredient and ask yourself what kind of meals are prepared with it. Then you take the [for example] chunk of cauliflower, put 2 cubes of potato next to it and some Gouda on top.

The end result should be a slab of flour with vegetables on it, good spices and as little meat, fish and cheese as possible. Not because meat, fish or cheese are not wonderful but because they get in the way of the vegetable flavors.

Being cheep as fuck is just a side effect.

The only down side is that you have to keep making pizza 2 or 3 times per day week after week after week. It never gets boring tho.

Final note: Keep as much stuff frozen as you can or your adventure ends up chasing expiration dates.

If you have a way of measuring your body fat to a reasonable degree of accuracy, you can ration your food by knowing how much stored body fat your body can convert into energy per day. Your body can convert roughly 0.9% of your body fat into energy in a day. So if you're 180lbs with 33% body fat, you have 60 lbs of fat on you. You should be able to convert ~0.54lbs into energy, which at ~3500 kcal per lbs comes out to 1890 kcal being the maximum calorie deficit you can overcome with just stored body fat. Subtract that from your daily calorie expenditure (another messy estimate) to get how many calories you need to consume to avoid muscle breakdown and energy crashes.

Keep in mind that every person's body and metabolic system is unique so you'll want to put in a generous error buffer. I'd cut the calorie deficit by half, at least to start with. Also notice that each day your total stored body fat will be less, so the number of calories your body can extract from that stored fat will also be less.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15615615/

I saw one ad for hand sanitizer where 1 bottle was regular price, 2 bottles was 100x price. I support that kind of "price gouging."

There are people who live in situations where they have no stove or no room in or access to a fridge. Historically many people got food from the market each day.

Are you certain it only subtracts from fat? From my understanding, you will also lose muscle too (especially without exercise)