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

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

#141

Post by _nhynes »

i_am_nomad wrote: post #73

Another suggestion: eat seitan, if you can. It’s basically wheat gluten, made into dough and baked like bread, but it has a meatloaf-like texture. Add in spices and nutritional yeast or grated Parmesan, and it’s delicious. On top of that, powdered wheat gluten has never been cheaper, probably because it’s now an unwanted by-product of so much gluten-free baked goods and pasta. You can find it online for about $4/poun…

To add to this, Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP) is often in stock despite other dry proteins being unavailable due to most people not recognizing it as food. It's incredibly filling (digests for hours), fairly inexpensive (~$3.50/lb), and quite high in micronutrients like potassium [0]. This is what I switched to after not having a kitchen in which to make pseudo soylent [1].

I'd recommend preparing TVP in the following manner:

1. boil some water and add to TVP (add chia seeds, if possible, for fiber and extra fat-soluble vitamins)

2. in a separate bowl, partially microwave diced cheap vegetables (alternating carrots and whatever was on sale was my go-to)

3. add steamed veg to TVP, add spices/condiments, and microwave for a bit longer

4. stir in peanut butter

should take about five minutes total

For breakfast-y TVP, I replaced the vegetables with cocoa powder. Peanut butter can also be subbed with any free food that you might find (e.g., from lab meetings).

[0] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/339371/n...

[1] https://github.com/nhynes/pbean

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

#142

Post by samsonradu »

nimbius wrote: post #28

Its worth clarifying that the article is specifically addressing the fallout from the pandemic: Unemployment and poverty due to failing economies and shuttered restaurants and bars. In the US, Despite our country having vast and endless supplies of food from megafarms and their accompanying subsidies, there is very little safety net in America to ensure anyone is fed at all once they are unemployed. worth posting, a…

Can’t help seeing the irony of the US being bankrupt by an ilness - someone on Twitter

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

#143

Post by robocat »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #83

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 t…

You could do that, but it is dangerous to do so during an epidemic.

Having body fat helps you if you get very sick. Having low body fat means you are at a higher risk of death when your body has to fight off disease. Being very underweight increases your risk of catching diseases.

Of course, being excessively obese has other risks.

I am not a doctor (although anyone blindly following internet advice needs to be careful!)

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

#145

Post by smnrchrds »

BurningFrog wrote: post #102
smnrchrds wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence for this? I don't meant referring to economics textbooks. I mean concrete evidence that empty shelves right now due to this epidemic are the results of price gouging laws. For example, showing that states with price gouging laws have empty shelves and states without do not, when controlling for other factors.

> I don't meant referring to economics textbooks. If you don't allow referring to the vast empirical literature on price controls, you've already decided what you want to believe.

Flu can cause fever. Every fever is not caused by flu. Every flu does not cause fever.

I am like a patient asking the doctor is they have evidence this fever is caused by flu, not for example COVID-19. I wouldn't want to be referred to medical textbooks telling flu causes fever as your only evidence.

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

#146

Post by SuoDuanDao »

chantelles wrote: post #106

I left home at 15 and some adults who worked together let me move in with them and be their maid. I paid $150 a month in rent and got $10 a month to live on. I worked out how to live off Milo (a Jamaican malt supplement), Chips Ahoy cookies (1/2 a cookie a day for a treat) and dumpster dived vegetables (mostly cabbages and carrots). I lived like this for years, when I got my first real jobs I made sure to save at lea…

I'm curious about your writing, could you link to where I can find some of it?

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

#147

Post by treerock »

nimbius wrote: post #28

Its worth clarifying that the article is specifically addressing the fallout from the pandemic: Unemployment and poverty due to failing economies and shuttered restaurants and bars. In the US, Despite our country having vast and endless supplies of food from megafarms and their accompanying subsidies, there is very little safety net in America to ensure anyone is fed at all once they are unemployed. worth posting, a…

I'm curious if anyone has numbers on how much a homemade sourdough loaf costs on average. My experience is that flour is quite expensive (and currently not available in UK shops).

I've also noticed a spike in electricity costs since we've started baking regularly. (Difficult to calculate exactly)

My guess is that baking your own is a bit cheaper than going to some artisanal baker, but a lot more expensive than a standard load.

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

#148

Post by mikkelam »

Somewhat on topic; I experimented with making my own soylent-like derivative back in university. I think that was about $2.5 per day for 3 meals. Prettty miserable but the whole process was a lot of fun, felt like a mad scientist.

These days I just bake my own bread, mostly because it's 100x more delicious. I'm probably not saving any money due to experimenting with all these expensive-ass flours

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

#149

Post by yowlingcat »

bluedino wrote: post #15
austincheney wrote: post #2

Excellent guide and very nutritious. On a side note I wonder how the pandemic will impact food service in the long run from the perspective that before the pandemic many people never prepared their own meals. Now in many areas people are for the first time limited to groceries and produce instead of restaurants and fast food. If people continue their own food preparation moving forward this will have interesting cons…

We haven't reached shortages and such yet - and we also would have to have food scarcity for a long time to change the habits of Americans. This will be "real" food scarcity, not the stuff manufactured by the left and the media, with food deserts and all. I haven't seen fresh beef or chicken and the grocery stores for two weeks now. I doubt we'll get to the point of our grandparents and great grandparents, where they…

Casualties in "the food and restaurant industry" are ones you're applauding? How about casualties of those in economic precarity, full stop? A food supply chain shortage is not a good thing for society, and to purport that is laughable. I get the impulse to presume that constraints breed creativity, but when it comes to survival, constraints also breed death, suffering and starvation.

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

#150

Post by dean177 »

Zenst wrote: post #112
dean177 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> muscle weighs more than fat On average, the density of fat is 0.9 g/mL, while the density of muscle is 1.1 g/mL. It’s just not that much

Sure on average but whilst that is often bounded about, most people are not average. Bit like having 10 people with shoe sizes of 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13 so you go, the average size is 8.5 and proceed to make 10 pairs of 8.5 size shoes. Gets down to knowing yourself and how much that differentiates from the average and adjusting accordingly. Alas many look at average and work with that, so somebody small who needs ma…

The variance for muscle density is considerably smaller than the variance in shoe size.

https://itis.swiss/virtual-population/tissue-properties/data...

In this case the average alone is representative of the population without any additional qualifications.

Please don’t drink and drive.

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