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

Also, keep your eyes open for unobvious cheap food - people panic buy the food they know e.g. in NZ: wheat flour, pasta, tinned tomatoes. But while there was no flour, there were still dried beans and other products that have more food value on shelves that were still great value per $.

Everything I have read and experienced suggests this is not true.

You may be unaware of it if you have never been desperately poor. A lot of the food aid available to the poor in the US is handled very quietly because it's done by local organizations trying to take care of the local people who actively want to avoid letting predatory vagabonds know where they can get a free handout.

I have read in the past that America would look a lot better on paper if we counted emergency food stores as part of our assets in the same way European countries typically do.

Decades ago, I read about a study that indicated that only one half one percent of Americans qualified as "poor" by the standards of people in India when based on metrics like food access.

I have read that most housed Americans get three meals a day and most homeless Americans only get two meals a day. There are places in the world where two meals a day would be pretty good food security.

I'm sure we are facing some very real challenges. I'm not convinced that America is as precariously positioned as some people seem to think.

I see comments in this discussion indicating that people who have known serious privation are fairly unperturbed. I think the people freaking out are mostly comfortably well off who think giving up a few comforts is a nightmare scenario.

I'm all for actively promoting information for how to feed yourself cheaply while we actively forbid a lot of people from going to work. Cooking from scratch is a terrific way to both save money and give yourself something constructive to do so you aren't going stir crazy and heading for going postal.

But there are many Preppers in this country who already had a year or more of stored food and the things I'm hearing suggest hoarding is being done in a bizarre pattern that suggests a lot of upper class emotional BS is going on.

According to the research in Diet for a Small Planet, at the time the book was written, every country had the means to feed their people. Famine was due to political and social forces, not due to absolute lack of food supplies.

More recently, I have read of cases where food aid sat on the docks rotting because the whole reason people were starving was due to civil war. The food aid was de facto intended to feed people who were more or less being intentionally starved out and the people in power absolutely weren't going to give them free food from other countries.

Venezuela was in a real world of hurt before covid19. They were hunting wild donkeys and breaking into zoos to steal the animals from zoos. They are going to see terrible problems.

The US doesn't have to. We need to figure out what works so we can avoid unnecessary hardship.

A lot of people are working on it. We aren't just sitting here idly waiting for the four horsemen of the apocalypse to show up.

First, start estimating how many calories you need per day on credible sites like [1]. Then, buy a scale, measure it twice everyday--first, in morning when you wake up (and peed) and second, right before you sleep. The subtract these two and get an approximate drop in weight (for me, it's usually 1-1.2 lbs over night for average type of food that I eat). Use that to approximate how much food you should eat in the evening and what type of food you should eat so that you can reach your weight goal.

Keep adjusting your portion of food (start from the portion size that will fill you up until your next meal) over the next 10 days to see which one keeps your weight under check or make it go lower.

I have lost 20 lbs between Dec '19 and end of Feb '20 just by doing this. In summary, measuring your weight diligently (just twice a day or even once a day in the morning if you want) is a good enough start to lose weight.

[1] https://health.gov/our-work/food-nutrition/2015-2020-dietary...