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Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

miketuritzin.com

121–130 of 361 posts

Re: Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live on ~9AUD per day, AUD being roughly equivalent to the USD. $3 of that goes towards a coffee, $3 goes towards meat, and the other $3 goes towards vegetables and other foodstuff (rough estimates). The only issue I have is that most of the meat I buy is cheap - frozen chicken pieces, ground beef/pork, sausages, chuck steak, etc. - and cheap meat can be pretty horrible until you know how to cook it properly. You'l…

You spend 33% of your food budget just for coffee? Have you thought about doing something about your caffeine addiction?

Haha. $3.00 is how much one flat white costs at the local cafés. Guess I should have mentioned that I'm not downing 10 or 20 cups of instant coffee per day.

Re: Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

#122
Broccoli crowns are on sale this week at Lucky (in the Bay Area) for $0.57 / lb. This should allow the OP to shave at least $0.50 per day from his food budget. :-)

http://www.anyleaf.com/product/broccoli-crowns

As the co-founder of AnyLeaf, I talk to lots of people about saving on food and groceries. Some people "trade down" to save money, e.g., by replacing meat with beans. My personal strategy is to determine the diet I'd like to eat and that I consider healthy (the Paleo Diet, in my case) and then plan my shopping around the weekly sales offered by grocery stores. The variation in the price of a given item at a given store throughout the year is huge. Almost everything goes on sale for at least 50% off at one time or another. Also, every week there's almost always a good sale being offered on some product in every category (meat, seafood, fruit, vegetables, etc). A typical meal for me is meat or seafood with some vegetable and some fruit for dessert. If there's a great sale on chicken breast, I'll have chicken breast. If the sale is on ground turkey, I'll have ground turkey. Likewise with fruit and vegetable choices. Shopping this way is a low-effort (if you use AnyLeaf) way to save substantially without trading down and compromising your nutritional goals.

Re: Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

#123

If you live in Mountain View (or the bay area for that matter) go to 99 Ranch. It's an asian supermarket that smells like fish due to their huge live seafood section. If you can get past the smell you will be able to buy fruits and vegetables for extremely low prices. I can't believe how low their prices are some times. It is by far cheaper than Costco, Farmers markets, Safeway, and Nob Hill (from my experience).

A lot of asian markets have great deals and are worth going out of your way for deals if there is one near you. Everyone else is talking about fruit being expensive, but I go to Korean markets in LA that currently sell 5-10lbs of oranges for 99 cents and pineapples for $2 on weekends, just to start things off. $2/lb sliced ribeye, 20 cents for a small bunch of scallions, $4.99 box of mango...you get the idea. It's entirely feasible to eat tons of fresh fruit and even meats and pricier veggies on a tight budget if you know where to shop.

Re: Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

#124
post #50
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Even less constructive is whining about it.

No, it is not. Pointing out the idiocy of killing a thought out comment without an intelligent rebuttal is retarded -- supporting that retardation is worse.

Re: Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live on ~9AUD per day, AUD being roughly equivalent to the USD. $3 of that goes towards a coffee, $3 goes towards meat, and the other $3 goes towards vegetables and other foodstuff (rough estimates). The only issue I have is that most of the meat I buy is cheap - frozen chicken pieces, ground beef/pork, sausages, chuck steak, etc. - and cheap meat can be pretty horrible until you know how to cook it properly. You'l…

You spend 33% of your food budget just for coffee? Have you thought about doing something about your caffeine addiction?

33% of a food budget sounds like a lot.

33% of $9 hardly does...

Re: Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

#126

My wife and I tried to do this recently on $1.70 per person per day. We didn't last our intended 28 days. A few observations we found: Meat and organic food was too expensive. Fruit is crazy expensive so we bought OJ from concentrate with no additives as a cheap source of Vitamin C. Eggs were are very expensive, but we needed the protein and nutrients, so rationed ourselves to 3 each per week. We had to remove all su…

I would love to find a community of like minded individuals in the bay area that meetup regularly to shop in bulk and divide.

We did this on reddit recently with herbs/spices sold in bulk where people basically committed 20 bux and got a healthy personal portion of the loot.

It would be great to do the same with a costco bill....

Re: Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

#127
post #41

I've thought about putting together a brief founders' cookbook with a dozen or so of the recipes for things that I survived on in the lean days that you can make for about a buck or two and in about 20 minutes. The real trick is not buying prepared foods at all. Things like flour, rice, eggs, beans, pasta, potatoes, fresh fruit and vegetables, milk, yogurt, cheese, ground beef, fish filets and chicken breasts are all…

Or an app.. This is your ingredients for this week. This is todays recipe.

Re: Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

#128

I'd really like to see someone do an analysis like this, but including meat. I'm a meat lover, but would like to get an idea of just how cheaply I could eat healthily.

I live on ~9AUD per day, AUD being roughly equivalent to the USD. $3 of that goes towards a coffee, $3 goes towards meat, and the other $3 goes towards vegetables and other foodstuff (rough estimates). The only issue I have is that most of the meat I buy is cheap - frozen chicken pieces, ground beef/pork, sausages, chuck steak, etc. - and cheap meat can be pretty horrible until you know how to cook it properly. You'l…

Some types of meat have great nutritional value but are for some reason overlooked or considered "second class". Things like chicken/beef/pork hearts, ox tongue (was a rare treat in USSR!), chicken/beef liver are very cheap (like $4 AUD per kilo or even less) and can be eaten without literally anything going to waste (no bones etc.)

Re: Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

#129
post #71

more people should write posts like this so the myth of "eating healthy is more expensive". And it doesn't need to be boring food like in this post. Italian peasants have been spending much less than $3 a meal for centuries and have one of the healthiest diets around.

No, because it's not a myth. Eating healthy actually does requires a lot of energy & in many cases does cost more. If it doesn't cost more it's because you're going to be taking a lot out of the flavor department & you're going to be investing a lot of time shopping, preparing, storing & tracking costs. There is savings to be had in volume, but volume is hard to achieve when you're cooking for just 1 or 2 people.

Stating that "Italian peasants have been spending much less than $3 a meal for centuries" is silly on many counts. First this article is about $3 a day, not per meal($3/meal x 3 x 30 = $270 per person per month which seems more realistic). Second, you ignore currency inflation & the negatives of being a peasant. It's similar to saying it must be great to be a Chinese peasant because they can get rice for really cheap. Third, Italy is a small country that has a long history of quality food production, there is less focus on quality in the US & more on quantity. The US is a big country and the environment varies greatly from place to place. You might have a great farming community & your city might support farmers markets, but that doesn't mean that everyone has those facilities or even if they do that the products produced are actually cheap.

Part of the problem is that quality food has been relegated into a "gourmet" category which demands a higher price & profit margins than industrialized foods & even those industrialized foods aren't cheap in low volume. You will often see higher quality tomatoes on a Burger King burger than what's at your local supermarket going for $2.99/lb.

This is just a blog article, with one bland meal. I don't know how it even makes a scuff as far as destroying this "myth".

Re: Eating Healthily for $3 a Day

#130
post #126

My wife and I tried to do this recently on $1.70 per person per day. We didn't last our intended 28 days. A few observations we found: Meat and organic food was too expensive. Fruit is crazy expensive so we bought OJ from concentrate with no additives as a cheap source of Vitamin C. Eggs were are very expensive, but we needed the protein and nutrients, so rationed ourselves to 3 each per week. We had to remove all su…

I would love to find a community of like minded individuals in the bay area that meetup regularly to shop in bulk and divide. We did this on reddit recently with herbs/spices sold in bulk where people basically committed 20 bux and got a healthy personal portion of the loot. It would be great to do the same with a costco bill....

Now that's something I could buy into
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