You don’t need to add anything except water to flour to make bread. Mix four and water, let sit for an hour or so, flatten into rounds, and bake. You’ll get dense flatbread. You don’t need store-bought yeast or salt or anything else. If you’re frugal you can save a bit of yesterday’s dough to add to today’s dough to inoculate it with yeast, but if you haven’t saved any starter you can still make unleavened bread. Best bet for unleavened bread is to make it like a cracker rather than a loaf, if you make a loaf expect to spend a lot of time gnawing.
I’m pretty sure that in America, the cheapest calories are from potatoes (which can be prepared for eating using any heat source whatsoever). Sure, cookies may have more calories per dollar than carrots, but carrots are hardly the only thing in the produce aisle.
Surely lard, or the super-cheap “American cheese” would be the highest for strictly caloric measures? It’s gotta be a fat of some sort. Oleo, perhaps? Corn Oil?
ETA: I’m not arguing the overall premise though. There’s no question that eating empty calories is far cheaper then healthy foods.
It also requires potentially hundreds of dollars more in monthly rent to have an oven to cook with. Many people living in poverty don’t have access to a kitchen, or the appliances themselves may be broken or unusable.
This is not to mention the time cost involved, and the knowledge involved in how to make palatable bread is not something most working people have these days.
Sure, the statement was hyperbole - but cookies and other junk foods are a pretty good bet for the poor. If you want something reasonably tasty, quick, and cheap, you’re looking at junk food. Unleavened bread rounds don’t really qualify under any but the last category.
If we’re talking ready-to-eat I’d say potted meat. . .
*You didn’t say “edible.”
But, you don’t need an oven. I’ve baked bread with fire and a hot rock. A hotplate and a frypan (or even scrounged sheet metal) could be used. Also, rice, beans and potatos also mentioned upthread just require boiling. Yes, for the extreme poor (homeless level) even this may be very difficult.
I don’t disagree with this, which is why I said it is a problem of ignorance. This is something that can, and IMHO should, be taught.
Add yeast and salt (also very cheap), or keep a starter alive and you can have very good leavened bread. It isn’t rocket science, housewives have been doing it for millenia. I understand why a poor person would choose junk food from time to time, do it myself. But I don’t buy that it is a choice they are forced into by poverty. By my calculation, they are spending about 3 times as much for the easy option.
It is one of the wonders of modern civilization that even poor people can be fat. It didn’t use to be that way, and still isn’t in many parts of the world. Where people are really needing to maximize the calories they can buy for thier dollar, they choose basics like rice, potatos and flour to eat.
Gruel can be made from flour…
2 teaspoons of flour
1 teaspoon of salt.
Boil one cup water. Separately, drip water on flour and salt until it makes a paste.
Add the paste to the boiling water.
Stir to a semi-fluid consistency.
Strain to eliminate film.
Serve warm
This sounds like a significant exaggeration, since serviceable used ranges are regularly seen on Craigslist for under $100 (sometimes for free). Yes, this would presume you know someone with a vehicle capable of hauling it.
Of course you could also find someone whose oven you could borrow the use of, in exchange for some nice freshly baked bread.
The actual hands-on time to create bread is quite modest - comparable to the time it takes to consume a meal at McDonalds. The necessary knowledge can be obtained in 5 minutes at any library.
Well, plenty of junk food qualifies, though the point is that it’s not really all that cheap compared to several alternatives that, admittedly, require just a bit more time. But if we’re presuming extreme poverty, shouldn’t some time be available?
Who actually uses the calories per dollar metric?
Does the average consumer at the Supermarket measure their purchases that way? Isn’t it more common to measure price per unit volume? I mean the grocery stores here have price per gram on the shelves, it makes comparison shopping very easy.
Otherwise I might see measuring number of servings per dollar being useful but again, who uses the calories per dollar?
Or living in an apartment. Do you think that most landlords would be okay with your hot rocks and sheet metal plan?
I’ve lived places without kitchens that also forbade hotplates, toasters, etc.
I’m not arguing that there’s anything wrong with our current way of doing things. I’m saying that poor people choose the foods that they do for logical reasons that don’t include being stupid, horrible, lazy people who want to be fat, which always seems to be the implication in threads like this. If you’re among the working poor, time is at a premium just as available spending money is, and processed foods just make sense in that situation – especially in the short term.
Can you eat a perfectly healthy, balanced, unprocessed diet on a shoestring? Given enough time, energy, and an available kitchen, sure. But it’s ignoring the bigger issue to believe that just educating the poor about how to cook bread or make rice and beans is going to solve the problem. Some processed foods, like ramen and macaroni, are so incredibly cheap and easy to make that it’s no wonder people turn to them. Likewise, it’s far easier to eat a balanced diet if you can afford a wide range of healthy foods, including fruits and vegetables, without paying a substantial premium over and above the cost of unhealthy, processed foods.
The way I read it, ThisOneGuy was disputing your claim that a person needs hundreds of dollars a month in order to have the facilities to bake bread. You’re correct that one possibility is to rent an apartment with an oven in the kitchen, but ThisOneGuy offered the alternative (for people who can’t afford to rent or otherwise choose to live off-the-grid) of heating up rocks or sheet metal with an open fire, and baking bread on that. Unless campgrounds and fuel for a fire are not cheap where you live, I can’t imagine that accessing the facilities to bake bread the way T.E. Lawrence did on his journeys through Arabia would ever increase one’s cost of living by hundreds of dollars a month.
I think it’s about pleasure per dollar, not calories, and there food wins hands down over everything else in America. It’s one of those pick two out of three situations, but in this case it’s cheap, healthy, and delicious.
The real problem comes when you are so poor that you can’t afford any other sort of pleasure. If all day long you say no to your kids when they want cable TV or to be in the school band or go to the zoo or get a new dress for Easter or a cool toy for Christmas or have a birthday party or any of the thousands of things that you’d like to do, well, I imagine it’s real, real tempting to say “yes” to cookies and Little Debbies (which I think are more calories/dollar than most cookies).
I go for the “bland, cheap, healthy” diet myself, but it’s easier to do that because I’ve got a thousand other ways to stimulate myself. Take away my internet and my TV and my solid, satisfying marriage and I bet there would be more cheeseburgers in my life.
But most homeless people live in cities. Places where open fires and firewood are banned and non-existent. If you can’t afford an apartment with an oven, you’re not going to have easy access to a fire pit.
Maybe the next time a panhandler asks me for money, I’ll give him some kindling and suggest he make some Lawrence of Arabia bread.
Anyway, for the OP, it’s clear than Pollan is talking about PREPARED food. I’m sure Karo corn syrup is a great deal on calories per dollar, but it’s not edible.
You do get a great return at McDonalds and other fast food places.
Burger King’s Buck Double: 410 cal/$1
McDonalds’ McDouble: 390 cal/$1
Wendy’s Double Stack: 360 cal/$1
An adult can get 2000 calories from just five dollars, plus it’s hot food and has a mix of protein and carbs. I’ll take that over gruel any day.
Add in the other things that make eating poor difficult and its an even better “deal”
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the working poor’s lack of time - often between working and transportation issues, they don’t have a lot of time in their lives to bake bread.
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the lack of cooking facilities. My experience as a poor inner city student was that I had a kitchen, but it wasn’t really a FUNCTIONAL kitchen for anything that couldn’t be cooked on a stovetop. The cockroaches sort of made the oven… unappetizing… to use.
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the lack of cooking skills. I know people who don’t know how to boil spaghetti noodles. This one can at least be fixed, although you have to be willing to fix it.
With those hurdles - plus the fact that most people think McDonalds is pretty tasty and gratifying - is it any surprise that one quarter of children eat fast food once a day?
I don’t live in a city, but I was under the impression that grocery stores with fresh veggies and fruits and cooking staples weren’t very common or easy to get to inside of cities.
If you can’t just go to your local grocery store (because there isn’t one) and you’re relegated to a gas station ‘quickmart’ with their higher prices and small packages - I can easily see some lady with 6 kids going over to Wendy’s and buying each of them two doublestack burgers and then taking them all home. That’s $12+tax ($14 if she gets two for herself as well) and less than 5 minutes of prep with no knowledge, effort, or utilities required.
I can’t really think of anything I can get at a gas station with that same $12 (or $14) that would feed my (hypothetical) 6 kids with equal lack of effort and resources on my part.
I remain convinced that this is a bunk discussion. If you want to eat cookies and fast food, don’t tell me about about food or price , and go ahead.
All cultures have base meals that are at least approaching dietary needs:
- curry in India/Pakistan
- Pho in Vietnam
- Couscous in north Africa
- Maffé in black Africa
- Chili (con carné if possible)
etc etc ad nauseum. you can include the French Cassoulet, the Russian Borcht and the Irish Stew
All of these can be confectioned in rudimentary kitchens, in more or less time, most demand quite little competance, all are dirt cheap, delicious, and satisfiying to eat.
Bread (real bread) can be baked easily in a cast iron (or terra cotta) pot on an electrical range, matzos, shapati, aarum can be cooked in a frying pan
Dried beans of all sorts, lentils, green, brown and coral, can be cooked with a ham bone (or other) for taste, “low” meat cuts cook well in a pot (and have high fat content)
The traditional soup sets on the corner of a wood stove in a big pot, one adds the daily aquisitions, be it a few carrots, or a piece of lard, or greens if the season permits, plus a bit of water.
The whole thing “boils” down to cooking for tomorrow. It’s not more work, just longer to cook, the slower the better. The toughest part is the shopping, bus fare/time vs lentils may be a tough choice.
You can even go farther, many asiatic countries have techniques that reduce fuel consumption, generally by slicing food into paper thin slices that cook quickly. That does mean razor sharp knives and time.
The only essential is good refrigeration, unless you are cooking for a big family. a freezer is a great tool when used correctly (dates on portions!)
I’m not quite sure in the States, but here in France, you can eat for about 1/4 of McDo price, and what a difference. It also is prone to inviting someone to share…
My “being poor” experience was pretty much limited to college and shortly after getting out. For periods we didn’t have a car.
For both the apartment I lived in and the home I lived in post college (which I owned, but was in a very working class neighborhood) there was a grocery store AT THAT TIME within walking distance. Both have since closed. The one near the house I lived in was a great neighborhood grocer with a good meat market. Expensive compared to a supermarket, though - but their produce was decent, meat excellent, and they were fairly well stocked.
The one that was near my college apartment - which really was in a not nice neighborhood (we moved about the time heroin needles started showing up regularly in the stairwell and the homeless would find there way into the basement) was a really poor grocer. Everything they stocked was MUCH more expensive than a supermarket and you wouldn’t want to buy produce there - it was in horrible shape.
Which is a chicken and egg question - are inner city grocers poorly stocked and expensive because few in the inner city buys apples and broccoli or meat - which means if they stock it there is a lot of waste - or do people in the inner city not buy produce and meat from the grocery store because it is expensive and poor quality?
But the culture supports that sort of cooking. Our poor, inner city culture doesn’t. And when you introduce an affordable Fast Food substitute into those cultures - it doesn’t take long before those cultures stop supporting that sort of cooking.
I quite agree, thats the whole point. I may be a stubborn old guy, but I remain convinced of several essentials (going off subject though)
- Standard (cheap) fast food is not a healthy diet
- fast food eating is detrimental to family, and as such, to social life
- social structures are built around essential needs, these same structures build the fabric of our nations
- modern refrigeration has made food conservation possible, fast food consumption is part of social ghetto confinement, eat run and go has become a “cultural” excuse as opposed to a formal presence and involvement at mealtime.
- fast food providers are after the buck, nothing else
I admit having no blanket solution, even here in France fresh produce is very expensive, and local commerces tend to close, unable to compete with larger (farther away) hypermarkets.
I do dream that the smell of a simmering pork loin will make others remember that food can taste good, and be shared with one’s family.