IANA Nutritionist, but that looks like a perfect diet to me Mangetout. The only suggestion is perhaps some milk (fresh or powdered) for the calcium.
Any idea what the cost/meal would be?
I recall getting a 3lb. container of assorted nuts at Costco for about $9. At 19 cents, one ounce a day contains a large amount of protein, fats, and is cheaper than cooking up meat.
Use dried beans bought bulk (cheap), big bags of rice (cheap) and ham hocks (cheap) for source of complete nutrition that feeds millions of people every day just fine.
A salad on the side wouldn’t hurt.
Great answers all around, thanks everyone 
Even now that I’m not a total cheapas*, I’m still a big fan of rice… it’s cheap, easy to store, and easy to prepare. I never bought bulk beans, but that’s a logical addition
Rice is less diverse in nutrients than other grains such as wheat and barley - both of which can be boiled and served in a similar way (although it takes longer).
Blake you’re wrong in saying that cabbage is nothing but carbs. It’s in the cruciferous vegetable family (along with broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, etc.) and is actually rather low in carbs – only 5 grams per cup (shredded) serving.
A one cup (shredded) serving has 40 mg of Calcium, 200 mg of Potassium, 28 mg Vit C (~50% of US RDA), 35 mcg of Vit A. (~4% RDA).
Boiling cabbage cooks a lot of the nutrients out, but pickling (a la sauerkraut) preserves most.
I can buy one-a-day vitamins for about $1.10 for a one month supply. Those should take care of vitamin C, iron, Etc. After that I would try the rice & beans route. Do I win?
It turns out McDonalds also have packets of maple syrup… far better with oatmeal than white sugar.
The Austin Walmarts used to sell their unsold whole rotisserie chickens for $1 at the end of the day (11pm or so), which is also a tremendous deal.
You can probably get generic canned vegetables fairly cheap. If you wander the supermarkets, you can usually get free food samples.
If you know where the local soup kitchen is, you can get a free hot meal each day.
If you know where and when the donut shops dump their older baked goods, you can snag freebies there.
If you have any friends, you can conveniently forget your wallet each time you meet for lunch or dinner.
Basically, it’s pretty hard to starve in the US.
Cereal from the dollar store.
It’s fortified.
The way to do this is to think like a third world peasant. A grain is your basic food…corn, rice, wheat, barley, buckwheat…whatever grows best in your area. Since you are in the US you don’t really have to worry about that, just find whatever is cheapest and you can have a variety. Pick up bulk whole grains from wholesalers or other suppliers. Whole grains will be much much better for you than white rice, white flour, etc. Get a hand grinder to make your own flour or masa, or cook them whole just like brown rice. If you have very little cooking fuel, picking up a used construction worker style thermos works well…you boil water, measure the grain, and pour everything in and seal. Wait whatever the cooking time for that grain is, and you save wasting energy keeping it simmering.
Next, add fresh vegetables and fruits. A peasant is going to have a little truck garden for this and will eat whatever grows best and is in season or has been preserved. You will shop sales. Every grocery store will have loss leaders every week…items that are sold below cost to get you in the store. You are going to walk past all the other high-priced items and go straight to the loss leaders. Buy large amounts of whatever is on sale. One week it might be bananas for $0.28/lb. Another it might be cabbage at $0.17/lb. Onions, 3 pounds for a dollar. 15 pounds of potatoes for 99 cents. Get a LOT, since you will be getting most of your nutrients from these, and the vegetable combined with grain is going to be 90% of your diet. The grains provide some nutrients, especially whole grains, but are mostly calories. The vegetables and fruits will keep you healthy. And if you live in the suburbs, sometimes neighbors will have apple trees or blackberry bushes that they just ignore. Don’t be shy about asking permission to harvest free produce.
Next, protein. Whole grains contain some protein, especially wheat. But it is incomplete protein, you will get sick if you only eat grains. Peasants will keep chickens, fish, and hunt small game, and will kill a pig, sheep, or cow a few times a year, or maybe only once a year and then preserve as much as they can and gorge on the rest. They will also try to maximize their vegetable protein with legumes and such. Beans are cheap if you get them in bulk, but watch out. With modern factory farming, chicken is often cheaper than beans. If you shop around, you can often find chicken for less than $.050/lb. Sometimes meat is a loss leader, or is nearing expiration and you can pick up other meats for very cheap. But you are going to be eating meat only a few times a week.
Then add luxuries. Cheap luxuries. Water is free, but a few cents worth of leaves turns it into tea. Cooking oil can be found cheaply. Gallons of milk are often loss-leaders. You can get cheap sugar and powdered milk in bulk. Spices and aromatics may seem expensive, but you are only getting very very small amounts, and if you get tired of your diet you are going to start looking longingly at the boxes and cans of food in the grocery store that cost 10 times what your diet costs. A little bit of garlic, ginger, oregano, chile or cumin can keep you on your plan and only costs a few dimes.
The point is to buy things as low on the industrial food chain as possible. Bulk raw food is very cheap. Packaged raw food is pretty cheap. Packaged processed food is expensive. Packaged ready to eat food is very expensive. Restaurant food is hideously expensive. And you have to out-think the food industry. They trick you with sales, so you get revenge by buying loss leaders and ignoring the other inflated junk. They tempt you with fancy expensive packaging, so you have to ignore the pretty packages and get things in bulk. They load everything with fat, sugar and salt, so you prepare everything yourself.
This plan requires you to do a lot of cooking yourself. If you try to buy food that doesn’t require much cooking you are going to get much less nutritious food at much higher prices. But loss leaders sometimes give you an edge…sometimes a national packaged brand of something is cheaper than bulk. You get a wide variety of produce since different things go on sale every week, but you have to know how to prepare them. And you have to have a kitchen and equipment, even if that is only a knife, a hot-plate and two pots. But eating this way will be an order of magnitude cheaper than eating processed foods, as well as being much much healthier.
Beans are very cheap, full of nutrients, store well and provide some of the harder-to-get things like protein. Beans and Rice, supplamented with some fruits and vegetables now and then, will keep you going forever.
If you are serious about this, do invest in a pressure cooker. They will make even old tough beans cook in less than an hour without having to soak them. Practically everybody in the world that subsists off of beans and rice uses a pressure cooker. I’ve seen peaseants cooking beans with a pressure cooker over an open fire. They are ubequitous in the third world.
Comparing chicken and beans by the pound is deceptive. You aren’t going to find boneless chicken breast for fifty cents a pound. And even if you did, a pound of beans is going to go lot farther than a pound of chicken. It is true, though, that even the most austere “peasant” food is usually supplemented with small amounts of meat, eggs, fish, or dairy, which will prevent the problems sometimes associated with a strict vegan diet.
Yeah, but the bones in hindquarters or whole chickens are valuable. Every time I roast chicken I make soup from the bones and drippings. While the bones might not have as much food value as meat, they aren’t waste either.
You don’t need dairy products in order to get calcium. Fresh green vegs will do nicely.
Someone mentioned vegetables in cans: check the labels carefully. Some canned vegetables have almost no nutritional value left after all the processing, and contribute little except bulk, fiber and salt. Frozen are better, as are fresh-picked. Frozen may even be better sometimes than supermarket “fresh” vegetables that have been sitting around for a long time.
If you chew the bones into a fine white powder and swallow, it’s a source of calcium. Also, chew up and swallow the cartilage on the ends of the bones.
Did you see what I posted? : The trouble with rice, cabbage and oatmeal are that they are highly deficient in just about eveything except carbohydrates, and cabbage isn’t real rich even in that
From your own link: 4.833 Carbohydrate, 1.282 protein, 0.240 fat.
Cabbage is clearly deficient in everything but carbohydrate, and it doesn’t have even much of that. Which differs from what I said how exactly?
Or are you implying that 1g protein/kg is not deficient?
Excellent and informative post Lemur866.
Another thing I like to do is buy a pound of the aforementioned bacon trimmings, a two-pound pack of turkey thigh meat (which is often very cheap), then throw it in the food processor with three or four slices of bread, an onion and some herbs - after processing, I form it into little meatballs and freeze them on a tray.
When they are frozen, you can tip them into a freezer bag, then you only need take out as many as you need - avoiding waste is just as important as getting the food cheap in the first place.
keep leftovers and fry them up the next day; if you roast or grill a piece of meat with bones in, boil them up afterwards (with the carrot tops and other vegetable trimmings) - save the resulting stock and make risotto or soup.
Or an entirely different tactic: get a (second) job in any type of restaurant. You will get one free meal per shift, which should be your major meal for the day: go for meat and vegetables and fruit to the greatest extent feasible. I mean, if your job is at an IHOP, get scrambled eggs & hash browns & ham & OJ, not a chocolate chip muffin and a cup of coffee.
In addition, if you are even a slightly decent worker, your manager will turn a blind eye to your taking away some ‘outdated’ food (as in, stuff that didn’t sell while it was hot enough) or things like some rolls & butter left unused at a table. Strictly speaking, that remainding food is supposed to be garbage, but they don’t care if workers take it. Just tell the manager about your pet pot-bellied pig, and you can walk away at the end of your shift with plenty for your freebie meal #2 of the day.
Finally, evaluate your diet, and keep on hand whatever you can eat uncooked that fills the worst gaps for your final meal/snacks.
I did this through a very lean couple of years during college. I waitressed at a family type restaraurant from just 5 to 8. Even though a three hour shift didn’t legally require the free meal, the manager was a good sort. And I was a good and dependable worker. Pretty much all I ever bought out of pocket was alternating multi-pound bags of oranges and apples and the occasional jar of peanut butter.
Dinner (4:30pm): full meal, compete with meat, vegetables & dessert.
Breakfast: apples or oranges.
Lunch: sandwiches made from the leftover rolls/butter/any gleanings.
Snacks: more apples or oranges.
It was often boring, but perfectly nutritious. Plus I never had to do any cooking or cleanup, and I needed the job money for other expenses anyway.
I used to live off next to nothing at University and still managed to eat amazing meals practicalley every day. You just need to go to the supermarket at closing on a sunday and you can find all sorts of nice stuff for next to nothing that is either going out of date or is slightly damaged. Aberdeen angus fillet steaks for 10p, salmon fillets for 25p that kind of thing and fruit and veg could be bought from a market in bulk for virtually nothing, I got 4 kilos of slighlty overipe tomatoes for £1.20 once and made a massive pot of soup and a load of passata for making pasta sauces. If you shop right you can basically eat what you want for really cheap - blagging free bread is easy from bakeries when they close and they usually chuck in some cakes and doughnuts as well!