This thread has inspired me to stock up on a reserve of cheap food.
What kind of foods can I buy in bulk that are cheap, yet will still sustain me? Calories are one thing, but preferably I’d like to avoid getting scurvy or rickets or any other disorder from being deficient in any vitamins.
I’ve figured Potatoes, Beans, Rice, and Ramen Noodles are super cheap. But I have the feeling I couldn’t live on those alone. Any other nutritional cornerstones I can get covered at a low price? What are they feeding those kids in Africa you can sponser for 80 cents a day? 
Beans, rice, with a bit of cheese and lime juice. It’ll keep you going for a long, long time.
Well, if you’re going to stock up, don’t stock up on potatoes. They go bad pretty quickly.
Canned tuna and mac and cheese, on sale.
Beans and rice, of course. They’ll cover you in protein and carbs. They are slim in fats, however. Stock up on some lard or butter (lard is cheaper) which will last basically forever (especially if it’s in the freezer, well-wrapped).
Do you have a decent sized freezer or are we sticking with pantry foods here? The reason I ask is I’m partial to frozen veggies, but canned are fine as well. Pretty much any veg you like, but the secret is to vary the colors - some greens, some reds and oranges, some whites. Each day you should have the equivalent of 3-4 cups of raw veggies (about 2 cans or one frozen 10 oz bag). Obviously, if times are really tight, you can live on less, but if you’re trying to stay healthy, that’s how many veggies you need every day. (And most Americans don’t eat nearly that many on their best nutritional days.) So hit a dollar store or warehouse club and stock up on whatever strikes your fancy, just make sure there’s a variety, and eat a different color each day. Canned fruits are good for stocking up, just don’t get the ones with the heavy syrup. Get light syrup or in juice.
Onions last quite a while if kept in the dark and cool, and they’re surprisingly nutritious. Much of England ate nothing but bread and onions for decades. They are yummy sauteed in butter on their own, and of course add flavor to so many things.
Apples last a good for a long time after they’re picked. Last year’s crop was being sold as late as this August, so they last a year under the right conditions. For your use, keep them in a cool pantry or refrigerator if you have to. Try to find this year’s crop - usually farmer’s markets are good for that. With all that soft food you’re stockpiling, you’ll welcome something crunchy.
For meal stuff, I always have a couple of cans of cream-of-something soup in my pantry. Any meat (pork chops, chicken pieces, even ground beef) browed in a skillet with a little chopped onion and then simmered in cream-of-something (with a little water or milk if needed) makes a good entree. Slice up some potatoes and put them in the skillet with the soup and simmer until soft, or serve over rice or noodles. Add a little white wine to the mix before simmering, and it’s Ghetto Gormet!
Potatoes and milk are supposed to be a comprehensive source of nutrition. It was the primary diet of many Irish peasants.
Oh, and rickets is something only children get. It’s a deformation of the growing skeleton due to a vitamin D deficiency. If you’re full grown, you can’t get rickets. (Doesn’t mean you can’t be vitamin D deficient. But the cheapest source of Vitamin D is sunlight.)
Scurvy is preventable with a daily dose of 60 mg Vit C per day (100 if you’re a smoker or on daily asprin therapy.) That’s not very much, most of us get that from food. But if you’re worried, get a bottle of lemon juice and drink a tablespoon mixed in a glass of water each day.
Ahh, but notice you don’t see any Irish peasants anymore!
(Laughing Lagomorph, proud great great great…etc…grandson of Irish peasants).
I lived in a cabin in the woods for awhile once, and found the aforementioned (brown) rice and beans to be the most useful staples. Millet is good, too, but to my taste, it needs the addition of vegetables, or a bit of meat or fish and some seasonings to make it really tasty. Oats are good to keep around, too, and oat bran, which is now pretty widely available in bulk, cooks up very quickly and doesn’t have to be used as a sweetened cereal. I kind of prefer it with just butter and salt, maybe some Goya Adobo if you can find it.
Often rice and beans are satisfying, to me, plain with just some butter or oil. But to spice things up a bit you can get a masala (such as garam masala) from an Indian grocery; or you can do what I did, and make up a masala of your own. I ended up with a twenty-three spice mix, but that was just me being crazy. You can start with the basics, such as paprika, turmeric, cayenne, chili powder, cumin, white pepper, fennel seed, and so on, mixed to taste, and go on from there. I used to add it to the water when cooking rice. A mix of spices like this can be produced pretty cheaply from the bulk section of a good co-op or health food store, and it will last a year or more if tightly covered.
Ghee, the clarified butter used extensively in Indian and Middle Eastern cooking, is easily made once you get the hang of it. There are a number of recipes available online. It gives you the flavor of butter without the sensitive storage issues – a jar of ghee will keep at room temperature for several months, or up to a year in the refigerator. And, because it’s been clarified, leaving pure butterfat, you can actually fry in it. I used to make it quite cheaply by using whatever unsalted supermarket butter was on sale; now, because I don’t like the idea of bovine growth hormones, I use organic butter.
There are a few Chinese and Japanese items that keep for a long while and can add interest and nutrition to plain dishes, like the Japanese katsuobushi, dried shaved fish flakes, furikake, a seaweed-based salt condiment, and black sesame seeds. And seaweed itself is a good source of extra nutrition. All of these can be stored quite awhile and are available fairly cheaply at Asian supermarkets.
Nutritionists have determined that the basic diet of the Woodland (American) Indians - half of my ancestors - had a complete protein balance. Meat was available only as a result of hunting, or of the turkey poults they raised, so meals comprised of beans, corn and squash were much more than half of their total diet (the same was true of the nations of the southwest - Navaho, Zuni, Pueblo, etc.).
If you check, you’ll discover that this diet is high in both proteins (from the beans and corn), and vitamin A precursors (from the corn and squash). The beans and corn both preserved (dried) well, following harvest. The squashes, excluding the “summer” squashes (yellow crookneck, basically, or zucchini), keep VERY well, so long as they’re kept in a fairly dry place.[sup]1[/sup] So, having them fresh will produce more vitamins, but is not necessary in order to derive a reasonably adequate nutritional balance therefrom. Canned beans and corn, while not optimal for nutrition, are adequate, and easy to keep/store, although dried beans in a bag store even better, and are cheaper, to boot. Squash is cheaply available out of season to the city-dweller only as canned or frozen: take your pick.
Since you reference the previous thread, you will have noted that I recommended beans & rice, and gave some very rough, very basic directions for cooking. Bear in mind that, while it is an acceptable subsistence diet for a while, you would in due course have dietary deficiencies (both vitamin and mineral). However, if you take a daily multivitamin, it will go a long way towards keeping you healthy on that diet for a long time.
I do not encourage anyone to plan on living indefinitely on a diet that doesn’t include fresh fruit and vegetables. I remind you that the Woodland nations had fresh food for 6-9 months of the year (depending on how far north/south they lived).
[sup]1[/sup]They had storage “houses”, where the foodstuffs were stored up on platforms or in containers. Yes, of ccourse there were losses to small animals. :rolleyes:
This might sound like a snippy answer but I am being sincere. Do you have a backyard? If so, consider ripping out some of the grass and planting a few easy to manage crops. No better way to insure you have food. Plus it is really fresh food. (in season).
This reminds me of a psudo-riddle, how did people keep their meat from spoiling before there was refrigeration? By keeping it well fed.
Someone mentioned canned vegetables as a source of vitamins. Check the nutritional information on the labels, though. Some canned veggies have little of value except fiber.
Do I even need to say it? Sugar water.
And vitamin pills.
Also, some grain based foods like oatmeal & cereal are fortified with a variety of vitamins and minerals.
Maybe i’m dense but fruits and vegetables don’t seem that nutritious. Most only have one or two types of vitamins/minerals in them and almost no calories. And they are expensive. Maybe i’m missing something.
No one has mentioned eggs, one of the best and least expensive sources of complete proteins.
If you’re stockpiling stuff, it wouldn’t hurt to keep some powdered milk. Cheap, good source of protein, can be mixed with water to drink or added to soups, stews etc. as thickener and protein booster. Whole eggs and egg whites are also available in powdered form.
Maybe some ideas here:
Honey stays good forever. Barley is better than rice, I think. Pasta/noodles are good.
P-nut butter for the fat.
But what is the real best thing is to go hit whatever super cheapo "overstock, discontinued and dent’ store you might have, and just buy what’s cheap and dried or canned. We have “Canned Food Grocery Outlet” & “Big Lots”, but I am sure every city has something similar.