I’m going with Almonds, oranges, and either milk or eggs. Almonds are high in just about everything (calories, fiber, protein & vitamins) other than Vitamin A, C & B-12. The oranges and milk/eggs those.
Menu for the day (divided in 3 meals)
2 cups almonds
2 glasses 2% milk
2 large oranges
2 hardboiled eggs
2400 calories. 108g protein. 47g Fiber. 85% or more of USRDA 17 essential vitamins and minerals (all but 4 well over 100%)
We have an inmate where I work who’s doing a hunger strike. He’s refusing all his meals. However, because of a medical problem, he was prescribed a daily ration of Ensure. Officially, this counts as “medication” not “food”, so we have to follow all the procedures for somebody who’s not eating.
On the down side, many of us feel that going on a hunger strike while drinking Ensure every day isn’t really getting into the spirit of the thing. But on the up side, if he keeps it up, I’ll eventually be able to post on how long a person can live on a diet of only Ensure.
How much of this stuff would your average 5’10" 175 lb man go through in a day?
Is that $25 for 25 lb + shipping going to be more or less expensive than groceries?
Hmmmmmmmmmm.
On the fourth page of my google search, I determined this stuff has 3.3 KCal/gm.
That means a man with a 2000-calorie-day diet would go through 492 lbs in a year, at a cost of $540/yr plus shipping.
Looks like shipping would cost $580 per USPS guidelines by weight.
A complete, balanced diet for $1120/yr or just under $94/mo.
Hmmmmmmm. Actually, my wife keeps our groceries down to $150/mo for two people, so that’s not a deal… but it would save labor on cooking dinner.
That’s quite admirable. I can do the same thing, but only with excruciating diligence. I have a tough time even keeping the cost of our pets (2 small dogs, 2 geckos, 1 hamster, 1 chinchilla, 2 fish tanks) down to less than $80/month.
Well, manna of course 
.
Oops—forgot the African Grey. :smack:
No it’s ambrosia that you can live on forever 
Terry Pratchett said you can live indefinitely off of dwarf bread. I’m not sure if that applies to humans, though.
You can’t live forever.
Two mid-sized dogs run us $32/mo including veterinarian costs, but as the dogs age, I expect total cost of ownership (TCO) to rise as maintenance expenses move towards the roof.
Our groceries used to run much higher.
I’ve had an individual on a certain financially-oriented message board claim that she can get costs down to a dollar a day per human. I have to imagine that diet is probably only marginally more exciting than Monkey Chow.
If TV dinners count as a “single food,” then I would think that any dinner that had a portion of meat, a portion of potatoes/fiber, and a vegetable portion would be a fairly balanced meal. Just stock up on Swanson the next time you’re out. I guess you could even smash it all together so it really is “food goop.”
Isn’t rice and beans supposed to be a sustainable diet? Though that’s not just one food either.
That link was a WHEE bit mangled.
Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarfs_(Discworld))
Color me dubious. I like to do that too—sometimes I calculate the exact cost of the meals that I’m preparing and play a game with it to see how far I can take it. It would probably depend a lot on where you live. Here in Los Angeles, food is about twice as expensive as it is in California’s central valley, which is generally a dirt cheap place to live. But even in Bakersfield or Fresno, eating off a dollar per day would be difficult. It could be done, but I would imagine that the diet would be composed almost entirely of rice, beans, potatoes, corn oil, and pasta without any dressing. That’s a pretty marginal existence, but in all fairness, my father told me that that’s how a lot of people ate during the Great Depression.
I don’t want to run the “low-cost dining” hijack on this thread too much further, but based on the board I was on, “the diet would be composed almost entirely of rice, beans, potatoes, corn oil, and pasta without any dressing” sounds like exactly what this lady, and that forum on that message board would reccomend.
It is the most extremely financially “cheap” forum I’ve ever seen, with the arguable exception of maybe FatWallet.
I did that, when I was very poor. One one-dollar TV dinner a day. Of course, I also made myself sick on that diet, so maybe it’s not such a good idea nutrition-wise.
In a time of hardship, I lived on 10 /week (including groceries other than food, like, say, soap). Actually less than 10/week (50 french francs/ week, to be exact), but since it was ten years ago, I think it’s about that when adjusted by inflation.
And I was able to eat everything : meat, eggs, vegetables, milk, cheese, fish, etc… though of course my menus included a lot of starchy foods (pastas, potatoes, etc…), and for instance “meat” was much more likely to be liver or heart than steack.
It’s surprising how you can eat for cheap when you really have to…
I imagine that human flesh would be pretty nutritious. If the guy or gal was healthy when “harvested” then they should have about any nutrient you need in an easily digestible form…er, uh…or at least so I’ve been told. :eek:
What about potatoes and milk? I’ve read that Irish peasants lived mostly on potatoes and milk before the Potato famine.
If the Monkey Chow didn’t catch your fancy, you might try Plumpy’nut - a mix of “peanut paste, vegetable oil, milk powder, vitamins and minerals, combined in a foil pouch”
It’s being used in Niger to feed hungry children:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article304628.ece
Arjuna34