The challenge: Put together a filling, nutritious, good-tasting meal for the minimum cost. At average grocery retail prices. I’m in the suburbs of Washington, DC and I usually shop at Giant Food and Safeway. There’s also the cost of energy to cook the food; I don’t know how to estimate that, but let’s assume that for this amount of cooking on my gas stove it’s negligible.
I’m actually quite fond of corn pone with pinto beans. Mmm-mm, old-fashioned down-home American good eats. Here’s how it breaks down:
Cost:
Item Mass Cost
Corn pone:
1 cup cornmeal 120 grams $0.21
1 cup tap water 105 grams (insignificant, <$0.01)
0.5 tsp salt 3 grams (insignificant, <$0.01)
1.5 tbs oil 21 grams $0.11
Pinto beans:
0.5 cup dry beans100 grams $0.39
1 cup tap water 105 grams (insignificant, <$0.01)
½ onion 100 grams $0.28
1 tsp cayenne 0.5? grams $0.01
0.25 tsp salt 1.5 grams (insignificant, <$0.01)
Total 577 grams **$1.00**
Nutrition:
1,008 kilocalories
27 grams fat
32 grams protein
165 grams carbohydrate
25% RDA Vitamin C
53% RDA Iron
16% RDA Calcium
There you go: One lousy dollar is all it takes to satisfy Johanna’s tummy, nourish her adequately—and even taste good into the bargain.
Which means you’re paying above-average grocery prices. And probably aren’t allowed to keep chickens. I’m ahead already! (I was thinking about something along these lines recently, so I’ll come back and actually do the math if I get a chance.)
How much is rice per pound at the grocery store? Cornmeal is the cheapest foodstuff in the grocery that I know of. The good local brand around here, which I use, is Indian Head cornmeal from Maryland at $0.80/lb. Whole grain, stone ground, and impressively economical. In Montana, would rice be cheaper than in the DC area because the overall cost of living is way cheaper, or more expensive because of the long distance to truck it all the way from Arkansas?
OK, Chronos, you got me. I looked it up and where I live, the cheapest white rice at Safeway is a mere $0.69/lb. I hadn’t been aware of that because I always buy brown rice which costs about twice as much, for some reason that makes no economic sense to me because it requires less processing than white. Price supports for white rice only? Well, you’re in the lead then. If you substituted 120g of rice for the cornmeal, the meal would cost only about $0.96. Omitting the oil would bring it down to $0.85. And you would have a nice mess of gallo pinto.
I think it’s a function of economy of scale (white rice is a bigger market) and the fact that white rice keeps better (years versus months) by virtue of losing the oils in the bran.
Oh yeah. “Rice and beans” sounds so blah, though. With just a little onion, garlic, tomatoes, seasoning (and one lemon) you could serve basmati, daal tarka, and channa masala.
I used to regularly feed a houseful of poor slackers to repletion for ~$5 this way.
1 cup of rice
1 cup of lentils
1 can of chick peas
2 onions
Tomatoes (purchased sloppy ripe for $1 a bag)
1 lemon
Company coming - a head of cauliflower and a couple potatoes and you’ve got aloo gobi.
Learn to cook indian and suddenly it’s possible to be poor without eating poorly or feeling poor in the kitchen. Just so long as you have the spices handy…
Unlike most things that I subsisted on when times were tight, I still make these dishes now that I’m well settled in bourgeois existence and my wife’s reaction is not at all the same as it would be if I set KD or instant ramen down in front of my family. (Though it probably helps that I usually serve them with some variety of curried meat as well, now.)
That reminds me, I used to buy big bags of frozen “vegetarian chicken” (and other products, for variet) from a specialty shop in our neighbourhood that supplies Buddhist vegetarian restaurants. Very very tasty (not like most “mock meat” you find) and so inexpensive it seems like a miracle. I’m so glad that they never worked out that they could have sold their product for ten times more if focused on a different demographic.
I wish that they were close enough to justify a trip down there once in a while.
Oh, absolutely. Rice and beans, in some form or another, is the staple food for darned near the entire planet.
I don’t actually buy much rice myself, so I can’t be sure, but $.69 a pound for rice sounds exorbitantly expensive to me. In general, around here, things that are mostly water cost about the same as out East (the lower general cost of living more or less cancels out the relative scarcity of water), but dry-ish things are significantly cheaper.
Baked beans over tater tots is reasonably good and costs almost nothing. Probably not the lowest, but definitely put it on your list if you want to do some sort of shantytown diet.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t share the Cheap Eats blog in this thread.
I get a lot of mileage out of potatoes, too, though their price has climbed more steeply than other cheap foodstuffs since I began shopping for myself all those years ago. Tater tots, though, as a rule I shun processed anything when I can make things from scratch, so all I ever buy is the basic unprocessed ingredients as much as possible, fresh taters instead of tots. I bake all my own bread.
Chronos, I took up your suggestion and I’m chowing down on beans & rice for dinner tonight. Sure is good.
Actually homemade tater tots are outrageously good, and even cheaper than storebought. More work, of course, but if you appreciate fresh whole foods and “the hand of the cook,” it may be worth it.
If counting the extreme low cost of what grows in my garden, I can make a meal out of an egg, a single strip of bacon and a bunch of my home-grown veggies. The egg and bacon combined are maybe 50 cents. Potatoes, peppers, chives and broccoli are darn near free. But I also add about 8-10 drops of Cholula hot sauce. But the total cost is definitely under a buck.
Tater tots might actually be cheaper than whole potatoes, if you get them in bulk. The reason they were invented in the first place was to find a use for the scraps of potato left over from making things like French fries. Since they’re made from what would otherwise be a waste product, they’re profitable at almost any price.
Today I cut the bad part off a big potato, scrounged in the refrigerator and cut up a wilting green pepper, a chunk of onion, and two slices of leftover ham. Cooked it all in a little oil in a pan, and I have enough of this stuff for two meals, if I stretch it with eggs and toast. Pretty sure it cost around $2 . The point is, someone else would have thrown all those bits and pieces out, but I just made do with what I had.
If you buy whole potatoes in comparable bulk, you should be able to do better, though obviously local or temporary conditions might create odd markets sometimes. The main practical factor would be storage–how many whole potatoes or bags of frozen tots can you really keep? Big processing companies are set up to handle huge volumes to their advantage, and the largest share of the potato crop is produced according to their schedule and requirements. Just-folks can’t handle truckloads of either whole or processed potatoes.
That was years ago. Tater tots have been a standard production item for a while now. They’re part of the profitability calculus for the entire potato crop and processing plant system. The price of things like french fries now includes the expectation that so many tater tots will be made. They’re not a byproduct.
Look at what happened to chicken wings AKA buffalo wings. They USED to be what the poor people ate. I had the urge to buy some recently (wanted to try a new recipe), saw the price :eek: on the bag, and just moved on.
Here’s how it breaks down: