Cheap Nutrition

How much money should you be spending on food per day as inflation continues to raise food prices? Well, eating out at Five Guys for a meal will run you about $15 per meal and not be super healthy.

A simple meal that I enjoy quite a lot is just cheesy toast. I buy:

• Bauernbrot Rye Loaf Scratch Made ($3.50)
• HEB Select Colby Cheese 16 oz ($4.50)

and I put 2 oz worth of sliced cheese on a slice of bread, make 3 of them, stick them in the toaster oven, and wait until the cheese melts. Total ingredient cost: $0.21 (bread) + $0.56 (cheese) * 3 = $2.31 for a meal with the following nutrition profile:

Which is not only substantially healthier, but ~85% cheaper than fast food. 2 meals of that per day plus a multivitamin and some whole milk and you'd easily be eating at about $5-6 per day.

However, if you're willing to make your own bread, the bread cost goes even lower, by about half, so knock off $0.36 per meal or ~$0.70 per day. And the tastiness goes up as well. If you're even more intense you can make your own cheese from raw milk but that's noticeably more work and I have no idea how much money you save from it, though the tastiness probably increases again as well.

Granted, this is pretty minimalist, but compared to rice and beans I think it's both healthier and tastier. So mix in some more expensive meals, and some cheaper rice+beans meals and you should easily be able to eat for $10 per day or less, even in the modern climate.

I'm not saying this is some sort of revelation, but I've just been eating this a lot recently because of reading "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Price and I have to say I enjoy it.