[tnel]

My response is that not everything is South East Asian prices, and even in Cambodia you can pay a lot for food if you're eating at the wrong places and eating more expensive stuff. Mexican food is expensive here and not particularly good for instance. (My Cambodian friends do make some really good home made Mexican food from scratch sometimes though)

Honestly I like cheese and potatoes and egg and all, I just don't think I could consume that much of those in a day. I rarely eat eggs or dairy or bread just because they're not so popular over in Asia. I am known for eating much more than Cambodians though.

Typically I skip breakfast, then for lunch I make a rice cooker full of rice and I go to the Asian "fast food" place and buy 2 bags of ready made food (either ginger chicken, stir fried eggplant, green beans and tofu, beef intestine curry with morning glories, palm sugar pork fat soup, or bitter gourd ground pork soup) and we eat that on our rice.

Typically those two bags of food cost us $1.50 and feeds 4 people, the cost of the rice being so negligible I don't count it. We usually get 2 meals a day like that which comes out to $3 or $4 a day for 4 people and we eat to our heart's content.

In-between meals I'll eat bananas or papayas that grow in our yard. Often I'll eat a lot of those at a time so that they don't spoil. I also make a lot of oatmeal chocolate coconut peanut butter no-bake cookies. (These are a bit more expensive treat and maybe cost $0.15 a piece in materials)

When we eat at the regular places in Cambodia it's usually $2.50 a meal per person, so we try to avoid that.

Coming back to the United States, most regular restaurants seem to cost at least $12 a person and it's a bit weird for me since I prefer eating cheap home-made meals and don't really get the appeal of restaurants.