Lets flag last time's discussion of v0.1 ahead of time, so we can move on and advance rather than rehash.
1) A little too much oil/fat to be politically correct, a bit too little to be nutritionally correct. Canola oil? I wouldn't put that in my car. Eat half as much olive oil if you have to, but don't eat that rot.
2) Carbs about right to be politically correct, WAY too much grains/carbs to be nutritionally correct. Gonna get fat fat fat on this diet and feel miserable.
3) The guy from a culture where the average TV viewership per capita is 4 hours and 38 minutes per day (per Neilson 2012) could never have spare the five minutes to throw some beans in a slow cooker. Also all home cooked meals take 8 hours to prepare because he says so. Finally multitasking has not been invented (serious, HN?) so time spent stirring a pot must be spent 100% focused on the stirring never a single brain cell firing on any other task. I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN.
4) The point of the article was to set a ridiculously low standard while figuring out how to make it survivable, therefore at least 10% of HN posts will be along the lines of "her diet sounds boring". Well, congrats at missing the whole point. I will admit that around version 1.0 it would be interesting to see how you can improve her diet plan with the delta of $5/person-day to $6/person-day. I spend about $12/person-day but my family eats like kings, we really do enjoy our fancy stuff. I don't think it would be possible to cook at home more expensively without doing ridiculous stuff like upgrading us from organic grass fed beef to imported Kobe, or dumping genuine saffron all over everything. Maybe if we ate morel mushrooms with everything instead of an occasional delicacy, for example.
I had to Google Canola oil as I'd never heard of it, but it seems to be a product name for rapeseed oil. If so what have you got against rapeseed oil. It's a great oil and every bit as 'valid' as olive oil and I use both when cooking all the time.
Sure you can buy shit rapeseed oil, but you can also buy equally shit olive oil, and I fail to see why you would think one better than the other. Or is it just that the Canola brand produces bad rapeseed oil.
> 3) The guy from a culture where the average TV viewership per capita is 4 hours and 38 minutes per day (per Neilson 2012) could never have spare the five minutes to throw some beans in a slow cooker. Also all home cooked meals take 8 hours to prepare because he says so. Finally multitasking has not been invented (serious, HN?) so time spent stirring a pot must be spent 100% focused on the stirring never a single brain cell firing on any other task. I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN.
This is low quality, and doesn't add to the discussion.
Here's a real case study; a mother, two children under six years old, mid-twenties, high school dropout, only has a bus pass and foodstamps. The closest grocery store is 3 miles away and she lives on government checks.
How much time do you believe it would take her to go to the grocery store to get fresh produce? How much time does it take someone with kids AND a car to get to the grocery store and back?
How much time have you devoted towards helping the poor? I mean actually sitting down with someone in the bottom 15% (not your friends-friend who's eating ramen at college or someone you heard of from high school) and how successful were you in training them to spend less money?
These topics are fine for what they are: Affluent people trying to spend less. They lose value when people look at the numbers and say "Gosh, this is so easy, why don't the poor just do this! Why don't they just buy a hybrid and save money on gas? Or maybe order all this stuff online with their macbooks to save time?".
314 carbs is around what a bodybuilder eats when he's bulking up. But bodybuilders eat 4 times this amount of protein (55 g). This diet is designed for a normal/small person obviously!
How much would it cost to throw a multivitamin in there? Get some zinc, magnesium, fish oils in there since there's no meat at all. Zinc is obviously important if you're a man since you need it to produce testosterone.
I must have been drunk or dyslexic when I read the original article. I could've sworn that the URL was supplementacos.com and throughout the article, I was wondering, "OK, where is the call to action to buy a 1 euro supplement-taco?"
That said, virtually all of the ingredients listed (even oranges, in a citrus salsa) could be combined to make some tasty tacos.
Very interesting! I'm currently on a strength training/bulking diet, so I'll need about 3-4 times as much protein, but there are some interesting tidbits in here that I'll probably try and incorporate into my diet. I currently spend probably 10-15 dollars per day on food, so if I can cut that down to something like $5 that would be a huge accomplishment. If successful maybe I'll make a blog post about it ;)
Buy palm oil, raw pork belly, plantains, milk and sugarless chocolate.
Palm oil and pork belly are rich in saturated fat, and they are cheap because of that.
Cut and fry the raw pork belly with a little bit of palm oil, then fry the plantains with the oil that's left.
Make the chocolate with half water-half milk.
Enjoy something really healthy for a keto-style diet. When the currently acknowledged science catches up with keto research, this will not be cheap anymore: remember the shortage of butter in Scandinavia. This food will be really expensive in 15-30 years. Enjoy while it lasts.
It'd be interesting to see if anyone could look at this from a more "business" point of view, basically investing money up front for a better quality diet for less cost over the long term. For instance, buying seeds and growing veg, herbs, etc. Even buying 2-3 chickens and keeping them in your garden for eggs and perhaps meat. It'd be interesting to see what kind of investment would be needed, what the running cost would be and how long before you got a 100% ROI back.
She came down pretty hard on that in the article, even to the point of not buying spices because the smallest container is an expensive three months supply. Which is too bad.
On the other hand allowing 80 pound sacks of rice vs the little 1 pound bags that cost 2x as much per pound is going to really distort and mess up her math, so maybe she needs to stick to her very strict budget.
Buy spices in bulk - save lots of money. The price per kg is the same as per 100g at your supermarket. And then you can get away with eating the same staple foods all the time.
More meat and at least some beef. Obviously you can't eat steak for dinner every day for £1 a day but come on, a little thinly sliced beef stir fried with some teriyaki sauce - I can skip lunch for that.
Why no pasta? It's awesome to use up any leftovers you may have.
Then again you got your budget down to ~30 quid and I'm at more than twice that (though I never get over 80 except when it spikes around every 6 months when I buy spices) so clearly you must be making better choices. My excuse is that I eat meat and bake cakes.
I pick vegetables from a community garden, buy lentils from the grocery store, cook them with spices.. add butter || peanut butter & quinoa for fats & more amino acids. Very healthy, very cheap, tastier than anything I find in restaurants.
Really depends on location. Cheap canned meats are available. Chickens are cheap but take work (see standard objections to gardening). Roadkill is viable (norm in rural areas). Hunting takes work but can be cheap per pound (somewhere around license around $20, gun for $100, $0.25 per shot).
VLM|12 years ago
1) A little too much oil/fat to be politically correct, a bit too little to be nutritionally correct. Canola oil? I wouldn't put that in my car. Eat half as much olive oil if you have to, but don't eat that rot.
2) Carbs about right to be politically correct, WAY too much grains/carbs to be nutritionally correct. Gonna get fat fat fat on this diet and feel miserable.
3) The guy from a culture where the average TV viewership per capita is 4 hours and 38 minutes per day (per Neilson 2012) could never have spare the five minutes to throw some beans in a slow cooker. Also all home cooked meals take 8 hours to prepare because he says so. Finally multitasking has not been invented (serious, HN?) so time spent stirring a pot must be spent 100% focused on the stirring never a single brain cell firing on any other task. I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN.
4) The point of the article was to set a ridiculously low standard while figuring out how to make it survivable, therefore at least 10% of HN posts will be along the lines of "her diet sounds boring". Well, congrats at missing the whole point. I will admit that around version 1.0 it would be interesting to see how you can improve her diet plan with the delta of $5/person-day to $6/person-day. I spend about $12/person-day but my family eats like kings, we really do enjoy our fancy stuff. I don't think it would be possible to cook at home more expensively without doing ridiculous stuff like upgrading us from organic grass fed beef to imported Kobe, or dumping genuine saffron all over everything. Maybe if we ate morel mushrooms with everything instead of an occasional delicacy, for example.
dagw|12 years ago
Sure you can buy shit rapeseed oil, but you can also buy equally shit olive oil, and I fail to see why you would think one better than the other. Or is it just that the Canola brand produces bad rapeseed oil.
columbo|12 years ago
This is low quality, and doesn't add to the discussion.
Here's a real case study; a mother, two children under six years old, mid-twenties, high school dropout, only has a bus pass and foodstamps. The closest grocery store is 3 miles away and she lives on government checks.
How much time do you believe it would take her to go to the grocery store to get fresh produce? How much time does it take someone with kids AND a car to get to the grocery store and back?
How much time have you devoted towards helping the poor? I mean actually sitting down with someone in the bottom 15% (not your friends-friend who's eating ramen at college or someone you heard of from high school) and how successful were you in training them to spend less money?
These topics are fine for what they are: Affluent people trying to spend less. They lose value when people look at the numbers and say "Gosh, this is so easy, why don't the poor just do this! Why don't they just buy a hybrid and save money on gas? Or maybe order all this stuff online with their macbooks to save time?".
frou_dh|12 years ago
The meal plan should be christened "This Week In Starch". Just look at it!
enraged_camel|12 years ago
If you think about the main demographic of HN - people in their 20s who have spent more time with computers than anything else - it makes sense. :)
mitchi|12 years ago
skrause|12 years ago
ajays|12 years ago
If you just throw beans into a slow cooker without boiling them, you can risk haemagglutinin toxicity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaseolus_vulgaris#Toxicity
papsosouid|12 years ago
danso|12 years ago
That said, virtually all of the ingredients listed (even oranges, in a citrus salsa) could be combined to make some tasty tacos.
yathern|12 years ago
pvnick|12 years ago
Kurtz79|12 years ago
ColinWright|12 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775071
DanBC|12 years ago
The author is doing one portion for one person. The upfront costs of herbs would be easier if you do the plan for two people.
Shorel|12 years ago
Buy palm oil, raw pork belly, plantains, milk and sugarless chocolate.
Palm oil and pork belly are rich in saturated fat, and they are cheap because of that.
Cut and fry the raw pork belly with a little bit of palm oil, then fry the plantains with the oil that's left.
Make the chocolate with half water-half milk.
Enjoy something really healthy for a keto-style diet. When the currently acknowledged science catches up with keto research, this will not be cheap anymore: remember the shortage of butter in Scandinavia. This food will be really expensive in 15-30 years. Enjoy while it lasts.
TamDenholm|12 years ago
VLM|12 years ago
She came down pretty hard on that in the article, even to the point of not buying spices because the smallest container is an expensive three months supply. Which is too bad.
On the other hand allowing 80 pound sacks of rice vs the little 1 pound bags that cost 2x as much per pound is going to really distort and mess up her math, so maybe she needs to stick to her very strict budget.
mitchi|12 years ago
Paul_S|12 years ago
More meat and at least some beef. Obviously you can't eat steak for dinner every day for £1 a day but come on, a little thinly sliced beef stir fried with some teriyaki sauce - I can skip lunch for that.
Why no pasta? It's awesome to use up any leftovers you may have.
Then again you got your budget down to ~30 quid and I'm at more than twice that (though I never get over 80 except when it spikes around every 6 months when I buy spices) so clearly you must be making better choices. My excuse is that I eat meat and bake cakes.
lenazegher|12 years ago
mseebach|12 years ago
ctz|12 years ago
quantumpotato_|12 years ago
juskrey|12 years ago
Come on, travel to South Africa and settle in savannah, hunting and gathering for free. Anything else will kill you in unnatural and premature way.
koide|12 years ago
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_South_Africa#Predat...
deletes|12 years ago
antoko|12 years ago
so then you can buy these from asda and add it to whatever you want.... why wait for the OP to do the work?
http://groceries.asda.com/asda-estore/catalog/sectionpagecon...
ctdonath|12 years ago
ctdonath|12 years ago
solox3|12 years ago
unknown|12 years ago
[deleted]