In a Nickel and Dimed-esque blog post that details the budget meals meals he ate in college, Andrew Hyde claims you can eat healthily for no more than $36 for a month, or around 33 cents a meal.
Some of the advice seems relatively sound, barring Hyde’s scientific, yet utterly unappetizing tip that “Lard is the highest calorie per cent food you can buy.”
Yet, as a gluten-free, vegetarian art student with an enormous appetite and a non-enormous amount of money to spend, the article seems to avoid one of the easiest, time-strapped and time-honored solutions accessible to pretty much everyone, regardless of your preference in food or particular allergies—the crock pot.
Mild Moroccan lentil stews to spicy dahls, chili and all the other soups and long-simmering messes that you can think of can be cooking on the cheap while you’re not even in the apartment.
Food can be cooked in small or exceptionally large quantities, stacked into neat tupperware rows in your refrigerator or freezer, and reheated when you please.
Purveyors of fine vegetable stock can also easily create their omega-rich own by boiling down generally discarded kitchen scraps—tops and bottoms of carrots and celery, sweet potatoes, and other soup-friendly stuff from the garden—and letting the vegetable-rich water that remains soak flax seeds until ready to use.
I don’t get by on 33 cents a meal. But if you place your efforts on cooking vegetarian meals in a crock pot and potentially split a membership to a local CSA or organic distribution group with a friend or a neighbor, it’s definitely cheap and entirely healthy.
Tags: college, cooking, organic produce, vegetarian
I now eat Paleo which is quite a bit more but also makes me feel 1000x better (gluten free too, but has quite a bit of meat).