How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

Lets flag last time's discussion of v0.1 ahead of time, so we can move on and advance rather than rehash.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 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?"<p>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 ;)

An interesting read, and I would still prefer spending an year with this diet than a week on Soylent.

Why not do this as a more up-to-date, honest-to-goodness Linear Programming problem? Why all this faffing about with approximate sums by hand?<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775071" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775071</a>

This is a mildly interesting experiment. I kind of wish a more realistic budget had been allocated.<p>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.

My own version:<p>Buy palm oil, raw pork belly, plantains, milk and sugarless chocolate.<p>Palm oil and pork belly are rich in saturated fat, and they are cheap because of that.<p>Cut and fry the raw pork belly with a little bit of palm oil, then fry the plantains with the oil that's left.<p>Make the chocolate with half water-half milk.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>Why no pasta? It's awesome to use up any leftovers you may have.<p>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.

v0.1 discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685812" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685812</a>

I wonder what the "5-a-day" vegetable recommendation is based on - surely it can't be as simple as 5x80 grams of any plant?

I pick vegetables from a community garden, buy lentils from the grocery store, cook them with spices.. add butter || peanut butter &#38; quinoa for fats &#38; more amino acids. Very healthy, very cheap, tastier than anything I find in restaurants.

Is naive diet rationalisation a new hacker's disease? To die for math that is not working in long period, anyway?<p>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.

I really want to see some meat on that menu. I hope they do a 1.5£ or 2£ version.

Apart from being cheap, this is also very denture-friendly. Chewing is absolutely required only 1/6 of the time (carrots, seeds).