Feeding a family for one week

Sciforum members usually do not represent the masses. While younger days, I ate all sorts of stuff ...these days, I eat a reasonable amount of proteins as in Eggs, Chicken, Fish, Beef and Pork, Lentils and Protein powder as in milk shake when I do not have time to have something prepared. American store bought breads have tons of various chemicals, so we do our own bread once a while in a bread machine...otherwise it is easier to cook rice. We do drink lots of Water, Milk, Orange juice, grape juice, mixed fruit juices etc.

For some reason, the local water even after going through the filter does not agree with me, so I buy distilled water which is cheaper than the bottled drinking water...and so far no stomach problems for the last 5 years....

 

Pre-chewed? Can not buy dentures?

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Good goddess, you're spending $150-$300 a month (plus splurge) for one person! That would be $600-$1,200 per month for the standard family of four! Single people generally spend a ruddy fortune on food compared to married people, especially those with children. One obvious reason is that the families simply can't afford to eat that way, another is that generally at least one member of the family actually knows how to cook a decent meal, and finally it is a little more enjoyable to eat at home if you're not alone. Still, people like Neildo bring the average up. Some family out there is getting by on $250 a month to bring it back down!

Well of course. Mass production brings prices down, that's what the Industrial Revolution was all about! Trying to eat a Neolithic diet in a nation of agribusiness factory farming is like trying to drive a horse cart down the freeway. It's a sweet nostalgic idea, but the infrastructure isn't there to make it practical.

You have to REALLY feel strongly about it to:

• A. Override Homo sapiens's instinctive taste for meat. We are, after all, the only primate with a digestive system adapted to a hunter's diet.
• B. Balance a meatless diet. It's not easy to get the amino acids right, much less the vitamins and minerals. Especially for the people who don't even eat milk and eggs, which have some of the same nutritional value as meat. Life expectancy at the dawn of the Neolithic Era (the Agricultural Revolution) was around 50 for an adult who survived childhood. In the Roman Empire, when people had converted to a grain-intensive diet, it was down in the 20s.
• C. Pay for a non-carnivorous diet, especially one with no milk and eggs. Those vitamin-mineral supplements are expensive. You have to do some pretty fancy balancing of grains against nuts and seeds to get the proper amino acids for protein regeneration. Otherwise you end up like the Romans.

 

So you're one of the ones who has indeed overridden your body's adaptation to a carnivorous diet. Apparently to at least some degree because as you grew up you developed a moral philosophy against it. Most people hunger for meat to the point that not being able to eat it regularly is a major factor in their definition of "poverty." Although in the West our agricultural practices are such that a well-balanced diet with plenty of meat is not the most expensive way to eat.

Perhaps some day everyone will be like you. I don't evangelize meat eating and I respect people who don't do it. My wife won't let me get a potbellied pig because she'd have to stop eating pork and that's the only mammal meat she really likes. I draw the line at bunnies.

Some of those prices are outrageous. You need to get a Costco card or at least find a discount market. A three-dollar stack of tortillas is an armload. I put cheese in my eggs every morning and it often goes in my dinner, and three bucks worth lasts me a week. You should be able to get a pack of five peppers for five dollars.

For the goddess's sake, that water comes out of the same municipal supply as your kitchen faucet. It's honestly labeled as "purified water" and that's exactly what the city contracts to sell you for a monthly fee. They already outed Aquafina for having literally nothing in their factory but faucets--couldn't bust 'em because it was legal: "purified water." Get yourself a Brita or Pur filter pitcher and change the filter every three months. You'll actually have the filtered water you want that way, and save a fortune. too.

This is how people run up their budgets, it doesn't take a daily trip to Starbucks. They spend a ruddy fortune on the same water they get at home--or maybe somebody else's home in a different city. And they shop at Safeway instead of Costco. Sure you have to buy larger quantities but even if the stuff at the bottom of the sack goes soggy before you get down to it, it's still cheaper than supermarket prices. Use your freezer, get a vacuum bag sealer, be creative. We make our own dog food; for twelve dogs the annual savings are way up into four figures.

If you mean literally "junk food" and not just canned or frozen food--which is perfectly nutritious--you're doing something terribly wrong. I treat myself to frozen burritos or tamales from Trader Joe's once or twice a week (my wife and I are on opposite coasts due to my job so I don't get her home cookin') and I think they cost me less than your home-made fajitas, and they are most definitely not junk food. But by my standards $2.50 for those suckers is an expensive meal. It doesn't cost me anywhere near that much to cook up the ingredients I get at Costco. Pasta with imported Italian sauce, fresh ground Romano cheese, and sausage that I cook up in five-pound batches and freeze.

What kind of cheap-shit place is this that they don't have a microwave oven in the lunch room to boil a cup of water??? I hope they pass the savings on to you in a really generous salary.

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Suze Orman tried to help a "poor" lady balance her budget and she was spending $2,500 a year at Starbucks. I suppose I wouldn't be quite so contemptuous of them if they actually made gourmet coffee!

Yeah, that is a problem. I don't mind eating the same thing four nights in a row. I remember how good it was last night and I sort of look forward to having it again. I'm also not respectful of eating conventions. When my wife makes a big batch of something she has to freeze the leftovers right away or I'll want it every night. Sometimes I'm in a hurry or I just have a taste for a couple of peanut butter and cheese sandwiches on multi-grain bread for dinner, and I'm sure that doesn't cost 75 cents.

Like I say, even if you end up tossing some of it in the compost or donating it to the homeless guy outside the subway station, it might still be cheaper than buying in smaller quantities. The stores aren't ripping you off so much as that the packaging, shipping and handling just become so much more expensive.

I can't use those big plastic bottles either, but if you buy a 24- or 36-pack of regular 12oz soda cans at Costco they're about 30 cents each.

I suppose that's a salad for two or three nights? You're spending as much on salad as I do in two weeks and I eat one almost every night. They sell about half of those things at Costco and even the greens will last two weeks if you stuff them with paper towels, store them in the hydrator bin, and set your fridge temperature very carefully. They sell a three-pound bag of broccoli, florettes only, pre-washed, for about $4.00. I don't eat lettuce because spinach has more vitamins and minerals, but they sell spinach the same way and there's almost no kitchen chore I hate worse than washing spinach! You'll get really big cans or jars of olives and stuff like that at great savings.

 

That's just about exactly $500. (When I was a kid it was always $5/£1 and one of your pennies was worth two of ours.

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) That's not bad for six people. Especially since the U.S. is a major food exporter and it's generally cheaper over here.

Perhaps it's cheaper at supermarket prices but their price for packaged broccoli is about three times per pound what it is at Costco. I find that once I throw away the stalks (yuck!), Costco's is significantly cheaper.

Maybe all veggies are pre-washed these days, but they're lying out in open bins and everybody paws them. Considering how dirty my hands are sometimes when I walk into a market I can't blame people if the schmutz they put on the veggies is worse than the schmutz that the farmers already washed off.

And then I see rugrats reaching through their kiddie seats and playing with the food. Barf city.

 

I'm an unrepentant carnivore. Well, carno-chocolativore anyway. I eat vegetables because they're good for me, not because I like them. There are certain things, well actually a great many things, that the Fraggle does not eat. Number one on that list is celery. Broccoli stalks are pretty high, right next to Brussels sprouts, and you don't have to go too far down it to find zucchini.

So when all your zucchini plants bear fruit this summer and you go around leaving giant grocery bags full of zucchini on all your neighbors' doorsteps in the middle of the night, you can skip mine.

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When my wife makes soup it's got chicken, noodles, and matzo balls in it. Broccoli stalks go in the compost.

Vegetables I love: avocado, red cabbage... well wait there must be more... yeah, okra, cabbage with corned beef, eggplant parmigiano, bok choy.

And as we all know, chocolate is a vegetable.

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Yes I know, real Fraggles subsist on radishes. I guess my cover is blown.

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