Extreme Poverty Foods and Meals

[iris lilies]

I don't see why--I would think it depends on the nutritional value of the other ingredients. If the rest of it is all macaroni and noodles, maybe, but as long as there are plenty of vegetables, I would actually prefer less red meat. I make a mushroom bourgingnon, but I make a separate stew of meat. I eat it meatless and I add the meat for DH. It's very healthy, with mushrooms, carrots, onions, celery, etc.

I love the dishes where mushroom act as beef.

[lmerullo]

Today's healthy is tomorrow's unhealthy.

There's a slow evolution to the meat-free lifestyle.

[JaneV2.0]

I guess I've devolved; I was a vegetarian for years in the nineties. I liked the food all right, but didn't find it particularly health-enhancing.

[rosarugosa]

Miss Cellaneous: Thanks for so clearly providing insight into circumstances so different from my own. I've always lived in the suburbs and always had access to a car for grocery shopping. I can see how this makes a big difference in what we are able to do. We also have at least 6 grocery stores within a 3-mile radius, which also makes a big difference.

[happystuff]

I usually make casseroles BECAUSE I can get away with only using 1 pound of meat! A budget is a budget... LOL.

[Tybee]

I think a big part of economising with food is to shop in season. for example, at thanksgiving we scored a turkey for 37 cents a pound and another for 67. So we stuck them in our yard sale freezer (40 dollars a couple of years ago) because my husband makes dog food for the dogs and needs a protein. So we eat off the turkey, probably 3 meals or so, and make sandwiches, and the rest goes into the dog food with our garden produce like squash, and the carrots are from the gas station giant bag of carrots for 5 dollars, which we are storing in straw right now. But there is only about 1 month in the year when you can get turkeys that cheap. Which reminds me, we ought to buy more and stick them in freezer for the summer.

[Miss Cellaneous]

Miss Cellaneous: Thanks for so clearly providing insight into circumstances so different from my own. I've always lived in the suburbs and always had access to a car for grocery shopping. I can see how this makes a big difference in what we are able to do. We also have at least 6 grocery stores within a 3-mile radius, which also makes a big difference.

I find it interesting that when I had an office job and no car, I had no problem shopping 2-3 times a week and walking home from the market with a couple of bags of food each time, and no problem cooking from scratch every day. I was also walking the 1.5 miles to and from work--much less stress than taking public transportation.

But when I took a retail job because I had been laid off and I had a car, feeding myself became an issue. The retail shifts were 9-10 hours long, spent on my feet, and I was dead tired at the end of the day and my feet hurt (humans were not designed to stand for hours on concrete floors). Did not want to go shopping after work, did not want to stand up to cook after being on my feet every day.

I found that I bought more processed food, lots of frozen food, because it was simple to prepare. And I found myself buying fast food at least once a week, because I'd procrastinated on food shopping and didn't have enough food at home. And the carbs--I was buying stuff I never buy, like doughnuts and dinner rolls and cookies--when they say you eat more carbs when you are tired, they are correct. I didn't head into the market with a plan to buy these things, but I'd get home and I would have a loaf of bread, a package of English muffins, rolls, bagels and cookies. They were what my body was craving.

It took a fair amount of self-discipline, and self-care in terms of getting enough sleep and rest, to get back to a healthy way of eating. Once I found permanent full-time office work again, all those problems disappeared in a few weeks and I was back to steamed broccoli and baking my own bread again.

That interlude was a real eye-opener for me, in a lot of ways.

[happystuff]

Miss Cellaneous, I totally agree and can relate. I work retail (not walking the floor of a box store, but...) and that bone-tired at the end of the day is not conducive to cooking. And this is the busiest time of the year to boot - more hours means bigger paycheck, but also more exhaustion. I try to prep as many meals for the week as I can on the weekend. Tomorrow will be my big "planning" day. If I'm really good, I'll make a veggie egg dish to cut up and have a piece for breakfast every weekday and then make a big salad for lunches, and then just plan out dinners in the cp or pre-prepped in the fridge. It pretty much kills my Sunday, but makes the week so much easier.

[Luna6544]

I also vegeterian and my friends laugh at me as I eat only salads. I have some great tools for cutting vegetables and I preapre diverse types of salads with my mandoline slicer. I love to use all kinds of vegetables

[jp1]

Currently SO and I live in a place where at one end of the block is a safeway, at the other a fruit/veggie store, and a block past that a butcher shop. It's the opposite of a food desert. It's a food oasis. We eat well and one or the other of us is stopping in at one of the stores at least every other day. No more wasted anything because we only buy what we're going to eat in the next day or two. And my job is a cushy office job so I don't mind spending 1/2 or 3/4 hour every night cooking something reasonably healthy.

Our first apartment in San Francisco was not so conveniently located. (and we didn't own a car then) The nearest safeway wasn't far, just over half a mile away, 2 stops by transit. But what a difference. We both dreaded going to the store, ordered a lot of pizza and other delivered food, bought a ton of stuff from the middle of the store that could be at the ready in our freezer, spent a lot on safeway's delivery service. As upper middle class DINKs cost didn't really enter into the equation, but we still went with the easy/unhealthy choices.