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Femur

I have a few simple and general rules that I try to follow:

1. I try not to eat anything that does not easily rot. This generally keeps me away from processed food.

2. I try to eat a lot of things that are green (vegetables).

3. I purchase organic when I can.

4. Excellent ingredients minimally handled usually make for the best recipes.

These rules make for healthy and great tasting food. I am a single male and my monthly food budget is around $300. I buy from a weekly farmers market, Whole Foods, and occasionally WalMart.

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I try not to eat anything that does not easily rot.

Oatmeal and nuts are important exceptions to that rule.

Excellent ingredients minimally handled usually make for the best recipes.

This is the theory behind Italian cooking. The theory behind French cooking is that anything is edible with enough garlic and butter..

Yeah, for me, everything is edible enough with black pepper. My dad can eat anything with enough soy sauce, haha.

I have to say, dumplings are cheap and delicious also. Nutritious enough if you make seafood dumplings or vegetable dumplings.

Oatmeal is so delicious! I made a habit of keeping a container of oatmeal (bought in large bags from costco - no steel cut, but good enough) soaked in soy/cow milk in the refrigerator overnight. Serve cold the next morning with dried or fresh fruit or whatever else you might fancy (yes, it's muesli). For cold mornings, I'll go with hot oatmeal instead and steel cut, otherwise it's too much work to serve steel cut oats cold. It's a really flexible food with (what is to me) an infinite combination when it comes to toppings, and best of all it's cheap and nutritious.

The traditional way is this: soak in warm water overnight with a little vinegar, then warm it up the next morning slowly, serve with salt and a little butter. Delicious!

For a treat sometimes I have it with maple syrup and vanilla icecream...

"soy/cow milk"

I read that as "soy sauce or cow milk" the first time. Yuck.

Actually, you can use soy sauce and sesame oil to flavor Oatmeal, but then you are going for savory, not cinnamon/sweet. Most people wouldn't like that if you told them what it was, though. Flipping to savory from sweet or vice-versa grosses lots of people out.

Gosh, I'm spending barely $450-500 for a family of three.

That's probably a bad thing. Good healthy food, like proper cuts of meat and wild fish, is not cheap. Peasant food is cheap. Eat the cheap starch and lousy meat like the peasants and you'll find yourself bloated and waddling around just like them. I drop $150 a week on just me, easy.

I think you may want to reconsider your preferences among the food industry. Having a rich taste is one thing, but outright accusing less pricey foods as being lower quality is not exactly accurate. I can't imagine spending $150 a week on myself without buying * incredibly * fine cuts of meat on a daily basis.

I eat pretty good food on < $10/day.

Absolutely. Inexpensive cuts of meat are by no means 'worse' than expensive cuts. Certain cuts are always going to be expensive, such as fillet of beef, rack of lamb, but more under-appreciated (and cheaper) cuts can be just as good.

As for examples, pork belly is still very cheap, even since it came into fashion a few years ago, and is much more flavoursome than other cuts. Chicken legs are much cheaper than chicken breast, despite the former having more flavour. Rump steak is more flavoursome than Sirloin. Offal can be delicious, too, and despite its cheapness it is used in the very best restaurants without compunction. You simply have to know what you're looking for.

You can eat healthy on a whole lot less. My family is pretty health conscious (we are all vegetarians, and my mom is pretty much vegan). And I am sure we have never spent 500 a month for a family of three.

Not everything needs to be organic. Some foods usually have low levels of pesticides. And while Whole Foods has high quality food, it is usually pretty expensive. You can get high quality food for less money elsewhere.

That said, at least your food is probably healthy and high quality.

There are even some foods that are just unsafe organic. Pork (less interesting to you, being vegetarian, bear with me) is not nearly as safe, there's been a rise in trichinosis cases at least related to organic pork. I know I've seen evidence suggesting organic celery is worth avoiding too, but I can't find it now.

In any case, agreed that you don't have to spend an arm and a leg to get healthy food. Expensive often doesn't even indicate better food, just more aggressively marketed at suckers that'll pay more.

> My family is pretty health conscious (we are all vegetarians, and my mom is pretty much vegan)

Vegetarianism is not healthy.

Vegetarianism is not isomorphic to healthfulness, but it is healthy.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10627874

There is much more research on the topic.

It has also been shown that the same benefits arise from "flexitarianism", or limited meat consumption.

There are many ways how to eat healthy and stay on the low budget at the same time.

One of the first things here is to be smart when you shop. It takes time to find good places, and I'm even commuting 20 miles every two weeks for some grocery shopping, but I can buy high quality food very inexpensively. 20 miles sounds like a great deal, especially, when you'll think about the average total in the receipt (rarely less then $150-200).

And the second thing, organic is a buzz. Buying organic doesn't automatically mean you are buying healthy food. Buying non-organic labeled stuff, doesn't mean you're buying crap.

Whatever, eating habits are eating habits, and I'm not here to change minds. :) I still think that $500/month for a family of three is pretty much enough. However, I can't argue with the fact, that you can spend unlimited amount of dollars on food -- sky is the limit.

things that are processed do not easily rot... am i wrong?

take for example this pancake i bought from mcdonalds, i left it in my truck for like 7 months, still looked as good as new, kinda like this

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2008/09/12-year-old-mcdo...

I try not to eat anything that does not easily rot...

yeah, that's what he said. He used a double negation.

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