Happy to say I’m past the piss-broke stage of life, but I’ll never forget how much is sucks. One of the really shitty things about it is all the products marketed toward selling us a ‘cheap’ meal, and we buy it because you don’t question it: it’s poverty food, right? Must be among the cheapest options in the store, right?
Then you start pricing stuff out by things like cost-per-gram and realize you’re getting ripped off. To answer OPs question, I’d call that dish: predatory, bc it’s an up-charged box of ingredients that you can buy separately in probably that same aisle for much cheaper.
For anyone reading this who is stuck in that hell, first off: /hug. Second, the real poverty food MVP is rice. I don’t recall the price off the top of my head, and even if I did I’m sure it’s inflated since I was a frequent buyer, but look for “fortified short grain” which is usually the least expensive and is ‘fortified’ with some extra nutrients to get something other than carbs. Buy it in bulk - you can get it in 50lb bags at places like Costco (if you don’t have a membership, mooch a ride there off someone who does, they can get you through the door/checkout) or Asian/Middle Eastern grocery stores. Price it out to what you’re paying for the amount used in a single meal, and it’s like a literal nickel.
Rice makes for a boring meal by itself, but it’ll fill you up. Your second best friend is the clearance shelf. Pretty much any meat or veggie can go with rice. You’d be surprised how well other shit work with rice too… I recall having a single slice of shitty supreme pizza in the fridge; not enough for a satisfying meal, but, fuck it, whipped up a serving of rice, chopped up the slice of pizza crust and all, and threw it in when the rice was just about soft enough to eat and kinda stir fried it in. The oils from the cheese and sausage all got soaked up by the rice… end result wasn’t amazing by any stretch, but it was away more satisfying than a single slice of pizza or bowl of plain rice, tasted decent, costed pennies.
Pro tip: buy some snack-sized ziplock bags, measure out what you need for a serving, portion it into a ton of individual bags, and keep those in a sealed 5-gallon buckets. There’s a type of beetle that lays its eggs in rice, and it may not hatch until after you’ve bought it. Then they propagate, and there are tiny beetles all over the batch… and losing the better part of a 50lb bag to those fuckers is pretty heart breaking. If you portion it out first, and then it hatches, you lose a single-portion ziplock full. No biggie. Also keep the empty ziplocks and reuse them for the next big bag of rice.
Also get a cheap rice cooker as soon as you can afford it - a pot works fine, but a rice cooker will get you much more consistent results for much less effort.
If you have a grocery nearby that sells cheap goods from south of the border, grab some plantains. Wait until they’re good and dark, peel, cut them in half lengthwise and then in about 2” pieces and fry them. Making me hungry just thinking about it. Sofrito for the rice.
One of my favorite cheap meals.
(USD)
Sofrito jar 2.99
25 lb bag of rice 13.50 (~55 cups of rice, 25¢ a cup)
I noticed it happened a few years ago, I would get the goya one out of convenience. Maybe people caught on at how it’s a jar of magical goodness lol. Lucky for me there’s a mom pop shop that makes it from scratch.
Pro tip: buy some snack-sized ziplock bags, measure out what you need for a serving, portion it into a ton of individual bags, and keep those in a sealed 5-gallon buckets. There’s a type of beetle that lays its eggs in rice, and it may not hatch until after you’ve bought it. Then they propagate, and there are tiny beetles all over the batch… and losing the better part of a 50lb bag to those fuckers is pretty heart breaking. If you portion it out first, and then it hatches, you lose a single-portion ziplock full. No biggie. Also keep the empty ziplocks and reuse them for the next big bag of rice.
Do this, but also Freeze 'em.
The beetles you’re talking about are common in pretty much every grain. Freezing kills the beetles, the larvae, and the eggs. I’d suggest gallon-sized freezer bags rather than snack sized. If you don’t need the space for anything else, just store the bags in the freezer. If you do need the space, freeze the bags for a week, then move them to the buckets.
Same trick works for flour, oats, etc. Any grains you bring home should go straight into the freezer for a week before you move them to the pantry.
An additional benefit: Freezers are most efficient when they are kept completely full. The thermal mass and insulation of 50lbs of rice and/or other grains will keep your perishables frozen for days during a power outage.
it’s an up-charged box of ingredients that you can buy separately in probably that same aisle for much cheaper.
Yeah, this product is an awful choice for the budget conscious.
Pasta is like $1.20/lb. There are many different ways to dress up pasta with other ingredients, whether saucy or cheesy or creamy or oily or even relatively dry seasoning. You can add a cheap protein source. You can add vegetables. In many forms, pasta is still a one-pan dish that can be made in about 20 minutes, where you prep ingredients as the water boils. Or you can put in a lot of effort (all-day sauces, hand-pounded pesto, etc.).
My favorite low effort, cheap and nutritionally complete meal is boiling a package of pasta, dumping in a can of beans, dumping in a can of premade chili, and shredding a bunch of cheddar over it. The macros are good, even for athletes, it’s cheap, and it’s easy.
As you mention, rice is between $1 to $2 per pound, based on quantity and type. There are a ton of options around that, too.
Not to derail your point, but rice can be especially bad for people (myself included) where carbs (esp. white rice) make you hungry. If you’re one of those people where Chinese food makes you hungry an hour later, it’s usually because your insulin spikes in response to the rice.
For those people, obviously try to avoid white rice (and flour, sugar, and potatoes). Brown rice usually includes the fiber on the outside (which gets stripped away for processed white rice) which at least slows the carb rush.
Fresh or even frozen, unprocessed veggies that you have to cook yourself are still remarkably cheap, even in this economy. A pan of random chopped veggies and some random seasonings from the spice aisle (no blends!) can easily get you a filling and nutritious meal, and still cheaper than a box of hamburger helper.
Oh, 100% this is unhealthy as fuck. I gained a ton of weight when I was piss broke cuz all I could afford was rice - exceptions were a treat. When you’re that tight on cash though, you start to prioritize it over pretty much everything else, including your own body.
Spending any more on food would have required cutting into something critical like rent - I never did have to deal with homelessness, but boy did I toe that line.
In any case, this is desperation diet - hopefully for a very short term leading up to having the means to live a healthier lifestyle.
The catch for brown rice is it’s one of the few whole grains that turn rancid fairly quickly. Don’t buy 50 pounds unless you can subdivide it into vacuum sealed bags with oxygen absorbers, lest you end up with 48 pounds of rancid rice.
My guess is that cooling the rice causes some of the starches to polymerize into longer chains that are harder for your body to digest, which lowers the glycemic index of the food.
I also prefer very short grained rice, which has slightly higher protein to starch ratio and reheats better. This stuff is often sold as “sushi rice.” If you’re on a budget, Calrose medium grain is fine. (If you’re not on a budget, tamanishiki koshihikari is my favorite bougie short grain rice.)
Afaik it’s literally cook rice then cool it in fridge overnight before you use it. Something about the process makes the starch change and it’s better for people with the beetus. I am not a food scientist and idk how it works.
It certainly looks like it would be better than regular rice. From some quick googling, it acts more like fiber and is better for diabetics. If I had to eat rice, it’s probably what I would do.
Happy to say I’m past the piss-broke stage of life, but I’ll never forget how much is sucks. One of the really shitty things about it is all the products marketed toward selling us a ‘cheap’ meal, and we buy it because you don’t question it: it’s poverty food, right? Must be among the cheapest options in the store, right?
Then you start pricing stuff out by things like cost-per-gram and realize you’re getting ripped off. To answer OPs question, I’d call that dish: predatory, bc it’s an up-charged box of ingredients that you can buy separately in probably that same aisle for much cheaper.
For anyone reading this who is stuck in that hell, first off: /hug. Second, the real poverty food MVP is rice. I don’t recall the price off the top of my head, and even if I did I’m sure it’s inflated since I was a frequent buyer, but look for “fortified short grain” which is usually the least expensive and is ‘fortified’ with some extra nutrients to get something other than carbs. Buy it in bulk - you can get it in 50lb bags at places like Costco (if you don’t have a membership, mooch a ride there off someone who does, they can get you through the door/checkout) or Asian/Middle Eastern grocery stores. Price it out to what you’re paying for the amount used in a single meal, and it’s like a literal nickel.
Rice makes for a boring meal by itself, but it’ll fill you up. Your second best friend is the clearance shelf. Pretty much any meat or veggie can go with rice. You’d be surprised how well other shit work with rice too… I recall having a single slice of shitty supreme pizza in the fridge; not enough for a satisfying meal, but, fuck it, whipped up a serving of rice, chopped up the slice of pizza crust and all, and threw it in when the rice was just about soft enough to eat and kinda stir fried it in. The oils from the cheese and sausage all got soaked up by the rice… end result wasn’t amazing by any stretch, but it was away more satisfying than a single slice of pizza or bowl of plain rice, tasted decent, costed pennies.
Pro tip: buy some snack-sized ziplock bags, measure out what you need for a serving, portion it into a ton of individual bags, and keep those in a sealed 5-gallon buckets. There’s a type of beetle that lays its eggs in rice, and it may not hatch until after you’ve bought it. Then they propagate, and there are tiny beetles all over the batch… and losing the better part of a 50lb bag to those fuckers is pretty heart breaking. If you portion it out first, and then it hatches, you lose a single-portion ziplock full. No biggie. Also keep the empty ziplocks and reuse them for the next big bag of rice.
Also get a cheap rice cooker as soon as you can afford it - a pot works fine, but a rice cooker will get you much more consistent results for much less effort.
Add some beans and spices to that rice for an almost nutrient complete meal that can taste pretty damned good.
^ Beans FTW.
Dress it up with hot sauce if you can find it.
Getting slightly off the path of “cheap”…
If you have a grocery nearby that sells cheap goods from south of the border, grab some plantains. Wait until they’re good and dark, peel, cut them in half lengthwise and then in about 2” pieces and fry them. Making me hungry just thinking about it. Sofrito for the rice.
One of my favorite cheap meals.
(USD)
Sofrito jar 2.99
25 lb bag of rice 13.50 (~55 cups of rice, 25¢ a cup)
1 lb beans, pinto 1.19, black 1.59 (2 cups/bag, 60¢ cup)
Hot sauce 1.19
Plantains 65¢ each.
Rice and beans, decent serving, 1 cup cooked each makes a good amount, 85¢ total. Assuming some salt is already available to cook the rice with.
So adding a cup of sofrito, a dash of hot sauce, and cooking up a plantain will add a little over $2 to the total, make it $3 for the whole meal.
It’s crazy that those jars of sofrito got so expensive. I used to buy them for a dollar and change.
Probably tariffs? No idea. Yeah, they used to be like $1 or so.
I noticed it happened a few years ago, I would get the goya one out of convenience. Maybe people caught on at how it’s a jar of magical goodness lol. Lucky for me there’s a mom pop shop that makes it from scratch.
Scratch made sofrito? Nice!
Yeah, the store also has a lot of good food =)
If I had one trillion dollars I would still eat red beans and rice, often
Do this, but also Freeze 'em.
The beetles you’re talking about are common in pretty much every grain. Freezing kills the beetles, the larvae, and the eggs. I’d suggest gallon-sized freezer bags rather than snack sized. If you don’t need the space for anything else, just store the bags in the freezer. If you do need the space, freeze the bags for a week, then move them to the buckets.
Same trick works for flour, oats, etc. Any grains you bring home should go straight into the freezer for a week before you move them to the pantry.
An additional benefit: Freezers are most efficient when they are kept completely full. The thermal mass and insulation of 50lbs of rice and/or other grains will keep your perishables frozen for days during a power outage.
Yeah, this product is an awful choice for the budget conscious.
Pasta is like $1.20/lb. There are many different ways to dress up pasta with other ingredients, whether saucy or cheesy or creamy or oily or even relatively dry seasoning. You can add a cheap protein source. You can add vegetables. In many forms, pasta is still a one-pan dish that can be made in about 20 minutes, where you prep ingredients as the water boils. Or you can put in a lot of effort (all-day sauces, hand-pounded pesto, etc.).
My favorite low effort, cheap and nutritionally complete meal is boiling a package of pasta, dumping in a can of beans, dumping in a can of premade chili, and shredding a bunch of cheddar over it. The macros are good, even for athletes, it’s cheap, and it’s easy.
As you mention, rice is between $1 to $2 per pound, based on quantity and type. There are a ton of options around that, too.
Not to derail your point, but rice can be especially bad for people (myself included) where carbs (esp. white rice) make you hungry. If you’re one of those people where Chinese food makes you hungry an hour later, it’s usually because your insulin spikes in response to the rice.
For those people, obviously try to avoid white rice (and flour, sugar, and potatoes). Brown rice usually includes the fiber on the outside (which gets stripped away for processed white rice) which at least slows the carb rush.
Fresh or even frozen, unprocessed veggies that you have to cook yourself are still remarkably cheap, even in this economy. A pan of random chopped veggies and some random seasonings from the spice aisle (no blends!) can easily get you a filling and nutritious meal, and still cheaper than a box of hamburger helper.
Oh, 100% this is unhealthy as fuck. I gained a ton of weight when I was piss broke cuz all I could afford was rice - exceptions were a treat. When you’re that tight on cash though, you start to prioritize it over pretty much everything else, including your own body.
Spending any more on food would have required cutting into something critical like rent - I never did have to deal with homelessness, but boy did I toe that line.
In any case, this is desperation diet - hopefully for a very short term leading up to having the means to live a healthier lifestyle.
The catch for brown rice is it’s one of the few whole grains that turn rancid fairly quickly. Don’t buy 50 pounds unless you can subdivide it into vacuum sealed bags with oxygen absorbers, lest you end up with 48 pounds of rancid rice.
Can you do the thing where you make the starch resistant rice? Cooking rice then cooling it lowers the GI, from what I understand.
Can you explain? This sounds like something that could benefit my broke ass.
I found this: https://www.snaq.ai/blog/cooled-rice-blood-sugar-research
My guess is that cooling the rice causes some of the starches to polymerize into longer chains that are harder for your body to digest, which lowers the glycemic index of the food.
I also prefer very short grained rice, which has slightly higher protein to starch ratio and reheats better. This stuff is often sold as “sushi rice.” If you’re on a budget, Calrose medium grain is fine. (If you’re not on a budget, tamanishiki koshihikari is my favorite bougie short grain rice.)
Afaik it’s literally cook rice then cool it in fridge overnight before you use it. Something about the process makes the starch change and it’s better for people with the beetus. I am not a food scientist and idk how it works.
It certainly looks like it would be better than regular rice. From some quick googling, it acts more like fiber and is better for diabetics. If I had to eat rice, it’s probably what I would do.
Note, the wild or brown rice has more nutrients, because the shell was not removed to make the less nutritious sticky rice.