A meat and dairy free diet is much cheaper. $70 per week should be ample for sufficient and healthy food (and that would include luxury items like pistachios, pine nuts and fungi porcini.) As a vegetarian, you can have a gourmet diet on $70 and invite friends to share it with you.
This post was edited by inky at December 28, 2018 9:34 PM MST
Yeah but could you do it vegan/gluten free? It’s not easy and a lot of those types of food are expensive. I’m also paying for the convenience of not having to cook for myself
Yes, you can still live cheaply on a vegan diet. The trick is to access vegan recipes online and learn how to cook them. If you try to rely on pre-made dishes sold in health food shops and cafés, your budget will be spent in 3 days or less.
Vegans need to squeeze fresh citrus juice on green vegies to make the iron bio-available. Fresh and dried apricots are iron-rich. Focus on bio-available calcium-rich foods like soya beans. The calcium in nuts is mostly not absorbable. Eat a lot of mushrooms every day (the B12 is low in mushies and variable in quantity), or take a daily Vit B12 supplement. Supplements are very expensive.
And yes - gluten-free can be cheap too. You can get your starchy carbs from potatoes, rice and corn in all forms (but wholegrain rice is far better for nutrition and fibre). You can also get starches from amaranth, arrowroot, buckwheat (kasha), cassava, flax, millet, quinoa, sorghum, soy, tapioca, teff, polenta and fonio. Some of these are a little expensive, but you don't need more than a tablespoon to thicken a sauce or stew.
I recommend avoiding quinoa because the commercial sale of the crop is causing exploitation and starvation of the Indian tribes who depended on it as part of their staple diet; it's an unnecessary and unethical luxury.
Most Westerners eat far too much starch anyway. Leave out the sugars altogether - there're enough sugars in savoury foods without adding any. Starch is incredibly high energy food and takes a huge amount of hard work or exercise to burn off, or it quickly converts to fat.
A daily diet of mostly vegies and fruit, salads, herbs and spices, a small amount of protein (the equivalent of the palm of your hand), and with a tablespoon of healthy oils and fats works very well.
This post was edited by inky at December 28, 2018 9:57 PM MST
Yeah Ive been vegan for a while the problem is I just don’t have time for all this prepping and whatnot. I wish I did. The reason I am asking is because I was thinking about subscribing to one of those weekly grocery things that delivers all the ingredients to your house and all you need to do to is take like ten mins to throw it all together. I HATE starch meat and pretty much any bread items because they make me sooooo bloated
I still think it's possible for you to create a healthy diet within your gluten-free and budget and time limits. You may have to do a bit of research to find and experiment with various recipes until you find what works for you. I like to have about 31 recipes memorised so I can have plenty of variety. But I'm vegetarian, not vegan - and although I prefer very little starch, I do have about 50 grams a day, and gluten doesn't have any negative effects for me.
Try roasted vegies with garlic dressing and pepitas. Easy to just chuck the vegies and olive oil in a pan in the oven for an hour or until they smell caramelised.
Or a Greek salad using soy cheese in place of feta. To make soy cheese, wrap a block of tofu in a 1/4 inch layer of Hatcho miso, wrap in baking paper, waxed cloth or Alfoil, and keep in the fridge for a week. The flavour is delicious, and the miso can be re-used.
How much time do you want to spend in prep and cooking? Would you consider cooking up more than you need of a favourite dish once a week? Freeze it in portions, and then have one of them whenever you're feeling time poor or low energy.
I have a pet theory about gluten and bloating, but's not based on any scientific evidence. I think the bloating may be the result of a loss of beneficial gut bacteria. You have probably already heard that our gut biome contains hundreds of bacteria which do most of the digesting for us. Some are healthy and beneficial, while others are harmful. The harmful ones are no problem as long as they don't breed too excessively and overwhelm the good ones. But large, frequent or erratic doses of antibiotics can knock out the good bacteria and allow the bad ones to take hold, leading to all kinds of digestive and gut problems, and sometimes a lessening of immunity and resistance to diseases. The great American diet of high fats, excessive proteins, fried foods, carbs, alcohol, sodas, fruit juices and sugars can have the same effect. N.B the juices - they have very high sugars, but none of the beneficial fibre of fruit, and the vitamins decay during shelf life. So if one of the specific types of good bacteria has died, like the ones that normally digest wholemeal grains, then that would create problems every time you eat glutenous foods (not corn because it contains a different type of gluten).
If so, I would suggest an experiment. If you haven't already cut out all the great American diet foods (as mentioned above), do so for at least two weeks. Then cook up a quarter-cup of rice; keep it covered, and allow it to go sour on the stove-top for 24 hours. You've made a sourdough which has naturally fermenting enzymes in it - the kind that can assist your gut to grow good bacteria for cereal digestion. Then just have a teaspoonful, and put the rest away, covered, in the fridge. If you have no bloating, take another teaspoonful the next day, and the next until the rice is used up. If this experiment works, try it again with different kinds of whole grains - oats, or barley, or wheat cooked till as soft as porridge. By eating a very small amount of cooked whole grains each day, you can gradually build up the necessary good bacteria.
Consider briefly compromising, by allowing yourself to have pre-biotics made from dairy products each day for a week - things like yogurt, kefir, or pre-biotic capsules. Or, if you know a woman who is nursing her baby, ask if she can express a half cup of her milk for you.
Or, and this one is radical, ask a friend who has super healthy poop if they will give you some of it first thing in the morning. Blend it into a soup with warm water. Load it into a douch bag. Take it into the bathroom, hook the bag to the sink, lie down prone on the floor and administer yourself with the poop as an enema. I did this for a friend who had suffered the after-effects of amoebic dysentery (from India). Within nine months her good gut bacteria had multiplied to the point where she was hugely recovered and almost back to normal.
This post was edited by inky at December 28, 2018 11:02 PM MST
I fed myself and my mother for years and put aside a huge pantry of canned and packaged foods on 70 bux a month, and didn't spend that every month. I did that by buying what was on sale, and buying enough to last until the next sale.
For instance, back in 2008 butter went on sale for a buck a pound so I bought a hundred pounds and froze it. I recently saw a news story saying the US has hit a new high in butter consumption, 5.6 pounds per person per year. I have been averaging 5.9 pounds per year for the last ten years -- at a buck a pound.
depends if its american dollar, or canadian dollar.... but 70 $ is good for one week if you dont buy special products that cost high like gluten-free cookies and other organic products.
Element 99 