What's the minimum number of food items you can survive on exclusively and what are they?
What's the minimum number of food items you can survive on exclusively and what are they?
No.
I need money to be able to afford better food.
Monster’s not terrible if you buy it in bulk. You can get it for around a dollar per can from places like Costco.
Redbull idk - that stuff tastes like ass imo, so l never paid much attention to price. …for the record, most Monster tastes like shit too, but there’s a few gems in the Ultra line.
Oh I can give quick, easy, and cheap, with a heavy emphasis on cheap. In another comment I was gushing about carne de soya, you can get the equivalent of a pound of 90/10 ground beef for $0.97. You toss it in a slurry of sauce or seasoning and it becomes instant sausage with the exact same texture as ground pork.
Even baring that, just adding beans and lentils into your rotation can be a game changer. Good health and sleep is the strongest act of rebellion any one person can commit to.
Buy dried legumes to get proper protein. Both cereals and legumes have protein, but not the full set of essential amino acids. However they complement each other in this regard.
I’d also advise looking into cheapest vegetables and making a salad out of them. Where I am, it’s potato, carrots, and beets — coincidentally the ingredients for a traditional salad. They can be cheaper than rice.
What was the joke again…
“Humans can survive off a diet consisting of potatoes and butter, as demonstrated by a years long case study commonly known as Ireland”
Something along those lines.
yikes, scurvy much?
try brocolli and eggs
Not to be all “The safest way to ski is not to go skiing”, but throwing together a meal can be a way to exercise some agency during low days. Even if the food itself isn’t very healthy, the process can be good for you.
I’ll soak some beans overnight and be forced to boil them the next day. The steps are individually low effort and spaced apart (and you can cook beans with zero onions etc if you want) and at the end you can find yourself sitting in front of a hot bowl of good ass beans and feel hey that was good for me.
Hell, beans out of a can and tomato out of a can over rice out of a pouch can feel like you at least did something, you know? Delivery is relatively cheap where I live and getting into a cycle of being dependent on mass produced food really didn’t help me feel like I had a lot of control over what was happening in my life.
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You’re missing a bunch of micro nutrients which would cause problems over time with this. It has all the calories and protein you need though.
Add in some fat from somewhere like cooking oil, and a handful of vegetables like onions, carrots, etc. and you’d last a fairly normal human lifespan.
Vegetables often contain oil, the problem is getting omega-3’s, which our bodies can’t make.
In the sea, it’s algae who’re producing it: then krill, then squid/fish/etc eat them…
some plants make it, some don’t…
olives are good, olive-oil, etc…
but anybody who’s eating squash is getting omega-6’s or 9’s, even though it seems non-intuitive.
Any particular type of beans? Red? Black? Lentils?
Does the type of rice matter?
I’m intrigued by this possibility.
Does the type of rice matter?
Yes; make sure it’s whole grain. White rice is essentially junk food, with most of its fiber, vitamins & minerals stripped in the de-hulling process.
You might mix it with non-junk food rice. Shortgrain-brown might have a similar-enough cooking time that they can be mixed together. I’m hazy on that, as I stopped eating rice years ago, replacing it with steel-cut oats.
Or, who knows… maybe you could donate the sack to a food bank?
Why do people wash rice? Never really bothered with it. 2:1 usually works pretty nicely, get the water boiling add the rice and put it on low. Come back when ready.
Or like 4-5 to 1 with milk and have it as rice pudding/porridge.
I’ve often heard repeated that a human can live on water, potatoes, and salted butter basically indefinitely.
Not sure how true, but seems plausible.
“beriberi” is malnutrition: it means literally “i cannot”.
You become … not very able to do what you need to do, to survive, on this kind of diet, fairly quickly.
Egg-bread & scrambled-eggs ( with a multivitamin every other day ) can get you FAR, ultra-cheap ( if you ever need to get through a month on nearly-nothing ).
( obviously this isn’t long-term, this is short-term-survival stuff )
add-in carrots, if you can.
A bit of broccoli makes a BIG difference in one’s health.
Do what you can to get some omega-3’s into you: our bodies can’t make them, & if our bodies have to make omega-6’s & omega-9’s, apparently they just run mitochondria backwards, to do it.
Even a tablespoon of olive-oil / day will help your body keep functioning.
Chicken, broccoli, coffee, cream, cashews, olive oil, some cheese and spices, blueberries. That’s 95% of my diet right now, and for the past four years or so.
Could I “survive” on less? Of, course. Do I want to? No. But, I may need to in the future.
Ah yes. The low carb low cholesterol diet of diabetics with cardio trouble.
I can do this when everything else in my life is on track, but when I’m depressed or anxious it’s all I can do to put any kind of food in my belly. I fell off the wagon about a year ago.
Keep fighting the good fight.
For real, steak.
Its the ultimate elimination diet
Beef is very nutrient dense and contains all the nutrients a human needs
The carnivore diet is a thing, and it is just: beef, water and salt.
While you can get all the nutrition you need from eating animals, you have to eat the organs as well. Also the stomach contents of herbivores even. Wolves eat the stomach contents of deer and such to get their green requirements, everyone needs some green in their diet. But liver, kidneys, most of the organs need to be consumed if you live on only animals.
The germanics basically did for a long time. They ate meat, with a little cheese and milk products and a few veggies thrown in there, a negligible amount of grains, for a long time, including the years after they just appeared in central europe around the 1st century BC or so, there were celts and gauls before that in those areas, both broad terms of many groups to be sure.
But they were all giants for the day, the men were all 6 foot and above, while the romans were more like 5’2" and subsisted mostly on lentils and grains, along with seafood, but very little meat, at least on campaigns. That extra size and bulk obviously didn’t do the germans much good in war, organization means more than brute strength ever could.
I love food way too much it’s probably like 15 to 20.
spoiler- soya milk - one type of cereal - lets count uncooked eggs as 1 food type because i get to process them into any type i want - dairy free butter - olive oil - rapeseed oil - salt - pepper - pork ham - chicken - onions - peas - spinach - sweet potatoes - normal potatoes (i can now fabricate various flavours of crisps, yippee!) - sultanas - bananas - tea OR coffee! Toss-up between the two. - carrots - wheat flour - rice - tomatoes - pasta (some limit to what I’m willing to make myself) - sourdough bread - soya yoghurt - apples - oranges - strawberries
28… i’m gonna stop listing stuff before I sound like a fat ass
I don’t have the expertise to answer the question, but I’m sad that so many answers here are jokes, or five word answers that aren’t at all helpful :-(
Was really interested in this and hoped there’d be some knowledgeable people out there to educate us on this stuff!
My mum said when she had no money she lived off eggs, rice, spring onions (which you can just continuously regrow from the bulb) and dried fish.
I don’t know the nutritional facts of this meal, but it worked for her.