Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March one of the protagonists pondered what the consequences of bread becoming free would be, almost 60 years later the billion people starving in the world might consider it to be an improvement whenever it finally does happen. I guess he lived in a more optimistic time when people thought be now we’d having flying cars, robot servants and tv phones (Oh wait, we do have that last one. They’re called skype phones. Not cheap though.)
At the same time for people living in the west food has become incredibly cheap. The French revolution happened not because people were angry towards aristocratic dandies but because a couple of bad harvests forced the price of bread higher than what the average French family could afford and the price of cake higher still. Even in years of good harvests in that era a family would have to spend around 75% of their income just to get adequate calories from bread. Since then there have been massive improvements in technology, grain harvesting techniques and the massive boon of petrochemical fertilizers to the extent that an Irish family of four whose primary providers was earning the average industrial wage, buying the cheapest bread in Dunnes, would only have to spend 2.1% of their income.
I wouldn’t recommend that, though. For one thing bread is hard to digest on it’s own, which is why we smear butter, margarine, honey, jam, peanut butter, apple puree and the like upon it. For another, Jesus had a bit of a point when he said man does not live on bread alone. He wasn’t talking about having a balanced diet but it is really important to have one. He also used to eat fish , figs, drank wine which he made himself out of water… all in all the sort of healthy Meditterean diet that should have kept him going way beyond the tender age of 33. Besides, the really cheap bread is always white bread, which has all the bran and germ which contain most of the micronutrients scraped off it and made into vitamin pills
And monoculture isn’t a good idea. Living entirely on potatoes in the 19th century got us into all sorts of trouble as dependence on bread did for our French friends a century before. Today most of the people who have life expenctency of 50 or less are inordinately dependent on one crop like rice or cassava. Our bodies are designed to digest small amounts of varied foods as our ancestors did, and some dieticians recommend something called the caveman diet which I don’t think is that realistic. For one thing it seems to assume that people ate meat every day which the vast majority of people didn’t until after the second world war. because of various developments since then, it’s become the norm for most people in the west to eat meat every day, so people assume that you must need to eat meat every day, which you certainly don’t. Only about a quarter of us do, and if the other four billion of us did we could kiss the rainforests goodbye and wait for global warming to wreak havoc on our planet and for life to basically end.
When I tell people that I’m a vegetarian I’m often asked one of two questions. One is “What do you eat?” I can see where they are coming from to an extent as I’ve often been to restaurants where I can eat nothing on the menu, but the ironic thing is that most of the people who ask me this are people who eat a piece of steak with some mushy carrots and potatoes, or else some pizza, for dinner every day. I remember making some falafel as a student and having ask me what sort of meat was in it. I told him it was made from chick peas and he just looked at me kind of blankly. He was doing a PhD, though not in food science. So that’s what I eat….stuff PhD students have never heard of like falafel, hummus, mung beans, chick peas, tofu, quinoa, alfalfa sprouts…
Another, more rational, question I get asked is, “Where do you get your protein from?” people are under a misconception about how much protein they need, largely thanks to lobbying from the meat industry as detailed in Marion Nestle’s excellent book Food Politics. While scientists broadly agree on how much carbohydrates and fat we need, they can’t seem to make up their minds about protein, though most people seem happy to err on the high side. The truth is that you can get all the protein, vitamins and amino acids you need from vegetable sources, though it’s difficult to get enough calcium and B12 without eating eggs or drinking milk, or taking some sort of supplement. In fact, it’s way more important to get at least 5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day than to eat anything like as much protein as the majority of westerners consume.
Once you realize this, you can save a great deal of money, as meat costs a great deal more that any other protein source. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me, as it takes 5 times as much land to grow meat as it does to grow beans, and a huge amount of energy and labour to slaughter, process and refrigerate all the dead animals involved, the only meat that’s available that’s in anyway comparable to vegetable protein in price is the so-called “value” meat that tesco’s sell. It’s made from what’s called Mechanically recovered meat (MRM) which is made from what’s recovered from slaughterhouse floors with a sort of giant hoover… it’s quite probable that other materials get in there as well.
Bear in mind that meat is only going to get more expensive as we only pay a fraction of the cost when we buy in in supermarket or butcher’s shop and the majority of the cost is paid for by EU subsidies which ultimately come out of people’s taxes. This is all going to end in a few years and coupled with the increasing demand for biofuels is going to push the price of meat even higher. It’s possible that within a few decades meat could return to being an occasional treat.
If you’ve never cooked vegetarian before and you suddenly decide to start living that way I guess you’ll know how my parents felt 20 years ago when I first became a vegetarian. Most days we used to have meat and two veg for dinner, so when they very reluctantly accepted that I was becoming a veggie they started serving me raw soya beans with 2 veg. I remember my brother noticing that soya beans came from Asia and had to be soaked overnight then cooked for an hour. He thought people in Asia were too poor and ignorant to do all that themselves. Twenty years later, he’s a teacher but still thinks much the same thing. When I pointed out to my other brother that lentils were way cheaper than any sort of meat, he started pretending to push away flies as he imagined they did in Africa where he imagined lentils were a big part of the diet. (he’s a teacher too).
Since then I’ve learned some recipes that are more sophisticated without being that much more expensive.
I can’t emphasise enough the value of cooking for yourself over eating prepared meals from supermarkets. In the food industry as it’s somewhat shamefully called, they refer to prepared meals as “added value” products though for the most part they are only adding cost. I used to live next to a guy who once showed me some prepared meals he bought in Dunnes, telling me that he’d got dinner a desert for “only” E5, which was almost my whole daily budget for food. It was mostly empty calories in the form of hydrogenated fat with a lot of chemicals and even in terms of raw calories it was pretty unsubstantial. There may be a place for cusine like that for people who are poor in both money and time, but in our country at the moment the only really poor people are unemployed and they all have the time to cook from scratch.
Having said that, I do have a weakness for fruit smoothies, which always leave me feeling good for several hours afterwards; but which could be classified as a “value-added food”. I’ve never actually done the maths and found out if it was cheaper to buy the fruit, I suspect not as much of the cost of fruit is taken up by transportation. In general, I cook meals from scratch, and I’m only too eager to share some with you. The up-side of being unemployed is that you have more time to cook complicated dishes like these.
This one is called Chana Masala, it’s my version of a dish with the same name in India which is much mushier and spicier. Once you hunt down the spices each subsequent dish doesn’t cost much more than a euro to make. Some specialist spice shops have the masala already made up, though I prefer my own version. I learned to make it Northern India, though only by reading the instructions on the back of packet of chana masala mix. I serve it to a lot of couchsurfers (see travel Chapter) as it’s an exoctic dish that you can make largely with local ingredienmts. To make it really cheaply, leave out the cardamoms, although you can get them fairly cheaply in some specialist stores and not that expensively in Tescos. All the recipes I list are for 1 person, the person in question being myself. I’m told I have a fairly ferocious appetite, I have a fast metabolism and walk and cycle a lot.
Chana Masala
Chana Masala mix (About a teaspoon each of, In descending order: Coriander Powder, Cumin powder, Turmeric Powder, Chilli Powder, Nutmeg Powder, Cinnamon Powder, Raw Black Cardomoms)
1lb potatoes
I tin chickpeas (It works out way cheaper to soak raw chickpeas overnight)
2 tomatoes
1 onion
A pinch of salt and sugar.
Chop the potatoes into small pieces, unless they are baby potatoes. Add to cold water and bring to boil.
Chop the onion and fry until tender.
Add the spices, fry gently then add a small amount of water, stir gently. Add the chopped tomatoes stir until they are tenderized then add the chick peas. Add the salt and sugar (you’re really meant to use something called jiggery goor, but this is hard to come by)
Bring down to a low temperature until the potatoes have boiled, then add them to the mix. Stir in fairly thoroughly and serve, adding salt and pepper to taste.
Not that complicated, huh? Gordon Ramsey would never serve this in his restaurants as no-one would ever screw it up enough to deserve a bollocking.
Another of my favourite potato-based dishes is one which I originally came across in a book called Vegan Feasts. It involves carmelising onions, which as I understand it involves frying the crap out of them they are really crispy.
Potatoes and Lentils in Creamed Coconut with Carmelised Onions
4 medium-sized onions
1lb potatoes
150g split red lentils
1 tablespoon creamed coconut powder
Splash of lemon juice
Raw Ginger
Turmeric, Mustard Seeds
Chop the potatoes into fairly small pieces, drain the lentils. Put both into a saucepan with enough water to soak both.
Chop all the onions and fry gently. When tender, remove about a quarter and place in a smaller frying pan or saucepan, while turning up the heat on the rest.
Add the turmeric, chopped ginger and mustard seeds to the smaller pan, stir gently. When the potatoes and lentils are almost cooked, add this mix along with the coconut powder.
Keep frying the original onions until crispy. Server over the potatoes and lentils.
It’s a little more complicated than the last dish, I grant you, though does have the advantage of being really cheap and filling; perfect for cold winter nights.
One more recipe I’d like to share with the world in the form of anyone reading this is for Kichdi, which I found in a book called Linda McCartney around the World. I’m still waiting for Heather Mills around the World . As far as I know, India was the part of the world she was around at that time as they have a similar dish called Pilau there. I’ve been making some version of this dish several times a week ever since I came across the recipe. It can be the most beautiful dish in the world if you can get it exactly right, even if you don’t, it still keeps the wolf from the door. Ideally you would use saffron instead of turmeric but saffron used to cost more than gold and it still costs way more than turmeric. If you can’t find any cheap basmati rice, try some of the easi-cook stuff.
Kichdi
150g Basmati Rice
150g split red lentils
1 cup broccoli florets
1 cup frozen peas
1 onion
1 tomato
Raw Ginger
Spices: 1 teaspoon each of Turmeric, Cloves, and Cinnamon
½ teaspoon each of pepper and chilli pepper
Add the spices to some hot oil in a large saucepan. When they start to sizzle, add the chopped onion and ginger. When the onion is tender throw in the broccoli and peas, followed by the chopped tomato. Finally add the drained rice and lentils, and half as much water again. Boil at a medium temperature for around 20 minutes, whenever all the water has been soaked up. Serve with salt to taste.
It’s a deceptively easy dish to cook, as getting exactly the right amount of spices takes some trial and error, but if you get it exactly right you’ll be cooking it every week for the rest of your life as well.
In general I recommend stir-frying or eating veggies raw rather than boiling them. My grandmother, like many people of her generation, didn’t think anything was cooked properly until it was soft and mushy. But really the more you boil things, the less nutritious they become, so when you boil a lot of vegetables you are spending money on energy to diminish the value of the food you eat. When I was working extremely long hours last summer I used to eat hummus with raw veg for dinner every night… as well as being cheap and nutritious it was really easy to prepare. I have to confess I bought the hummus ready-made, though if you invest in a blender and the requisite spices it costs way less to make it yourself from raw chick peas. I don’t know how people made it in the middle east before blenders were invented.
As I alluded to, it can be hard to find some of the ingredients you need to cook vegetarian (or non-vegetarian as they say in India) food cheaply. It depends a good deal on where you live. Living as I do in Cork where we have one of the 10 best food markets in Europe (says The Observer, de oldest Sunday newspaper in de World, ya Langer) it’s rarely a problem finding cheap spices or vegetables. I’ve noticed that a lot of smaller towns now have some sort of health food store, though many of us still remain dependent on supermarkets. You can buy spices on ebay though they originate mostly from the UK which means international charges. Suprisingly, like the cowboy in movies who’s sitting down seemingly drunken and passed out like Dean Martin in Rio Bravo, Dunnes has sprung into life and become the best place to buy vegetarian fare like tofu and beans. You can get a pound of tofu there for E2.50 though this is still twice what it costs in the US where soya is subsidized heavily.
Supermarkets are a mixed blessing to put it mildly. On one hand they bully suppliers no end, take jobs out of every local economy where they are allowed set up shop, clock up endless food miles and turn many old towns into hollow shells. On the other hand they do sell some stuff cheaper than anywhere else, though if you look around carefully, you notice that not everything is cheaper there. They are mostly of benefit to people who have big houses in which to store bulk products and cars to transport then in, part of the paradox of the High Cost of Poverty. It is possible to beat the system that requires you to have a car to get the cheapest food, at least if you are a single person, with a family it becomes much harder. In general, the less money you spend, the less impact you have on the environment, but supermarket food only appears to be cheap as it’s long term impact on the suppliers, the massive distribution network and the huge waste involved isn’t always apparent. It may be true that we are spending less on food than ever before, but we are spending more on cars, petrol, insurance and everything else that goes with the cost of automation.
It’s a horrible paradox too that many of us are now going abroad to do our shopping every month, although some would take offence at that designation of the six counties. Its bizarre that by crossing an imaginary line that people drew eighty years ago to palliate half the people who live on one side of that line you can make the money that you earn go so much further… but that’s the strange world we created for ourselves. Bizarre, too, that our own government seem so impotent to stop it. I don’t actually blame people who are struggling to pay the mortgage for going cross-border shopping. I do blame the government for bringing us into the euro-zone without a proper debate; it’s been at the very best a mixed blessing.
I really have very little time for Lidl or Aldi. I managed to avoid Tesco’s for several years but when I went into one and saw how cheap everything was I got hooked. I was afraid the same thing would happen to me in Lidl but it never did… stuff cost around the same as Tesco’s but the athmosphere was wrist-slashingly Orwellian in there, or more accurately, like the dystopian world of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Horribly flawed as Dunne’s and Tesco’s are, at least some of the stuff there is produced locally whereas everything you get in Lidl and Aldi has come through a distribution centre in Germany. Some people say they like the crazy randomness of being able to go into a store looking for one thing and ending up buying another but frankly impulse buying isn’t what we need to do to get our economy back on track.
Until recently I was able to get vegetables cheaper in the old English Market, but this seems to have changed in the last few years. It could be because the supermarkets are using their dominant market position in a time of recession to drive all the opposition into the ground, or it could be that they are abusing their dominant market position to bully their suppliers even more. Either way you can get a bag of half a dozen peppers in tescos for E1.59 which is cheaper than anywhere else. On the other hand, if I wasn’t such a pepper-holic who would easily get through 6 peppers in a week it would still be cheaper to go the market.The ironic thing is that the mangy-looking peppers you get in a cheap-looking bag that marks you out to the other people in the queue as a prole are probably better for you than the shiny ones that you pay a euro each for, as they spray endless chemicals on them to make them look that shiny. Many of the chemicals are carcinogenic, which kind of defeats the purpose of eating fresh veggies in the first place, which is to remain healthy.
As I’ve said before, nutritionists recommend that people eat at least five portions of fruit and veg a day to remain healthy. But here’s the thing…they really think you should eat 8 or 9 portions but they think that isn’t very realistic for most people. To be honest, even though I’m pretty health conscious I don’t always hit the 5-mark. The scientists are also at pains to point out that it has to be 5 different fruits and vegetables, so you can’t just drink 5 200ml portions of OJ, appealing as that sounds and all. Its certainly possible to get enough fruit and vegetables on a low budget. If you have enough time, it’s worth buying fresh vegetables a few times a week, as some veggies lose their nutritional value fairly quickly. On the other hand it can be cheaper to buy in bulk though unless you are cooking for a family a lot of the bulk can end up being seagull food. In our country both tescos and dunes sell fruit and veg that are reaching their sell-by date cheaply. I once got what appeared to be 4 heads of broccoli for a euro, though when I opened the wrapper back home it turned out to be 6. I ate them all within a week, and didn’t turn green… that’s an urban myth.
A lot of stuff that reaches it’s sell-by date ends up getting thrown into dumpsters, which is disgraceful for many reasons. Firstly, there are people starving in the world who wouldn’t think twice about eating something that’s passed it’s sell-by date. Secondly, there are those who think, and I feel they have a point, that sell-by dates are a conspiracy by food companies to get us to buy more stuff. Like everyone else in the capitalist economy, they need to keep selling more stuff just to keep going, in spite of the fact that people in west already eat way more than need to already. Once the supermarkets have taken the food off their hands they don’t care what happens it…they aren’t charities. As supermarkets can’t legally sell anything that’s past it sell-by date it all ends up in dumpsters.
Thankfully enough people have become aware of this shocking development to do something about it in a way that benefits themselves. Dumpster-divers, or freegans organize trips to supermarket lots at night and scavenge what they can from the dumpsters, which sometimes can be really worthwhile stuff. The people I stayed with in New Orleans used to bring home fairly fresh-looking vegetables, as well as spices, juices, beans…basically enough to make a proper meal every night. If you go onto freeganworld.org you can read about people who get even luckier, one guy finding a fully functional computer outside an electronics shop.
On the other hand, it’s fraught with risk, as it’s unlawful and the resident Paul Blart won’t think twice about shopping you to the cops, although it’s said that Marks & Spencers turn a blind eye. As well as that you basically have no idea what’s in dumpsters and it could be toxic or sharp materials. There is some good advice on the freeganworld website, basically you need 3 people (one to dive, one to drive, one on look-out) and a car, a long stick for poking round and a hell of a lot of moxie. It doesn’t seem to have caught on in Ireland yet which is a bit of a shame.
Food companies have come up with other ways of getting people to spend more than they need. It’s a paradox of living in the west in the last 60 years that the poorest people are now the fattest. In India being considered fat is a sign of wealth, though this is changing fast as they are starting to have the same obesity problems that we have here. The same food companies that are making us fat are cashing in on our bulging waistlines by selling us “low calorie” food which is a complete paradox as calories are one of the essential elements of food. So the food companies, and 90% of the food available in supermarkets is produced by 5 vertically integrated companies; sell you something with half the food value for the same price and make it look like they’re helping you to lose weight. Here’s what to do if you want to save money on low-calorie fruit juice:
a) Buy some regular fruit juice
b) Mix it with water.
Seriously. Unless you buy the really expensive stuff, it’s basically concentrate shipped from Iberia and mixed with water anyway.
Then there’s low-fat food. Some food products are being marketed as 80% fat free which means they have 20% fat which is quite a lot. In any case your body needs a certain amount of fat, and a lot of the obesity problem is caused not by fat but by refined carbohydrates and sugars. There was an ad by greencore or whatever they’re called these days which boasted that sugar was a fat free food. No Shit! The people who make lard clearly missed a trick by not marketing it as a sugar-free dentally friendly product.
And don’t get me started on bottled water. Not only is tap water just as good for you, it’s actually better for you, as standards are higher for tap water than for bottled water. But somehow some fancy packaging and advertising has convinced us to spend money on what we could otherwise get for free. I saw a Michael Moore sketch that showed Mexican women who thought they could become tall and blonde if they used Avon products, and felt a bit sorry for them. Maybe it’s ourselves we should be feeling sorry for, thinking on some level that we’ll get laid as much as Madonna or Paris Hilton if we drink the same bottled water as them.
Packaging can make stuff look more appealing than it actually is. I’m pretty convinced that some of the “finest” and “value” products they have in Dunnes are the same product in fancier packaging, particularly pasta… seriously, what difference can there be? I noticed in Centra that the really cheap cranberry juice drink actually had more cranberry juice and therefore less added sugar than the one that cost twice as much and came in a nicer-looking box. Likewise for the sweetcorn and kidney beans they sell in Tescos. As far as I’m aware, some of the “budget” stuff you get in Tesco’s are “seconds” from the factory floor which means they aren’t on sale at full price because they don’t look nice enough, which seems like a moot point in regard to stuff like weetabix which doesn’t look that nice anyway. Then they have oats for 41c/500g which are actually made in Ireland and sell for half the cost of the oats in fancier packages… you wonder do you really have to pay so much for nice packaging? I guess it’s pretty natural to be attracted to things that are nice on the surface, otherwise no-one would have heard of Julia Roberts. When those of you who eat meat go into a supermarket you really only see the surface sheen and don’t see any of the suffering that goes into eating meat. And we put lots of stuff on ourselves to make us look nicer… but that’s another chapter.
Of course it could be the other way around as well, that the low price products are actually being sold below cost, which Mary Harney allowed by abolishing a ban on below-cost selling. Many people cling to the notion that if they are spending more they must be getting a better product but in many cases they are just charging you to advertise their products on TV. Supermarkets also charge producers to have their products at eye-level so you actually notice them so its worth either crawling round on the ground or else walking on tippy-toes to find cheaper stuff.
Or you could go out of the supermarket altogether as some stuff is cheaper in specialist stores. There’s an Indian store near where I used to live in Cork where almost every sort of bean and spice can found cheaper than in Tescos, as well as popcorn, pitta bread and other things I didn’t previously associate with South Asia. A lot of fruit and vegetables can still be found more cheaply in the market. There are also a lot of farmers markets springing up. Logically, locally produced produce should be cheaper because of decreased transport costs but modern capitalism doesn’t submit to logic any more than it does to regulation or morality. Until the price of oil gets really high it’s probably still going to be cheaper to buy mass-produced vegetables.
Organic is a bit more complicated. There’s a debate about whether organic food is actually better for you, but it’s clear that modern production methods are decreasing the nutrient levels in vegetables. In theory, organic food shouldn’t cost more as the decreased yields should be offset by the decreased spending on fertilizer and insecticide. However, instead of subsidizing organic farming, the government actually charge people to be certified as organic, and they have no choice but to pass the cost onto the customer. I saw some brazil nuts, which can only grow organically, next to some “organic” brazil nuts which were a very round 50c more expensive…you’re really just paying for the word organic on the cover. I also notice tesco’s have some so-called organic fair trade chocolate for a mere E1/100g. when you look closely at the label you see it’s made in Italy, where the standards are obviously much lower. (it is good chocolate, though). Apparently the two things you should eat organically if on a low budget are carrots and lettuce, which both suck up chemicals in different ways.
Likewise, fair trade products should be cheaper because of all the middlemen taken out of the equation but again it costs so much to certify and the cost is again passed onto the consumer. Its really disappointing to me that instead of subsidizing organic and fair trade products the government seeks to make money by charging people for certification.
One way to cut the money earned by middlemen like supermarkets, futures traders and the like is to grow your own food which is becoming really popular as people realize how nutritionally diminished supermarket veg is but baulk at the cost of buying organic veg. if you live in a flat you are probably limited to growing bean sprouts and having a window box, unless you have a flat roof in which case your options multiply. In any case bean sprouts aren’t to be knocked as they are one of the best sources of a lot of nutrients… they are basically the eggs of the plant world, generating all the nutrients they need to grow in the early stages of their development. And they are so easy to grow. You can splash out on a fancy device for growing them, but all you really need is a jam jar and some gauze and an elastic band. If u soak the beans in warm water for a few hours then drain them twice a day you should have some fresh, chemical-free bean sprouts to eat within around a week.
If you have a window box in a place with good light, you can probably grow lettuce, onions and other vegetables. The easiest way to get material to grow them in is to buy peat moss, but it can work out cheaper in the long run to buy a wormery (if you have room) and then compost all your kitchen waste and use that to grow things in.
If you have a flat roof or a garden, the possibilities are enormous. It’s said that if you grow biodynamically you can grow enough food to feed a family on quarter of an acre which many people have access to, although not the sort of people who would be reading this book. On the other hand, people have been “guerilla gardening”; taking over unused urban spaces and converting them into gardens for a while in the US, this trend is catching on in Ireland where we have no lack of disused urban spaces either.
Its notable that Havana, a densely populated city of 2 million people grows all it’s own food at the moment. It’s a strategy that’s been forced upon them by the US blockade on Cuba but it could be a pointer to a post-fossil future for many of us. Lets not forget that 160 years ago there were another 2 million of us on this island and the vast majority of us were growing our own food. We may need to do this again in the future, hopefully not becoming too reliant on one variety of one crop.
Until recently growing your own food, having chickens in the back yard, etc, was considered pretty retro and outré, satirized by shows like The Good Life. In recent years concerns about food safety, food security and food miles have put it back in the spotlight. Books like How to Grow more Vegetables by John Jeavons can help enormously for people with any level of experience in growing their own food.
Some food on the other hand, grows by itself, wild by the side of the road and doesn’t get eaten. I have a friend who used to live next to a place where there was an apple tree where the apples just fell to the ground and rotted. It wasn’t more than a couple of hundred yards from a supermarket where they sold apples that had been impoterd from either Chile or South Africa. They aren’t the only thing growing wild in Ireland. I grew up near a forest where wild onions grow, never knowing that they could be eaten. Turns out that not only are they edible, they’re actually somewhat of delicacy and sell for premium prices in restaurants. Mushrooms grow wild in the forest too, though you really should have some sort of guide to know which ones are safe to eat. In places like france and Italy people have folk knowledge of which ones are edible but we seem to have lost that here. I’ve got to confess I don’t really like the taste of mushrooms much as I love the idea of foraging in the woods for wild protein. Then there are blackberries which grow on what is for about 10 months of the year a fairly pernicious weed. Also elderberries, which are really just good for making booze with. For a more comprehensive list, take a look at Food for Free by Richard Mabey.
Erasmus said that when he had money he spent it on books and if he had any left over he spent it on food and clothes. He was probably exaggerating a bit as reading takes a lot of mental energy and that can only be obtained by having a varied diet, although there weren’t quite as many books around then.
It’s important not to scrimp on food but food companies do sucker us into spending more than we need and the results are too obvious in our expanding waistlines, the amount we throw out and the huge volume of meat we consume. Right now, it is possible to get a varied, healthy diet really cheaply, though to do that without patronizing supermarkets is easier said that done. Having a balanced diet is one of the cheapest ways to feel good as a lot of illnesses are caused by poor diet and not eating well can leave you feeling lethargic and listless. The good news is that you can get all the protein, fats and micronutrients you need without spending that much money. In an average week, I spend about E40 on food. It’s certainly possible to get by on less, though the price to be paid in the form of lack of energy really isn’t worth it. Food is at the top of the hierarchy of needs for a reason… we really can’t get by without it.
No comments:
Post a Comment