I have a theory that there is a impossible trinity (like in economics), where a food cannot be delicious, cheap and healthy at the same time. At maximum 2 of the 3 can be achieved.
Is there any food that breaks this theory?
Edit: I was thinking more about dishes (or something you put in your mouth) than the raw substances
Some popular suggestions include
- fruits (in season) and vegetables
- lentils, beans, rice
- mushrooms
- chicken
- just eat in moderation
Edit 2: Thanks for the various answers. Now there are a lot of (mostly bean-based) recipes for everyone to try out!
Also someone made a community for cheap healthy food after seeing this topic!
You already mentioned them, but I’m a huge fan of lentils. They go with so much stuff and you can combine them with a variety of spices. Give me any leftover ingredients and some lentils, and I’ll cook up something delicious. I can and will eat lentil soup for days.
They are also a pretty solid crop, they can grow in a variety of climates, require little water and are good for the soil.
Onion. It’s cheap, nutritious, acts as a low-key anti bacterial solution, can be served in a multitude of ways, or eaten raw.
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eaten raw
You, sir, are a monster.
Hmm time for a snack
Takes a bite from a raw onion like an apple
Listen for some of us that’s a delicacy.
Tony abbott is that you?
Subscribed.
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Be careful what you offer, 'cause that’s actually a thing on ActivityPub (nothing’s stopping anyone from following you as a user, Mastodon-style).
Followed. Don’t let me down!
Great fashion accessory too
As was the style at the time
Chick pea curry.
Thank you so much for the share! I love chickpeas so I’ll definitely be adding this to my recipes :)
Well, something being delicious is subjective, but if we assume a “general acceptance” of most delicious foods, potatoes could fit easily. They can be cooked in all kinds of ways, are very nutritious and, again, pretty much everyone says they’re delicious.
That’s a good point, but even within potatoes there is perhaps still a trade-off between “delicious” and “healthy”. As in steamed potatoes without sauces or stuff is kind of meh, while french fries are not that healthy.
Oven-baked potatoes is where it’s at.
And then there is mc Donald’s and similar chains. They managed to avoid all three of those things
I wonder if they are actually that unhealthy. After all a burger is just meat, bread, and some veggies. Doesn’t seem that unbalanced.
I assume the most unhealthy part there is the gallon of sugar soda that people also drink there ._.
undefined> Kebab
It’s all the additives to these otherwise quite wholesome ingredients that make them less healthy and not as nutritionally dense as they should be. McDonald’s burgers are not JUST meat, bread, and some veggies unfortunately.
Don’t forget that all of their ingredients are particularly low quality. Your beef was not a grass fed cow who lived a happy life before being killed. It was a cow who lived in misery eating awful food and producing low quality meat. And I’m sure everything else on the burger was low quality too.
I don’t know, they are pretty fucking cheap.
I could eat for a week in what I’d costs to buy one McD meal. It’s wouldn’t be a very varied diet for the week but it would probably be healthier than the one McD meal.
Not in Germany lol. A cheeseburger used to be 1€ now it’s at 2,29€ 💀. Cheeseburger menu costs 5,99€
Ah yes, a food that you can eat for three days without pooping while you stay in a tent?
A legend has been born already for this network xD
So… Are you just unaware of fruits, vegetables, and legumes, haha? In my opinion there’s a huge amount of food that fits all three categories. One of the best example of cheap, delicious, healthy, and easy is beans and rice, spiced up however you like.
Yup. Mexican, Indian, a lot of cuisine from poorer countries figured this out long ago. Beans or lentils over rice with the right spices, incredible. The restaurant version will add a lot of fat and heavy cream but if you make it yourself you can adjust that so it’s not unhealthy.
My first thought was just just “Bananas?” Lol
Yes - generally beans are both healthy (33% protein, 33% fiber, 33% carbs), cheap (dried or in cans), and can be pretty tasty, even out of cans, but if not with eggs, as part of a soup (tomatoes + grain + spices + veggies).
Agreed. Beans can easily be dressed up and made delicious with just a few spices for very cheap, and are very healthy.
Well, first we need to define what healthy means, because you could die of water intoxication, meaning there is a point where quantity matters.
Are cheese and butter healthy ? Not if it’s your only diet, but there are tons of very healthy things in cheese and butter. And of course, the same goes for every thing. So we must have balance in mind when defining an healthy food.
The second is to define what is cheap. In most of European countries, fresh food is relatively cheap, but in other countries they can super expensive. And there’s nothing more healthy than fresh food. So you definitely need fresh food as a base for an healthy balanced meal.
The third is highly subjective.
As for my healthy delicious cheap meal:
Breakfast
One scrambled egg by Gordon Ramsay with a melted slice of cheddar on toast and A fruit salad of one orange, one kiwi and one small apple
Lunch
Spaghettis with fresh garlic, olive oil, fresh basil and tomato wedges
Dinner
Pan-fried chicken fillet with frozen peas and carrot rings
Snack
Any fruit really
This is a really good writeup. At a glance, I’m guessing these three meals don’t collectively exceed 1,000 calories, which is important to note since OP will probably be very hungry.
This is a really good writeup
Thanks
At a glance, I’m guessing these three meals don’t collectively exceed 1,000 calories
Except for the breakfast, I didn’t specify the quantities. So I guess some could adapt those “recipes” to their needs.
You know, there are a lot of answers around different varieties of beans. Beans are ok but I don’t really really have a craving for them. The olive oil spaghetti tho…
Cashews. Benefits: heart-healthy fats, antioxidants, essential minerals.
These are insanely expensive in Australia.
When I was in college, I had the rule of not buying anything that is >$1.50 per pound. This is what I was reduced to (prices may be different now due to inflation and geo area):
- Apples, oranges, grapes, strawberries when they are on sale
- Milk, yogurt
- Pork shoulder, chicken quarters, thighs, drumsticks
- ground pork, ground beef
- Carrots, broccoli, potatoes, cabbage (you’ll be surprised at how good thinly sliced cabbages taste in a sandwich)
Cabbage sandwich? Is there some special prep to it? Seems like it would be super bland
Spice it up with sriracha mayo on toasted bread. salt, pepper and a sprinkle of msg on tomato slices and add simple pickled pink onions. Slice the cabbage into very thin strips and assemble. It’s my favourite sandwich.
Pickled onions: Red onions, sliced thinly, Boil 50/50 water and vinegar, add salt to the solution and optionally a bay leaf or other aromatics to create the brine. Put sliced onions in a jar and fill the jar with the brine, put it in the fridge after cooling down and wait a night for the sharp oniony taste to disappear.
Carters’ peanuts :)
Nutritious is very relative to industrialized food production. The most nutritious natural products are perceived as wild and are not objects of agriculture. Basically the objects of agriculture were selected on the ease of reproduction, not their nutritious value, or their cost. It just so happened that those that were easy to plant and grow were the leanest in quantity and complexity of nutrients. Many of the most nutritious seeds, fruits, and vegetables are becoming extinct with the elimination of natural forests. Planted forests would take thousands of years to stabilize as ecosystems (if ever) and be concidered sustainable food sources.
Cheap means the industry hasn’t been able to monopolize, but labor is very exploitable (see bannana republics, tea and coffee plantations). It also means the quantities produced have saturated the markets and the product is in abundance (wheat, corn, soy,…).
Delicious … only N.Europeans (and their N.Am. Oceania descendants) would consider eating a single element alone and judge it by taste. The rest of the world eat what they can get, spice it up, mix it, and make taste a final product of a mixture of things with a labor intensive process of preparing it. The dairy industry (waste of nutritients and exponentially waste of land use) and the sugar industry (it should have been banned under substance abuse addictive product that is a health hazzard as well) have blurred what “delicious” really means. Take as an example banana split ice cream, there is little nutritious value, if not harmful as a whole, made of three industrial products that maximize labor exploitation. If it wasn’t for capitalism nobody in their right mind would have come up with this one. It only exists because of capitalism.
Nutrition has been a dead end disaster since its early days of being industrialized.
Kebab plate with vegetables.
A coleague of mine was eating it when he was on a diet to lose weight. It’s basically kebab/gyros meat and a vegetable salad with a dresing (usually tzaziki). You have basically no sugar in it, it’s just protein and vitamins.
Back in the day it cost like 4-5 € where I live which was pretty cheap for a lunch. Now it’d more like 6-7 € but that’s still decent
That is not at all a healthy meal, lol.
Umm what’s unhealthy in it? :)
I guess it depends how we define what’s a healthy meal but in my book few rules to eat healthy are:
- lower your sugar, flour, potatoes income to minimum
- lower your fat income and choose right fats
- eat more fruits and vegetables
- maintain right ballance of carbs, fats and proteins
A “kebab salad” sounds quite healthy in that take. Despite sounding strange that a common street food could be healthy
It’s a lot of salt, processed meat, and the salad bar at a normal kebab shop is not filled with nutrient dense vegetables. If it’s me, I’d eat it as a takeaway and spread the meat over three days’ worth of meals and up the nutrient content with broccoli and nuts.
Ok fair enough about the salt amount, that’ll be very probably higher. But I don’t know, can you define “processed meat”? Because from how I understand it, kebab is just grilled chicken meat?
That happens when you get told as a child that meat is always healthy.
Thank you for judging my whole childhood based on one comment! 👍
Of all the things one could eat, meat is generally on the healthy side though…
I eat tofu like four days a week and it is the best thing ever.
What do you do with the tofu? I have tried a few time but it always taste kind of “bland”
Basic recipe for nice tofu:
- freeze the tofu. This is important as it changes the structure (it becomes dryer and more “meaty”), this is a common technique in asia.
- after unfreezing it, dry it with paper towels or something like that, cut it into die sized cubes if you want, sprinkle it with potato starch and fry it in a wok or hot pan with some oil. It should get brown and crispy.
- sprinkle a few drops of Japanese soy sauce on it while it the pan and continue to fry it. The soy sauce adds taste and makes it caramelise.
- add cooked rice, vegetables or whatever you want.
You can leave out some steps above. Without the freezing the texture won’t be as firm, without the starch it won’t be as crispy and without the soy sauce it won’t taste as good. I’m just saying that because sometimes it has to go fast or you’re missing ingredients, so you can compromise if needed. Doing all is of course best.
Mapo tofu
The trick that I discovered to tofu is to press it between a paper towel and a book. It makes it less watery and tastes crispier.
Not necessary when cooking all tofu, but really took my tofu game to the next level.
What flavors do you like? It Marinates up well and doesn’t take long to absorb the flavors, then fry, air fry or roast in the oven. I Love cooking it with a sauce/gravy to add flavor too. Also silken tofu chocolate pudding/pie filling. You cannot even tell it has tofu in it.
Everyone is going to like different things, but tofu is a bit like wonderbread. It also tastes bland, but you get addicted to it anyway. I can’t explain why, but at this point I just put thick slices of tofu into the air fryer for 5 minutes and eat it as-is. You’re right, it doesn’t taste like much, but nevertheless it’s hard to stop eating it after you’re hooked.
Some things you can try:
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Try smoked, extra firm tofu. You can eat it as a snack straight out of the pack, and the taste is somewhat stronger. It’s brown and kind of leathery.
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GRILL your tofu. Get some good char on there. It tastes absolutely heavenly and smoky.
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Put soft tofu into your smoothie. It thickens it a bit but won’t change the taste.
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Tofu tastes good in a lot of salty, carby dishes. For example, one of my 5-minute meals is chow mein noodles and canned mixed vegetables (beans sprouts, corn, and carrot) sauteed with sesame oil. It sucks some of the moisture out of the tofu, allows it to absorb flavor, and offers a firm, meaty contrast to the other components of the dish.
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You can put tofu into any “soup” - chili, curry, etc. and this is another pretty standard use.
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There are troves of marinades and dry rubs out there. A good way to start is to go to a restaurant and try bowls with tofu to get an idea of what you like, and then to use that as a template.
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Sweet potatoes. Very nutritious, very cheap, and taste sweet. Easy to prepare to, you can just boil or bake them for a little while without adding anything and they’re great just like that.
classic
You can cut them in half and microwave them, then eat them with a spoon like an ice cream with its own cone.
are we allowed to add ingredients? A little soy sauce on that and you’ve basically got yourself a meal
I didn’t even know that you can add soy sauce to sweet potatoes!
You can add soy sauce to anything you want!
