![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frugal meals math
2023-10-12 18:26I watched a Youtube video of someone trying to live on "$1 a day" for a week. This slid to "$10 a week" and then $10.90 in her actual purchases. Then we see her cooking and supposedly eating the meals. Doing a calorie estimate on her cart, I get about 1400 calories/day, low but plausible for a small adult woman. Her groceries included 2 pounds of lentils + pinto beans, whole wheat bread, and oats, plus one bag of refined pasta, so her meals having high satiety is plausible -- lots of fiber and protein. Though low in vitamins A and C or any fat apart from egg yolks.
But then she has another video, claiming 70 meals (servings) for $25. And while it might have some cheap recipe ideas, I estimate under 200 calories per meal. Absolute starvation if you tried eating 3 'meals' a day. I hope she did not in fact try feeding her family on that for a week, as the beginning of the video claimed.
Tangentially, I learned that US food stamp budgets have just been bumped up to $291 for an individual; it was $192 a few years ago. For a large family it gets down to $219/person, or $7.30/day. So her videos (made in the last year) are on absolute hard mode. (Eased by being near some cheap Walmart, her prices were way lower than what I get.)
But then she has another video, claiming 70 meals (servings) for $25. And while it might have some cheap recipe ideas, I estimate under 200 calories per meal. Absolute starvation if you tried eating 3 'meals' a day. I hope she did not in fact try feeding her family on that for a week, as the beginning of the video claimed.
Tangentially, I learned that US food stamp budgets have just been bumped up to $291 for an individual; it was $192 a few years ago. For a large family it gets down to $219/person, or $7.30/day. So her videos (made in the last year) are on absolute hard mode. (Eased by being near some cheap Walmart, her prices were way lower than what I get.)