Eating cheap

Low cost, nutritional eating, with less fuss

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  • Not-quite-as-good pizza

    There are a million pizza recipes online. The best pizzas are (in my opinion) cold-proofed sourdough on a hot woodfired oven. Typically high hydration, and unforgiving if you don’t develop enough gluten. Not to mention you need the oven! Here’s one of mine that’s much more forgiving and, if you close your eyes, basically pizza!

    Cheats easy pizza – the dough

    A low-cost, low-difficulty impression of a good pizza. Good enough to fuel you through the evening

    Prep Time
    15 mins mixing, 3.5 hrs proof

    Cook time
    10 mins

    Serves
    2


    Meal
    Dinner

    Ingredients

    • Strong white flour – 265 g
    • Sugar – 1 tbsp/12.5 g
    • Salt – 0.25 tsp/1.5 g
    • Dried active yeast – 0.5 tsp/2 g
    • Baking powder – 0.5 tsp/2.3 g
    • Whole milk – 25 ml

    Directions

    • Preheat oven to as hot as it will go. If you have a thick cast iron pan or baking stone, put that in to heat up too.
    • Mix flour, sugar, and salt
    • Activate yeast – whisk with 100 ml of warm/lukewarm water and a pinch of sugar. Make sure it smells nice and yeasty and is completely dissolved.
    • Mix milk into yeast
    • Pour into flour mixture – knead for around 5 minutes until smoothy and elastic
    • Put in bowl, cover with a damp teatowel and leave to proof in a warm area until approximately doubled in size – around 2 hours
    • Knock down (throw onto the worktop and squish) then sprinkle the baking powder over
    • Knead and work the baking powder in – another 5 minutes
    • Cut the dough into portions. Cutting into 4 will make pizzas around 6″ wide – just enough to go into an air fryer if that’s what you’ve got. Cutting into 2 instead will make a better size pizza
    • Shape into balls, and let them rest for a minute or so.
    • Shape the pizzas – lightly oil your hands and work surface. Form the crust by poking your fingers in around the edge, leaving a gap about 0.5 cm wide. Squish the centre to push the dough out. Work the centre with the edge of your palm to get it nice and thin, maintaining a small crust. You can pick the dough up around the crust and work it around. Stop once it starts to get too see-through!
    • Leave it on a square of greaseproof baking paper to make it easier to handle. Cover and leave to proof for approx. another 1.5 hrs
    • Top, and bake for about 10-15 minutes until the base is cooked through and toppings suitably melted

    The life story

    Another life story. I started baking when I left university in 2017. I made my first baguettes using leftover oil from a duck confit (hardly cheap!) and they were chewy and tasted of duck – unsurprisingly!

    My housemate and I used to have pizza every week – and I decided to start making them. Some failures and disasters later, I decided to go on a course at the local bakery. While there, the subject of pizza ovens came up and they specifically cautioned against a wood-fired Ooni/Uuni if you’re making lots because it’ll take all your time managing the fire.

    So what did I do? I went and got an Ooni! I loved it, but they were correct – it’s a pain to make lots of pizzas on. After using my friend’s large clay oven, and working constantly to turn pizzas, get them out and immediately be launching another, I was set on an upgrade. But then I left for New Zealand and started living in a van – no wood fired oven here!

    This recipe satisfies my (occasional) craving for some hot carbs. In a pinch, you can steam the base to cook it, fry the toppings, then pull the toppings out of the pan, fry the base until browned and throw the toppings back on. I cook the entire thing in an air-fryer (I did tests about which I preferred, steaming the base and air-frying with toppings on or air-fryer all the way. It’s basically the same).

    This recipe originally came from a Bao recipe – hence the idea to steam the bases.

    Nutrition and cost

    This recipe is just for the bases. If you split the recipe into 2, then you’ll be looking at the following:

    Energy (kCal)Protein (g)Carbs (g)Fat (g)
    52516.8102.22.8

    Hardly high fat or keto. Definitely high carb. But sometimes that’s what you need.

    For costs, I’ve assumed you use 300 g of flour due to wastage. At the moment in New World that comes out at 69 cents for the whole recipe – 35 cents per serving (if you cut it into 2). Cheap, and effective. This must be why flour and salt were handed out as rations! (N.B. Costs have been rounded to the nearest cent, salt isn’t free).

    ItemRecipe price ($)
    Flour0.51
    Baking powder0.02
    Yeast0.07
    Salt0.00
    Sugar0.03
    Milk0.06

    Toppings

    Toppings are a personal preference but obviously you can’t just eat pizza-biscuits (unless you really want to). I’m a big fan of a four or five cheese pizza – quite the expensive habit. I recommend trying a blue cheese pizza with some thin slices of a sharp apple thrown on – it sounds odd but it really pops.

    To make a basic tomato sauce, you can do the following:

    1. Pour a can of peeled plum tomatoes into a bowl, and squish with your hands
    2. Add any of the following to taste: salt, olive oil, oregano, basil, sugar. Mix in, and taste frequently.

    That’s it. I typically use around 4-5 teaspoons of that base per pizza so it lasts for ages. The entire base will set you back around $1.5 (depending mostly on how much olive oil you put in), so per serving I estimate you’d be spending around another $0.15.

    Top with around 50 g of mozzarella – approximately $1 – and a couple of slices of ham – around another $1 – and you’ve got a tasty cheap meal. Excluding energy costs you could be making this for around $2.50/serving!

    Bonus photos

    Here are some I made earlier. On the left, one that’s just been air-fried. On the right, the base was steamed for 8 minutes, then topped and air-fried.

  • An aside recipe – seaweed nut snacks

    A break from looking at numbers – here’s a recipe I love making when I’m hosting at home

    Vegan seaweed and nut snacks

    A healthy, easy, fast, flexible and mostly vegan table-top snack of roasted nuts baked in seaweed sheets

    Prep Time
    15 minutes

    Cook time
    15 mins

    Serves
    2-4


    Meal
    Snacks and games

    Ingredients

    • Seaweed sheets x 2
    • Cashew nuts – 20 g
    • Walnuts – 20 g
    • Almonds – 20 g
    • Olive oil – 2.5 tsp
    • [Choice] Marmite – 25 g
    • [Choice] Tahini paste – 25 g
    • [Choice] Honey – 25 g
    • [Choice] Other binder – approx. 25 g

    Directions

    • Preheat oven to 180 °C fan
    • Blitz nuts together in a food processor to desired consistency – I prefer a coarse grind so there are still pieces of nut left over
    • Gently dry roast the nut pieces together in a pan until fragrant
    • While hot, mix with the binder of your choice – I love Marmite here
    • Oil the seaweed sheets, place one on a baking tray, and spread the hot nut mix over it. Sandwich with the other sheet
    • Place a second baking tray or dish on top to squish it down, and bake for 15 mins
    • Remove from oven, and cut into squares approx. 2 cm big. Serve hot and enjoy!

    The life story

    Now that the recipe is over, the story behind it. It all started, as such stories do, in the summer of 1973. The Watergate scandal had broken, Skylabs had been launched, and everything was looking up.

    Unfortunately, I hadn’t been born yet – and wouldn’t be for another few decades – so I can’t say that this directly impacted things. My board games cohort, for whom I created this recipe, also hadn’t been born. But the game was afoot!

    In reality, I felt guilty that the vegan member of our team couldn’t eat all the crisps we were furiously stuffing into our faces to make sure we managed to get more but not have to take the last ones. I also felt a bit guilty about the volume of crisps I was stuffing into my face. I decided to see if I could come up with a better alternative.

    The requirements:

    1. Easy
    2. Vegan
    3. Tasty
    4. Snacky and finger-food capable
    5. Vaguely healthy. A hand waving idea that it wasn’t the worst thing to be eating

    What I ended up with was making something akin to snack squares from a blend of roasted nuts, mixed with a flavoursome binder, and sandwiched in seaweed for finger-food-ability. My binder of choice is Marmite partly because I love it and partly because our resident vegan happened to have mentioned they add it to dishes to make them taste a bit meatier (ergo – they were on the side of liking marmite, as is correct).

    The Marmite is entirely replaceable (as are the nut mixes), and I’ve had success with Tahini paste (made from sesame seeds) and honey (which obviously stops this being a vegan recipe).

    By my calculations, using Marmite, it has the following nutritional info:

    MacroQty per 100 g serving
    Energy559 kCal / 2,340 kJ
    Protein22.9 g
    Fat14.5 g
    Carbs44.5 g
    Fibre5.3 g

    It’s easy to make, requires very little active prep (the hardest bit is spreading the mix – use an oiled spatula) and is incredibly moreish. I don’t recommend making this the entire meal but it’s a great snack to throw in a bowl!

  • Sort by cheapest – background

    Tl;dr

    What follows is a poorly formatted write up of the process of trying to get product information out of New World. I succeeded! A lot of it is trying to simplify the process. You don’t need to understand it. The end goal, is to scrape grocery store sites to list products by a custom filter – e.g. cheapest protein.

    Intro

    It’s hard to kick the habit that I don’t want the cheapest, I want the better quality. I do want the cheapest. But sometimes the cheapest isn’t actually the cheapest. Supermarket websites allow you to sort products by cheapest-per. Cheapest per kilo, cheapest per can. What about cheapest per energy? Cheapest per protein? Cheapest per overall nutritional score?

    It’s easy to think that they don’t do this because it would be too hard. Well. Let’s find out. In this initial intro, I’m going to look – manually – at New World. If it proves to be successful, then I’ll try to make it more generic, and eventually make something anyone can use.

    But first – how does the internet work?

    The internet

    This isn’t a course on web programming, and I don’t think I could adequately do one that isn’t better covered by someone else’s YouTube video, but a very brief explainer:

    Imagine that you want to send a letter to someone, asking for some information. You need:

    1. Their address
    2. A way of asking them to look something up
    3. A way of telling them what to look up
    4. A way of telling them how you want that information
    5. A way of them sending it back to you

    Intuitively, this isn’t hard (although I doubt many people have sent letters now). The address – well that’s easy:

    Mr H. Potter
    The Cupboard under the Stairs
    4 Privet Drive
    Little Whinging
    Surrey

    A format easily understood. You know who you’re sending to, and where they’re going to be. In the internet, this is a URL1 – the thing you type to go to google.com or, in this case, https://www.newworld.co.nz/

    That’s the address part. Let’s jump to #5 – a return address. Well, either in your letter you put a return address on the top right, or you include a SAE – Stamped & Addressed Envelope that they can just pop the response in and send back. For now, that’s a close enough analogy2

    Now #2-4. Telling someone to look something up, what to look up, and what format you want it in. To a native speaker this is really easy:

    “Please could you give me a list of all your flours, and their costs, and send them back in an ordered list?”

    In English, we have a fixed set of words that describe “Please give me”. The internet is no different! The key words for today are:

    1. GET (please give me)
    2. POST (take this and remember it)
    3. PUT (take this update and remember it in place of a previous one)

    In this case, we want to GET. Then we say what we want to GET – generally people only have a fixed list of things they can GET. After all, you wouldn’t expect a flour shop to be able to give you a list of all their washing machines – at least, not a useful list.

    This is called a route, and you can see it in your web browser again – the path broken by ‘/’, for example, if I go to New World and look for bananas I get:

    https://www.newworld.co.nz/shop/category/fruit-and-vegetables/fruit/bananas?pg=1

    The URL, the address, is http://www.newworld.co.nz

    The route is /shop/category/fruit-and-vegetables/fruit/bananas

    After that, we can add extra information, like filtering out certain items, with a ‘?’ and a series of ‘thing’=’value’ pairs. Here that extra information is that we’re asking for page 1 only.

    What about the format to send it back? Behind the scenes, your web browser is including the information that it would like the content back in, for example, HTML – the language that web browsers understand, or JSON – a convenient format for computers in general to understand.

    Seeing it in practice

    There’s a lot of information here, and it’s quite small, but on the right we can see a browser making a GET, to http://www.newworld.co.nz, to a path (filename) that ultimately ends up as /category/fruit-and-vegetables/fruit/bananas. You can try this yourself by opening up your console (usually f12) and moving around websites.

    But this is pretty inconvenient – it still involves clicking. I want to know if we can do this automatically. When websites and services have a way of interacting with them, they have something called an “API” – a list of all the ways you can interact with them and what words to use. New World have one, but they don’t release it publicly. Fortunately, because they have a website, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. In fact, right here we can see a request to api-prod.newworld.co.nz:

    Let’s try poking around. For this, I’m going to use Postman – a tool for interacting with APIs

    I wanted to see if there was a good way of getting all products. Finding the right path is a bit hard because the website only lets you navigate by category – so let’s try each category. Is there a way of getting all categories?

    Well. Yes. As it turns out, if you ask for a category page that doesn’t exist, the response helpfully gives you a list of the ones that do exist:

    That 404 in red is a special number that means “The thing you were looking for doesn’t exist”. But then in the “letter” (in the previous analogy) that was sent back, we’ve helpfully been told all the categories that do exist – here you can see “Featured” and “Fruit & Vegetables”. It’s also telling us how to access them (the “url” field).

    Picking out a particular category, it turns out that you have to chase down multiple levels. I’ve ended up back at bananas:

    A result! With a list of bananas. The results list is actually quite useful – it gives you all the information you expect to see, including cost and cost per unit – as well as the unit (kilos in this case). But that’s not enough – we need nutritional information!

    A single banana

    Using the list, we can now get the product page for each individual banana. This is the address http://www.newworld.co.nz/shop/product/<productID&gt; – for example https://www.newworld.co.nz/shop/product/5338126_ea_000

    Success! Unfortunately – there’s no nutritional information for bananas. A slight snag. Turns out bananas weren’t a good example. What is? What else? Pie!

    Pie comes through

    I’ve cheated slightly to go and get an individual pie from the new world website. It’s this Great Southern Pie. And here it is, a pie in all its glory – nutritional information and all:

    Cleaning up

    This is all quite messy. There must be a better way, right? Well yes. Going back to the page inspection, there are calls to api-prod.newworld.co.nz. That sounds much more promising!

    This API needs us to identify ourselves. Fortunately, our web browser has to do this anyway and the calls to it are nice a clear. First, get simply get current user, which sends us back an access token:

    Then we include that token in our new requests to the api:

    Much faster, much cleaner. One small detail is that we need to tell the api (at least this one) which store we’re looking at. The Cromwell store is “9829c627-42c8-4ad7-b550-f9dba9fcd44a”. A list of stores comes back from the “api-prod.newworld.co.nz/v1/edge/store/” address.

    Summary

    Now I have the beginnings of a way to access product information programmatically, I can start to make a computer do all this work for me. From there – it’s a case of trying it out for new grocery stores, too.

    Footnotes

    1. Ackshually it’s not that simple. But for now – yes it is. ↩︎
    2. See 1. ↩︎

  • Pay peanuts, get walnuts

    I was wandering through a Sunday market here in Cromwell – you probably know the type. Incredibly expensive cheeses. A coffee cart that’s inexplicably about 50% more than the coffee shop a stone’s throw away. Someone selling hand-knitted tea-cosies and polished gemstones. The odd stall proudly owning a “witchy” label selling incenses, stones, and herbal teas. Maybe some soap. Not the kind of place you’d expect to get cheap food.

    Tucked away in the corner, however, someone was selling sack of walnuts – in shells – for $12/kg. I didn’t know quite what the ratio of edible walnut-to-walnut shell by weight a walnut is, nor did I consider looking it up (a lot of times in my life you could ask “what were you thinking?” and the response would be: “Uh. Nothing?”).

    Lugging a kilo of unshelled walnuts home, I promptly put them in a cupboard and forgot about them until my existing supply of (shelled) walnuts ran out, which took about 3 weeks (longer than anticipated).

    Van life on the cheap necessitates two things:

    1. Not buying much stuff
    2. Not having much stuff

    As such, I don’t actually own a nutcracker. The best I had, or so I thought, was a rubber mallet that I use to hammer in pegs for the awning. Not particularly hygienic but so long as it only touches the shell – so what?

    Well. Hygiene was the least of my worries; I spent a good five minutes picking bits of walnut, shell or otherwise, out of the rug. And so this time I changed tack…

    A hand job

    “Can you crack walnuts by hand?”

    Yes. Yes you can. It requires a bit of technique – namely lining up the seam of the walnut shell with your palm, going sideways, then pressing hard. Judging the pressure is a bit of a knack and many walnuts turned into more of a walnut powder than a walnut piece, shell included in the mix. But, nonetheless, it did end up being more successful than the mallet.

    Briefly. About 5 nuts in I discovered what you might call “a tough nut to crack”, which resulted in deep imprints in my palms and a fully intact walnut. Cue switching to the base of a mug to crack them open, which turns out to be much more controllable and less painful – although I was concerned about the structural integrity of the mug.

    Ultimately I spent about 30 minutes in all cracking 198 g of walnuts, including picking out what I can only describe as “walnut piece dividers” that sit through the middle of the nut itself. What did I produce for this effort? 93 g of edible walnut.

    Some was wasted during early efforts but ultimately most walnuts were cracked with ease and the nut generally intact – I’d estimate that a skilled cracker could get around 50% yield.

    The final cost

    What does this mean? It means that so long as you don’t count your own time cracking them (and it’s a perfectly pleasant activity if you’re watching TV) the cost of walnuts, bought whole and shelled, becomes around $24/kg. The cost in shops? The cheapest I’ve found is $26.60/kg but the typical price is more like $30/kg – $40/kg.

    Accounting for taste

    A bonus here is that I think that these walnuts are significantly tastier than the price equivalent or cheaper in the super market. No doubt this vendor is seasonal and won’t be around for much longer, but I shall definitely be returning. The overall nutty flavour was much more prevalent, with much less bitterness, and they didn’t dry my mouth out as much

    Energy budgets

    Nuts may not be the obvious choice for cheap eating, but they’re packed full of energy – a good reason they’re typically included in trail mix – and are incredibly versatile. Mix water and sugar to make a simple syrup and candy them. Blitz them to make a powder and use as a flour-like substitute (other ingredients also required). Plus, packing around 65 g of fat and 15 g of protein per 100 g of walnut, the energy density is around 700 kcal/100 g – which makes my hand-shelled walnuts good for around $290 kcal/$ – that’s 67% higher than the pie in my previous post.

    Plus they pack in around 6 g of fibre/100 g, as well as Omega-3 and Omega-6 fats. Hand shelled (in season) walnuts. Pretty much the cheapest healthy snack you can have.

  • Now I eat humble pie

    Humble pie. That which we are forced to eat when humiliatingly wrong. But also one of my favourite foodstuffs! The secret to a great pie lays in the secret ingredient of… pie. It’s hard to get a pie wrong (although if you serve it with mashed potatoes and/or peas on top – congratulations, you’ve managed).

    It’s also the first thing I’d reach for when I want a quick, low fuss meal. New Zealand is great for pies (barring aforementioned serving style) and a good pie can be got for dirt cheap. Take this family pie from Fresh Choice – unfortunately Fresh Choice don’t display nutrition labels on their website but fortunately I happen to have one in the fridge. One $10 pie contains 1,735 kCal.

    N.B. They recommend three servings, but depending on how you vary your meal sizes, I’d make it two for a large lunch, or three for a smaller dinner.

    A price comparison

    That’s 174 kCal/$ – how does that stack up? A famously student – and therefore cheap – meal of beans on toast should be a worthy contender. Let’s try to get 900 kCals of beans in our bellies!

    I’m going to look at two options – the first is the absolute cheapest beans on toast possible. The second uses seeded bread and slightly more expensive beans, to give a slightly better meal (although you really shouldn’t be relying on this for particularly good nutritional value). The bread’s will be:

    1. Pam’s Value White Toast Fresh Sliced Bread – coming in at 781 kCal/$
    2. Freya’s Swiss Soya Linseed Bread – tipping the scales at 481 kCal/$

    For beans, I’ll pair Pam’s to Pam’s, and Freya’s to Wattie’s (I’m desperate to compare to Heinz – the _correct_ brand of baked beans, but given this is a blog about eating cheap, I’ll have to draw the line):

    1. Pam’s Value Baked Beans – 350 kCal/$
    2. Wattie’s Baked Beans – 139 kCal/$
    3. (FYI Heinz came in at a measly 97 kCal/$. They do taste good, though)

    Britain has, as expected, provided an answer to the question of the right bread-to-bean ratio, coming in at 4 slices per tin (~400 g) of beans. This is serious research being done for you – my one reader!

    I’m making an assumption that a listed serving of bread is two slices – it looks to be about right based on how many slices are in a bag. That means per tin of beans, with four slices of bread, we’re looking at:

    1. Pam/Pam – 662 kCal per four slices or 1 tin of beans – for a cost of $1.37
    2. Freya/Wattie – 874 kCal per four slices of 1 tin of beans – for a cost of $3.86

    Adding an extra pair of slices of bread and half a tin of beans to the Pam/Pam combo to bring it up to 993 kCal gives a final price of $2.06.

    I consider the range of 874 – 993 to be good enough for this, considering you’re not going to be eating half a slice of bread with a spoonful of beans.

    Bean-to-pie

    If you have the absolute cheapest beans, with the absolute cheapest bread, then you’re paying around $2 for nearly half of your daily calories (assuming you’re around 2,000 kCal). That’s incredible value, but unlikely to be sustainable as a long term diet without incurring some major issues.

    If you want to add a bit of flavour* then you can move upmarket, get a bit more fibre and spend $3.86 for about the same. It’s a big step up, but with that you get some more protein, and around twice the fat. Not to mention the fibre – which really is important. Fibre isn’t listed on the online nutrition info but for the macros you’re looking at:

    ComboProtein (g)Fat (g)Carbs (g) / Sugars (g)
    Pam/Pam396.6179.1 / 35.7
    Freya/Wattie43.613.295.9 / 35.4

    Meanwhile our pie is coming in at $5 for a ~900 kCal portion. That yields:

    PieProtein (g)Fat (g) Carbs (g) / Sugars (g)
    BoB Creamy Chicken30.662.437.2 / 2.7

    I’ll admit, I was surprised at how low the protein was. But equally, pay a little extra and you’re getting around 1/8th the sugar. Not to mention the semblance of vitamins – this pie contains hints of carrot, onion, and celery – for a broader range of vitamins than will be found in just beans on toast. Again – I am not a nutritionist, but you’ll find more of vitamins A and K in foods with carrot and celery, without missing anything from the beans (thanks onion).

    Whichever way you slice it

    Ultimately the choice is yours. At these levels, for a quick and easy meal, I’d opt for the $5 pie portion over $2 of cheap beans on toast, every time. That’s the difference between around 15 minutes of work (at minimum wage) and around 6 minutes.

    I’ll work 9 minutes more for a pie.

  • A sour (cream) study

    I was doing some shopping today and stopped to check my choice of sour cream, which I use to add an energy boost to my salads. Astounded at leaving with 6 items having spent nearly $90 (although I do have 3 weeks worth of chicken lunches in the freezer now) I went back over my bill to see where I could save.

    In particular, I noticed that of the 6 things I bought, sour creams had a huge variation in cost-per-calorie. If you’re calorie counting, it really pays to pay attention to what’s actually in what you’re buying.

    In this example I’ll compare three different brands of sour cream available at new world, in 250g sizes, as well as two “lite” alternatives. I’ll include costs for pre-and post-clubcard discount.

    The contestants

    First up, is Anchor Original Sour Cream, sporting the following macros (per 100g):

    • 3.8 g protein
    • 22.3 g fat
    • 3.8 g carbs (of which, 3.1 g sugars)
    • 953 kJ / 228 kcal

    Anchor Original is my go to choice. A 250 g tub costs $4.45, or $3.99 with clubcard – for a cost of $1.78 and $.160 per 100 g respectively. Time to check and see how it holds up…

    Our other contestants are:

    • Meadow Fresh Traditional
    • The Collective Straight Up (squeeze bag instead of a tub – likely a premium for that)
    • Anchor Lite
    • Meadow Fresh Lite

    Sour cream – in numbers

    Here’s how they stack up:

    BrandProtein
    (g/100 g)    		Fat
    (g/100 g)    		Carbs
    (g/100 g)    		Energy
    (kcal/100 g)
    Anchor Original3.822.33.8228
    Meadow Fresh Traditional3.517.65.9194
    The Collective4.212.36.8154
    Anchor Lite4.011.44.6136
    Meadow Fresh Lite4.410.96.7141

    That’s a pretty wide spread – unsurprisingly, the “lite” variants are just less overall, but I was very surprised to see The Collective coming in with just 68% of the calories of Anchor Original. It does have one of the highest protein counts – and protein can lead to feeling fuller, so if you’re struggling to stay within your calorie target, that might end up being the better choice.

    But how much do those creams cost, and what’s the cost per calorie?

    Pricing it up

    In the table below, I’ve calculated the cost per calorie for each option. Where a clubcard discount is an option, the reduced cost is in square brackets []. Because the costs are very low per kcal, I’ve priced it per 1,000 kcal for readability:

    BrandCost
    ($/100 g)    		Calorie-cost
    ($/ 1000 kcal)
    Anchor Original1.78
    [1.60]    		7.8
    [7.0]
    Meadow Fresh Traditional1.889.7
    The Collective1.9812.9
    Anchor Lite1.78
    [1.60]    		13.1
    [11.8]
    Meadow Fresh Lite1.8813.3

    That’s quite a swing. From the most expensive cost-per-calorie (unsurprisingly a “lite” variant – Meadow Fresh Lite) to the cheapest is an increase of 70%. The figures here may seem negligible, but if this applies across even half your shop, by cost, that’s a significant expense. Again, if you’re calorie counting.

    If you’re always using a fixed amount of a given ingredient then the cheapest per 100 g (assuming you’re on a tight budget) will be the easy choice.

    In actual fact I’ve managed to not prove the thing I was trying to set out to show – that sometimes the more expensive option is cheaper in the long run. But hopefully you’ll agree based on this, that it’s entirely possible.

    Even though I knew that there was going to be a big swing in cost-per-calorie, I was surprised to find it was as much as this.

    In practical terms

    It’s not practical to inspect the nutritional value of absolutely every item you buy, nor is it reasonable to expect someone to do so. It would take so much time to do a weekly shop that the prices would probably have changed!

    But we can change that. Talking technically for a second, it’s entirely possible to automate this. I don’t mean some pipe-dream, I mean that given a free weekend, fetching prices and nutritional information for absolutely everything in your weekly shop, and making it searchable, is entirely feasible. This is something I’d like to consider making, freely available, in the future.

    Wrapping it up

    I hope this was informative – and shows just how much different products that may be nominally the same can differ, and that with the right circumstances, big savings could be made with careful choices.

  • Minimum wage – maximum value

    Hello, and welcome to Eating Cheap.

    I’m Mike Young and this is my attempt to feed myself for as little as possible, and stay healthy while I do it. I hope this may be of use to you, too!

    I’m a mechanical engineer-cum-software engineer on hiatus and traveling. I’m privileged enough to say I’ve never had a minimum wage job, and never really needed to deal with sorting through groceries to keep costs low.

    Until now…

    I’m still in a pretty good position. The job may be minimum wage but other costs (namely rent and utilities) are very low. I’m also starting this from a baseline of having no dietary restrictions, children, other dependents, or health problems. Consequently, that leaves me with time enough to dive into what I eat.

    Health and nutrition

    I am not a medical professional. I don’t intend to provide medical or nutritional advice. But I am good with numbers, and in a pinch I can put together tools to help sort the wheat from the chaff.

    I aim to make it clear what’s my opinion, what’s my opinion with a basis behind it, and what’s a direct quote from literature. For the most part though – this is just my opinion. I’ll also make it very clear where AI has been used to search sources – and I will always link the underlying sources when possible.

    I think it’s important to watch what you eat – but more importantly to read the labels. Lots of cheap food is low in calorie density and comprises mostly of water. Investigating labels and comparing prices is time consuming – and I assume most people on minimum wage don’t have that time. I aim to do some of that work for you, and possible help along the way.

    Macros

    I am not a nutritionist. I cannot advise anything other than speaking to a health professional about what you should be eating. With that said, I generally follow a high-fat diet – it personally makes me feel satiated for more of the day. It’s worth noting that at the same time I started upping fat and dropping carbs, it coincided with a generally healthier diet anyway. As ever – consult a professional if in doubt.

    Meanwhile, though, foods are made up of three macro (main) components:

    • Carbohydrates, or carbs – provide fast energy
    • Proteins – Help build and maintain muscle, and can provide energy when other sources are not available
    • Fats – Highly energy dense, slow to release

    Each one has its place, and I consider it more important to look at the quality of the food rather than the pure content – 250 kcal of brown rice is likely to provide higher quality nutrition than 250 kcal of margarine.

    Calorie counting

    Is a major part of eating cheap. Over-eating means over-spending. There are a number of ways to know how many calories you should be eating – and it will serve you well to get a good baseline. Once you start counting you may be surprised at how calorie dense some foods are.

    I had the good fortune to have a DXA [“Dexa”] scan 3 months ago. It’s absolutely not a requirement – but it was fun and quite interesting. From that, my estimated Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR – the amount of energy I need to exist) was calculated as 1,479 kcal. I add to that a rough baseline of 550 kcal for light activity and general walking, for a baseline of 2,140 kcal. If I do any strenuous work throughout the day – I’ll add more. For reference, I’m 175 cm tall and weigh 68 kg, a figure staying fairly constant.

    Calorie counting can be done for free using a spreadsheet (or a piece of paper). It is much easier to use one of the variety of tracking apps – I can’t recommend any one in particular except that I use Cronometer which suits me well.

    Beware – generic inputs on apps for foods may be alarmingly different to the label. If in doubt – trust the label where available.

    Where from here?

    I hope that gives a brief introduction of where I’m coming from. Over the course of this blog I’ll aim to look at the most cost and time-effective recipes for delivering nutrition. At the moment I’m in New Zealand, where the cost of groceries is high and the minimum wage is low – hopefully this is applicable to other countries.

    At some point in the future I’d like to set up an app that scrapes supermarket websites for groceries and sorts out the cost-per-calorie, as well cost-per-<macro>calorie to help people sort brands and products to see what’s actually going to be cheaper, rather than cheapest per kilo.