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!
Onion. It’s cheap, nutritious, acts as a low-key anti bacterial solution, can be served in a multitude of ways, or eaten raw.
Subscribe for more onion facts. 🧅
eaten raw
You, sir, are a monster.
Hmm time for a snack
Takes a bite from a raw onion like an apple
Tony abbott is that you?
I thought your facts would lean more towards the lemon lifestyle.
Followed. Don’t let me down!
Great fashion accessory too
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.
humus
Only truly cheap if you make it yourself. That’s why I commented below on the missing item of “effort”.
granted
Ah yes, a food that you can eat for three days without pooping while you stay in a tent?
the three sisters are very nutritious. corn, beans, squash. add any spices you like, and a good oil (my faves are la tourangelle olive oil and their toasted seasame oil, sold on amazon and not expensive). salt and spices make all the difference.
🥑
I think a ripe avocado can be a good meal by itself, it has healthy fat, vitamins & fiber.
One avocado as a meal is cheaper than alot of other options.It’s so awesome with a bit of kala namak on it. Mjam!
It depends where you live (I’m in Bangkok, so grocery choices are quite limited).
I love Oats. I got massively back into them again this year… now I buy around 3kg every month (instant oats).
It’s only this year, really, that I discovered that oats are still really good and creamy when not made with milk… and it’s really easy to boil a single cup of water to dump on a cup of oats for a perfect breakfast (left standing for a minute - done… no need to ‘microwave’ oats).
Also, cheap staples include: carrots, potato, broccoli, spinach…
Frozen strawberries are dirt cheap here too.
Breakfast 1:
- Instant Oats (1 cup, 1/4 tsp salt, 3tsp sugar, 3 tsp creamer)
- pulsed to powder in the blender with a cup of boiling water poured over.
- Blend 100ml milk with 3 strawberries and mix that in. The beauty of this is (as my son does NOT like stodgy/thick porridge) I can add an extra 100ml of milk to his breakfast, and it becomes a liquid smoothie.
Breakfast 2:
- Weetbix are not too cheap, but ONE biscuit mixed with ONE cup of oats is a massive breakfast - and tastes of Weetbix… and is ridiculously cheap in comparison.
Breakfast 3
- Oats work great with eggs…
- 1 cup oats, some salt, some cumin (maybe a teaspoon)
- 2/3 cup boiling water (soak a minute)
- 2 duck eggs mixed in
- butter up the frying pan and dump it in there, cover and cook gently for 3 minutes, flip and give them another 3 minutes.
DIsgusting poopy one
- 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder mixed with 4 teaspoons of non-dairy creamer + 1 cup oats
- pulse to powder, add a cup of hot water.
That’s choccie heaven right there.
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.
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.
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.
Well-seasoned, air-fried chicken is super healthy and cheap.
Chicken has been heavily, heavily marketed as a health food, and while it’s not the worst thing you could eat, if you actually look at its nutritional profile it’s not particularly nutritious or “healthy”. That’s just Tyson Foods & co working their magic. It’s more like the ultimate neutral food - nothing terrifying, nothing great, a bit like its taste.
Chicken breast lean protein. What do you mean by “nutritional profile”?
Lean protein =/= healthy. Like, at all. This is a myth from the freaking 1980s. Nutritional profile is a breakdown of the micronutrients that a food has, and it determines whether a food is “nutritious” and therefore, in general terms, “healthy”.
Please, oh please, don’t go around telling people that food is healthy if it is a lean protein. I’m sure it’s well intended, but it’s also misinformed. If you want to learn about how to assess whether a food is healthy, go make an appointment with a dietitian - your insurance will often cover the first appointment.
You sure typed a lot without explaining what the nutritional profile of chicken is or why it’s not healthy.
Sorry, unfortunately nutrition is more complex than what you can sum up in a few sentences. To answer that though:
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Chicken isn’t categorically “unhealthy” in the same way double stuf oreos cooked in lard are - I said in another comment that it’s the ultimate neutral food, and if you look at its profile I think that’s a fair statement. It’s not completely devoid of nutrients, it has a couple of things in significant quantities - phosphorus, selenium, and B3 for example - but overall it’s not very nutrient dense. It doesn’t have a ton of huge negatives either - a bit of saturated fat, but nothing to write home about. If you’re looking at a “Hitler-Hanks” spectrum where the lard oreos are on one end and a spinach chia seed broccoli whatever salad on the other, then chicken is probably right in the middle somewhere. Its D&D alignment is True Neutral. The point I was making in my earlier comment was that “protein” doesn’t make a food healthy, and that there’s a lot more to it than that, and if people use that mental shortcut they might end up making misinformed decisions.
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The nutritional profile of chicken would be a lot to type out, but you can look at the NCCDB or Cronometer Gold (which uses NCCDB among others) for an elaborate breakdown. Just keep in mind that it doesn’t capture everything - it’s an amazing tool, but it won’t cover the catechins in your tea, for example.
Ultimately though, if you’re reading this, let me take this opportunity to encourage you to GO SEE A REGISTERED DIETITIAN. Your insurance will often cover 80+% of your first appointment, but even if they don’t it’s an amazing investment. You’ll live longer, probably spend less on food, and spend a lot less on hospital bills after your first heart attack.
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8oz of skinless breast has 250 calories, 0 carbs, and >50g of protein. That’s really nutritious and healthy in my book.
That’s very similar to something like lentils, and a lot better than something like rice which other people are saying but is essentially empty calories with barely any nutritional value.
Macronutrients are not what makes a food healthy. In particular, high-protein does not make a food healthy. By that reasoning a lot of fast food could be considered insanely healthy, but it’s not. That’s just our downright shitty levels of education surrounding nutrition.
What actually makes a food healthy depends on a lot of different factors, but a common one and relatively reliable standard bearer is whether it is “nutritious”. When a food is nutritious or nutrient dense, it is micronutrient dense. This includes things like spinach and beans and seeds and broccoli and all of the other foods that your parents made you eat. Micronutrient poor foods are ones that have relatively few micronutrients, but usually are relatively calorie rich. This includes things like mozzarella sticks, wonderbread, fruit gushers, heavy cream, twinkies, and so on. We do need macronutrients, but virtually anyone who gets enough energy (calories) from food also gets enough of them, except in specific cases like being a professional athlete. The athlete wouldn’t die of protein deprivation if they didn’t pay attention to their intake, but it would make it harder for them to perform well.
So no, chicken is not, by any standard, “really nutritious and healthy”. It’s not completely devoid of nutrients - it’s relatively rich in phosphorus and selenium if you eat it on its own, for example, but it’s far from what anyone would consider nutritious. It’s somewhere in between fried mars bars and spinach.
Fried soy beans with garlic. Tastes approx like potato chips, about the same price as beans, and decently nutritious. Just don’t use too much salt or oil.
Rice and beans, just be a little creative with preparation. Also you can make lots of soups that are cheap and healthy and its super easy to make too.
My vote too.
If you expand the format to rice + dried bean/legume/grain (e.g. lentils, quinoa), you can really expand your possibilities without breaking the bank.
Chana masala is pretty delicious and I’m pretty sure it’s healthy. I think it’s mostly chickpeas and vegetables which are both pretty good for you.
Scrambled eggs.
