There are two kinds of people in the world. People who enjoy cooking, and everybody else. This section is mostly written for everybody else. I’m guessing people who enjoy cooking won’t find the project of eating well for less very difficult.
The aim in this chapter is to spin up a system whereby you are eating well and not spending very much money or time to do so. In my experience it’s relatively easy to eat for $200 or less per person per month, or $6.66/day. I find it a challenge to eat for only $100 a person unless you’re getting food outside of the grocery store system (e.g. you have a productive garden, dipnet fish, or dumpster dive).
Now, this is the Crowbar Manual, not the Pattycake Manual. It isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be effective. Often, when doing the Crowbar method, we “force” a significant change, which is uncomfortable, and we use that discomfort as a motivational lever to increase our skills to make it feel good.
But nothing kills morale faster than unsatisfying food. If your morale is low because what you’re eating sucks, everything else you’re trying to do is going to be much more difficult. If you associate the entire project of internalizing post-consumer praxis with unsatisfying food, you’re likely to quit.
Because food is the cornerstone of morale, this section is one of if not the most important sections. If you can change your habits such that you’re eating really good food, not spending a ton of time prepping (unless you enjoy food prep, in which case go for it), you look forward to your meals, *and* you’re not spending very much money, you are very well set up for overall success. This can be one of your most important early wins, a win that demonstrates to you that you can make positive changes in your life and enjoy the results.
I recommend putting as much surplus effort into this as possible. You don’t want it to drag out over months and months. I suggest focusing very intensely on this step until you’ve got a system you’re happy with and it is running smoothly. Back-burner whatever you have to in order to get the hang of this as quickly as possible.
I think of the crowbar tactics to eat well for about $200/mo in three stages.
Stage 1 is very simple:
- Make the food you eat yourself. Don’t get food from restaurants, take out, doordash, or cafes.
- Stop drinking alcohol.
- Stop eating meat.
- Eat dairy sparingly. Cheese for taste, not the main ingredient.
- Buy ingredients, not packaged foods. Buy oats, peanut butter, and honey, not granola. Flour and eggs, not pancake mix. Flour and salt, not bread. Beans and rice, not frozen burritos. Tomatoes, onion, peppers, limes, and chilis, not a tub of salsa.
You can do all of these immediately, with overnight cost reduction results. If you don’t know how to cook, however, you might not know what to do with the whole ingredients you’ve purchased.
The second stage is just one thing:
Learn how to make tasty and easy meals for yourself/your household out of ingredients.
Our culture is weird about food. Cooking can become a status symbol reflecting bourgeoise affectations. Our food choices reflect who we are. If our food isn’t delicious, photogenic, and took 3 hours of prep, then we’re Doing It Wrong. Alternatively, if it isn’t scientifically certified to be The Optimum Best nutrition based on the current internet trend of the month, then we’re Doing It Wrong. What to Cook becomes a fountain of neurosis.
We have the idea that home-cooked meals have to be either some kind of ambitious production, or bland raw vegetables served with a side of suffering. Do your best to recognize and let go of any of these notions that might have been incepted into you.
You have and/or will develop your own ideas about what you Should eat. For the Crowbar, let’s make it simple: learn to cook meals that are easy to make and tasty and make them out of ingredients.
- If you aren’t making food that you think is tasty, you won’t want to eat it and you’ll head for Chipotle or the frozen dinners aisle.
- If you aren’t making food that is easy to make, you’ll get exhausted from doing prep all the time and just grab takeout.
- If you’re making food from whole ingredients and not boxes, even if you’re mostly making pancakes, burritos, and pizza, it’ll probably be a lot healthier than eating out all the time. After you’ve habituated cooking all your meals for yourself, you can devote surplus cognitive bandwidth to dialing in the nutrition optimally for your body and lifestyle.
How do you do this? Write down all your favorite meals. What do you like to eat? For me, the list is:
- Burritos (especially breakfast burritos)
- Egg sandwiches
- Hearty pancakes (with fresh-milled flour and two eggs instead of one. They’re unlike the super fluffy cake pancakes drenched in high fructose corn syrup you get at ihop).
- Pizza
- Pasta bolognese
- Simple salads
- Grilled cheese and tomato soup
Doesn’t look super healthy, does it? It isn’t super healthy! But it’s also not super UNhealthy. Let’s break it down:
- The burritos are mostly rice and beans, with vegetables (onions, peppers, and salsa which is just vegetables), a small amount of cheese, and a tortilla (DIY or storebought).
- Eggs sandos: eggs and sourdough I make myself. A little bit of cheese plus salsa.
- Pancakes: Fresh milled flour (I prefer half and half rye flour and winter red flour), an egg, baking soda/baking powder, coconut oil, peanut butter, and a smidge of honey or jam.
- Pizza: flour, sourdough starter, a can of diced tomatoes, and costco cheese. This is probably the least healthy thing I eat. But also, if you’re gonna eat a pizza now and again, make it yourself for a dollar or two, rather than twenty bucks and drenched in grease.
You get the idea. I also cook a lot of meals that aren’t necessarily my top favorite comfort foods, but are still plenty tasty and easy:
- Lentil stew
- All kinds of soups
- Chili
- Salads with beans for heft
- Oats with peanut butter, dates, nuts
- Roasted sweet potatoes with veg and beans
- Shakshuka
- Fried rice
Am I saying that you should eat burritos and pizza every night of the week forever? I am not. I am saying that you can probably relax a bit about food in order to habituate cooking all your food at home, which will make a big different in terms of your cost of living, your health, your time, and your sense of self-efficacy. Once cooking becomes a normal part of your life, you can tweak it to be as perfectly dialed in to whatever food/nutrition scheme you want. Again, cooking just about anything yourself at home is likely to be healthier than if you’re getting most of your food out, or buying pre-packaged foods.
The final note about this is that one component of “easy” can be “cook more than one meal’s worth at a time”. The simplest way is to make more than you need for dinner, and leftovers are tomorrow’s lunch. Breakfast can be super easy oats or egg sandwich or eggs, leftover beans, and spinach. Then you’re essentially only cooking once a day.
A level up from that is to do a big batch of cooking on, say, Sunday. Cook up a big pot of stew, chili, or bolognese, and that can be several meals of the week that you just need to reheat or at most boil up some pasta.
The third stage is about getting your ingredients for as low a cost as possible.
First, pay attention to where you get ingredients from:
- Buy in bulk (Costco, Azure Standard, etc). It’s much cheaper to buy 25lbs or rice and beans at a time rather than in cans or the small 1lb bags you get at normal stores. For things like rice, beans, lentils, wheat berries, oats, etc, buy these in bulk. If it’s going to take more than a couple months to eat your way through a bag, get 5gal food grade buckets with gamma seal lids.
- Buy from discount grocers (Aldi, Grocery Outlet, etc). The move is: go to the discount grocer first, and if you need anything they don’t have, you can grab it from the ‘normal’ grocery second.
- Don’t buy food from Whole Foods, street name “Whole Paycheck”.
Second, take a look at the expense of the individual ingredients you’re buying. It isn’t actually that useful to look at the dollar amount for a given item. What does it mean that a jug of olive oil is $16 and a head of Kale is $2.50? The comparison means nothing. Instead, pay attention to the amount of calories you get per dollar, and the amount of “nutrition” you get per dollar.
Pay attention to the calories per dollar of foods. This is easy to do with the calculator app on your phone. Grab a tub of coconut oil and multiply the calories by the servings. Then divide that number by the price. That’s your calories per dollar ratio. If you eat around 2,000 calories a day, and want to spend $200 or less on food per month, that’s $6.67/day and you need to average about 300 calories per dollar. Don’t take my word for it, maybe I’m lying to test your. Do the math yourself, commit the numbers to memory, and use them as a rule of thumb when shopping. You’ll start to get a sense for what a good cal/$ range is for different kinds of foods.
If you’re a nerd like I am you might make a spreadsheet with a meal plan to figure this out. I did this for a month – I calculated the costs of various ingredients, came up with standard meals, figured out the macros and the cost, and built a system that I knew would result in a <$200/mo grocery bill. Once I’d got the hang of what to cook, I didn’t need the spreadsheet anymore. For me, that was easiest. Most people don’t do things like that. They just follow the above guidelines and adjust as necessary. That’s fine.
Pay attention to nutrients per dollar of foods. I don’t know of a good way to quantify this, but you’ll want to pay attention to it in a qualitative sense at least. Blueberries might have lots of nutrients, but they can cost a lot for a tiny little tub. In contrast, a sack of baby spinach or carrots can cost a couple bucks. Eat more spinach than blueberries, is what I’m saying.
The holy grail is ingredients that are high in both calories and nutrients, can be had inexpensively, are easy to prepare, and can be used in a lot of different delicious recipes. Pinto beans are a great example (refried beans for Mexican food, put them in any kind of soup, in chili, on salads…).
Additionally, there are nutrient benefits in places you might not think of. We’re used to thinking that bread products are trash. That’s because studies are done on breads made from Bread Products using processed flour and additives. Don’t buy white bread! Don’t even buy whole wheat bread! Don’t buy Bread Product! Make your own bread, from grain you grind yourself, from organic wheat and rye berries. It’ll be delicious and hearty.
The calories per dollar for wheat berries is quite high, and by grinding it fresh yourself every couple of weeks you get good nutrients from the whole grains. Making bread is really easy. The internet wants you to think that you have to spend six hours doing 47 steps involving scales and test tubes and all sorts of things to make a loaf of bread. These are foodie status games. By all means do all that stuff if you enjoy spending hours making food that’s 7.4% better than what I can make in seven minutes. Otherwise, just mix flour, salt, water, and yeast (or sourdough starter), knead it with your hands, let it rise for a while, then stick it in the oven and take it out when it looks right.
Bottom Line: Cook easy meals that you look forward to eating using calorie- and/or nutrient-dense ingredients
Be sure to learn how to make tasty meals that you look forward to. I don’t love cooking. Most of the time it’s a chore. If there were an inexpensive and just-as-healthy alternative that didn’t involve any effort, I’d do that instead.
The first thing I learned how to make inexpensively was burritos, because I love burritos the most. I make tortillas and salsa from scratch, and buy rice, beans, and spices in bulk, and get organic produce at discount grocers. I love eating my burritos and they cost about a dollar. I recently settled on my preferred salsa: half an onion, maybe a quarter of a can of chipotle chilis in adobe sauce, a can of diced tomatoes, cumin, salt, lime, etc.
I also recently learned how to make pizza. It is so easy. I make the dough the night before, blend a can of diced tomatoes and add salt for the sauce, and top with costco cheese. Delicious. A buck or two for a full pizza pie.
For fancy breakfast I make hearty pancakes. I grind rye and whole wheat flour at home, and use coconut oil and peanut butter and a dash of maple syrup or honey from a friend’s hive. Delicious, filling, and extremely cheap. Or I’ll fry some eggs and put them on top of homemade sourdough. Or good ol’ oats (with almonds and dates, peanut butter, coconut oil, cinnamon, and hemp seeds).
Making chilis and stews takes a few minutes and is hearty and will feed you for days. It takes about four minutes to prepare a lentil ragu or bolognese for pasta, and it’s hearty and full of protein. I regularly prepare pinto bean chili and have sourdough bread with it.
The point is, don’t assume that you need to do some 3-hour prep time Gordon Ramsay sing-along bullshit if you’re going to cook from home. Go for tasty and hearty, not Michelin-aspirational. (Unless you just love cooking and get a lot of satisfaction out of it, in which case chase your stoke on that! And invite me over!)
For the Crowbar Era, it is good enough for now to find easy to make meals that are tasty. Even if all you’re eating is mostly pizza and burritos and pancakes, as long as you’re making these meals from whole foods ingredients and not processed packaged food-products, you’re almost guaranteed to be eating healthier than if you were still eating out a lot or eating prepackaged foods. And you’ll be spending a lot less money.
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