Affording to Eat

I have been pretty absurdly poor in my life, and I learned to eat cheaply. Enough people have asked me for how to do this that I decided to finally write it up. A lot of this is based on living in the United States, but a lot of it is globally applicable common sense.

There are a few major rules to eating cheaply:

• You need to cook. If that's a serious problem tell me and I guess I'll post fast easy recipes and instructions too.
  
• If food goes bad before you eat it, that is lost money
• You are descended from a lizard and if you see excess you will eat more
• Your freezer/refrigerator space is limited, your room temperature storage is less so
• Not all items have equal markups for buying in small quantities
  

So now lets apply this

1. Anything you buy frozen, are ok about freezing, or store at room temperature you should buy in bulk.
   
2. Anything frozen you buy in bulk but eat thawed should be rebagged. Bags should be equivalent to whatever you expect to eat between when you first thaw it and when it would go bad. If it is a raw ingredient bags should be the size you use to cook one meal. Err on the side of bags that are too small, you can always thaw another one early.
3. When you prepare food that doesn't mind being frozen, make extra and freeze it. It means you can be lazy another night.
   

Breaking up bulk

You must keep everything extremely clean when you break food up from bulk orders. Any germs you introduce at this stage will have a very serious impact on the shelf life of the product. All containers have to be very clean, and anything which touches the food has to be very clean. I would often turn the ziplock bags I was transferring food into inside out and use them like gloves when handling the food that was going into them.

If you do Tupperware tubs do things that stack, and get ones so cheap you don't mind throwing them out if one falls to the back of the fridge and gets really horrible. Get ziplock bags in bulk.

Did you forget that this stuff freezes?

• Cheese
• Meat (some people don't like it that way)
• Bread products (bread, tortillas, rolls, bagels, english muffins)
  

Substitutions:

• Bread: about 30 cents to make, about $1.25-$1.65 to buy. A bread machine costs 50 dollars and the work involves dumping the materials in, hitting a button, and coming back 3 hours later. Materials for bread are water, flour, oil, and yeast which do not go bad. Figure out if that saves money.
• Candy. You are not allowed any more candy. If that's really hard you can buy bulk candy at costco/etc, or better yet raw baking ingredients. Chocolate chips are about 30 dollars for a 30 pound bag, aka the same price as about 5 packs of chocolate bars. Never buy individual candy bars. Rebag and hide the bulk candy from yourself so your lizard brain doesn't let you pig out.
• Pancakes: making your own mix is no more work than a mix, honest. Don't get prefrozen pancakes: make a bunch on the weekend and bag them up for breakfast each morning.
• Bakery items: No. Make them yourself or do without.
  

Serious discounts in bulk and lives forever:

• Flour
  
• Sugar
• Brown sugar (rebag airtightly so it doesn't get weird)
• Rice
• Lentils (seriously, actually kinda tasty. Steal Indian recipes)
• Beans (warning, soaking these sucks, prepare in bulk and freeze)
• Pasta
• Alcohol. If you like it cold/have a bad lizard brain refill smaller bottles in the fridge.
• Coffee
• Laundry detergent
• Toilet paper
• Paper towels
  

Co-Op for shelf life

You're probably not the only person interested in saving money. There are some things which have huge bulk discounts but not an infinite shelf life, so break up bulk runs with friends. These friends are likely to be also good for splitting a costco membership with you. Don't go in on bulk orders for stuff you don't like.

• Potatoes
• Onions
• Cereal
• Yogurt
• Cheese (if you are running low on freezer space)
  
• Meat (if you don't like it frozen)
• Fresh fruit
• Fresh vegetables
  

Co-Op for interest

These things you may never finish if you get the super bulk quantity, split among friends

• Spices
• Peanut butter (advise against rebagging)
• Nuts
• Olive oil
• Other cooking oil

Quirks

Local grocery stores really price gouge on vegetarian substitutes, dietary requirements and foreign food. If you get any of the following things but don't get them in bulk, you should strongly reconsider.

• Soy milk
• Nutella

Up

My mom's dad dreamed of a better life. Born in Hell's Kitchen, he permanently damaged his heart swimming in the polluted rivers as a child. They sent him on a charity cruise for dying children to give him one nice experience before he kicked it, but he's the one child that lived.

My mother dreamed of a better life. She hates mint ice cream. Once her family ran out of money, and used the last five dollars to buy a gallon of it for dinner. She's never told me what happened after that. She chose a career at my age to support her dying father and lives a reasonable middle-class life now.

I lived a sheltered and comfortable life. My father was out of work intermittently, but I didn't know. My parents, two siblings, and I would split one can of spam and a pot of rice for dinner, but for a kid my age that combination of grease, overprocessed meat, and carbohydrates was one of the coolest meals around. It wasn't until my mother announced one day that dad had a job and we wouldn't be having spam anymore that I figured anything out. I went to college, graduated into a respectable cube farm career that paid more than my parents made combined some years, and settled down to wonder if there was anything better.

Enron always wears polo shirts, says it's just what happens to you when you go to prep school. I give him no end of shit about it. He too was the poor kid in his highschool, but mostly because his family didn't have a jet.

***

"You're almost at the end!" I hugged him.

Jace didn't look up from screen and his keyboard, "The end?"

"You're level 54 now, you'll be level 60 soon. That's the highest level."

"See, that's the difference. Some people think they're hot shit when the reach 30, or 50, or 60, but for each person who considers something a goal, there's a better player who shrugs it off as a simple prerequisite. Those girls you coach dream of getting into college. You consider it a simple rite of passage on your way to the next thing, and always assumed you'd go."

"It's... still an achievement?"

Click click click went the mouse. He sighed and rolled his eyes, "The game starts at 60."

***

I sat on the deck of the Torii with Enron.

"I'm thinking of running for the board."

"Why?"

"I dunno, seems like a thing to do. I'm not sure what to do with myself anymore. I achieved most of my major goals. There is obviously more out there than a cube farm and toys, but I haven't any idea what it is, let alone how to get it."

"There's lots more,"

"Your life isn't interesting to me. There has to be another path 'up' other than the useless socialites."

He shrugged.

***

Six months later we, the four cofounders, are standing in a mall on a Monday afternoon staring.

"Neutral colors, all the products are very brightly colored, so the backgrounds are all very neutral to let them pop."

"Floors have busy patterns."

"Mmm, casinos are like that too."

"Let's go in the bookstore. Pretty dense product display there..."

***

"This has the potential to make us all life-changingly rich"

"I was looking for life-changing-lulz, but I also accept cash."

"That puts each of us past the only phase change in real wealth: buying your freedom. Below that is all gradations of slavery, and above that is all gradations of rich."

***

In a white suit coat he looked strangely out of place in the party. When he took us outside to talk to him, suddenly I begrudged Bluebeery and Enron a lot less for constantly wearing those damn polo shirts. Now I was the one who looked out of place, and they both needed me to make a good impression on the Angel.

"You guys are working on something pretty exciting," he said.

***

We're in a pool at a, for lack of a better term, corporate mansion. The pool is full of eager biologists playing water volleyball, and the garage is filled probably over a million dollars in lab equipment.

Enron taps me on the shoulder and laughs, "This, this is 'up.'"