I’m sad that this is worth mentioning. But if you are dealing with hunger amid threats to SNAP benefits, rice and beans are very cheap per meal and can be bought in bulk. Here’s some tricks I’ve learned:
If you get dried beans, make sure you follow the directions to pre-soak them. Canned beans are easier to prepare, just dump in near the end of cooking to heat them up. Dried lentils don’t need to be pre-soaked, but I prefer to cook them separately and drain the water they boil in.
Brown rice, barley, or other whole grains have much more protein than white rice and I find them more filling. Whole grains take longer to cook than white grains.
Frying diced onions in the pot before adding the grains and water is an easy way to kick the flavor up a notch. Use a generous amount of cooking oil (light olive oil is healthiest) for cost effective calories and help making the meal more filling.
Big carrots or celery in bulk are pretty cheap too. I like to dice carrots by partially cutting length wise into quarters, but leave the small end intact to keep the carrot together to make it easier to dice down the side. Add them to the same pot as the grains after the grains start to soften. Beets are also great; skin and cube then boil separately until soft. Change up your veggie to get a mix of vitamins
Get some bulk garlic powder, hot sauce, paprika, cumin, crushed red pepper, black pepper, etc. Season and salt the pot to taste.
You’ll only need 1-2 pots and a cutting knife/board for veggies.
I recommend Harvard’s Nutrition Source for science-based nutrition information and they have some recipes too
Edit: discussing big changes in diet with a primary care doctor or registered dietician is generally a good idea.
Probiotic supplements may help with gas.
As a bonus this sort of meal has a very small environmental footprint.
Imagine living in a country with 900+ billionaires, with growing tendency, where regular people are discussing about the best ways not to starve.
Not that it’s much better where I live, but damn, what the hell is wrong with this world?
The problem is less that people can’t afford to eat, it’s that they’ve been alienated from their food and don’t know what to do to feed themselves without being exploited by gouging opportunists.
The elite have always been vampires living on the blood of us peons… it feels new to us because we are living it now, but history shows its been this way a long time, and it was probably the same in prerecorded history too… we, as humans tend to suck…
part of it is that the working class, poor to people who incorrectly think they’re middle class included, basically everyone who is not ownership class (where owning things is the primary means of making them money), utterly fail to organize, and sometimes actively work against their own interests (like the “lets make a third party!” morons, the “I am morally superior for not voting” morons, and or course the actively malicious “I let the billionaires tell me that them fucking me was actually brown people’s fault” morons.
I hate the use of working class that excludes front line workers who very much still work for a living. Why call it working class if it’s just a fancy name for lower class instead of fully including all workers?
???
I certainly include them in my definition.
I took. > Incorrectly think they’re middle class
As to assume you didn’t. But clearly my assumption was wrong
As the saying goes, “most of the working class are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
I don’t even think they think this. I think its small potatoes compared to the ones who are convinced that skin colour is like shirt colour in middle school sports, and that means they’re all on one team and the ones who don’t think that are traitors.