It may sound impossible to get all of the protein, vitamins, minerals, calories, and fats that you need for just 7$ a day, but It might actually easier than you think. As an Industrial Engineer, the answer of course had to involve a spreadsheet—so that’s what’s provided.
The goal:
Find a diet that maximizes my health and minimizes the monetary cost to get it, and the time cost to prepare it and dispose of it.
The way I achieved that goal:
Create a spreadsheet that tracks how many calories, protein, fats, vitamins, minerals, etc that I’m getting based off of the nutrition information of each of the foods that I’m eating scaled up by the serving size that I’m eating it. Then compare how much of everything that I’m getting to how much is recommended based off of the CDC’s recommendations which are put on the nutrition labels of food that you buy.
Context behind this goal:
In fact, I ate this exact diet everyday while I was at my internship in California. I stayed in an AirBnb but to my chagrin there were four dogs there and they ran the house—kitchen included. I tried cooking something once, but all of the dogs started barking and jumping up on me and trying to eat things off of the counter. So cooking was off the table.
This new situation of not having a kitchen required me to think a lot about what an optimized diet would be and how I would be able to make it with small appliances that just plug into the wall. After researching some lists of healthy foods, I came up with essentially the list you see above in the spreadsheet. I did make a couple revisions over time. It initially had bananas but they made my room smell a little weird so I decided not to have them in there and replaced them with grapes). Also, since I couldn’t use the kitchen, I had to get some kitchen appliances. I settled on getting a small rice cooker and a small hardboiled egg maker. I already had a mini-fridge with a small freezer and a microwave provided in my room.
I went the whole internship pretty much just having a bowl, a lunchbox, and a couple fork and spoons.
One thing that was honestly was pretty nice was how much it simplified my mental life. Less small scale decisions that I needed to make so I can focus more on bigger decisions and enjoying life. It gave me lots of time to think, walk around, have fun, dance, etc.
So that’s pretty much the story behind this diet. Costs about 7$ a day.
Here’s a picture I took in the store
On this trip I got a lot of the things in the spreadsheet, and I also wanted some cottage cheese so I got that.