this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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I feel like since they are mostly water weight, the math doesn't always look great. But let's go through it!
For example: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Russet-Potatoes-10-lb-Bag-Whole/10449951?classType=REGULAR&from=/search
10 pounds of food for $3 sounds great, but in a pound there is only 300 calories about, depending on type/peel/etc. So 3,000 calories for 3 dollars. At $1 per 1000 calories it isn't bad.
But let's compare to this 5 pound bag of flour for 2.38, at 3 cents an ounce:
https://www.walmart.com/search?q=flour
A pound of flour has 1,600 calories. So this bag of flour that is cheaper than the potatoes, has 8000 calories for 2.50. But you'll need to put in some elbow grease to make it edible. Doing a sourdough is probably the cheapest way to do it since all you need is flour, water, salt, and the starter you made using flour, but it is more time intensive. So about 3,200 calories for a dollar.
Rice comes in with a very similar amount of calories, but just a little more expensive at 4 cents an ounce:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Long-Grain-Enriched-Rice-5-lbs/10315395?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1600&from=/search
Rice is a bit easier to turn edible though, so the extra dollar might be worth it for a 5 pound bag. 2,400 calories per dollar spent.
Then oatmeal comes in as our most expensive at 7 cents an ounce.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KV4H51G?tag=sacapuntas9-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1
At once again 1600ish calories for a pound of dry oatmeal, it is 1.12 per pound. So it is creeping up closer to the price of potatoes TBH, and if you were super on a budget the oatmeal would be the first to go. But I suppose potatoes aren't "that" much worse than oatmeal. But my thought was oatmeal is good breakfast option so wanted to include it, and the top bit is mostly setup for bottom.
Knowing this stuff is helpful to our daily lives because rich people hate us.
I'm sure all of this is correct, but you're forgetting one thing: potatoes are the only one of these you can grow enough of to eat at home, as long as you have space for a bucket or sack or two of soil, and which basically require zero processing aside from applying heat to consume.
I agree with you that we shouldn't actually need to know or use any of this information, and as a poor disabled person I also know that growing your own food isn't always an option for everyone, but if it is an option, I think it at the very least puts potatoes back in the running.
You absolutely got me there! I mentioned making your own sour dough, but didn't factor in growing potatoes.
I think you need to include energy cost in the preparation stage. Bread requires a hot oven, which is a real amount of electricity
it's close to $0.40/kWh where I live. From this link it says that a bread maker uses only .36kWh, but an electric oven would be more like 1.6kWh. So bakita single loaf of bread, you end up with a not insubstantial fraction of the total cost going to heating the oven.
Of course, many bulk foods require heat, so it gets a little sticky this way. Oats/oatmeal probably wins out here, as you can just soak them overnight.
Good point! Rice makers are super efficient, so rice made with that might be the winner. But honestly the cheap carbs you can stand and make edible cheaply are probably just what you gotta go with.
It takes less time to cook than bread, but most other proteins take a bit of time to cook as well.
energy costs could probably be significantly reduced if the cooking was done on an industrial scale, so that most of the head goes into the food