this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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Canned food is not the cheapest way to go. Dry goods are. Beans and rice you could do for a dollar a day.
You won't enjoy it though.
And even if you're going with canned foods, canned ravioli is definitely not the cheapest way to do it. Buying dry spaghetti and canned pasta sauce is significantly cheaper (and significantly better tasting).
Won't enjoy it? Just learn to cook and buy some spices. Big bag of carrots, some onions, cellary. All super cheap. Splurge on one jar of chicken better than bullion. Add some cans of beans and dry pasta if you want and you have an excellent soup. Cook one big batch and you can eat it for days at about $1 per day.
Make a spicy Cajun red beans and rice.
I was broke after college for a while and got really good at shopping, meal planning and cooking, and still make some of those recipes today for my family because they are genuinely so good and comforting.
beans celery onion and bell pepper is like $8–9 and hopefully you have paprika and garlic and you definitely have salt and pepper. That's like 85% of red beans and rice assuming you have rice already. Or if you can get some noodles and chili powder and an onion and diced tomatoes and tomato sauce and you got a pot of cinci style chili thats pretty damn filling. Or an onion and northern beans and cornbread is incredibly filling.
You can eat really cheap if you know where to look for food on sale and have the wherewithall.
I know a store that sometimes has discounted turkeys on sale at .50/pound, for a young turkey it's like 7 bucks. That, a 15 pound bag of russets or two, about 5 bucks each, some carrots and celery, about 2-3 for about two pounds. After you eat the meat, boil the carcass with all the fat and everything with the carrots and celery, you can eat for like two weeks on that alone if you had to.
But eating turkey soup gets old.
You'll have video games to comfort you though
Throw in some peas - they're also inexpensive and taste good.
Naw, generations of very clever broke people have learned to do amazing stuff with rice and beans. Got some extra raisins? Sure throw em in. Cocoa powder that's about to expire, why not. Some peanut butter left in the fridge and you got no bread, sure throw that in.
Oops you just reinvented mole.
It doesn't take all that much to make a delicious rice- or beans-based meal. Though you do need to buy a few more ingredients. Bibimbap is a great rice dish. Emerald dal is spinach and lentils, but I'd put dried lentils in the same cost-effective category as beans (wouldn't be surprised if they are a bean, assuming peas are also beans) and a batch could last you for a few days.
I actually just spent like two weeks eating almost nothing except for rice and beans.
I had little in the way of spicing it up, some greens I foraged, oyster mushrooms I had foraged and dried, some homemade vinegar with some garlic powder while it lasted, maybe a bit of beet powder. Salt obviously. Pepper, cayenne, or chilie powder while it lasted.
Back on meat and potatoes for now.
Lentils, and peas are old world, beans are new world plants. The lentils and peas will cook quickly, while beans take hours of boiling to cook. That said last time I tried to make rice and lentils it didn't taste as good idk why.
Imo, lentils need carrots the way food in general needs salt, so that might have been the difference. I assume other sweetish (culinary) vegetables like squash or sweet potatoes would work as well, but since I tried them with carrots, I haven’t made them without to test (seriously, it’s that big a difference, plus carrots are the cheapest of the three).
It doesn’t need to be much, just one or two roughly chopped and thrown in with the raw lentils to cook together. I don't generally want the mushy carrot mixed in with the lentils afterward, so I just eat it separately (which is why I chop it roughly- if you chop it finely, it’d probably basically melt into the finished dish).
Thanks for the tip. Carrots are an underutilized food. I briefly worked for a chef with a small high end restaurant serving a fancy hotel, he did a bunch of carrot side dishes and mixed it in with a lot of stuff it was good idk how he seasoned it all.
Suprisingly, apple is good in a lot of stuff like this. Green ones are traditional for savory type foods but the others are good too.