Hunger Action Week day 1: organic and vegan for $7 a day

I’m vegan (obviously) and aspire to eat local, sustainable and organic food as frequently as I am able. Is this possible on a $7/day diet?

For the first day of Hunger Action Week, I decided to find out.

Many people think that food co-ops, Whole Foods and other natural foods stores, and farmers markets are overpriced, but this is not always the case, particularly where local and organic foods are involved.

I think this comes from the fact that stores like Safeway and QFC screw really consumers over with organic and vegan specialty goods — if it’s expensive at Safeway, it must cost twice that at Whole Paycheck!

Not always so.

Conventional items at a mainstream supermarket cost less than conventional at Whole Foods, but organic at a mainstream supermarket often costs more. I am always shocked to see that an Amy’s frozen dinner sells for at least a dollar more at QFC than Madison Market.

And there are always deals. I have finding deals at “pricey” places down to a science:

Balance the inexpensive finds from the bulk bin (beans, grains, flour, sugar, etc) with produce.
Look for sales.
Make it a point to stop by the discontinued shelf and the deli and bakery for deals on food that is about to expire.
Make liberal use of coupons, even if it makes you feel like your grandmother.
Most stands at the Farmer’s market have “seconds” — bruised or otherwise ugly produce — which can save you, the consumer, tons of money; many stands sell their produce for a price competitive with natural foods stores.

Ecoblogger Jennifer Grayson has more on this in a video on the Huffington Post — it’s a great watch.

Therefore, while some might laugh at the idea of eating on $7 a day with items purchased entirely from a food co-op, it’s really not that far-fetched. With a little elbow-grease and ingenuity, anything is possible.

So, I headed to Madison Market.

I spent about an hour browsing the store, looking for deals, searching for recipes on my iPhone, going back and forth between the bulk bins and the produce section so many times that I started getting strange looks from the one seemingly nice person who works in the place. (Madison Market is great, but some of the staff need a refresher in customer service. I work in customer service– I can say these things.)

I decided to make seitan tacos. Corn tortillas are cheap, and the One Dollar Diet folks (also vegans) made liberal use of seitan during their adventures. Cabbage, that favorite of peasants across the world, was cheap, and the store had taken the consideration to cut some of the heads in half– a good candidate for a coleslaw-y side salad. My friend Toni makes a delicious Peruvian cilantro-flavored rice, so I went with an imitation of that too. Bam. Dinner.

Oatmeal makes an inexpensive, satisfying, and filling breakfast. Add a TBS of peanut butter, and you have yourself a proverbial breakfast of champions.

So, I had dinner and a cheap breakfast, but what about lunch? What about snacks? What about my favorite meal of all, the one my father’s nightly ice cream ritual taught me to believe is what the whole day leads up to — dessert?

Lunch hit me in the bulk aisle: couscous with garbanzo beans (henceforth to be called chickpeas, for alliterative purposes). Add some roasted cauliflower (again, balancing the cheap grain and the expensive veggie), sauteed onion, and raisins for contrast, with some simple spices, and you have yourself a meal, friend.

I still had enough in my budget for dessert: a small Sjaak’s peanut butter bite.

Intake for the day:

Oatmeal + peanut butter: $0.13 + $0.21 = $0.34
Pink lady apple (snack): $0.70
Two bags of Kroger-brand Pekoe tea (not from the food co-op, but it’s going to be a rough week at work even with caffeine mainstreamed into my blood supply, so I had to cheat): $0.06
Chickpea and cauliflower couscous: $1.42/serving
Clif bar (snack): $1.00
Seitan tacos with coleslaw: $1.62/serving
Cilantro rice with black beans: $0.59/serving
One Sjaak’s Peanut butter bite: $0.69

Total: $6.41 (with $0.59 margin of error– see below)

Takeaways from the first day:

Fresh chile peppers are an excellent way to add flavor and spice for very little dough.
It’s hard to budget for something like 1/4 tsp of cinnamon. I know it costs money, but you can’t just weigh out 1/4 tsp cinnamon on a kitchen scale like you can weigh 1/2 cup of beans to determine cost. So, for my cinnamon, cumin and nutritional yeast, I just estimated that the cost they would add would still put me under $7 for the day.
It takes a lot of work and planning to eat creatively on this small of a budget.
Having extra equipment, in this case a blender (a VitaMix, no less), and a rice cooker, really increases how much you can cook. A VitaMix is very pricey, but a regular blender and a cheap rice cooker are not. The rice meal below, with canned beans instead of dried, would make an easy meal for someone without a kitchen but with $50 to invest in devices that just need an electric outlet.

I was never hungry throughout the day, or at least any more than I would be on a typical day.

Breakfast was full of fiber and protein to fill me almost to lunch (I’m hungry by 11 a.m. regardless of what I eat for breakfast), and the afternoon Clif Bar added some extra vitamins, calcium and protein. All of it was all flavorful enough to keep my interest. I made enough that I, as a single person, would need to eat the same thing lunch everyday (couscous) and then the same thing for dinner (tacos) for a week, but it was so delicious that this prospect doesn’t deter me (and I’m a bit OCD, which helps).

Recipes below.

Chickpea and cauliflower couscous:
serves 4

1/2 cup dried garbanzo beans, soaked overnight and cooked (1 cup cooked beans): $0.41
1/2 yellow onion, diced: $0.37
1 lb cauliflower: $3.31
1/4 tsp cinnamon:
1/4 tsp cumin:
2 tbs canola oil: $0.34
1 cup couscous: $0.82
raisins: $0.42
salt and pepper, to taste.
total per serving: $1.42

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Cut cauliflower into small florets and coat with 1 TBS oil in a large bowl; mix in cinnamon and cumin. Roast for 20 minutes. Remove to a large bowl.
Place couscous in a medium-sized bowl. Pour 1 1/4 cups boiling water over it, stir, and let sit 10 minutes or until grains are fluffy and all water has been absorbed. remove to the same large bowl as the cauliflower.
Sautee onion in the second TBS of oil until brown. Remove to same bowl as cauliflower and couscous, and add remaining ingredients. Stir until well mixed and place in refrigerator to chill.

Seitacos with coleslaw
serves 4

1 small green bell pepper, cut into strips: $1.12
1/2 yellow onion, cut into strips: $0.37
1 package tortillas: $.99
serrano chile, diced: $0.05
gluten: $0.96
Thyme: $0.09
Nutritional yeast:
soy sauce $1
1/2 head of cabbage, shredded: $1.49
2 tbs lime juice: $0.27
1 tbs canola oil: $0.17
salt and pepper as needed
total = 1.62

Combine shredded cabbage, lime juice and 1 TBS canola oil in a large bowl. Set aside.
Make seitan following VegWeb’s directions; slice into thin strips
Sautee onion, bell pepper and and serrano chile in 1 TBS oil until starting to brown. Throw in seitan strips and saute a few minutes more.
Warm tortillas in the microwave on a plate covered with a paper towel. Fill with seitan mixture and top with coleslaw. Garnish with cilantro left over from making cilantro rice.

Cilantro rice with black beans
serves 4

1/2 cup black beans, soaked overnight and cooked (1 cup cooked): $0.32
1 bunch cilantro: $1.39
rice: $0.52
1 tbs lime juice: $0.14
total: 0.59

Blend ≈4/5 of the bunch of cilantro in a blender with 1 cup water and 1 tbs lime juice until well blended. Add enough water to equal 2 cups.
Place rice in rice cooker with cilantro water, salt and pepper and cook.
When rice is finished cooking, stir in beans.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2011 at 9:02 PM and is filed under Hunger Action Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.