healthy and cheap

So this is what fast food looks like on the $3 diet. A 5 lb bag of stir fry veges - broccoli, beans, carrots, peppers, and some other assorted stuff. At $0.06/ounce, it doesn't get any cheaper.

I picked up some frozen boneless, skinless chicken breasts for $0.16/ounce, so I think I am in business for stir fries.

I might go back and try tofu - it's $0.11/ounce - but last time I tried tofu I was underwhelmed.

Frozen doesn't have the same snap as fresh, but it doesn't go bad, and with this mix, it makes it easy to throw together dinner on the fly.

Unfortunately it takes up a lot of space in the freezer (and ours is not very big). You could argue that poor people would have even smaller freezers. That might be so. Or they might not have one at all. Also possible. Small freezer space could be solved by joint shopping - buying a bag and spitting it between households. This is the kind of thinking my grandparents used to engage in from what I remember. It's not something we in the middle class would think to do - at least not with food. But sharing is becoming stylish again - think zipcar and other car sharing services. I think a lot of these institutions have been forgotten because our wealth no longer required it.

I actually spent about 10 minutes standing in front of the freezer section trying to decide between the stir fry blend (above) and the alternative Asian stir fry for a dollar more:

The Asian had a few different vegetables - mushrooms for example - but in the end price won out over variety.