Punk Rock Diet: How To Eat Well On A Budget

                                                           Have it your way, bitch!

We’ve all tried to survive on nothing but ramen noodles or Kraft Easy Mac at one point or another. Perhaps you’ve tried the tuna and water diet. Or maybe you took the line about liquid bread from Joss Whedon’s Firefly a little too seriously and think beer is actually a good meal. But no one thing can give you everything you need in a balanced diet, and it’s not one of those things the government just made up to control our minds (wholly unlike the Backstreet Boys whose success can only be explained by a secret government attempt to brainwash an entire generation of girls that backfired and made Lance Bass gay. Trust me, it makes sense in my mind. And I’m a genius.)

Human beings are made up of lots of different kinds of things. There are different chemicals that make up fingernails, skin, blood, bones, etc. that give each of these things their unique properties. Because we’re the most complex life form on Earth – and that’s only above the shoulders – we need lots of different things in our diets to keep all of our parts working.
Punk rock life is often one of poverty, and usually by choice. But poverty doesn’t instantly translate to famine. You can eat like a king with just a few simple rules.


Start thinking about unit price:

 

Don't let the corporations fool you. This is not worth a dollar! You are getting gouged!

Those McDonalds hamburgers look pretty tasty for ninety-nine cents, huh? But think about this. If you made them at home, burgers twice as big as that cost you a measly thirty cents. The rub? You have to buy in bulk. Big warehouse outlets like Costco and Sam’s Club can sell you food at incredibly low prices. I know what you’re thinking – those fascist corporations! Well think of it this way. The less money you spend, the less money in the system. And you will be spending money on food somewhere, why not spend less?

Learn to cook:
You don’t have to be a master chef. Learn the basic principles behind cooking beef, how to season it, what temperature to cook it at, how to tell when it’s done cooking, etc. Same with chicken and pork. You can also do fish, too, but if you live in a landlocked area you might want to stick to the land animals. Vegetables are also important to diets, but that doesn’t mean you have to have some fancy salad or something. Learn to bake a potato – a simple skill that appears to be getting lost as generations progress. It will fill you up for cents. A simple dish that has always delivered for me is throwing cut-up beets, red potatoes, sweet onions, and yams into a glass dish with some olive oil and baking it at 400 degrees until they’re soft. Salt it and you’ve got a stomach full of high-fiber, high vitamin food too keep you energized. Best of all since it’s rich in iron and copper, it actually helps you heal faster by allowing your red blood cells to carry more oxygen. Root vegetables are a good cure for hangovers and mosh pit injuries.

Only get what you can eat:

 

Dude, you paid eight bucks for those pickles. Why did you think you were going to eat all of those?

Why let food go bad? You paid for it! Or even if you didn’t pay for it – free food, dammit! You will always periodically need food, and it’s one of the few things on this planet with intrinsic value. So when you are going out to buy food, make sure you’re not buying things that you’re going to let go to waste. Planning out your meals is a good way to make sure of this, or if you’re more finicky buy things that can be prepared lots of different ways. If you get two types of pasta, three types of pasta sauce, beef, chicken, bread, and garlic butter, you’ve got enough food to have a different meal every night for a week.
If letting food go bad happens a lot to you, figure out why. What types of food do you buy too much of? Why do you buy too much of it? Can you get it in a more appropriate size? Remember that you can go broke saving money. Getting twice as much for only ten dollars isn’t much of a deal if you’re not even going to finish half of it before it goes bad.

Have the right tools:

 

You do not need anything fancier than this. At all. Ever. This is the perfect cooking machine.

When I was running a house of punks, stoners, and hippies I found that the best gift I had ever been given was a black spice rack fully stocked with every seasoning I could possibly want – everything from coriander to rosemary; saffron to salt; cumin to poultry seasoning. By changing the flavors on top of it, chicken and pasta becomes taco chicken salad; or Italian chicken Alfredo; or spicy Asian stir-fry. There’s a reason they call it “spicing it up”.
Also, invest in cookware. You can usually get decent pots and pans from second hand stores like Value Village or Goodwill, but stay away from Teflon. It breaks up after a while and flakes into your food. Instead, look for cast iron or stainless steel. Cast iron is the best, as stainless steel tends to get black crap on it whenever you cook something a little too long. They are really difficult to clean. But they’re both better than Teflon because Teflon will give you cancer.
A barbeque is also a major asset. Commonly you can find classic Weber grills that are in perfect working condition for free or cheap on Craigslist, yard sales, or just left out on the side of the road. The second best gift I was ever given during my tenure at the Devil Duck House was a grill. It wasn’t one of the UFO-shaped Weber charcoal barbeques, but some terrible old propane grill. The propane nozzle was clogged and broken, so we just threw charcoals in the bottom and it worked fine. Constructing a grill isn’t difficult, as it has very few components.
There are a variety of things you might need to cook at home on a budget depending on your style. If you end up being good with Asian food, a wok is a good investment. For those who like to grill sausages and onions, a good set of tongs and grill cleaning tools will be in orders. And if you become a fan of roasting, a good chicken stand is only a few bucks and really worth it.

Eat for free when you can:
Go to the grocery stores like Trader Joe’s or wholesalers like Costco for lunch. The employees don’t care if you take a bunch of samples for free. They don’t get paid enough to care.

 

These Escherichia coli bacteria (commonly known as E. coli) are native to your lower digestive tract. It's when they get in your stomach via food that they become a problem. But keeping them happy in your lower intestine will keep you happy!

And keep an eye on corporate bakeries. A lot of the chain cafes that sell pastries will have a corporate policy that they have to throw out food rather than give it out for free, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it for free. If there’s a place like this near you, just watch them at the end of the day to see when and where they go to throw out the food. Often they will go into a building and through a bunch of hallways before ending up at a dumpster just around the corner outside. This is because the companies don’t want to attract homeless people to ruin their image. But if you just follow up after the employees leave and snag the goods out of the dumpster first, you’ve got perfectly good bread or doughnuts or cupcakes, a little smooshed, tied up in a garbage bag ready to be eaten. They aren’t thrown into bags with actual garbage – they’re wrapped up separately!
Being a human in and of itself is hard. It takes hundreds of calories a day just to grow new skin, and if our iron levels drop we risk not carrying enough oxygen to our vital organs. Different kinds of salts regulate different brain functions and muscular contraction. Not to mention the complex processes of life forms that live inside us symbiotically, like E. coli bacteria that live in our large intestines. They help break down our food, and your farts are actually your E. coli’s poop.
So don’t make it any harder on your billions of cells and trillions of chemical processes – remember to take care of your body. Just because you live fast doesn’t mean you have to die young.

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