True, if you take meat out of your diet and add lots of fresh vegetables and grains you can eat well for very little money. Hint: Use spices creatively. Most people on food stamps wants convenience foods and prepared items like cookies which raise the price.
Indeed.
I work at a small-town grocery store and you have no idea how many welfare mothers come into the store and load up those food stamp cards with purchases for candy, soda, junk food, and the like. I grew up as what most would consider “poor.” My parents, however, saw the value of good nutrition. Candy and pop were rare treats. Fruits were the norm, and most every spring (even to this day), we bought seeds and planted a small vegetable garden. Some hard work, yes, but we ate out of that garden in the late summer and it paid off.
The key is that you just have to pay attention and don’t go for the sugary stuff. A lot of those welfare mothers are just trying to appease all the kids they’ve had and just feed them stuff they’ll “like.” That’s not a good long-term plan. Instead of buying the Froot Loops or Lucky Charms, buy some Cheerios instead. Little things like that will go a long way.
“...healthy diets should be built around vegetables, grains and fruits, not meat and prepared foods...”
A couple of problems with this advise - contrary to what dieticians (a lot of old paradygm in what they advocate) and the USDA say, grains should be minimised in our diets. Grains are bad for several reasons - phytates and polyunsaturated fats. Refined grains (bread, pasta, etc) are the worst kind, although sprouted grain breads are healthy in moderation. Fresh vegetables and fresh fruits are good. Eggs should be included in all diets. Eggs are the lowest cost source of protein, and eggs are the standard by which all protein foods are measured - a near perfect protein food (forget the cholesterol myth - eggs are not a problem). Raw or minimal cooking is best for most of these foods, including eggs.
Red meat (beef, venison, buffalo, beefalo) can be healthy, but the “poorer” cuts are healthiest. Have these ground, or grind them yourself, and add organ meats to the grind for a super health treat. Rare is healthy.
Cut out the sugar and sugar sources. Use honey for sweetener, or maple syrup, or stevia. Fructose (not high fructose corn syrup) is ok in moderation - low glycemic and nearly twice as sweet as sugar. Minimise white potatoes (white flesh) and eat with the skin. Fried is good, but it must be fried in coconut oil.
Polyunsaturated oils are bad (corn, soybean, canola, peanut etc). Olive oil is “neutral”, but do not heat it - use it for your salads. Coconut oil, a saturated, medium chain fatty acid (mostly lauric acid) is the only oil that should ever be used for cooking or frying. We get a naturally refined coconut oil that does not smell or taste like coconut, and it is reasonably priced.
Trans fats come from polyunsaturated fats. I think that although trans fats are not good for us, they are no worse than any of the polyunsaturated fats - it is all bad.
So, back to eating well for less - fresh fruits and vegetables are easy to find at reasonable prices in season. And if you can find a market that specializes in these items in a bulk food, market type atmosphere, you can probably get good stuff for less year round. Again, eggs are a cheap source of the best protein out there - eat as many as you want, but eat at least four eggs a day. And go for the lower cost cuts of beef. Chicken is ok, but you need chicken that has never seen hormones or antibiotics. Stay away from store-bought milk. Pastuerization and homogenization make milk deadly. If you know a dairy farmer...well, get it straight from the cow.
Well, guess I got a bit long-winded with my comments, but you get the gist. We eat well, and we do it for less - routinely. We do not buy prepared foods. We do not buy dry breakfast cereals. If we occasionally have oatmeal, the oats get soaked over night or longer so that they have a chance to begin fermenting - much healthier, and the oatmeal tastes better. We eat eggs, good, fresh, free-range Amish eggs, and they cost less than the supermarket eggs. We use real butter, real milk, lots of leafy green stuff, and we like and eat fresh fruit. We get beef, occasional chicken, occasional fish (wild caught only, not farm raised). Last but not least, we drink lots of water. Not city water, however, with its chlorine and fluorine. We know where to get good, fresh spring water, and it is free, right from the spring.
I’ll take some veggies and fruit. Cows exist on this planet for a reason. To become steak.
As for grains, they aren’t food. They are weeds at best. Everybody has been conned into eating them b/c they are cheap to grow. You have to pulverize them, add butter, oil, salt, sugar, etc. etc. to make them taste better than straw. A large percentage of the population then gets sick off of them.