What was the joke again…
“Humans can survive off a diet consisting of potatoes and butter, as demonstrated by a years long case study commonly known as Ireland”
Something along those lines.
Think it’s important to point out that they didn’t do that by choice.
If you could only have one food, potatoes would be a good choice.
yikes, scurvy much?
try brocolli and eggs
Potatoes are A ok against scurvy (unlike eggs alone who can come along for the ride though, because hash brown and fried eggs, yum)
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- Rice
- Beans
end of list
You’re missing a bunch of micro nutrients which would cause problems over time with this. It has all the calories and protein you need though.
Add in some fat from somewhere like cooking oil, and a handful of vegetables like onions, carrots, etc. and you’d last a fairly normal human lifespan.
Vegetables often contain oil, the problem is getting omega-3’s, which our bodies can’t make.
In the sea, it’s algae who’re producing it: then krill, then squid/fish/etc eat them…
some plants make it, some don’t…
olives are good, olive-oil, etc…
but anybody who’s eating squash is getting omega-6’s or 9’s, even though it seems non-intuitive.
Any particular type of beans? Red? Black? Lentils?
Does the type of rice matter?
I’m intrigued by this possibility.
Does the type of rice matter?
Yes; make sure it’s whole grain. White rice is essentially junk food, with most of its fiber, vitamins & minerals stripped in the de-hulling process.
Cool - thank you! That makes sense. I know there are so many types of rice, so I’ll do some research too.
I have a sack of white rice to eat through… I don’t really know what to do with it all. My partner got it from work. Would rather basmati rice really.
A lot of rice sold (most?) is “enriched” so the vitamins and minerals are added back. But the fiber is gone and rinsing the rice washes away the nutrient powder.
Why do people wash rice? Never really bothered with it. 2:1 usually works pretty nicely, get the water boiling add the rice and put it on low. Come back when ready.
Or like 4-5 to 1 with milk and have it as rice pudding/porridge.
Washing rice makes the final texture better. Unwashed rice has a coating of starch that causes the grains to stick together in a gooey mess.
Never really found it gets gooey unless I stir it lots.
Washing the rice reduces the starchiness which makes it less sticky.
You might mix it with non-junk food rice. Shortgrain-brown might have a similar-enough cooking time that they can be mixed together. I’m hazy on that, as I stopped eating rice years ago, replacing it with steel-cut oats.
Or, who knows… maybe you could donate the sack to a food bank?
Afaik pretty much any kind of cereal with any kind of legume provide the essential amino acids needed by the body. Both of them have protein, but not the full set of amino acids that the body requires in a certain proportion.
Idk about vitamins, though.
B12?
–Edit–
And on closer look also (at least) fatty acids, calcium and iodine.
Potato
I’ve often heard repeated that a human can live on water, potatoes, and salted butter basically indefinitely.
Not sure how true, but seems plausible.
“beriberi” is malnutrition: it means literally “i cannot”.
You become … not very able to do what you need to do, to survive, on this kind of diet, fairly quickly.
Before the 1840s, Irish farmers lived on.potatoes and milk, with the odd herring in winter when milk was harder to come by. Not a pleasant diet, and you’re buggered if the potato harvest fails, but definitely doable.
Listen, taco bell has maybe 10-15 ingredients and has an infinite menu item…
Does Soylent count as 1 item?
god I miss Soylent. Cooking/eating is a huge burden for me (depressed and lazy) so I drank the heck out of Soylent when I was in the US. Now in Japan the only thing close is Calorie Mate and it’s not nearly as good/nutritious. :(
Not to be all “The safest way to ski is not to go skiing”, but throwing together a meal can be a way to exercise some agency during low days. Even if the food itself isn’t very healthy, the process can be good for you.
I’ll soak some beans overnight and be forced to boil them the next day. The steps are individually low effort and spaced apart (and you can cook beans with zero onions etc if you want) and at the end you can find yourself sitting in front of a hot bowl of good ass beans and feel hey that was good for me.
Hell, beans out of a can and tomato out of a can over rice out of a pouch can feel like you at least did something, you know? Delivery is relatively cheap where I live and getting into a cycle of being dependent on mass produced food really didn’t help me feel like I had a lot of control over what was happening in my life.
I’m in the US and have only ever had Huel. It’s an amazing product so I’d recommend that if it’s available there (the company started in the UK so it’s not US-centric at least).
I think it might be available on Amazon here, I’ll check it out! Thanks~
I know this is Lemmy and all, but, uh, beans.
Egg-bread & scrambled-eggs ( with a multivitamin every other day ) can get you FAR, ultra-cheap ( if you ever need to get through a month on nearly-nothing ).
( obviously this isn’t long-term, this is short-term-survival stuff )
add-in carrots, if you can.
A bit of broccoli makes a BIG difference in one’s health.
Do what you can to get some omega-3’s into you: our bodies can’t make them, & if our bodies have to make omega-6’s & omega-9’s, apparently they just run mitochondria backwards, to do it.
Even a tablespoon of olive-oil / day will help your body keep functioning.
For real, steak.
Its the ultimate elimination diet
Beef is very nutrient dense and contains all the nutrients a human needs
The carnivore diet is a thing, and it is just: beef, water and salt.
Most people who do this, do branch out after a while and add eggs, fish, liver etc
I’d be worried about purines. A diet of pure steak would likely lead to an insane case of gout, which is a buildup of uric acid crystals in your joints… which ranks pretty high on the list of excruciatingly painful things you can be diagnosed with.
It’s a good concern, but people doing zero carb and low carb do not see a increase in gout, quite the opposite. It seems that uric acid is a intermediate indicator and not causal of gout (which is principally drive by fructose)
You might want to have an orange now and then.
Sprinkle a bit of lemon juice over the steak.
As long as you’re okay with being the least climate-friendly and probably having cancer by the age of 50. People need fibre.
While you can get all the nutrition you need from eating animals, you have to eat the organs as well. Also the stomach contents of herbivores even. Wolves eat the stomach contents of deer and such to get their green requirements, everyone needs some green in their diet. But liver, kidneys, most of the organs need to be consumed if you live on only animals.
The germanics basically did for a long time. They ate meat, with a little cheese and milk products and a few veggies thrown in there, a negligible amount of grains, for a long time, including the years after they just appeared in central europe around the 1st century BC or so, there were celts and gauls before that in those areas, both broad terms of many groups to be sure.
But they were all giants for the day, the men were all 6 foot and above, while the romans were more like 5’2" and subsisted mostly on lentils and grains, along with seafood, but very little meat, at least on campaigns. That extra size and bulk obviously didn’t do the germans much good in war, organization means more than brute strength ever could.
If we are counting singular food items, surely haggis would be a better choice for mixed nutritional values. Both are probably lacking vitamin C though so I hope you like scurvy.
Scurvy is a disease where cells are starved by vitamin c… Vitamin C gets into cells via the GLUT-4 transporter. This transporter moves both glucose and vitamin c. In the context of a zero carb diet there is no glucose competing for the glut-4 transporter, so the natural vitamin c levels in the meat are sufficient.
We knew in napoleonic times that soliders with scurvy could be cured with a horse meat diet (it’s in the military medical books!)
Breastmilk should be enough. Just difficult to source.
Not if you have enough money.
Eggs and potatoes?
I pretty much live off energy drinks and rice rn.
My dude, do you need some easy recipes? That can’t be good for your mental health.
No.
I need money to be able to afford better food.
Energy drinks are expensive, health and money.
Redbull and Monster are expensive. Venom and Unbound Energy are less than a dollar.
A 32 oz bag of dried beans is $2. A 2 lb bag of carrots, also $2. Cook these together and you have a ton of meals
Too bad I only have $3. Cooking my rice in Unbound Energy instead of water.
Gently I ask, do you think there’s a reason for that?
Monster’s not terrible if you buy it in bulk. You can get it for around a dollar per can from places like Costco.
Redbull idk - that stuff tastes like ass imo, so l never paid much attention to price. …for the record, most Monster tastes like shit too, but there’s a few gems in the Ultra line.
Oh I can give quick, easy, and cheap, with a heavy emphasis on cheap. In another comment I was gushing about carne de soya, you can get the equivalent of a pound of 90/10 ground beef for $0.97. You toss it in a slurry of sauce or seasoning and it becomes instant sausage with the exact same texture as ground pork.
Even baring that, just adding beans and lentils into your rotation can be a game changer. Good health and sleep is the strongest act of rebellion any one person can commit to.
Buy dried legumes to get proper protein. Both cereals and legumes have protein, but not the full set of essential amino acids. However they complement each other in this regard, hence people living their entire life on rice, beans, and some fish.
I’d also advise looking into cheapest vegetables and making a salad out of them. Where I am, it’s potato, carrots, and beets — coincidentally the ingredients for a traditional salad. They can be cheaper than rice.
I read once that a person could survive indefinitely on potatoes and milk.
It’s true. Add oats and eggs, and they can thrive.
I wouldn’t thrive without pizza. That’s my only one need.
Crime fighting turtles always saying shit like this
Cowabunga, Dude!
use oats for crust, mashed potatoes and boiled eggs for toppings, and if you want the extra effort you can also use the milk to make cheese. i bet itd taste the same as normal pizza
I don’t have the expertise to answer the question, but I’m sad that so many answers here are jokes, or five word answers that aren’t at all helpful :-(
Was really interested in this and hoped there’d be some knowledgeable people out there to educate us on this stuff!
My mum said when she had no money she lived off eggs, rice, spring onions (which you can just continuously regrow from the bulb) and dried fish.
I don’t know the nutritional facts of this meal, but it worked for her.
If you switch out the fish for chicken or something like spam or corned beef, and add onions and garlic, that’ll do me.
With enough body fat, sprinkle in a bit of electrolyte and maybe vitamins and that’s all you need.
I remember reading of a supervised case like that, many months of not a year. I couldn’t find it with a quick search.
