Canadian politician says a family can eat on $75 a week

It's also not difficult to make pizza. As long as you have fuel for an oven and the basic ingredients.

Wife and I have pretty simple diet, but we also come from poor rural families. So we bake a lot of bread, make our own noodles and pasta, make our own cheese, ferment for kefir and kvass, pickle and can. We pay attention to meat sales and will cure or dry what we can if we don't freeze it. We also make a lot of our own sauces, preserves and so on.

Beyond that most of our meals are rice, buckwheat or potato based with lots of veges (whatever is cheap, in season and traded with friends) and lots of spices.

We bake several loaves of sourdough bread a week, sell most of them and end up with a small profit.

It's only expensive in time. Cooking for yourself and planning ahead food wise is definitely a large time commitment. But we both grew up like this so it's normal to us. I grew up in Appalachia and she grew up in Moravia.

If we spend less than an hour on food in a day, that means we spent several hours on it at some other point and will have to spend more time on food later. We definitely do have a winter stockpile despite living in an environment that is year around temperate and growable. And our weekends are usually the equivalent of a full-time job when it comes to food: shopping, trading, prepping, preserving, etc. We both work full time, but it's a 9-5 five days a week that allows us to plan our time well.

This definitely isn't doable for a lot of people who have multiple jobs or unreliable/variable schedules. And it's certainly a skill and mindset that has missed a generation or two.

Food deserts and the lack of access to goods and material is definitely a huge barrier.

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