The Man Who Ate Everything (5 page)

Breakfast on Day Two was lavish—a scrambled egg, a few slices of bacon, two slices of toast, and a half glass of grapefruit juice. Lunch was yesterday’s turkey in a potato salad on a lettuce
leaf with more Drop Biscuits. Dinner brought Bean Tamale Pie, additional lettuce, crackers, and Peanut Butter Snack Loaf. You beat peanut butter, sugar, and an egg into some Biscuit Mix, bake the mixture in a loaf pan for forty minutes, and eat it for the next three days, not without enjoyment. Snack time was cold cereal. I love cornflakes with lots of milk and sugar.

The main feature of Day Three was Turkey Spanish Rice (which happily used up Monday’s turkey), more collards (have I discovered a subtle ethnic bias in these menus?), and more of yesterday’s Peanut Butter Snack Loaf, which would be finished, toasted, on Day Four. My Biscuit Mix was running low, and I drew up plans to make some more.

And so it went. Or would have went if I had not, several weeks earlier, accepted an invitation to a tasting of black truffles jetted over from the Perigord region of France at dinnertime on Day Four. I spent the rest of Day Four testing several forthcoming recipes in
Thrifty Meals for Two:
Roast Pork with Gravy, Pork and Cabbage Soup (the two sharing the same piece of pork), a Barbecue Beef Sandwich, Stove-Top Beans (I would make these again), and Bread Pudding.

On Day Five I resigned from the Thrifty Food Plan. It had taken most of the fun out of eating. Besides, four days is almost a week. Most of the recipes were not awful, although they stressed the kind of weakly flavored mock-ethnic dishes that American dietitians love and I despise. Green peppers found their insidious way into everything. The recipes expressed a complete catalog of modern nutritional superstitions: salt, cooking oil, and sometimes sugar were reduced to ridiculously small amounts; the turkey was wastefully relieved of its proudest part, its skin; butter was eliminated entirely (even though the transfatty acids in margarine are nearly as dangerous as saturated fat); and milk was always the nonfat dry version, which produced a gray and watery bread pudding. But the planning was clever: buying and cooking in large amounts, using leftovers in other dishes, and eliminating all precooked and convenience foods. If you are poor enough for
food stamps, it is assumed, you will have all the time in the world to cook everything from scratch.

But aside from the constant and wrenching hunger that it brought, the Thrifty Food Plan has a deeper problem, which lies in the rules underlying its construction. I called the USDA and learned that the computer program used to design the Thrifty Food Plan aims to satisfy a list of nutritional and economic objectives while
departing as little as possible from the current eating patterns of American families.
The result is an excessive emphasis on meat— even on a budget of $3.53 a day—and an underemphasis on the nutritious but much cheaper grains and legumes. And so the Thrifty Food Plan failed to answer the question that still fascinated me: What is the absolutely cheapest subsistence diet, and can it be turned into something palatable?

The problem looked like child’s play. All I needed was a list of all foods, five thousand or ten thousand of them; nutritional information about each food and its cost; a personal computer with a statistics program installed; and somebody to type the first two things into the third. The mathematical problem is generally referred to as linear programming, and the routine commonly used to solve it is the Simplex Method, which somebody once tried to teach me in graduate school long, long ago. You simply ask the computer to choose a group of foods that collectively satisfy your list of nutritional requirements while absolutely minimizing the overall cost. It’s like the simultaneous equations we learned to solve in high school, but much more complicated. Yet with a personal computer, the whole problem should take just a few minutes to solve. I planned to patent the answer as the Simplex Subsistence Diet.

I went out and bought a program called
Health and Diet Pro
for $39.95 and installed it on my hard disk. Although the manual is perfunctory and confusing, the apparent purpose of
Health and Diet Pro
is to help you keep track of the various nutrients and poisons you take in, make your recipes healthier, and construct fitness and diet regimens. I am bored by all of this. What interested
me was that buried somewhere in the heart of the program is a list of three thousand foods along with nutritional information about each of them. Could I add cost figures to this list and then manipulate the program to solve my subsistence problem?

I think the answer is no. I spent an evening at it without the slightest success. Admittedly, I was on Day Two of the Thrifty Food Plan, and the Bean Tamale Pie had destroyed my concentration and made me grumpy. I might have had better luck after the truffles.

I searched the technical literature. In 1945 the late George J. Stigler, an economist who later won the Nobel Prize, made what he described as the first attempt to design a mathematically precise subsistence diet for an adult male, using food prices from August 1939. It consisted of 370 pounds of wheat flour, 57 cans of evaporated milk, 111 pounds of cabbage, 23 pounds of spinach, and 285 pounds of dried navy beans. The total yearly cost of these ingredients was $39.93. Today they would cost something like $460, or $1.26 a day. By August 1944, relative food prices had shifted and so had Stigler’s perfect diet. The evaporated milk and dried navy beans had disappeared, and in their place were 134 pounds of pancake flour and 25 pounds of pork liver.

It took me no time at all to figure out that a year’s diet of cabbage bread and pork liver pancakes plus an ounce of spinach now and then was somehow not the answer for which I had been searching. But a similar study done in 1981 came much closer. Jerry Foytik of the University of California at Davis followed Stigler’s general method but applied sixty additional rules to ensure variety and palatability. His ideal diet contained sixteen foods that would cost today about $238 a month for a family of four—a mere two-thirds of the price of the Thrifty Food Plan.

Scaled down to one day’s ration for a couple like my wife and me, Foytik’s ideal subsistence diet consists of three glasses of skim milk, 4 ounces of chicken, 3 ounces of hamburger or other meat,
a
little more than one egg, 1/4
pound of dried beans, a large glass
of defrosted orange juice, 1
/2
pound of fruit and a bit less than that of vegetables, 1/2
pound each of potatoes and cereals (like rice), 1 pound of bread, 1/4
pound of other baked goods, nearly 6 tablespoons of oil or butter, and 2.31 ounces of sugars and sweets. Cost, at my overpriced Greenwich Village supermarket: a ridiculously economical five dollars a day for two adults.

Now it’s your job and mine to make something delicious out of our Simplex Subsistence Diet. Just remember: this is close to the theoretically cheapest diet that will keep you alive and well nourished. Even if we add an extra ounce of sugar, a cup of coffee, and a little olive oil to make our lives more scrumptious, we can still beat the USDA and its Thrifty Food Plan at their own game.

The meaty American diet, even when scaled down into the USD As Thrifty Food Plan, seems ill prepared to cope with subsistence in a delicious way. But Italian and French country cooking are full of recipes that would fit perfectly with the Simplex Subsistence Diet. Even modern French chefs instinctively know how to cook stylishly at just above the subsistence level. I telephoned Daniel Boulud, former chef at Le Cirque in New York City and owner of the brand-new restaurant Daniel, and asked him to dip into the first draft of his forthcoming cookbook for his least expensive recipes. Boulud immediately produced the following soup, which uncannily mirrors our Simplex Subsistence Diet.

Swiss Chard and Bean Soup with Ricotta Toasts

Adapted from
Cooking with Daniel Boulud
(Random House)

1 tablespoon unsalted butter, 8 cents

2 slices slab bacon, 1/4 inch thick, cut crosswise into 1/4-inch lardons, 41 cents

1 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped to yield
1
/2 cup,
46 cents

1/2 pound white mushrooms, caps only, cleaned and cut into
dice, about 1 cup, $1.43

1 garlic clove, peeled and finely chopped, 4 cents

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, plus more for the toasts, 10 cents

2 quarts chicken stock (made at home by browning 2 pounds of chicken necks and backs in a 6-quart stockpot with chopped onion, celery, and carrots; covering with 10 cups of water; and simmering with parsley,
^l
/2 teaspoon of salt, and a few peppercorns for 2 to 3 hours), $1.60

1 cup dried navy or cannellini beans soaked overnight in cold water, 34 cents

1 pound Swiss chard, leaves only, washed and coarsely chopped, $1.49

Salt and freshly ground black pepper, 10 cents

1/4 pound ricotta cheese, 50 cents

4 thin slices country bread, 30 cents

1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese, 19 cents

Melt the butter in a 4-quart saucepan over medium-high heat and brown the bacon on all sides. Spoon off half the fat and add the onion, mushrooms, garlic, and the 1
/2
teaspoon of nutmeg, and cook slowly until the vegetables have softened, 5 to 8 minutes. Meanwhile, warm the chicken stock in another pan, and when the vegetables are ready, add the stock and the presoaked beans, bring to a boil, and simmer for 35 to 40 minutes until the beans are just tender. Add the Swiss chard,
^l
/2
teaspoon of salt (or less if the bacon and broth are especially salty), and a pinch of pepper, and simmer for another 15 minutes. Adjust the seasonings. Keep warm.

Spread the ricotta on the bread and sprinkle with the Parmesan and a grating of nutmeg. Toast under the
broiler until golden. Ladle the soup into large soup plates and float the ricotta toasts on top. With more toasted country bread, this serves 4 as a complete supper, at $1.76 a person.

Perfumed Rice with Lamb and Lentils

Lentils and rice eaten together compose a complete and extremely economical source of protein. I have now discovered that lower grades of wonderfully aromatic basmati rice can be had for only $1.20 a pound in many health-food stores (and in the Little India section of Manhattan). The world champions in rice cookery are, I think, the Persians, and so the other evening I took a well-known Persian basmati rice and lentil recipe from the excellent
New Food of Life
by Najmieh Batmanglij (Mage Publishers), cut in half the amount of lamb, dates, and butter and eliminated the saffron (the four most expensive ingredients), and cooked a princely feast for six for $1.49 a person.

3
cups long-grain white basmati rice (slightly more than
1 pound), $1.20

Salt, 3 cents

2 medium onions (1 pound total), peeled and thinly sliced,
89 cents

4 tablespoons cooking oil,

36 cents 1 pound lamb shoulder, bone in, cut into 2- to 3-inch pieces,

$2.59 Freshly ground black pepper, 2 cents

^l
/4 teaspoon turmeric, 3 cents

^l
/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 7 cents

1 1
/2 teaspoons Persian allspice (approximated by mixing a generous

1
/2 teaspoon each ground cinnamon and ground cardamom with a generous
^l
/t teaspoon ground cumin), 24 cents

2 cups water

1
1
/2 cups lentils, 58 cents

1 cup white raisins, 88 cents

4 ounces (about 1 cup) pitted dates, chopped, $1.25

1 stick
1
/4 pound) butter, 67 cents

2 tablespoons yogurt, 14 cents

Wash the rice vigorously in five changes of warm water and soak it for at least 2 hours in 8 cups of water mixed with 2 tablespoons of salt.

Saute half the onions in 2 tablespoons of the oil over medium-high heat until soft and golden, about 10 minutes. Add the lamb; season with
3
/4 teaspoon of salt, a good pinch of pepper, the turmeric, cinnamon, and
1/2
a teaspoon of the Persian allspice mixture; and
sauté
for another 5 minutes. Add 2 cups of water, cover, and simmer until the meat is very tender, 2
1/
2 to 3 hours. Set aside.

In a saucepan, mix the lentils with 3 cups of water and
1
/2
teaspoon of salt, bring to a boil, simmer for 10 minutes, and drain. In a frying pan, saute the remaining sliced onion in 2 tablespoons of oil over medium-high heat until soft and golden, stir in the raisins and dates, cook for 2 more minutes, and set aside.

Parboil the rice by bringing 2 quarts of water and 2 tablespoons of salt to a boil in a 4-quart pot (nonstick is best), adding the presoaked rice, and boiling for 3 to 5 minutes, stirring every so often, until the grains just
lose their brittle core but are still quite firm. Drain the rice and rinse it in several cups of warm water.