The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [17]
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 Périgord 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