The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [18]
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, ¼ pound of dried beans, a large glass of defrosted orange juice, ½ pound of fruit and a bit less than that of vegetables, ½ pound each of potatoes and cereals (like rice), 1 pound of bread, ¼ 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 USDA’s 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,