pinkrobe

Ice cream and potato chips FTW. They are typically the cheapest sources of food energy other than eating pure lard or drinking corn oil. Get the cheapest crap you can find to maximize your savings, and the chips should ideally have some sort of sugar in the flavouring, like BBQ.

jaa1085

Don't think that is very good of advice.

DataJunkie

My gut expanded reading pinkrobe's post.
ew

545h4

How about this one?

I bike to the office 4 days a week. But on Fridays, I bike to a CSA farm, work for 1/2 a day, and during the crop season (starting next week), will be biking my share of produce (along with meat/eggs from the farm). There's gotta be some serious carbon offset credit for this...

Why not start taking into consideration the distance your fuel is coming from to where you consume it? Applies to both petrol and ingestible foodstuffs....

jaa1085

CSA Farm?

Please explain.

caloso

MMmmmmmm lard.......

HardyWeinberg

Community Supported Agriculture

jaa1085

That is awesome!

HardyWeinberg

We've had a farm share for several years now. 3 different farms over time (and over 3 states now that I think of it). Something I really like is having all vegetable purchase decisions removed. They just show up and then you figure out what to do with them.

caloso

Yup. Never knew I liked kale until the box showed up with a ton of it. (Sauteed with wine vinegar and olive oil and some garlic. MMMMMmmmm)

jaa1085

How much of everything do you get? Or does it vary?

Andy69

sound like an excuse to eat ice cream and potato chips to me.

I will be using that excuse this afternoon

HardyWeinberg

My wife makes this kale-sausage soup that I like a lot. The amount of anything you get varies w/ how much you order (whole or half share) but it generally comes in proportion to that week's harvest, so we are getting our first batch for this year this coming weekend (was supposed to start in May but due to long winter, *nothing* sprouted) and I am expecting a lot of leafy greens.

545h4

It will vary from time of season (early spring is usually less volume than late August), season to season (thank you global warming for such extreme weather patterns!!!), farm to farm.

But generally you are investing in the farm. (Whether through time or $$) You get to know the farmers, and what it takes to run a sustainable community. Plus, I don't have to worry that this food has been globetrotting!

Nothing beats cantaloupe that has just been harvested! And the variety is usually amazing. As someone posted earlier, I fell in love with kale, too! But my favorite discovery was kohlrabi!!!

545h4

It wasn't so much a problem of long winter up here (although it was a VEEERY long winter...!), as drought conditions right now. It's really depressing that I have been getting excited for rain in the forecast...!

lil brown bat

54etc., we don't got a drought, not even close -- it's just been dry for the past month or so. Still, it's nice to have Mother Nature take care of the watering chores. When we finally got that rain last Friday, my vegable garden went banana-whackies. Now my corn is growing so fast you can almost see it, the black beans have all popped out and are growing just about as fast...the tomatoes are sulking but they'll come around. Even better than a CSA is Grow Your Own!

545h4

Boston, and coastal NH for that matter, have gotten some rain, but with the exception of 2 or 3 days in the last month, every rain cloud has gone out to sea and skipped over southern Maine. The fire alerts have been extremely high, etc. So, yeah, we got a drought...

ItsJustMe

Pasta, tomato and browned ground beef, some spices and a potato are a heck of a lot of calories for about $1.50 a serving. I don't know how many but I know I ride 22 miles a day and it costs me less than $6 a day to eat. It cost me about a buck less when I wasn't riding.

caloso

I know that in the morning I can get 30 miles on a bowl of oatmeal. That has to be less than a dollar a serving.

huhenio

Beef brisket = 2 bux

Ground beef = 2 bux

pasta = cheap

veggies = all colours, 3 times a week

fruit = 5 kinds, 3 times a week

cost = don't care

good calculations, original poster!

Tails2k5

Keep in mind cars (and bikes) cost more than their fuel. The IRS considers it costs $.50/mi to drive a car. This would make a commute of 23 miles come out to $11.50 in cost. This includes the cost of the vehicle/depreciation, gas, insurance, etc. So if you avoid owning a car in favor of a bicycle, this is what you save.

What becomes VERY interesting is that for me to travel home from college, around 260 miles, I can buy a bus ticket for $50, which is FAR less than the $130 the IRS rate suggests. So without carpooling, buses/biking/whatever is cheaper for even long distances, unless you value your time relatively highly.

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/...176030,00.html

WilsonZone

I've been stockpiling for the last 10 years, so I have plenty to burn.

mconlonx

I read on teh intarwebz somewhere that for the calorie equivalent of food compared to gasoline, bikes get 3000 mpg. It was probably on this forum somewhere and I don't remember if there was a reference or even if the math needed to get there was spelled out exactly.

JugglerDave

Well, a gallon of gas contains 33000 calories of energy. So if you burn 33 calories per mile on a bike that's 1000 mpg for the energy in a gallon of gas. But 33 food calories for humans, who are about 25% efficient converting to mechanical energy, "wastes" about 75% of that energy. So theoretically the 33000 calories of energy would be 4000 mpg if you could convert directly to mechanical energy.

Or look at it this way. for 33000 calories in gasoline you get (say) 24 mpg, that's 1375 calories per mile. For a person on a bike spending 35 calories per mile. The car uses 39 times more energy per mile. Of course, a car weighs about 20x more than a person on a bike so the energy efficiency (From amount of weight moved per mile) is more like 1/2 that of a bike.

Tabor

White rice is even cheaper.