How to eat (decently) on a dollar a day

For the last couple of weeks, Rebecca Currie has spent approximately $1 per day on food. Normally a frugal shopper (she spends an average of $80 a month at the grocery store), she embarked on this experiment to show how ultra-cheap eating can not only help consumers save money, but could even improve the quality of their diets. Displaying her findings on her blog, she is making it clear that cheap food and poor eating don't have to go hand-in-hand.

Currie is hardly the first person to explore the wonders of super-cheap cuisine. In The Man Who Ate Everything, author Jeffrey Steingarten spends a chapter exploring various methods of subsistence cooking and offering recipes like "Sludge," a ground beef-based Depression era dish that is like meatloaf, minus much of the flavor. For that matter, thrifty consumers from the Manson family to today's "freegans" have discovered the wonders of harvesting free, if somewhat wilted, produce. For that matter, Currie herself was inspired by the One Dollar Diet Project, a blog in which two California high school teachers documented their month-long attempt to eat for only $1 a day.