My first month living on my own I bought a five pound bag of carrots because it cost sixty cents more than the small one. I threw most of it away eleven days later. I did that all year with a lot of things.

Here's the correction this whole video sits on, and it's the opposite of what you've been told. For one person, the cheapest food is not the one with the best price per pound. It's the one you actually finish. A $2 bag that rots on day six cost you $2 and fed you nothing.

Almost every frugal cooking video is written for a family of four, and scaling it down does not work.

In this video:
Eggs, and why portioning beats price
Oats, lentils, and why lentils beat beans when you live alone
Frozen vegetables, and the argument the frugal internet gets snobbish about
Cabbage — three weeks of shelf life after you cut into it, and nobody lists it
Rice, tomatoes, potatoes, peanut butter, tinned fish
The eleventh thing, which isn't a food
Your freezer as a pause button (the single biggest one)
Why batch-cooking meals fails and batch-cooking components works
When bulk buying is right, and when the shop is selling you a bin

I'm not a nutritionist or a chef. I went nine days without power one winter and have spent the years since asking better-prepared people what I got wrong. It's all in When the Lights Go Out — link on the channel description.

What's the one cheap thing in your kitchen that has never let you down? And what did you finally admit you were buying in bulk and throwing away? Mine was carrots.

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