Shop like a Hunter-Gatherer, Eat Like a Peasant, Spend Like a King

Converting material hunger into intellectual and spiritual hunger is the ultimate life hack, a Mr. Fusion for overcoming the intimidating logistics of actually making it from point A to point Z. As the Good Book says, "Man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."

I've found great value in words from lesser sources as well: since the New Year, I've been reading a book-a-week. All have been nonfiction and all free or nearly so - libraries and Friends of the Library bookstores are sweet, sweet intellectual welfare, and I am only too willing to bum off of their largesse. 

Up this week is Gregory Clark's Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, and it's loaded with nuggets of applicable wisdom for the frugal wealth-builder. He called my attention to one economic law in particular that has a lot to teach us about cheap living.

Engel's Law states that the poorer a person is, the larger the percentage of his or her income is spent on food. Clark found that the poorest societies spend more than 80% of their incomes on food, a percentage that drops to a paltry 5% in the richest societies. The high percentage of the poorest societies are even crazier when Clark factors in the poorest of the poor opting for the cheapest possible form of calories, e.g. broke Irish farmers eating nothing but potatoes. For perspective, I can get a 10lb bag of russet potatoes on sale for $.99. 

While Engel's Law is informed by necessity - the truly impoverished spend a higher percentage on food out of desperate lack of income, not gluttony - the principle is worthy of updating for us Americans, maybe the richest people in history. Compared to the poor Irish schmos of yesteryear and the Malawian farmers of today, we aren't just crushing the percentages, we're crushing the scales. We eat 18th-century poverty for a pre-breakfast snack.

As such we have plenty of room to drop the hammer on our percentages, in terms of income and body fat. The fun part is that by adopt an impoverished 18th-century peasant's approach to food - cheap calories at subsistence level - we can push our percentage of income spent on food to the microscopic figures that have historically typified royalty. In short, eating like a peasant will help you spend like a king.

Right now you're probably picturing some starving peasant chowing down on nothing but carbs. What about all those organic, certified free range chicken breasts you absolutely need to be healthy? Good news: eating healthy on the cheap isn't that hard. Check out this list of the top 50 healthy foods. Not too many budget busters on the list, and plenty of bargain items if you are willing to expand your hunting grounds beyond the local supermarket chain.

Oils are going to be your toughest terrain. Coconut oil and extra virgin olive oil are pretty pricey. Even butter is expensive compared to those inviting but bad for you $1 tubs of margarine and towering bottles of canola oil. A little creativity helps here - Mrs. Fruglar scored us some free coconut oil in return for Amazon reviews. That tub lasted us several months, which has made me more amenable to an occasional splurge on a healthy cooking oil.

In seafood, go for the often ridiculously cheap sardines (just got a close to a pound of canned sardines for $.69) over the expensive shrimp. For other meat, chicken and pork are easy to find cheap. Drumsticks (I get them for $.49 a pound) and pork chops are where it's at. Beef and lamb are amazing, but that's usually factored into the price - save them for special occasions.

If you shop at little markets, either farmer's markets or the crowded off-brand stores where none of the checkers speak English, vegetables are criminally cheap. To the point of being fronts for money laundering. I've found potatoes, garlic and onions for almost nothing. I'll splurge on broccoli at $.99 a pound just to get some green on the plate.

To round things off, there's coffee - which is free in most workplaces and cheap elsewhere if you kill your inner snob - and tea. For dessert, go with strawberries or one of the cheap fruits, whole milk, and cheese. Off-brand cheese and milk aren't bargain bin items, but they won't kill your budget, and they are hard to over-consume, from a price and diet standpoint.

Hunt for those items and your food spending will plummet as a percentage of your income without hurting your health. So there you have it: shop like a hunter-gatherer, eat like a peasant and you can spend like a king.