[13b9f227ecf0]

Potatoes and sweet potatoes are very cheap and you can practically live on them, in perfect health. Generations of Irishmen, Kitavans, and Peruvians have. This claim that you can't eat healthy on the cheap is silly. Eating just potatoes & butter & a few eggs a day and you could probably go years before having problems. The prep time argument is also silly. A sack of potatoes will keep for a month and you can boil or nuke a potato in minutes.

The "convenience" foods are about the taste and pleasure. It's not cost or convenience. Junk food and fast food are very tasty and offer variety, unlike plain potato, or some other reasonably nutritious gruel.

[ellyagg]

Indeed, the old Irish diet of milk and potatoes was pretty darn healthy. If you're trying to eat healthily, cheaply, and with a reasonable cognitive load, it's hard to go wrong with eggs, milk, and potatoes. Poor people can do this. Eggs and milk get you all the important macrominerals and fat soluble vitamins and potatoes are nature's multivitamin/multimineral. Nothing else can really touch these for depth and breadth of essential nutrients:

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/recipe/2864450/2

They scale well, so even if they're not the only things you eat, you're at least assured of not being acutely deficient of anything. Plus, it's easy to prepare lots of yummy things from them.

Now, if you're concerned with maximum longevity, you should try to add as many fruits and vegetables a day as you can to suck up phytonutrients/antioxidants.