I live in Europe: rice, beans, lentils, meat and vegetables are way too expensive here. Eggs were okay until the pandemic hit and prices went up. Now they’ve come down a little and I can afford them again. That and cheese is my stock now. Pasta is okay, but I can’t eat much of it every day because it really fattens me up.
A quick search shows most beans, dry, to be about €2/Kg - $2.17/Kg at todays’s USDEUR cross-currency rate - in 500g bags from the supermarket (which is about the most expensive way to get them if dry as bigger bags and different sources are cheaper). That stuff doubles or triples in size when you cook it, so one such bag is 5 - 10 individual meals if you eat nothing else (which I don’t recommend, though it would still be a lot healthier than just rice or pasta because beans actually have a much wider variety of nutrients that the other ones).
(Granted, searching for the same thing in the site of Albert Hijn in The Netherlands shows them to be twice as expensive and less common there, though checking Morrisons in the UK shows them mainly cheaper than NL but more expensive than PT, though some are cheaper than what I saw in my searches of PT supermarkets)
More in general, for maximum savings and if you’re in Europe (specifically the EU), you can order them via the internet in large quantities from some other country as easilly as from your own, especially since dry beans are absolutelly fine for shipping as they have really good weight to nutrition ratio, won’t spoil and require very little packaging and no special protection for shipping. Whilst Portugal is big on beans and chickpeas, some countries favour other pulses such as lentils.
However you should get a pressure cooker if you’re going to be using dry beans as they take a lot longer to cook otherwise so gas/power costs are about 3x higher if you cook them in a normal pan.
I don’t have to worry about foodprices nowadays but if I was going for maximum savings in it whilst not risking my health too much it would be relying heavilly on pulses in general (so beans, chickpeas, lentils and so on).
I live in Europe: rice, beans, lentils, meat and vegetables are way too expensive here. Eggs were okay until the pandemic hit and prices went up. Now they’ve come down a little and I can afford them again. That and cheese is my stock now. Pasta is okay, but I can’t eat much of it every day because it really fattens me up.
I’m in Portugal.
A quick search shows most beans, dry, to be about €2/Kg - $2.17/Kg at todays’s USDEUR cross-currency rate - in 500g bags from the supermarket (which is about the most expensive way to get them if dry as bigger bags and different sources are cheaper). That stuff doubles or triples in size when you cook it, so one such bag is 5 - 10 individual meals if you eat nothing else (which I don’t recommend, though it would still be a lot healthier than just rice or pasta because beans actually have a much wider variety of nutrients that the other ones).
(Granted, searching for the same thing in the site of Albert Hijn in The Netherlands shows them to be twice as expensive and less common there, though checking Morrisons in the UK shows them mainly cheaper than NL but more expensive than PT, though some are cheaper than what I saw in my searches of PT supermarkets)
More in general, for maximum savings and if you’re in Europe (specifically the EU), you can order them via the internet in large quantities from some other country as easilly as from your own, especially since dry beans are absolutelly fine for shipping as they have really good weight to nutrition ratio, won’t spoil and require very little packaging and no special protection for shipping. Whilst Portugal is big on beans and chickpeas, some countries favour other pulses such as lentils.
However you should get a pressure cooker if you’re going to be using dry beans as they take a lot longer to cook otherwise so gas/power costs are about 3x higher if you cook them in a normal pan.
I don’t have to worry about foodprices nowadays but if I was going for maximum savings in it whilst not risking my health too much it would be relying heavilly on pulses in general (so beans, chickpeas, lentils and so on).