As a parent, you know it's not just baby talk. Somebody's hungry. So talk with your baby's doctor about invasive pneumococcal disease, or IPD, and ask how Prevnar 20 pneumococcal 20-valent conjugate vaccine can help protect them. Children under 2 are at increased risk, but Prevnar 20 can help them develop more immunity to 20 strains of bacteria that cause IPD.

Prevnar 20 is approved for children 6 weeks and older to help prevent infections from 20 strains of bacteria that cause invasive pneumococcal disease. Do not get Prevnar 20 if your child has had a severe allergic reaction to the vaccine or its ingredients. Those with weakened immune systems may have a lower response to the vaccine.

Talk to your health care provider before vaccination if your baby was born prematurely. Side effects may include irritability, pain, redness, swelling at the injection site, drowsiness, muscle pain, decreased appetite, headache, and fever. For full prescribing information, please call 1-855-213-2138 or visit Prevnar20.com. Ask about Prevnar 20 for your baby.

Visit AskForPrevnar20.com. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we're going to talk about eating cheap. How would you advise somebody who only has perhaps $20 or $30 a week total to spend on their food? I spent this last weekend doing exactly that, and today I'm going to share with you what I told them and give you some philosophy and some principles for eating cheap.

By the way, today's show is brought to you by Warby Parker, a good advertiser for today's show. If you'd like to get a pair of eyeglasses that are awesome and also very inexpensive, please visit WarbyParker.com/RPF for your next pair of eyeglasses. This last week, I have been out in Texas.

I was out there for FinCon 2017. While I was there, I had a few other things in addition to the conference that I needed to accomplish. One of those things was I needed to go and see a friend of mine who has really been struggling, a young man who's a college student and is in a dire financial situation.

So I needed to come alongside and work to help him. One of the components of our time together was that he needed some food. When I say needed some food, I mean really needed some food. I don't want to share many details about my friend, but just to give you an idea, he's been really struggling.

He's been homeless for a number of months. He was sleeping in a park and just not eating for days at a time. So we're talking extreme, extreme poverty here, very, very challenging situation. And so I wanted to make sure we took him to the grocery store. James says in his letter in the Bible, he says, "If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?" So I wasn't about to say, "Well, go in peace, my friend.

Be warmed and filled." So we went down to the grocery store and wanted to fill up his pantry for him. And as we were in the grocery store walking around, I realized that my friend didn't really know how to food shop. Now, often I take things I've learned, especially in the last week I've been reminded that I take things that – for granted, things that I consider are common knowledge, basic knowledge to most people I've learned are not basic knowledge.

So as an example, as we were going into the local Walmart, I asked him, I said, "What would you buy if you were here to shop for food? Let's say you had – you're going to buy some food. What would you buy?" Well, my friend, a young man, college student, says, "Well, I'd buy a bag of chips and maybe I'd buy some yogurt.

I'd probably buy some cereal." And he kind of goes through this typical college student food and I was a little horrified because I'm not broke but I barely buy chips. I consider chips to be an outrageously expensive food item. They're nothing but air essentially and very expensive. So when I buy chips, it's usually tortilla chips because those are the least expensive and it's a special treat.

It's not a staple of my diet. And I was just kind of horrified that he would say that he would buy chips. But then I started thinking about it and I realized I looked through his eyes and it sobered me because I realized that probably in his life, he had never been to the grocery store with anybody who had just given him a lesson in how to shop for food.

Now it's especially challenging for my friend because he's an immigrant to the United States. He's not a native-born US American. So for him, even just the experience of being in a grocery store is a new experience. He didn't grow up going to the grocery store with his mom and dad and being instructed like my children are.

My wife and I take our children to the grocery store. It's constant instruction. We explain to them. We're buying this, not that, and here's why. We explain to them how to read the labels, the ingredient labels to make sure they're getting something that is as clean as possible in terms of food quality.

We talk to them about unit price. We do all kinds of things with them just as a matter of course every time we're in the grocery store. And so I expect that my children when they're at my friend's age in college will just have those lessons embedded in them and they'll never think.

But yet that's not the situation that my friend is in. And so he went on a shopping trip with Josh. I walked him around the store. We spent about 45 minutes and I gave him some basic lessons of the way that I approach a grocery store. That it would be valuable for me to share it with you.

I thought maybe I would be able to help you or at the very least give you some things to think about so that you can go and help somebody else. Because my friend, there are people all around us every day who are hungry. And if you and I just blow past them and don't see them and don't help them, what are we doing?

Let's you and I slow down and notice the people around us who are in need. And I firmly believe that if you give a man a fish, you'll feed him for a day. And if you teach a man to fish, you'll feed him for a lifetime. But guess what?

You need to give a fish and teach how to fish. And so today I want to share with you just some ideas that I have. Maybe this will be very basic but I have learned and been reminded constantly that the things that seem basic to me are not necessarily basic to other people.

Now one quick caveat, for the purpose of this show, I am talking about situations of extreme poverty. I'm talking about people who are hungry, who are not eating for multiple days in a row because they simply don't have food. I'm not talking here about somebody who only has a $500 food budget and trying to figure out how to pull back a little bit.

I'm talking about the most basic level of hunger and poverty. So if you want to apply some kind of thought about what's the healthiest food or – I'm not talking about health considerations. I'm not going to get into the organic food or conventionally raised food or any of that stuff here.

We're talking about people whose stomachs are in knots because they're hungry. I want to help you if you're in that situation not be hungry. I want to help other people not be hungry. So here are a few principles to start with. I believe these principles are consistent across basically almost any situation.

And then I have a few tactics that will change from time to time. So principle number one of being able to shop and eat well on a tiny budget is this. Always buy your food in its most fundamental form and learn to cook. Now he's going to buy the food at the most fundamental, most basic, closest form to how it comes out of the ground.

So you need to avoid what are called in the world of business value-added products. Let me explain value-added products. If you're a manufacturer, let's say you're a large food manufacturer, you can go to a farmer and you can buy a basic product like a grain, let's say wheat from a farmer.

But if you just turn around and resell that wheat to a consumer, there's not much of an opportunity for profit. And so you look at that wheat and you say, "Well, what can I turn this wheat into in order for me to be able to sell it for a higher amount?" Well, you may take that wheat and add a few other ingredients and create a box of crackers.

Or you may take that wheat and add a few other ingredients and create a box of cereal. You may take those potatoes and add some ingredients and some processing and produce a bag of chips. You may take that wheat and add a good amount of sugar and produce a carton of Oreo cookies.

All of this is called adding value. Now value-added products for the producer are good because that means higher profits. But as the end consumer, it means higher costs for you. Anytime you can take that value-adding process out and do it yourself, you can save a huge amount of money.

You can go down to the local store and you can buy some delicious chocolate chip cookies. But if you buy the basic ingredients for those chocolate chip cookies and make them yourself, you can have the same chocolate chip cookies for a tiny fraction of the cost. Now, this is not free for you.

This is not pure savings because it requires your time and it requires your expertise. That may or may not be worth it for you. But if you are in extreme poverty, if you are hungry, you've got to put in the time to make the basic food. So a simple example would be this.

As I was with my friend, he said, "Well, one of the things he would do is probably buy some bread." The challenge with bread is that bread is – I consider it pretty expensive, especially for bread that has some good nutritional value. Now, you can often find a loaf of bread that may be $1, $1.50 a loaf for the most basic loaf of bread made with enriched white flour, just very, very – the cheapest of ingredients.

And you can fill your stomach with that. I'll give you a strategy for bread in a moment if you do want to buy a final product. But you can fill your stomach with that. But if you buy kind of a loaf of bread that has a little bit more value, a little more substance, maybe a multigrain loaf, something like that, you're talking $3 or $4 for a loaf of bread.

Now, a lot cheaper to buy a loaf of bread than to go down to the local sandwich shop and purchase a value-added sandwich. Something – buying food in the end market, the retail market and the restaurant market is basically the highest form of value-added food. The restaurateur is purchasing some basic ingredients and some value-added ingredients already.

Maybe they're buying their bread and then they're repackaging it in the form of a sandwich and you sell you a sandwich for $5. So you can work your way back and the closer you get to the fundamental form of the product, the cheaper it is. So don't buy the sandwich if you're in poverty.

I've often noticed this. I have some friends who are very poor and one of the things I have seen with a couple of my friends who don't have the skill of cooking, they'll frequently purchase things like fast food. I think we all enjoy a good fast food burger from time to time whether that's a regular pleasure or a guilty occasional pleasure for you.

But it's expensive. Pay five bucks for a Big Mac, $4, about $4 for a Big Mac at your local McDonald's. So avoid that. But then let's come back to bread. Bread is very expensive. So you want to move back a stage if you can. Flour is less expensive than bread.

And with a little bit of flour, you can – flour, salt and a little bit of oil and you can make your own bread that's just inexpensive like French bread style with minimal flavor. It's very, very simple to make and very inexpensive to make if you start with flour.

Or you can even go back to the most fundamental form and purchase wheat. For somebody in extreme poverty, buying wheat would probably not be a good place to start because you need some kind of processing equipment. But this is what my mom did when we were growing up. I was the youngest of seven children.

So how do you feed seven children on a very modest budget? Well, she would buy wheat by the bucket. Sometimes – I remember one time she purchased something like 700 or 800 pounds of wheat. It would come in 50-pound buckets and we had stacks of buckets of wheat in the closet that she bought direct from a granary.

And then she would grind the wheat and once a week, she would grind the wheat and make a dozen loaves of bread. It would allow us to have high-quality bread, a whole wheat, fresh, delicious bread at a low cost because she started with the most fundamental element. It required the investment of time and skill.

But the total financial cost was very low. So that means that you've got to avoid – if you're in the situation, you've got to avoid all of these value-added products. No cereal, no crackers, no bread. And this applies to other areas as well. One of the things, my friend, we got him some cheese.

But I showed him the price difference between shredded cheese and non-shredded cheese. Something as simple as choosing to buy your cheese shredded adds a little bit to your budget. Frequently, you'll see now the grocery stores are often producing small containers of things like fruit. You can buy fruit inexpensively and cut it up yourself or you can buy the cut-up fruit, which is more convenient and has a significant cost.

So principle number one, buy at the most elemental form. Subset of principle number one, however, is you need to be able to cook. You have to learn to cook or to prepare food. The best bet is actually for you to study and learn to cook some sort of ethnic food.

Find a traditional culture, whatever culture, and study a traditional ethnic diet in that culture. You will usually find how to cook delicious food that's cheap. Traditional diets are almost always based on cheap ingredients. Any ethnic heritage has traditional foods, whether that's potatoes and cabbage, pasta and tomato sauce, rice, beans or tortillas and beans or noodles.

My wife and I, we have a theory. Basically, the comida tipica, the typical food, the comida tipica of any culture that I've ever been exposed to involves some basic starch, some oil and some salt or instead of oil, sometimes butter and salt because this is how people have figured out how to make cheap food good.

Any culture, polenta from the Italian culture, it's basically a cornmeal with some butter and salt cooked together or you have rice dishes. You have rice with butter and salt. It makes a delicious food. You have French fries. You take a starch, potato, add butter and salt, create something delicious.

You go through almost any traditional diet and you'll find that the comida tipica, the typical food, is probably going to be some form of a starch and some oil and some salt because these are the things that people have learned will help you to make cheap food good, tortillas, breads, fried breads, various types of foods.

If you will study a typical food from an ethnic heritage, you will find all kinds of recipes that will help to take a very basic ingredient and to transform it into a delicious end product that comes out being a few pennies a serving. This will also help you with the health of your food because we should never disregard health and quality.

But if you start with basic ingredients, basic ingredients have certain fundamental nutrients and if you cook them yourself, then you can control what goes in to the food and that will help the outcoming health to be the best possible. Now, in a minute, I'm going to give you some very practical examples because I don't really expect my friend, a college student, young man, I don't expect him to start making a potato soup.

Delicious, very cheap soup by the way. I make a potato soup. I flavor it with onions and leeks. Very inexpensive, very delicious. I don't expect him to start making intricate pasta dishes. And there I got a bunch of examples, just simple, fast, easy college student food that allows you to fill your stomach on a weekly basis for maybe $20 or so.

But a few more principles to go through in a moment. Sponsor of today's show is Warby Parker. We all know that the ability of producers to connect directly with consumers is having a massive disruptive effect all over our world. And one of the most important industries to be disrupted is the industry of eyeglasses.

As a long time wearer of glasses since I was a young child, it's a long time wearer of glasses. I am so excited to see the eyeglass industry being disrupted. It's been historically run by a cartel of essentially one company that has kept prices artificially high. But now with the ability of companies to reach consumers directly over the internet and with the increasing familiarity of people and their willingness to buy things online, even things like glasses, we are seeing those prices come down.

Eyeglass wearer, I am so excited to see that. Warby Parker is a company that has focused on creating really high-quality and really high-fashion eyeglasses and eyewear at a very low price point. The idea here is not how do you get some junky just basic glasses online for the cheapest possible.

The idea here is how do you get high-fashion glasses that look great and yet don't destroy your budget. Functional fashionable eyeglasses start at 95 bucks including the lenses and all lenses include anti-glare and anti-scratch coatings. The way it works is they have a free home try-on program. You order five different pairs of glasses and you try them on for five days in your house with no obligation to buy.

They ship free to your door and include a prepaid return shipping label. One of the benefits especially even in the context of today's show, every time you buy a pair, they send another pair to somebody who is in great financial need. Go to warbyparker.com/rpf. Again, Warby Parker, P-A-R-K-E-R, warbyparker.com/rpf.

Order your free home try-ons today. Last I forget, actually while you're there, click through that link just so I get credit for your traffic please. But after you go there, check out the iTunes app. The Warby Parker iTunes app allows you to take quick pictures with all the different frames and send them out to your friends and families with a stitched together movie so they can help you decide what looks best on you.

It's always the biggest challenge. You're standing in front of the mirror trying on glasses, trying to figure out what looks good. Well, it's one thing to have the salesperson give you advice. It's another thing to have your friends say that looks great or that doesn't look great. warbyparker.com/rpf. Back to strategies for eating cheap.

Again, principle number one is buy at the most fundamental form. Principle number two, buy as close to the source as possible. Now obviously this is related to buying fundamentally. But the more people you can cut out of the process, the more people you can cut out of the sales line getting to your door, the cheaper you can get your food.

This may or may not be easy for you. If you're living in a downtown big city environment, it may be very difficult for you to get close to a farmer. Very tough. But don't forget that this can be a valuable and useful strategy. Sometimes something like a farmer's market can be a great place for you to get high-quality food inexpensively.

But anything you can do to buy as close to the source as possible directly from the farmer, directly from a distributor, that will help you to save money. Especially in today's world where you can do mail order. If you have enough money to where you can – in a stable enough life where you can order a large quantity of something, you can purchase directly from the source.

That will help you to get high-quality food at the least priced product possible. Principle number three, also related, buy the product as directly as possible. Here the most important example is the value of shopping store brands versus brand names. I introduced my friend to the concept of store brands.

Of course, we were in Walmart, so it was their great value brand. But I almost always will choose store brands. Here's why. The store brand, especially if you have a store, they want to choose a high-quality product. And so they choose a good manufacturer of the product and they just private label it.

So it's Great Value if you are in Walmart or it's the Publix brand if you're shopping at Publix or it's Kirkland Signature if you're shopping at Costco or – I forget the Sam's Club one. Sam's Choice? I don't remember the Sam's Club one. Kroger, whatever the local store is, they have a store brand.

And you'll always – almost always save money on that store brand. The reason is because that store is not engaged in all of the marketing costs. So they're just buying the product and they're cutting out one name along the list. So you can buy local your toasted oats cereal and it will cost you less money than buying Cheerios brand.

Why? Well, nobody is on TV advertising during children's TV programming for toasted oats. Cheerios, on the other hand, is there. So buy the product as directly as possible. Look for and find the store brands and try it out. Principle number four, buy the product at the lowest unit price or at least buy the product at the lowest unit price that you can afford.

When you're shopping, you need to start with shopping based upon what you're trying to get, of course, but then shop based on unit price. I taught here – I taught my friend to read the unit price tags and this is a lot easier than it used to be. It used to be that you'd have to sit there and pull out your calculator and calculate the total cost of the product that you were trying to buy.

Divide that into the number of ounces or the number of units of that product and figure out the unit price yourself. Today, most of the grocery stores print the unit price right on the label. So you should be comparing items based upon cost per ounce or cost per pound or cost per unit.

Whatever the actual unit that is listed on that tag, shop based on unit price. I took my friend over to the yogurt section and I asked him. I said, "OK, what yogurt would you buy here?" He pointed to – not knowing. He pointed to the brand name, individually packaged yogurt.

So I just had a few minutes and I shared with him and I showed him how. If you go with the store brand, you get the same product, same ingredients, same nutritional profile, same product. And if you go with the larger package instead of the individually wrapped tiny little single-serving containers of yogurt, you get the larger package.

You wind up with a significant reduction in unit price. So shop based on unit price. Now the caveat here is you have to be able to afford the total unit cost in your budget. And for people who are very poor, this can be a real challenge. You might want to buy a 10-pound block of cheese because that's substantially cheaper.

But if you have $20 to spend in your whole week budget, you can't buy a $12 block of cheese. You have to buy a very small unit. So as you're building your way from poverty to wealth, one of the first things that – one of the biggest impacts that you can make is set aside the money.

So you can start to buy larger quantities of product that will give you a lower unit price. This will require you temporarily to take – to have a bigger budget. You may spend $30 but that – instead of $20, but that cost will be extended out. If you look at people who are poor all around the world, one of the biggest challenges you find is because they are often kept in this cycle of small income and high expenses, just money being grabbed for everything.

You'll find that they buy quantities – they buy products in very small quantities. When I was younger, I lived for three months with a family in Central America. And frequently, because the family that I was staying with had small children, frequently, the mother of the house would send me down to the local pulperia, the little corner store, to buy products that were needed for that day.

And so I'd go down to the local pulperia and I'd come and I'd buy one roll of toilet paper. We would buy one – five eggs, very small quantities. And frequently, even the local pulperia would purchase the not very large quantity and then cut it down into smaller quantities to resell.

And this was incredibly important to the families in that neighborhood because they could buy those very small quantities and fit that into the amount of money that they had available. But as you are able to save more money, you should quickly work to try to buy based upon the lowest unit price, buying larger quantities and saving for the future with those actual physical products.

Or oftentimes buying larger quantities and repackage. So as your wealth grows, as your savings grow, this is one of the most useful things for you to do to save money. Very frequently, my wife and I will buy large quantities of food and then repackage them into the freezer. We'll buy 10 pounds – 10 or sometimes 20-pound packages of ground beef at the restaurant supply store.

We'll buy a 40-pound box of chicken and then take that and reseal it, cut it up, take some time, reseal it into Ziploc bags, put it in the freezer. But now if you take and buy a 10-pound block of ground beef, I can buy that for half the price that I could go down to the local grocery store and buy a one-pound package of ground beef.

Same beef. I'm just buying a much larger quantity. I'm getting a 50% savings with no sales, nothing else, just simply buying based upon unit price. So focus on that and as your income grows, as your savings grows, and you get out of the most basic level of poverty, then focus on buying things in larger quantities so that you can get at the lowest unit price.

Principle number five, buy when seasonal supply is at its highest and then if necessary or if possible, put things away for the future. One of the hallmarks of people who are wealthier is that they tend to have a longer time perspective than people who are poorer. This happens both culturally speaking on – across a broad culture, a broad ethnic group or a broad group of people in a country.

But it also happens within individuals. If you actually look and see, individuals who can delay gratification, who can think far ahead in the long run will wind up being wealthier than people who can only think of today. Now certainly there are pressures that face families that are in extreme poverty where they can only think of today and it's right to think of today when there's a crisis.

But as soon as you can get out of the crisis, you want to think for the long term. So something as simple as buying when seasonal supply is at its highest is very, very important. We've increasingly lost this in the US American culture as we have gotten disconnected from the actual production of our land, production of our farms.

And as we've increasingly become engaged in a global food market, we basically always have things that are fresh. If you and I were to go to the grocery store and we would find that we couldn't buy fresh fruit, we would say, "What? What do you mean I can't buy fresh fruit?" Well, that's because our fresh fruit, if we live in the northern hemisphere, comes in from the southern hemisphere.

So when it's the middle of winter, we have fresh fruit coming in from where it's the middle of summer or its harvest season. But there's still a dramatic change in prices and even today, there are significant seasonal changes of prices. So do your best to buy when seasonal supply is at its highest and do your best to shop seasonally.

If you think about what foods are in season and you choose during a specific season to focus your food budget on those foods, that will get you the lowest costs. And then if you have the capacity to store those foods or set them aside for a future season, that will help you to be able to have your total food at the lowest possible cost.

So buy when the seasonal supply is at its highest and shop seasonally. Now, as you become more advanced, as you start to build and set aside skill, I think there's good value in planning how to preserve foods, how to keep foods for the future. Things as simple as having a freezer or having access to a freezer, preserving food through other methods like canning.

I think there's great value in it. But oftentimes, the startup costs are very difficult for families in poverty. But there's still value in some of these things to be able to buy when things are cheap and then to set them aside for the future. So think about seasonality. Principle number six, buy the lowest quality food that will meet the intended purpose.

And here, by quality, I'm primarily thinking about how things look. Buy the second-rate-looking food and learn how to use it in a way that will be appropriate for its status, I guess. Same thing I mentioned a moment ago that when I was younger, I spent significant time in Central America.

And one thing I just remember so clearly is I visited a banana plantation. This is one of the large companies. We're on their banana plantation, which was just really incredible to see. As we're taking a tour of it, the plantation manager is showing us how they sorted bananas. And what he showed was he said, "We have three grades of bananas." So the bananas that were the most perfect-looking, the most beautiful-looking bananas, those got sent to the United States market.

The bananas that were a little bit misshapen, that looked a little bit different, that weren't all perfectly uniform, those got sent to the European markets. And then the bananas that were neither of those first two were the ones that stayed in Central America. Now the question was this. Did the Central American bananas – were they inferior to the U.S.

American bananas? Well, when measured on the basis of looks, yes. The U.S. American bananas had to be perfectly uniform, perfectly consistent, just very appropriate. And that's kind of emblematic of the U.S. American culture in which looks are the most important thing. Everything has got to look great. But in reality, the local Central American bananas were many ways better.

Now sometimes they just were the same product that was being sent to the United States. But – and they looked worse. And so on that measure, they weren't better. But they were certainly cheaper and that was appropriate to the Central American market. But many times, even in the local Central American market, they would eat just different varieties of bananas that didn't have that perfect uniformity.

If the only bananas that you've ever had are Chiquita bananas from your local grocery store, that you buy them in the clump of six and they're all big and exactly the same, you're missing out. Because those bananas frankly are not very good compared to the massive variety of the hundreds of different types of bananas that you can get in Central America or in Asia, et cetera.

You can get bananas that are my favorite, just the little apple bananas. Those are easy to find and if you have a Hispanic food store, you can find those on the shelf. But if you just find little apple bananas, they're like eating sugar and there's hundreds of varieties of bananas that are all better.

So if you look around and you look at food, try to focus on buying food that has different qualities that will meet the intended purpose. So buy things that don't look quite as good but that are significantly cheaper and meet the purpose. Then think about how to use food that doesn't look quite as good.

If I have tomatoes, I like to buy little cherry tomatoes. They're a nice snack. But sometimes they'll get ahead of me and they start going soft. Well, don't throw them out. You figure out, "Well, how can I take a tomato that's gone a little bit soft and then use it in a form in which its softness doesn't matter?" The obvious example is you cook it.

So you put them in a hot pan and you braise them a little bit and then use that as a topping or a tomato sauce to go on something else. And you would never know that that tomato was a little bit soft. So buy slightly lower quality food that meets the intended purpose and then develop techniques that will allow you to work with it.

Now those are principles. If you have more principles, that's the best I know of things that are consistent across the board. I have a few other things that are tactics. But if you know of other principles, things I'm missing, come on by and let me know that. Comment on today's show and tell me what you think are fundamental principles that would apply no matter where someone is living.

Here are a few tactics that I follow as well. Shop the lost leaders and sales. I explained this to my friend how in every store – in the modern grocery store world, you will often find that a standard marketing technique is to use what's called a lost leader. A lost leader is an item that is severely discounted in order to get people to come into the store to buy it at a good deal.

Sometimes the grocery store will actually lose money on the product in order to get people to come into the store. And then while they're there, they'll buy the other higher margin products. So a good example right now as I record this and release this, it's Tuesday, October 31, 2017.

That means that we're going into the holiday season. During the holiday season, you can buy things like turkey for 98 cents a pound usually. Well, there's no reason why you couldn't buy a half a dozen turkeys at 98 cents a pound. And that's a very inexpensive unit price for poultry.

That's a lost leader for the store. But what they're hoping you do is come into the store to buy your turkey to get ready for Thanksgiving. And then while you're there, you buy all of the other foods that you need to prepare the traditional Thanksgiving foods. So if you shop those lost leaders and you shop the sales and that influences your buying habits, you can save substantial amounts of money.

One of my favorite tactics next is don't shop with white people. I generally find that white people are bad grocery shoppers. So I look for the non-white people and try to shop with them. So let me give you a few examples. You can often find – if you find out and ask your non-white friends where, you can often find an ethnic food store.

Often these will be focused on a specific ethnicity, whether that's Asian or Hispanic frequently or African. Often these ethnic food stores will work with – will appeal to people that's anybody except white people. So I often shop in ethnic food stores where there's black people, there's Asian people, there's Spanish people all around.

And they're from all kinds of countries. But the thing they have in common is they're not standard white US Americans. If you go into those stores, you find a whole different stream of products and you find a whole different stream of things that are available to you. And you often will find substantially reduced product prices.

And so I often find that this is one of the best things to do to get deals and especially on certain products. Example, here in – where I live in South Florida, there is a grocery store chain that is very focused on targeting Hispanics. All of the workers are Hispanic.

All of the brands are Hispanic. But that's one of the best places to go to get large cuts of meat for barbecue because you can go in there and you get these large cuts of meat. And you can – they have the butchers in there doing it. And it's very, very inexpensive to get large cuts of meat.

So if I'm going to cook meat for a lot of people and I'm just buying conventional, inexpensive meat but I need a big cut for smoking or for barbecuing in some way, that's one of the simplest and best places to go. It's a very different environment than the local white person food store.

But it's a completely different price point. It's up to savings of half. So look around. Other things with fundamental foods, you can – in cultures that eat a lot of beans and a lot of rice, you can go into the local Asian store or the local Hispanic store and they'll have many more varieties than just white rice and brown rice like the local mainstream grocery chain has.

They'll have all kinds of varieties of rice, all kinds of different things. And it's all very inexpensive. But now you start to bring in more interest to your cooking. So you can cook with black rice and you can buy all these interesting types of beans that are dried beans.

They're very inexpensive. But that selection is just simply not available at your mainstream white American grocery store. Same thing happens with vegetables. Obviously for health reasons, we want to eat as many vegetables and fruits as we can. But if you shop in the mainstream white American store, you find that the vegetables all look perfect.

They're beautifully waxed and beautifully laid out. But you can't afford to buy them. But if you look around and find out where are the immigrants going and go and shop at their vegetable stand, go and shop at their store, you'll usually find vegetables and fruits that don't look as good but are 20, 30, 40 cents on the dollar.

Way, way cheaper. So look for where are your non-white friends shopping and go and shop in the ethnic food stores. And then while you're there, ask some of your people who – your non-white friends, ask them for their traditional recipes because often – a good example is fish. Go to one of the local stores here in West Palm Beach where they have just a huge variety of fish that almost none of which I have no cultural experience with.

And yet all my Asian friends, they buy this and they buy that and the fish is cheap and they know how to cook it and use it into a traditional stew or a traditional soup and they know how to cook the whole thing and eat the whole thing. Many times in Asia, you go and eat fish head soup or all of these things that are completely outside of my own culture but that are really valuable techniques for learning how to get the most from your food.

So look for where do your non-white friends shop. Next tactic is minimize your meat purchases. Don't buy meat. Meat is generally pretty expensive. Obviously, I eat meat and there are tactics and tools for not doing that – for using meat. But you can often fill that void with meat in a very different way.

The practice that many of us have of having meat as our center of our plate food with large cuts of meat, this is a pretty expensive way to cook. And so just simply minimize your meat purchases. There are a lot of staple foods that you can use especially instead of meat and there are staple foods that – just speaking tactically here – that will help you to fill your stomach with even minimal cooking skill.

So let me give the best example of some simple examples I gave to my friend who is not a skilled cook, college student, not likely to say, "Well, how can I learn how to make polenta?" How can I work on my paella? Things like this. This is not likely for him to do.

One of the staple foods to look at are eggs and egg dishes. So when I was in the grocery store with my friend, I took him over to the chip aisle. I showed him how a bag of chips, just kind of the kind of thing that he said he would buy, a bag of chips is about $3.50.

And most of us, if we are eating that as a primary food, we could easily consume an entire large bag of chips for a meal. And at the end of the meal, we have almost no nutritional satisfaction and we're still hungry. I walked him over to the eggs and I couldn't believe that in Texas at the Walmart we were shopping at, in Texas you could buy a flat of 18 just conventional standard factory farmed eggs, 18 eggs for a total of 58 cents.

18 eggs for 58 cents. Which means that if you were to compare the price of eggs versus the price of that bag of chips at $3.50, you could either have one bag of chips for $3.50 or you could buy 111 eggs. 111 eggs. That's nine dozen eggs that you could buy for the same $3.58.

There is no comparison. There's no comparison between the nutritional value and the stomach filling value of buying nine dozen eggs as compared to one bag of chips, but the same cost. Now remember the context here. My friend is going hungry for days at a time because he doesn't have food.

What's going to be more helpful, a bag of chips or nine dozen eggs? So a staple food instead of using meat for protein, eggs and egg dishes are a staple food and there are so many ways to cook eggs. There are so many ways to prepare eggs. There are so many dishes that can be made with eggs as the primary feature that when you can buy an 18-pack of eggs for 58 cents, that's an incredible opportunity, incredible option.

A few other staple foods that I pointed out to my friend, another one that I shared with him was something like tortillas. I have found that tortillas are one of the most useful foods that you can make and that you can buy to help fill your stomach and to have delicious food.

Tortillas, even if you buy the pre-made ones, whether that's flour or corn, the pre-made tortillas that you can buy in the store are significantly cheaper than bread. Bread is about four times more expensive. If you compare a slice of bread to one small tortilla, bread is about four times more expensive than our tortillas.

The other benefit of tortillas is tortillas last much longer than bread. So you can buy a larger package at a very inexpensive unit price and that package of tortillas doesn't go moldy. It lasts longer. So tortillas will last – I found that it will last for weeks and weeks.

And in terms of the pleasure of eating a tortilla, it's very simple and easy to take a tortilla. You make some eggs, some scrambled eggs, put a little bit of spice on top to spice them up a little bit, maybe some tomatoes or some kind of topping. And then you toast up a few tortillas, corn or flour, toast them up in your pan and now you have a delicious breakfast that you can be completely full on that's incredibly inexpensive.

So the fact that you can buy a large packet of tortillas that will last for a long time, then you can – it's really, really valuable. Additionally, tortillas can be made yourself. Now, I struggle to make tortillas. I don't have a tortilla press. So I've tried to learn how to do it.

You can buy in the local grocery store. You can buy just straight-up corn flour. Look for – it's called maseca in the Spanish. It's just targeted at the Spanish people, maseca. So you can buy corn flour and then you just make them up with corn flour, a little bit of water, a little bit of salt.

So I've worked and I've made tortillas using two plates pressing together. And one of these days, I'll get an actual tortilla press. But when you start buying maseca and making them yourself, water, salt, and a little bit of corn flour, you get them even cheaper than the pre-made tortillas.

One little tip for you, if you struggle like I do to actually make tortillas, then you can make arepas. And so make the Venezuelan or Guatemalan arepas, which are similar to a tortilla but instead of being thin, they're much thicker and they're more like a – about the thickness of English muffin.

So make arepas and arepas can be adjusted and used as a sandwich bread for all kinds of dishes, all kinds of delicious things. You can take arepas and make a bean mixture. I like to make – one of my favorite recipes that I learned from a Colombian – a Venezuelan friend of mine is he taught me to take – to make arepas.

And arepas are very simple, a little bit of salt, a little bit of maseca, which is the corn flour and some water. I mix them up and cook them on a griddle and then fry up some plantains. You can buy down here – you have the Spanish plantains. They're called platanos maduros.

And so what you do is you buy plantains, which are these big cooking bananas that the Spanish people cook with, and then basically let them go completely black. And then you just take those and fry them up in oil and that's how you make the sweet plantains that you'll frequently get for a dessert.

We take those sweet plantains. You make some arepas, make – fry up some platanos maduros, the sweet plantains, and then cook up some eggs, fry some eggs, put some eggs on top. And you can have that and you can add other sauces and things as well. But now you have an absolutely delicious meal that's made out of cheap, cheap, cheap ingredients.

You're making the arepas for a few pennies. The eggs are a couple of pennies each and the plantains are very, very cheap. Just kind of let them go. The secret to good plantains, if you're ever cooking them, your plantains have to be completely black to where you think they're rotten.

That's the time at which you cook them. So that would be an example of a basic staple food, just tortillas and tortillas. You get the flour ones. That works well with peanut butter in lieu of bread. Less expensive, lasts longer than bread, and especially you don't need refrigeration or freezing in order to make those last.

Tactically, another one, obviously rice. Rice is, of course, a staple for rice and beans, is a staple. But you can learn to cook rice and there are all kinds of interesting rices and you can adjust the flavor profile of rice with just a few different adjustments. Sometimes make your rice with a little bit of coconut milk.

You can buy coconut milk very inexpensively. Make it with various types of meat broths and that adds a savory flavor to the rice or just straight-up rice. Straight-up white rice with butter and salt is delicious and will fill your stomach and it's so easy to cook. There's a reason why a vast majority of the world's population lives on rice.

It's tremendous value. And then if you shop in one of the ethnic food stores and you start to vary your rice palette instead of just white or brown or jasmine, now you can start to get some of the interesting rices, the yellow rices, the black rices, all these just interesting flavor profiles.

Then now you can have cheap food that's very, very diverse. Of course, beans are a staple as well. There's a reason why we say living on rice and beans for a reason. But beans are one of the most valuable foods that you can have with their filled with protein.

They're filled with starch. They fill you up. That's an excellent food. The key is learn to cook a few recipes, learn to cook a few things. A can of beans by itself is very unappetizing. But if you take a can of beans and you start to learn how to cook Cuban black beans and rice or learn how to cook gallo pinto from Costa Rica or learn how to cook a traditional pinto bean recipe, learn how to cook cowboy pinto beans, basically you can make beans into a delicious filling meal.

So rice and beans for a reason. Cornbread is a tremendous inexpensive but filling thing to make. So that's cornbread on the side with a pinto bean recipe. You can make cornbread, simple cornmeal, very simple recipes, and it's delicious. Cornbread can be made savory and it can be made sweet depending on what you put on top and it can fill you up inexpensively.

Potatoes, potato dishes, and especially sweet potatoes are one of the most valuable things that are traditional from the European culture. So there are all kinds of ways to take potatoes, to spice them up a little bit and have a really filling meal that keeps your stomach full. Pasta, of course, has tremendous opportunities.

Study all of the different pasta dishes. But you can make very simple pasta dishes and very inexpensive pasta sauces and, again, have a filling meal for your stomach for a few pennies. In lieu of cereal, one of the most valuable things is to look at oatmeal, either rolled oats or steel-cut oats.

Even if you buy a large – steel-cut oats are much more expensive than rolled oats. But you can make delicious breakfasts that are very filling with a small quantity of rolled oats or steel-cut oats that is way cheaper than a box of expensive cereal. And so for my friend, something like that for breakfast, if you make an alternating breakfast, one day you eat eggs, another day you eat oatmeal with some minimal toppings, you can eat really well on a very low cost.

And then, of course, you get into flour and flour-related foods. Pancakes are incredibly cheap, even just basic pancakes, and yet they're very versatile and can fill you up. And any kind of flour dishes or things related to pancakes are simple and easy to make. We have a traditional recipe in our family which is very much like a German pancake.

We call it – a very funny name. Get ready to laugh. We call it fluffy waffy. But the recipe is so simple. You take – if you're a single person and you're making a 9x9 pan, double it for a 9x13. But you just grab four eggs, a half a cup of flour, a cup of milk, and a pinch of salt.

So again, four eggs, half a cup of flour, a cup of milk, and a pinch of salt. Blend it up in a blender if you have a blender for a minute or so. And the blending process puts a bunch of air into the recipe and bake it in the oven on a high temperature, about 425 degrees for 20, 30 minutes.

This is a Joshua's Cooking Show. I didn't intend to give you recipes here. But bake it in the oven and it's delicious. And it can be a savory dish. But we usually eat it as a sweet dish. Put a dash of honey on top, a dash of maple syrup, whatever you've got.

And it's sweet and it's delicious. But the cost of it, four eggs – let's make a 9x13 pan which would last for a couple of days for an individual person. So eight eggs, a cup of milk – excuse me, two cups of milk and a cup of flour. Flour is crazy cheap.

And I couldn't believe in Texas you could buy a gallon of whole milk, standard, just conventional milk, 98 cents. 98 cents for a gallon of milk. Couldn't believe it. That's about a third of the price of what I pay here in South Florida. So with these basic things, basic ingredients, and I haven't even touched on vegetables, all the different vegetable things that you can do, you can eat very well on almost nothing.

But you need a little bit of time and a little bit of skill, a little bit of focus. Very basic equipment, a little bit of time, a little bit of focus. And if you start expanding, stir-fries, casseroles, soups, many of these things that we look at are traditional foods because they're things that you can put just whatever you can find into.

A soup allows you to take vegetables that may not be the most beautiful vegetables of all time and by cooking them, retain the flavor and retain the nutrition. And yet you're not looking at the fact that there was a bruised spot on the tomato. You never know if there was a bruised spot on the tomato or not.

That's what the value of a soup is. And you can put in and take out whatever it is you happen to have on hand. So these are some skills that we have to develop and we need to teach other people these skills. Finally, a few other just thoughts, costs of food.

There are other costs of food that are interesting and especially when you're working in – from a position of extreme poverty, you've got to consider some of the costs of food. How do you cook? How is the cost of energy into the food? How is that going to work out in terms of how are you physically going to cook?

If you are in an extreme situation, you can make your own rocket stove that you can cook with twigs outside on. For most people, they have a method of cooking. But there are traditional methods to even minimize the energy usage. I've recently become very interested in thermal cooking, which is a technique where you simply raise the temperature of the food.

You bring your food to a boil and then you wrap it up in a lot of insulation, whether that's – in the old days, they would do this with a box of hay, a hay box. Today, you can do it with a cooler and towels or they make specialized thermal cookers that look like crockpots but without the heating element, without the cord.

And then you just let the food cook slowly over the course of six or eight hours and that cuts your energy usage tremendously. Very popular in RVers or people who live on sailboats where every drop of gas that goes into their gas burner needs to be rationed very carefully.

Thermal cooking is a very efficient way of cooking. There are ways that you can build a solar cooker. So commercially bought solar cookers work very well but they're expensive. But you could build a solar cooker and you can bake bread. You can make soups. You can even barbecue in a well-made solar cooker.

And so now we're minimizing the cost of cooking. And then also don't neglect the value of minimizing the need for refrigeration. Many people, the cost of running a refrigerator may be a significant expense. And so many foods can be made without refrigeration or you can make slightly different choices that will help you to minimize the need for refrigeration.

Sometimes this results in just simply buying refrigerated foods right when you're going to use them. Avoid meat, for example. But if you need to cook with meat, then you come down to the grocery store and you cook with meat that day and you don't keep significant amounts of meat on hand.

Or perhaps if you need to use a small amount of cheese and you didn't have the ability to maintain it without refrigeration, you just purchase a small amount for that day. Sometimes you can do it with changes in the type of food that you buy. A good example with milk, if you don't have refrigeration, much of the world lives on UHT milk, ultra-pasteurized milk that doesn't need refrigeration because of the cost of refrigeration.

And so you can purchase ultra-pasteurized milk. It costs a little bit more in the United States than does the normal milk that needs to be refrigerated. But it allows you to have a similar effect. It's good milk. It's not powdered milk, although there is, of course, the option for powdered milk.

But it's much, much better than powdered milk and minimizes refrigeration. And then a lot of times if you look at your products, if you look at your choices, there's a reason why canned foods are useful. You can make canned vegetables. It may not be quite as good as fresh but it may minimize your need for refrigeration.

And then finally, briefly on health. What about health? As I said in the beginning, my intention in this show was to not come at this from most of us who are doing pretty well. We think about things and we buy very expensive products and we're kind of elitist snobs in many ways about the food that we eat.

I'm talking about how do you fill your stomach. How do you fill your stomach when you're hungry and you're not eating for multiple days? Even if you follow these things, I think that you can fill your stomach and be pretty healthy. As long as you avoid a lot of the pre-made stuff, a lot of the junk that's in that stuff is really problematic.

But even if you're making basic foods, basic egg, basic rice, basic bean dishes, basic vegetables, I think you can eat a really healthy diet on a low cost because you're working with those fundamental ingredients. And finally, one of the biggest blessings we have today, multivitamins are cheap. Obviously, there's tremendous debate in the world of nutrition about vitamins and supplements and all that stuff.

Multivitamins are cheap and you can go into just about any store and you can get a large bottle of inexpensive vitamins. Does it help? I don't see how it could hurt. I'll let other people debate that who are more knowledgeable. But in terms of filling in some of the vitamin deficiencies, that can be a very inexpensive way to try to help fill that in.

And that's it. That's all I have to share with you. I hope this content has been interesting or useful to you. If this has been helpful for you, I'd love to hear from that. If you have other tips or ideas or especially if you have other principles, things that you think are kind of fundamental strategies that apply in almost every context, I'd love to hear some of those from you.

Come on by at RadicalPersonalFinance.com and comment on today's show. Let me know those and please, I beg you, if you know somebody in your life, you might take things for granted. Even as I've done this show, I have to fight the feeling of the fact like my audience knows all this stuff.

I don't know anything special. I feel this way frequently when I do shows and I just think, well, everybody knows this. Everybody knows this certain thing. I do it with specific financial concepts. I do it with all this stuff, but I've learned everybody does not know it. And yet, just again compare.

I want to just compare so clearly the value. Think of my friend. Just simply learning to not buy a $3.50 package of chips but to buy 111 eggs for the same amount of money. Think of the impact that that can have on his stomach. Now, look around your town.

Look around your life and try to find some of the people that you can teach some of these things that for you are old hat. And get in there and help. I think it's very easy for many of us to ignore some of what goes on in our own country, whether it's in the United States or not, with regard to how many people are really hungry.

Let me just read a couple of statistics. I know these statistics. I just kind of randomly grabbed some from the FeedingAmerica.org website. But these are consistent across the board. But think about this. So as of 2016, 41.2 million Americans live in food-insecure households, including 28.3 million adults and 12.9 million people.

Now they say the majority of people who are food-insecure do not live in poverty and the majority of people who live in poverty are not food-insecure. An estimated 58 percent of food-insecure individuals reside in households that earn more than 100 percent of the poverty line. And 61 percent of people living in poor households are in fact food-secure.

Twelve percent of households are estimated to be food-insecure. Five percent of households experience very low food security. Households with children report food insecurity at a significantly higher rate than those without children, 17 percent compared to 11 percent. Households that have higher rates of food insecurity than the national average include households with children, 17 percent.

Especially households with children headed by single women, 32 percent, or single men, 22 percent. Black non-Hispanic households, 23 percent, and Hispanic households, 19 percent. As of 2015, 5.4 million seniors over age 60, or 8 percent of all seniors, are estimated to be food-insecure. Food insecurity exists in every county in America, ranging from a low of 3 percent in Grant County, Kansas, to a high of 38 percent in Jefferson County, Mississippi.

Now if you're like me and you look at those statistics and you kind of scratch your head and say, "Huh?" Even I'm not even going to what their definition of food-insecure is. I just encourage you to notice this. Look at the way the people around you shop and look at the way the people around you eat.

In the United States of America, there is no reason why any person should be food-insecure. There's no reason why any person should go hungry. The US government subsidizes food so heavily, so heavily that you can do what I said. You can buy 18 eggs for 58 cents in Texas.

You can buy wheat and flour and these basic things for so, so cheap. So cheap. So what's the problem? Well, there are probably many things and I'm not competent to try to solve everyone's problems. But one simple thing is the skill of shopping and the basic skill of cooking.

I'm often appalled when I go to the local Walmart in the poor section of town where I live. You look around and you look at the food that is in people's carts and obviously people who are struggling. It's appalling. It's absolutely appalling because there could be so much more that's done.

So get involved with those. Practice techniques for yourself and then get involved with those that you can affect personally and help people. Because there's no reason why people should be hungry, especially in the United States of America. I hope that these ideas and these principles will be helpful to you in days to come.

Thank you for listening. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs.

Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value. Discover your tropical dreams at FijiAirways.com. That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways.