How to feed your family for under $5: Canned bean dinners that are really delicious

[hunter]

54. My parents had more children than they could comfortably support.

I learned early how to prepare food on a very limited budget.

In my feral young adulthood I learned how to survive on little or no budget -- dumpster diving, scavenging leftover food from the tables (and sometimes the trash...) of fast food places, etc.

There really shouldn't be any stories of food scavenging like that in a wealthy and supposedly civilized nation.

My "food security" has always been a big bag of rice and a variety of beans and lentils in my pantry. Spices and flavorings are treasure even if it just those little tubs of taco sauce that Taco Bell used to leave out on the counter for the taking.

The traditional foods of recent immigrant communities tend to be very affordable, especially if you live in one of those communities. There's a lot you can do with rice and beans beyond a simple can of beans with rice.

I have two frugal cooking traditions to draw upon -- my wife's Mexican traditions, which my sister-in-law is the family caretaker of, and my own less appealing potatoes-and-cabbage-and-Lima beans with a smoked ham hock, beef tongue, or fish tossed in if you've got one.

One of my brother's is the cook in our family and can rightfully be called a chef. He's owned restaurants, which is not an endeavor for the fainthearted. He can make a stupendous meal out of the most basic, almost random, ingredients. He likes food.

If I hadn't learned to cook and be social about food I'd be a hermit sitting in front of a computer monitor writing code, eating whatever my handlers fed me. My first serious girlfriend's pickup line was, "Come with me, you need to eat." And this was true.

My approach to eating, especially when I'm in a bad place mentally, is disturbingly utilitarian. I don't want to be malnourished, or so skinny as to alarm people, or end up in the hospital as a skeleton-man when I get the flu or some other similar ailment. My wife witnessed me as a skeleton man with pneumonia early on in our relationship and it's a wonder she didn't flee.

My wife's an academic. She got at least a quarter century as a full time student, from kindergarten past graduate school, and never really had time to cook. So I became the cook by default, which would have surprised anyone who knew me when I was young.

Our county has a well regarded food bank and it's important that people contribute money to it. Food donations are important but dollar donations have a much bigger impact.

But frankly, that's not enough for me. I want to live in a world where anyone, simply by virtue of being human, can walk into a basic eating establishment, sit down, and order a satisfying, nutritious meal. I want to live in a world where children get free meals at school. That's not beyond our reach.