Beef and chicken boulion cubes are about $4 for a bottle of what, maybe 30 cubes?! That’s 30 meals.
Chicken quarters (meat!) are less than half a Dollar per pound.
Flour bags are cheap. Yeast packets are cheap. Bake your bread. Roll your own tortillas (and chips!).
Corn, potatoes, and green peppers are cheap.
Strawberries grow in your window planters, city folks. So do delicious Israel melons.
Rice and beans are cheap, but peanut butter can be inexpensive, too.
Grow a little. Shop a little. Make a little. You can make a budget stretch a long way.
Hot dogs. Beanie-weenies. Sister Shubert rolls.
Tea brewed from bags, or made from scratch from dandelions.
Syrup tapped straight from maple and hickory trees. Pine cone nuts from every pine cone.
Heck, people can buy a milk cow for less money than they pay for store-bought milk each year.
Fish that are line caught from the nearby stream, lake, or coastline.
I’d suggest honey, but raising your own honeybees is illegal in NYC! Laws have consequences.
Which is to say, money *isn’t* the problem...
Southhack, there is an Eastern principle called ‘prana’ where you eat the life force of say, a carrot or potato, freshly dug.
It’s the distance where a plant or animal was gathered, so you get it early in the street markets.
Root and some lettuce-types maintain their ‘prana’, or life-force all throughout their shipping and handling, and are the best for energy consumption.
Yeah, YOU try keeping that in an apartment!
(maybe if I use the freight elevator....)