Due to travel restrictions, I have to leave Massachusetts on a train at midnight to catch a 6AM flight out of Providence, RI. I grab a slice of pizza from my lab group, and eat three eggs on the way.$0.45Unfortunately, I leave my laptop in a taxi cab, and find myself in Los Angeles with no way to contact my friends who don't know I'm coming. There, in the airport, in my moment of greatest distress, is an ice cream store. Forlorn, I can't pass up a chocolate ice cream cone.Ice cream cone time! $2.00!$2.45I see now how things get expensive. The rest of the day I eat delicious dumpster-dived tiramisu, chocolate soy milk, and salmon. And one of the carrots I packed in my bag.$2.65I spent all of today rapelling down cliffs and running down riverbeds in the San Gabriel mountains, but all the sugar has gone straight to my tongue and given me some inflamed tastebuds.

Yesterday I started brewing a batch of kombucha, and today I'm throwing a bunch of lentil seeds in a bucket with some water, and making sprouts.I'm also drinking a whole bunch of water, carrying a gallon jug around with me. Have you ever wondered why a gallon of water is ~$1, but a quart is $2.50? I think I'll never know.Here's how I'm doing:Some yogurt mixed with flax seed/trail mix. Big yogurt probably cost me $2.50, and I'm eating about 1/3d of it, or about $0.80. I'm probably eating around $0.50 of the toppings, too.$1.30Free cookies! I got two cookies from a libraries promotion. Delicious!$1.30Free pizza crusts! Yum!$1.30

So, after an fast and hard game of ice hockey, I started sleeping a lot more. The past week (before this experiment really began, though I was eating the same way), I had been sleeping around 5 hours/night, comfortably. Last night was a more reasonable 8 hours, and I'm humanly tired again.Scored a free Samosa from an Indian buffet catered for some talk.$0.00Eggs cost $1.79 per dozen at my local grocery. Awesome!Also, did you know you can make scrambled eggs in a microwave?They turn into this giant fluffy, scrambled egg marshmallow.I also felt really good afterwards, so I suppose I needed the protein.Two eggs, at 1/6th of $1.79, or $0.30$0.30Half a chicken burrito, served on my lab group's robot arm!$0.30The rest of the yogurt with raisins and nuts and flax seeds, at $1.30$1.60I am hungry! I got some akmak whole wheat crackers, my favorite when I was little, for $2.00, and there are five sheets inside. $0.40$2.00It seems astoundingly easy to be quite full all the time, and not spend close to $3. I'm considering cutting out the free food, although it's difficult to resist.

Up like a shot, at 10 AM! Only five hours of sleep needed, for me. I'm trying to sleep as much as I need to - go to bed when I feel tired (though I'm usually working on my MASLAB robot until late - instructable coming soon), and wake up when I feel like it. So it's especially neat that I seem to need little rest.I munch on some veggies - carrots and kale (I surprise myself because I'm actually hungry for leaves).Carrots are only 99 cents per pound, which, in my bag, is 5 carrots. One carrot, 20 cents.$0.20I feel like I could eat as many eggs as I wanted to. Why are eggs so cheap? Isn't protein supposed to be expensive? If I spent $3 a day on eggs, I would be eating 24 eggs, every day. Are eggs far more expensive in other countries, or are they just hard to get? I can make meals out of these things just by dipping them in hot water, or microwaving them. That's easier for a college student to make than Ramen!I hardboil and eat two eggs, $0.30.$0.50The key to this is clearly to eat stuff when I actually feel hunger, or even just its beginnings. It's becoming rare, most of the time I feel satisfied, happy, energetic, and not in need of food. The main difference between this and my past eating habits is, I don't feel 'full' or 'stuffed' ever, just 'not hungry'.I'm flying soon - does anyone know if eggs are counted as a liquid, by the TSA?Can I fly with hard boiled eggs that are 3oz. or less?Does putting my perishables through the x-ray machine at the airport make them last longer?Delicious whole-fat cream on top vanilla yogurt with trail mix and flax seeds, $1.30.$1.80I'm leaving the university for a bit, so starting tomorrow I'll see how $3/day holds up against travel and the "real world"

So, today is an exercise in how not to. I start the day with a quesadilla, and a surf session at Manhattan Beach in LA. What a good way to get an appetite!The quesadilla cost about $0.50, and I follow it with an egg.$0.65After this, though, things don't go as planned. My two most stylish friends talk our way into an industry-only fashion show, and get to look at the latest legging swatches, and the newest in sustainably mined green enviro-hip chemically etched jewelry, and then consume a whole lot of Mexican food, including a "Bionica" (a huge pile of fruit, yogurt, and dried coconut guaranteed to give you huge pulsing muscles filled with ), and a "Torta Hawaiiano". I can already feel that I've eaten far more than I want or need, and I spend the entire day being thirsty.

I get the heck out of Los Angeles, and try my luck in San Francisco, instead. I eat one of my last traveling eggs for breakfast, and head to Macworld to bathe in the aura of shiny gadgets, bLOLggers, and people with iPhones. The conference has a bunch of food, so today I subsist on two free chocolate chip muffins, and a whole lot of mint tea with milk and honey. This is a lot of free food! I'm don't feel much like I'm learning about subsisting on cheap food, right now, but I'm learning a whole lot about how sensitive I can become to what I've eaten. These two muffins sit like rocks, in my stomach. Huge, chocolatey, pillow-like rocks. I am still feeling well-rested enough, and get up really early, but all this food is quick to slow me down. Later in the night, I am visiting some friends in Santa Clara who feed me a spinach salad with lots of kidney beans, cottage cheese, and chickpeas. Then we go pick and eat delicious tart oranges from trees. California is the best!

I spend this day hanging out in Berkeley/Oakland, and on Alameda, at Squid Labs.All I need in the morning are a pair of steaks, courtesy of Tim Anderson himself. He buys the meat in these giant 10 lb. blobs, and pares off strips of meat, and broils them in a toaster oven. This must be the easiest conceivable way to cook meat.The steaks go on top of a salad made out of mung+lentil bean sprouts, and some leftovers from some company lunch.I'm so set all day! Towards the later afternoon, I become hungry and find a bowl of "brownie bites", and snack on them for a while. Today = free! $0.00

Man, airports are quite possibly the worst place to get food that's good OR cheap.At 5 AM, I land in Atlanta, eat my last hard-boiled egg, and snack on a cheese danish I had stashed in my bag.After that, I see which restaurants will give me the most free water. Cinnabon does all right, but their water comes out of the icky fruit punch tap, and is slightly red and ickyfruitpunch flavored. Starbucks keeps a pitcher full of ice and complimentary water on their cinnamon-dusting table, but they give out small cups and the water is too cold for me.That's all until around 2 in the afternoon, when, catching the train to Boston at the Providence train station (travel restrictions), I have a tiny cup of vanilla yogurt for $1.79.Not at all the same value as the big tub I'm used to, and it doesn't even come with bacteria!$1.79Later, I'm laser cutting my newest robot, when I feel the urge to forage.The media lab regularly stocks everything I need except for food. This must be what it feels like to be a graduate student. Everything I need to keep working, except sleep or food. Actually, food does sometimes appear, if you know where to look. And the sort of random superstition one could only develop by living in Skinner's box, I seek food.Victory! A stack of pizza boxes on top of a trash can yields one remaining pristine slice. It's all mine, in its full, crunchy-crusted, pesto-and-anchovies glory.I much on pizza, and think "my robot needs 6-32 bolts". Time to look for robot stock. "And I want to listen to Devendra Banhart," which is also in stock.

I have been awake all night. I have been building robots since 4 PM yesterday. All on the power of chinese takeout and powdered hot chocolate!Around 3:30 AM, my favorite late-night cleaning lady, Peggy, offered me some Chinese food she'd ordered, but didn't want any more of. And her offer was well received, even though it was an off-time for eating and I wasn't quite hungry. The gluttonous student who doesn't know when the next meal will appear had struck, I suppose. And, I reflect as I continue to pick pieces of bright pink meat from my teeth, that meat was tasty.$0.00The rest of my energy has sprung from the artificially-intelligent Media Lab drink-maker-cum-Starbucks. This machine can literally make any drink involving coffee, milk, or tea, and all you have to do is press a bunch of buttons. I think I've had, dissolved in watery milk, at least six packs of hot chocolate mix. Which gives me a few more hours of robot building before I stumble and fall into a glucose coma.The sunrise brings renewed energy, stronger lasers, and hope. By noon I have consumed nothing more, than those six packets of hot chocolate powder, and Peggy's chinese food. I'm not hungry, but rather thirsty, so I buy myself a new gallon jug of water (I'm not sure where my old one's gone). A note on water - I really like having a jug like a boat-anchor. I don't feel compelled to finish it, so I sip as I'm thirsty. I can always refill it, it's cheaper than a nalgene, and if the bottle gets broken or lost, I can always get a new one that's exactly like the old one.\Gallon of Water: $1.29$1.29I suppose I can understand, right now, what it's like then to be both hungry and attempting to not eat. I'm not trying to be hungry - I feed myself with something good when I am, but I have this amazing craving to spend a large amount of money, on food. Facebook Inc., decides to try to convince MIT programmers to write the hip new mashed-up blogoriffic killer-app by buying pizza the way the cookie monster buys cookies. There's just so much pizza, everywhere, on multiple floors of the building. Someone brings a few boxes back to the MASLAB/6.002 lab, where I'm madly building robots.Hooray, pizza! Three slices and many pizza crusts later, I'm filled.$1.29

I could not possibly eat any more pizza, after yesterday. I fill my backpack with discovered low-cost staples - yogurt and trail mix, eggs, a fresh apple, and a jug of water.I eat at least half the container of yogurt, and four eggs, and snack on trail mix. I also grab free chips that someone's eating in lab. Yogurt and trail mix are around $1.50, the eggs, $0.60. $2.10MIT has a mailing list called "reuse", where people who want to get rid of things will send out an email, and give away some amazing stuff. I picked up a 5-gallon bucket of popcorn kernels, so tonight my friends and I have a chocolate milkshakes + popcorn party, and watch "Bubba Ho-tep" about a revived Elvis Presley who lives with a man who believes that he is John F. Kennedy, and who together battle a southern-transplanted ancient Egyptian mummy. Both my brain and my stomach are full of delicious non-nutritional content, afterwards.

My free living food has borne fruit!The sprouts are sending up green shoots, and the kombucha is sparkly and delicious, today!A handful of sprouts, and a glassful of kombucha, and some eggs, are the best way to start! I also juice a lime I picked in California into my water bottle. All water should taste so good.My friends from China, Jim and Mandy, give me a "Moon Cake", which looks like a bun filled with eggs and meat, smells like a pastry, and tastes fabulous.Sprouts: probably about $0.02. I probably paid $2 for a sack full of lentil beans, and used a tenth of it for the sprouting. Those twenty cents worth of sprouts will last me for at least two weeks. Man!Kombucha: All it takes is a teabag and some sugar. Should I even count this beverage? It's nutritional because it's full of bacteria, and they reproduce for just a few ounces of sugar. My glass of the k'cha: $0.05?So, I'm already full, and only set back $0.07, plus $0.30 for the eggs.$0.37This makes me think I could probably do pretty well growing mushrooms. Does anyone know anything about growing mushrooms?

Since my sprouts & kombucha blossomed, I am set for at least two weeks of low-cost/free eating. So, at this point, I conclude writing about what I'm eating, as I've discovered and localized around a set of foods that cost me mere pennies.Additional foods that I thought of being good and cheap to eat, but didn't explore:-Oatmeal:You can eat a filling meal on just a handful of this and some hot water.Tastes really good mixed with anything (fruit, yogurt, trail mix, ketchup..)-Quesadillas:So, cheese and tortillas are both sold in reasonable bulk and at prices where you could cheaply eat a few quesadillas every day. - Sauerkraut:Sauerkraut is a surprisingly tasty topping for a slice of bread/pizza/soup/anything.Sauerkraut, and anything you can grow on your shelf are fabulous cheap foods.-Kefir!You can also grow Kefir on your shelf. Like kombucha. No instructable on that yet.-MushroomsI am curious to know what growing mushrooms (especially indoors, on a shelf) is like. Can mushrooms be grown hydroponically?