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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2860 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 26, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Anyone here with experience when it comes to meal-replacements?

I have, on a few occasions, tried various flavors of Huel:

  • It tastes like ass chalk.
  • A single bottle 500ml bottle is only 400 kcal, which is a fucking salad, not a meal as far as I'm concerned.
  • I can get a 12 pack for £42 on Amazon, which comes to a stupidly low 114 kcal/£. And that's just a nominal two days of consumption.

A diet of takeout, even something fancy, will almost certainly beat it on calories per unit of currency. I don't really see the point unless I'm traveling and don't want to deal with a "normal" snack. It's very much not a full meal either way.

Why do I even ask? I'm consumed with exam anxiety, my meds suppress my appetite, and I can't be arsed to cook right now (even if, in all honesty, it won't cut down into study time). Plus a moderate caloric deficit is something I don't mind, from a weight loss perspective, I just don't like getting stiffed on the calories I get. I would be happy getting 1800-2000 a day, which is about what I can reasonably continue for days/weeks without feeling like I'm starving.

In other words, can you think of something superior on metrics such as taste, price per calorie, which I can stock up on?

(Please don't suggest sticks of butter, pemmican or drinking cooking oil. I'm only human. If all else fails, it's McDonald's and their shakes that have calorie densities comparable to nuclear fission)

I tried soylent for a while. I added some strawberry syrup to make it taste better, and I didn't run into any problems at ~1000kcal/day. It's 233 kcal/USD for the powder (which is currently sold out?), or 100 kcal/USD for the premixed shakes.

If we allow simple meals (inspired my the biryani benchmark) as meal-replacements, you could always peasant-maxx and just microwave potatoes.

Potatoes are very close to nutritionally complete when eaten with any kind of cheese or milk. Depending on how refined your taste in cheese is, it will knock restaurant/delivery biryani out of the water in terms of price per calorie. You can easily deal in total calories by adding butter.

peasant-maxx

My ancestors, including my dad, were born peasants. They tried very hard to ensure that I wouldn't grow up as one haha.

People ate better during the Irish famine! Well, minus the potatoes.

Then upgrade your cheese game! There's practically no limit on nobility variety, tastes and prices. Goes extremely well with potatoes, doesn't increase the complexity of preparation towards anything resembling "cooking", still nutritionally complete. And unless you actually dislike potatoes and/or cheese, it should be far more tasty than a can of Delicious Soylent Green (or it's modern successors).

Avoid anything with Pea protein as its primary protein source (or that uses it at all), it is disgusting. Huel was fine when it used milk protein.

The issue is that a lot of these companies want to sell to vegans (for whom I imagine a nutritionally complete easy meal is a great convenience) and don't want to maintain separate production lines, sacrificing taste along the way.

a stupidly low 114 kcal/£

And how much does real food typically cost, in kcal/GBP?

Uh.. I've been fond of a single meal a day of biryani, which is about £14 and is about 2k calories. That's around 142 kcal/£. It is also nutritionally complete, in the sense that I have had periods of months where that's all I've really eaten, without obviously falling sick.

It's also worth noting that biryani is a lot tastier than Huel. If I was optimizing purely for calories, I'd be eating sticks of butter.

You mean a butter bar?

Deepfried sticks of butter are a form of indignity I wouldn't put past the Scottish. I believe I heard of someone actually make one, though I can't recall how they stopped it becoming oil in the process.

Same way as deepfried ice cream, I think. You cover it in batter and you fry very quickly, before the inside has a chance to melt.

The point of Huel is it's complete nutrition that's convenient, in the sense you don't have to think about the micros and phytochemicals, there's various options for macros, it's easy to prepare, and has minimal cleanup.

Less easy to prepare and more cleanup for the powdered version vs RTD but has the advantage of very long shelf life and compact storage. The essentials line is (I think) £26.70 per 22x400 kcal servings in the UK, or 330 kcal/£. It's not meant to be the cheapest per-calorie though. Assuming you are in pure survival mode, you can probably get away with three scoop (600 kcal) servings twice a day, supplemented with one meal of rice and beans or rice and lentils to make up the calories. In the US they have retort package rice and retort Dal, not nearly as cheap as making from scratch, but something even a student could afford.

Tamago kake gohan with furikake on top was an old standby of cheap, taste, pretty shelf stable ingredients of mine. Even made with microwave rice, it was pretty cheap and still decent tasting. But it's not clear to me if eggs can be found cheaply in the UK right now, or if they were if they would be safe to be eaten very lightly cooked.

Sorry you're having a bad time. Milk might be a good place to start - it's nicer than Huel, has more good things in it and it's cheaper. Get some apples for fibre to prevent gumming yourself up and ideally some decent-quality bread and cheese.

Less delicious than McDonalds of course.

In a way, my time in London derailed things. I was too torn up by the visa rejection to study the 3-4 days I was there, and I lost a great deal of time traveling back. The bus tickets were an absurd £120, if I'd been a better planner, I'd have booked a flight to Edinburgh instead and saved half the money.

(No knock against you! I had a great time hanging out with you, I wouldn't have studied anyway haha)

Now, I get home, and realize that I have to redouble my efforts if I expect to get decent coverage before my exam date. There's just so much to read, much of it is the same kind of rote memorization I've been kvetching about, and some of it must have pronounced antimemetic effect given how the facts slough off my brain like water/milk off a duck. Eating well is a luxury.

I guess I'll look for chocolate milk or plain gallon bottles and tons of powder. I've eaten worse! Thanks!

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