No Joy in Cooking

Secretary of agriculture Brooke Rollins recently suggested Americans can get the nutrition they need on $3 meals. Here’s what happened when I tried to follow her plan.

AS GROCERY PRICES CONTINUE to rise, putting pressure on household budgets, many Americans are looking for ways to optimize the money they spend on essentials. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins recently offered them some encouragement: For just three dollars, they should be able to put together a healthy meal of “chicken, broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other item.”

Science, she claimed, backed her up—or someone’s computer did, at least. In an interview with NewsNation, Rollins said her department had “run over a thousand simulations” to develop this meal-planning guidance.

A clip from the interview went viral online. Members of Congress started posting memes. Food policy experts scratched their heads.

After seeing this, The Bulwark’s managing editor, Sam Stein, asked if I would be willing to find out what three dollars per meal actually looks like in practice.

I agreed.

The rules were straightforward: three days, nine meals, and a total food budget of $27. Chicken, broccoli, and tortillas were the staples of each meal. One additional item per meal was allowed, so long as the total stayed under budget.

I wrote a list and drove to my local Aldi, where I was able to purchase the following:

• Five pounds of chicken breast ($12.85)

• One can of canola oil cooking spray ($2.29)

• One three-pound bag of long-grain white rice ($1.99)

• One jar of salt-free seasoning mix ($1.95)

• Twenty fajita tortillas ($1.55)

• One 10-ounce bag of frozen broccoli ($1.79)

• One jar of salt ($0.67)

• Three bananas ($0.65)

After adding in Virginia’s 1 percent tax on food, my total came out to $23.97—a full $3 under my $27 budget. Perhaps I could get a bonus meal out of my remaining cash.

After leaving the store, I went home and prepared my meals for my first day on the plan.

I lightly coated a pan with canola oil and cooked the chicken, seasoning it with lemon pepper and salt. The rice I cooked up in my Instant Pot before portioning it into Tupperware containers.

Day One

The first meal was fine, if a little dry. I decided to swap out the broccoli with my morning banana to ease myself into this new diet. Lunch was a bit better: The broccoli upped the moisture content, which made everything a bit more enjoyable. Dinner was fine, too, but I could tell by then I was already getting tired of this—not a great sign for the first day.

After I finished eating, I prepped my meals for the remaining two days. By the time I went to bed, I had a headache and a stomachache, and I felt unusually tired. The food was not bad, but it had quickly become joyless. Already eating was becoming just another chore.

Day Two

My stomach was still aching when I woke up, so I delayed eating for a few hours. When I did finally eat, the broccoli was once again my saving grace. I imagine the meal would’ve been almost inedible without it. That’s why it was so disheartening to realize I might not be enjoying any more meals with it: My broccoli bag was already empty.

Fortunately, I still had a few dollars in reserve. I stopped by the store on my way home and spent $1.99 of the remaining $3 in my budget on another bag of frozen broccoli. (Since the store was in D.C., I didn’t have to pay any tax on this bag.)

I ate my dinner and called it a night. My stomachache had subsided, I was pleased to notice, but I still felt mentally and physically drained.

Day Three

As I ate my final three meals, I began to realize that hunger was not my biggest problem with the three-dollar meal plan. Fatigue and boredom were. As I’d noticed on the first day, eating had become one more task to complete between work obligations, not something to look forward to or enjoy.

What I missed most was snacks. I love snacks. There was no room in the budget for any snacks—no popcorn, no Oreos, nor any kind of sweet treat to get me through the day. Without them, the days became a constant grind.

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I CONCLUDED MY EXPERIMENT with many questions. So I spoke with Colleen Heflin, a professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University who studies food and nutrition policy and social welfare policy.

“I was very confused,” Heflin said when I asked her for her reaction to Rollins’s three-dollar meal claim. “USDA has several established meal plans that they estimate the cost of each month. And none of those comes out to $3.”

For context, USDA makes available four food plans designed to show how a nutritious diet can be achieved for people in each of the four quartiles of food spending in America: Thrifty, Low-Cost, Moderate-Cost, and Liberal. Remarkably, the figure Rollins touted on television came out lower than even the lowest USDA estimate of how much it should cost to get the nutrition and calories you need—the Thrifty Food Plan, which the government uses once a year to determine SNAP benefit allotments.

“The maximum SNAP benefit . . . comes out to $3.31 a meal,” Heflin said. “So she was suggesting that the average family could survive on what is actually less than the Thrifty Food Plan.”

The Thrifty plan is intentionally bare-bones. “It’s not meant to be the average food plan. It’s meant to be one that you could survive on, but maybe not very happily,” Heflin said.

“It’s supposed to kind of cover all the nutrition that’s needed, but it’s designed to have everything cooked at home from scratch,” she added. “It’s not designed to have any convenience foods, not to have a lot of variety, and not a lot of fresh foods.”

Midway through my experiment, the agriculture secretary went on TV again and revised her estimate. Her latest numbers showed that a hypothetical American could theoretically enjoy “three full square meals and a snack” for $15.64 per day—a figure that comes out to about a nickel more than the daily average cost of food at home for a 20-to-50-year-old adult man on the Liberal Food Plan, which represents the highest quartile of food spending, according to the USDA’s latest monthly cost of food report.

“The fact that she immediately was walking it back when she was consulting with her staff tells me that nice, round number probably wasn’t very realistic,” Heflin said. “And that there’s probably some hard work going on at USDA to try to support the secretary’s position, as opposed to the secretary learning about how these food plans are conceptualized and the hard work that’s been going on there year after year.”

Heflin said it wasn’t clear what models Rollins had used to come up with her numbers. We asked the USDA to clarify the secretary’s method.

A spokesperson sent us an outline of the serving sizes that are recommended as part of the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) and explained that “it is all flexible”: Simulations the department had run using many combinations of proteins, whole milk, cheeses, fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and butter and oil had found “thousands of meal options” that would meet the DGA’s 2,000 calorie-per-day standard while costing the consumer $10 a day or less.

It didn’t quite work out that way for me. Perhaps I should have thought more imaginatively about what might pass for “one other item,” according to Rollins’s initial recommendation.

I was still confused about the money gap between Rollins’s initial three-dollar meal claim and her later clarification, so we followed up with the USDA spokesperson to ask if they’re also going to make more specific recommendations according to the four-track food plan model they’ve used for years. As of publication time, they haven’t yet gotten back to us.

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THREE DAYS ON THE THREE-DOLLAR meal plan had helped me realize something important: The diet had taken not only a physical toll, but a mental one.

“Many of us experience a lot of joy and satisfaction when we eat,” Heflin said. “When we are eating a minimal diet, oftentimes that’s monotonous and doesn’t have a lot of taste and joy in it.”

Heflin also emphasized that food insecurity remains widespread in the United States. In 2024, 14.4 percent of Americans—roughly 47.9 million people—lived in food-insecure households, according to the USDA Economic Research Service.¹

Millions of people in America are struggling to make ends meet, and they often have to make difficult decisions when grocery shopping each week.

“When households are struggling with difficulty affording food, they’re often going to make tradeoffs with other essential expenses,” Heflin said. “For many households, they’re going to prioritize paying for rent and utilities”—and are likely to postpone “things like medical care, prescription drug refills, . . . going to the doctor.”

I had to admit that these are not things I thought about at all while doing my experiment. But for many people, they are inescapable realities—aspects of life it’s hard to imagine being able to capture in an experiment or, for that matter, a simulation.

1. This figure is based on the civilian, noninstitutionalized U.S. population—so it excludes, for instance, military personnel living in group quarters.