Is there a food that is cheap, delicious and healthy at the same time?

Onion. It's cheap, nutritious, acts as a low-key anti bacterial solution, can be served in a multitude of ways, or eaten raw.

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Carters' peanuts :)

Nutritious is very relative to industrialized food production. The most nutritious natural products are perceived as wild and are not objects of agriculture. Basically the objects of agriculture were selected on the ease of reproduction, not their nutritious value, or their cost. It just so happened that those that were easy to plant and grow were the leanest in quantity and complexity of nutrients. Many of the most nutritious seeds, fruits, and vegetables are becoming extinct with the elimination of natural forests. Planted forests would take thousands of years to stabilize as ecosystems (if ever) and be concidered sustainable food sources.

Cheap means the industry hasn't been able to monopolize, but labor is very exploitable (see bannana republics, tea and coffee plantations). It also means the quantities produced have saturated the markets and the product is in abundance (wheat, corn, soy,..).

Delicious ... only N.Europeans (and their N.Am. Oceania descendants) would consider eating a single element alone and judge it by taste. The rest of the world eat what they can get, spice it up, mix it, and make taste a final product of a mixture of things with a labor intensive process of preparing it. The dairy industry (waste of nutritients and exponentially waste of land use) and the sugar industry (it should have been banned under substance abuse addictive product that is a health hazzard as well) have blurred what "delicious" really means. Take as an example banana split ice cream, there is little nutritious value, if not harmful as a whole, made of three industrial products that maximize labor exploitation. If it wasn't for capitalism nobody in their right mind would have come up with this one. It only exists because of capitalism.

Nutrition has been a dead end disaster since its early days of being industrialized.

You already mentioned them, but I'm a huge fan of lentils. They go with so much stuff and you can combine them with a variety of spices. Give me any leftover ingredients and some lentils, and I'll cook up something delicious. I can and will eat lentil soup for days.

They are also a pretty solid crop, they can grow in a variety of climates, require little water and are good for the soil.

Well, something being delicious is subjective, but if we assume a "general acceptance" of most delicious foods, potatoes could fit easily. They can be cooked in all kinds of ways, are very nutritious and, again, pretty much everyone says they're delicious.

humus

So… Are you just unaware of fruits, vegetables, and legumes, haha? In my opinion there’s a huge amount of food that fits all three categories. One of the best example of cheap, delicious, healthy, and easy is beans and rice, spiced up however you like.

the three sisters are very nutritious. corn, beans, squash. add any spices you like, and a good oil (my faves are la tourangelle olive oil and their toasted seasame oil, sold on amazon and not expensive). salt and spices make all the difference.

Ah yes, a food that you can eat for three days without pooping while you stay in a tent?

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I think a ripe avocado can be a good meal by itself, it has healthy fat, vitamins & fiber.
One avocado as a meal is cheaper than alot of other options.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/avocados/

It depends where you live (I'm in Bangkok, so grocery choices are quite limited).

I love Oats. I got massively back into them again this year... now I buy around 3kg every month (instant oats).

It's only this year, really, that I discovered that oats are still really good and creamy when not made with milk... and it's really easy to boil a single cup of water to dump on a cup of oats for a perfect breakfast (left standing for a minute - done... no need to 'microwave' oats).

Also, cheap staples include: carrots, potato, broccoli, spinach...

Frozen strawberries are dirt cheap here too.

Breakfast 1:

• Instant Oats (1 cup, 1/4 tsp salt, 3tsp sugar, 3 tsp creamer)
• pulsed to powder in the blender with a cup of boiling water poured over.
• Blend 100ml milk with 3 strawberries and mix that in. The beauty of this is (as my son does NOT like stodgy/thick porridge) I can add an extra 100ml of milk to his breakfast, and it becomes a liquid smoothie.

Breakfast 2:

• Weetbix are not too cheap, but ONE biscuit mixed with ONE cup of oats is a massive breakfast - and tastes of Weetbix... and is ridiculously cheap in comparison.

Breakfast 3

• Oats work great with eggs...
• 1 cup oats, some salt, some cumin (maybe a teaspoon)
• 2/3 cup boiling water (soak a minute)
• 2 duck eggs mixed in
• butter up the frying pan and dump it in there, cover and cook gently for 3 minutes, flip and give them another 3 minutes.

DIsgusting poopy one

• 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder mixed with 4 teaspoons of non-dairy creamer + 1 cup oats
• pulse to powder, add a cup of hot water.

That's choccie heaven right there.

Well-seasoned, air-fried chicken is super healthy and cheap.

Buy raw material and cook yourself.

Most premade food is expensive because:

• labor on cooking
• restaurant profit
• rent of the restaurant/owner of the place sell you food
• service

My very Italian answer is "pizza bianca" . I guess "healthy" depends, but it's generally OK carbs, it's delicious and with few Euros you can buy quite a lot (enough for a lunch).

Chana masala is pretty delicious and I'm pretty sure it's healthy. I think it's mostly chickpeas and vegetables which are both pretty good for you.

When I was in college, I had the rule of not buying anything that is >$1.50 per pound. This is what I was reduced to (prices may be different now due to inflation and geo area):

1. Apples, oranges, grapes, strawberries when they are on sale
2. Milk, yogurt
3. Pork shoulder, chicken quarters, thighs, drumsticks
4. ground pork, ground beef
5. Carrots, broccoli, potatoes, cabbage (you'll be surprised at how good thinly sliced cabbages taste in a sandwich)

Sweet potatoes. Very nutritious, very cheap, and taste sweet. Easy to prepare to, you can just boil or bake them for a little while without adding anything and they're great just like that.

Tacos and burritos could absolutely meet this criteria If you're doing them well at home, with the most unhealthy thing being the tortilla itself (You could argue that those are empty calories). Of course that means no sour cream or cheap cheese abuse among other things

Mac n cheese.

Ratatouille.

A lot of cuisine that is lauded all around the world embraces all three of those, or at least the original dishes they came from did. A lot of really fancy food today and in the last 50 years is just "peasant food". Sometimes just with fresher ingredients and more butter

Cabbage + brain damage

Rice and beans, just be a little creative with preparation. Also you can make lots of soups that are cheap and healthy and its super easy to make too.

Everything from my garden!

Right now, lettuce, kale, dill, peas, strawberries, oregano... the lettuce is on its sixth year of re-seeding, same with the dill.

Dill & vinegar flavored kale chips are amazing.

Lentils

Cashews. Benefits: heart-healthy fats, antioxidants, essential minerals.

Scrambled eggs.

Lentils.

This will be controversial. I'm going with Costco rotisserie chicken. $5. They taste good fresh but bad reheated. I don't eat the skin

Eggs with salt. Boiled, scrambled, any style really

Fried soy beans with garlic. Tastes approx like potato chips, about the same price as beans, and decently nutritious. Just don't use too much salt or oil.

Popcorn is very low calorie per volume, especially the types without a lot of fat.

Beans! Especially stew with them, you can throw in pretty much anything (veggies, meat, adjust your spice levels...) and once you learn the correct balance it's very tasty and filling.

I don‘t know about economics, but this is my entry to research:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0Xa7Dp3-eYA

And cucumber prices went up more than 50% for me in the last 2 years alone, so maybe you‘re onto something.

I think falafel and pita with all the veggies and sauces might be something that fits the bill that you can find easily.

Bananas (possibly depend on where you live).

And then there is mc Donald's and similar chains. They managed to avoid all three of those things

The one thing missing from the trinity is "effort". For instance, you could make any Dal, which would fit the trinity, but takes a lot of time. There are books with hundreds of Dal recipes that all taste different and work, too. And this is just one example. Less than a dollar a meal if made in bulk with rice.

Well chicken maybe as it is the most cheap meat. And it is subjective, but something like chicken soup (if cooked at home) can be relativly cheap and really delicious.

Also, just thought about it - fruits and berries also easily break this trinity

How is rice healthy? It's just something to keep me full.

I'd say sandwiches, depending on what you want to put in them. A loaf of healthy (low sugar) bread isn't going to be the cheapest option on the shelf, but if you're dividing the cost by the number of sandwiches you can make out of it, it still ends up amounting to a large number of really inexpensive meals. I normally just add some meat, cheese, lettuce, and tomato, and it's very nutritional and also delicious.

BEANS

Addictive carbs and salt, dirt cheap, and healthy as shit. Also convenient and compatible with most dietary/ethical restrictions.

If you learn to like beans when you're 20 and throw it into an index fund, you'll have a modest retirement fund just on the money you saved (yes, I calculated it based on money saved and growth of the S&P).

Pizza is pretty cheap in Italy, also Pasta.

potato

Jimmy Joy. Cheap (under 2 euros per meal), delicious and you can't really get any more nutritious than that. It has all the recommended nutrients in one go.

Sustainable eating is cheaper and healthier - Oxford study