USDA Searchable Recipe Database With Costs!

I've never been a nutrition hobbyist. I'm not up on the latest recommended servings of whatever, I don't count my fruit and vegetable intakes, and I'm morally opposed to low-fat sour cream or weird dairy-ish substances - I think most people eat more of them to compensate for the fact that they taste like poop. And until my doctor says something other than "Wow, your blood pressure is perfectly low," I'm going to continue in my ways. Call me crazy (my husband does), but I think my body knows what it does and doesn't need.

But despite my lack of interest/full-on loathing of things like the Food Pyramid (now called "My Pyramid") I was intrigued to discover that the United States Department of Agriculture has developed four different food plans which estimate the amount of money you'll need to spend to get the nutrition you need: The Thrifty (food stamps), The Low-Cost, The Moderate and The Liberal. The Liberal Plan is, of course, the wildly expensive and excessive one, because everyone knows wickedly rich Liberals are the ones who bought worthless mortgage paper and collapsed the stock market. And we eat puppies.

Accompanying the food plans is a searchable database of recipes AND their associated cost. I'm not entirely sure how they calculated the totals because the prices seemed a little low to me. But low or not, flawed or not, I'm so glad someone, somewhere is trying to calculate the cost of eating well. As Depression Fever sets in, few of us can afford to ignore it anymore.