How do I buy fruit, vegetables and tinned fish well when money is tight?

Six pages in this library are about the produce aisle and the tinned fish when the shopping has to last. Ask the stall for the seconds and Seventy pounds of ugly produce, split two ways are about where the cheap fruit and vegetables actually are. Buy the pumpkin on the first of November is about the one vegetable with a sell-by date fixed by a holiday. Smell the pineapple; the leaf tells you nothing and Roll the orange before you peel it are about picking fruit and using it before it turns. The species is printed on the can is about the one word on a tin of tuna. Four of them carry safety lines that come first, and the tin page keeps its own in a question.

The three safety lines. The pumpkin page says to cut a small piece of the raw pumpkin and taste it, an adult before anyone else eats it, and if it is bitter, properly, unpleasantly bitter, spit it out and throw the whole pumpkin away; the page carries the US poison-control centres’ line that the bitterness is a chemical called cucurbitacin, that it causes vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach pain hours later, occasionally badly enough for a hospital, and that cooking does not destroy it, so there is no boiling it out. Anything labelled ‘decorative use only’ is not food. The orange page carries a line for the reader who never thought the page was about them: if your mouth, lips or throat itch or tingle when you eat raw fruit, several single accounts in its conversations and forty accounts across five notes say the same happened to them and it was an allergy, oral allergy syndrome, and one contraindication says do not keep eating a food that makes your mouth tingle or swell until a doctor has seen you. If lips, tongue or throat swell suddenly, breathing is fast or hard, the throat feels tight, or someone goes pale, confused or collapses, the page says that is an emergency, 999 in the United Kingdom, 911 in the United States, 112 across the European Union, and an adrenaline pen if one is prescribed. And the tin page says that if you are pregnant, might become pregnant, are breastfeeding or are feeding young children, the fish advice is narrower and worth reading directly from the two US agencies rather than through a page.

The market is not the cheap option. It has a few cheap doors in it. Ask the stall for the seconds says six separate conversations, the widest agreement in its set, came to the plain conclusion that a farmers market costs more than a large supermarket for the same things, and two corrections puncture the slogan: cutting out the middleman does not make food cheaper when the middleman owns the trucks and warehouses that make food cheap per unit. Three conversations still save there, by asking one question at a stall that grows what it sells: do you have any seconds? Seconds are the bruised, split, misshapen or oversized produce that will not sell at full price, and two conversations say buying it by the box or the flat is where the money is. Two conversations go toward closing, when a vendor wants the stock gone, and the accounts argue whether that works; one account says haggling with someone who has worked since dawn is the wrong version of the wish and asking for a bulk price is the right one. Bring cash. Four conversations say a good share of stalls are not farmers at all, and the corrections give the reseller test: a distributor’s sticker on a piece of fruit, produce in printed boxes, and mangoes next to sweetcorn in a place where mangoes do not grow; dirt on the roots and odd sizes point the other way, and one caution says a genuine grower can still cost more than the shop. Five accounts say the roadside stand at the farm gate is cheaper than the same farm’s market stall, and two conversations name gleaning days, when a farm lets people collect what the harvest left, as close to free. One line for anyone using food-assistance benefits in the US: one caution says some markets take them, one account says in some regions the value is doubled, and a correction the page checked says the matching is a privately funded local or regional scheme that varies by market and is not a federal rule, so ask the market office before you count on it.

Look up whether a produce-rescue programme operates near you. Seventy pounds of ugly produce, split two ways is built on one person’s system, and the page says so. A local produce-rescue programme sells fruit and vegetables that stores rejected, crooked, surplus, close-dated, by the crate, advertising up to seventy pounds for twelve dollars; she splits each box with a coworker, which lands fresh produce in two kitchens at six dollars a side. The catch is the clock: rescue produce is close to its end date, so the page says box week is cooking week, she times her regular grocery pickup to the same week, cooks in one long push, and chops and freezes whatever the week will not eat; one good box left her with prepped frozen vegetables that fed her cooking for months. Programmes are local and uneven, hers is a regional charity, and the box chooses you, which the page calls half the fun and occasionally half a crate of one vegetable. Its exercise is to search ‘produce rescue’ or ‘ugly produce box’ plus your city or county.

Buy the pumpkin on the first of November, and taste it before you cook it. Buy the pumpkin on the first of November says that on the thirty-first of October pumpkins are decorations at full price and on the first of November they are produce nobody wants; three conversations say they get dramatically cheaper or free on and just after Halloween, and one account’s number is a quarter each, if you pick them for storage quality. Whether a carving pumpkin is worth eating is the argument the page carries whole: four separate conversations say it was bred for size and a hard skin and is often bland, watery and stringy against a small pie pumpkin, two say it is inconsistent, two accounts say it is perfectly fine cooked through, and three say it needs too much sugar and butter to be worth it. The deciding line the people there give is which pumpkin you have and how much you mind bland; blended into soup, chilli or curry, the accounts who liked theirs were happy, and baked into a pie that depends on texture, one account calls the result horrible. The craft is roast it face down and scoop, or boil the chunks in salted water first; roast the seeds in oil and salt; purée the flesh into flat freezer bags on a tray and stack them; keep the whole ones cool, dark and unbruised for months if your climate allows. One person asked how to can the soup and the question went unanswered; the page carries the university food-preservation centre’s line that mashed or puréed pumpkin is not safe to can at home, only cubes in a pressure canner, so freeze it. Two accounts say the library lends passes to the farms that charge for entry.

Turn the pineapple over and smell the base. Smell the pineapple; the leaf tells you nothing says five separate conversations pull an inner leaf from the crown and call it ripe if it comes away easily, and three corrections, one backed by three accounts and another by two, say a pineapple is picked at a set stage and does not ripen off the plant, so the leaf cannot be telling you about sweetness; it tells you about the leaf. Six conversations trust the smell instead, for most fruit: strong and sweet at the base means a fruit that will taste of something, and nothing means nothing. Three cautions rated high add the part that changes how you shop: it will not improve on your counter, so what it is in the shop is what it will be at home, and the page checked that against agricultural guidance. For melons, four separate conversations say the field spot, creamy yellow means it ripened where it grew and white means it was picked early, and four more say knock it for a deep, hollow sound. One caution rated high is about weight: the rule that a heavier fruit is a juicier fruit is true for oranges and limes and false for watermelons, where heavier tends to mean past its best. On limes and lemons, one correction says shine is irrelevant and a smooth, tight skin is what matters, and one correction backed by two accounts who tested it says rolling or warming a lemon does not give you more juice. Two cautions say not to squeeze avocados hard or jam a thumb into fruit, because it bruises what the next person buys. The rule that ties the page together is that some fruit finishes ripening on your counter, apples, avocados, cantaloupe, and some never will, pineapple and citrus, so buy the second kind ready and eat it soon.

Roll the orange, and cook or freeze the net before it turns. Roll the orange before you peel it says six separate conversations roll the fruit hard on the counter first and the peel lifts away in pieces instead of shreds; one account chills the orange for ten or fifteen minutes so the rind stiffens, and one cuts the top and bottom off, slits one side and unrolls the peel in one sheet. Three single accounts say planning fifteen minutes ahead to peel an orange is more work than peeling an orange, and the page says that if that is you the rest of it is about the net going soft. Five separate conversations say a surplus is marmalade, curd, cake, sorbet or a freezer bag of segments, one pastry cook warns that soft fruit is hard to zest so zest before it goes mushy, and four say the peel itself is worth keeping, candied, dried, or frozen as zest. Three say lemon juice on the cut faces keeps fruit from browning. Two separate conversations and three accounts say the way to pick fruit is by weight in the hand, and one correction says density is the test, not size. Whether to eat the white layer under the peel is argued three accounts to three and, the page says, matters only to your tongue.

The word on the tin is the species, and it decides the taste, the mercury and the price. The species is printed on the can gets one thing out of the way first: when somebody asks how to eat well on very little, a reliable number of people answer by inspecting the basket, and the page says nothing on it is that. Three species do most of the work in a supermarket. Skipjack is sold as light tuna: the cheapest, the lowest mercury, the strongest flavour. Albacore is sold as white tuna: it costs more, is very mild, can be dry packed in water, and carries substantially more mercury, around three times the light in the figure people quote, because it is a bigger, longer-lived fish. Yellowfin sits between them to eat and up at albacore’s end for mercury. The two US agencies that publish fish advice put canned light tuna on the best list at two or three servings a week, and albacore and yellowfin a rung down at about one, which the page notes is an unusual direction for food advice to run in, since the cheaper tin is the one you are allowed more of. If you have decided you do not like tuna, the page says check which one you tried, because a fair number who thought they hated tuna turned out to hate skipjack specifically. Canned salmon costs roughly what canned tuna costs, sits on the best list, and tastes nothing like tuna. One correction the page makes to a rule of thumb: small oily fish are generally the safe end, but mackerel is not one fish, and king mackerel is on the avoid-entirely list alongside shark and swordfish. On imitation crab, the page says surimi is white fish, usually pollock, heavily processed and high in salt, and the important part is allergens: many products carry crab or lobster extract for the flavour and most contain wheat, with egg and soy common too, so the folk wisdom that it is safe if you react to shellfish is often wrong, and unlabelled surimi from a party platter is not for anyone who reacts. The page’s honest ranking: dried beans, lentils, chickpeas, eggs, chicken thighs and tofu all beat canned fish per gram of protein, and a tin needs no cooking, no soaking, no washing up and no standing at a stove, which the page says is not a small consideration for somebody who is ill, exhausted, disabled or working two jobs.

Who these pages are not for. The market page says that if you came for the week’s staples on a tight budget, three conversations and a caution say the market is not built for that and the supermarket wins, and that where there is no market within reach the doors that remain are the farm gate and a phone call to the farm. The rescue-box page is one person’s system in one region, and yours may be a different organisation, a different price, or not exist yet. The pumpkin page asks the person who cannot bring themselves to waste a pumpkin that cost a quarter to waste the bitter one, once. The pineapple page says its smell test is not for a reader without a reliable sense of smell, for whom the visual and weight tests are the page. The orange page says that if you already carry an adrenaline pen for a food allergy it adds nothing to what your allergist told you, and that without a freezer half its surplus answers are not yours. And the tin page’s prices are somebody else’s local prices, and it says a fish or shellfish allergy can appear later in life, so a reaction to something you have always eaten is worth taking seriously rather than explaining away.