What if you could only have one kind of food all day?

This is one of those magical scenarios where, for nonsensical reasons, the world is limited in some fundamental way and we explore what that would be like. In this scenario, each day, you can pick one food and have only that all day.

Ideally, it would be healthy and delicious, and you wouldn't get tired of it, and eating nothing but wouldn't make you sick. What kinds of things would you be looking for?

(I'm already seeing there's an issue with what "a single food" even means. Surely a tomato counts. What about classic pizza sauce? What about cheese pizza? What about everything pizza? I don't have all the answers, but remember the point is to play with the idea of the limitation, not just trick your way around it.)

The first few things I thought of were: peanuts, Swiss cheese (but would that make me sick?), celery, multi-grain wholemeal bread, brown rice with pickles, chips'n'salsa, pretty much any soup/stew/chili, porter.

What about you?

I wonder how hard it would be to have a healthy diet with this restriction by just alternating through different foods.

I often eat sort of like this, if there is a large abundance of a particular kind of food. I would rather have as much of my diet as possible come from foraging/gardening than try to save a lot up for the winter, so what I end up doing is as I harvest, I make lots of one particular kind of food. (Never really one food all day though!)

If I go to a nettle patch and harvest a large quantity of nettles, I make nettle soup. I’ve had days in fall of 2024 when I ate little except for apple sauce. In other words, take advantage of abundance so that you can harvest as efficiently as possible and with as little waste or deterioration as possible.

Sometimes it requires more processing than usual though, especially when a food isn’t naturally considered to be highly digestible. It ties in very much with seasonal eating, I think.

i've had a few times in my life when i couldn't eat for one reason or another (jaw wired shut after breaking things, couldn't cook or hold a knife for a while) and got through eating limited diets.
I learned that I could eat banana yogurt shakes, oat/banana smoothies, or apples pretty much all day every day with no problem.
I am a variety kind of person-- once my problems resolved, i was pretty happy to move from apples to a pork chop or a bowl of miso soup. But if the world ends and I can only get one 50 lb bag of something, I'll take oatmeal, thanks, I think I could live just fine on it.

"Eggs are the fruit of the chicken"

I've been on an egg kick lately. If you put a few boiled eggs in front of me with some hot sauce, it is game over. Scramble them, poach them, devil them... it's all good!

A friend of mine made a quiche a month ago that was absolutely divine. Eggs and cheese compliment each other in a fantastic way.

Yeah, some foods are good candidates for this just because they're so flexible. Potatoes and eggs come to mind immediately. or if the item was "salad" and you could make a totally different one for each meal it would be no problem -- but I think that's veering into 'cheating' territory.

I have said before that nettles are a very good food I wouldn’t mind eating for most of my food, too.

I've made nettle soup a few times. Eating it feels good, but I (and more so) my family don't really love it. But I was wondering about variety and found a few options at this thread: https://permies.com/t/44253/Seeking-nettle-recipes

You already thought of my pizza idea, and I stand by it, totally not cheating  Or lasagna or manicotti.  I'm capable of having one meal in the course of a day as long as its big, so no problem there.

Christopher Weeks wrote: In this scenario, each day, you can pick one food and have only that all day.

In the short term, I would no doubt lose a few pounds. Monotony reduces appetite.

In the medium term, I wonder ... isn't this how prison riots start?

At times, I have done varying degrees of fasting, which I find easier than lessening my food intake.

When I am eating fruit, I prefer to keep to one kind per meal - in large quantities until I don't want anymore.
When the Plums are ripe, I eat a whole bunch of Plums.  Same with Cherries, Grapes, Peaches, Apples, what-you-got!?

I have found a single type of fruit per day to be agreeable on occasion.
Fifteen Mangoes in a sitting was too much.  Half a dozen big grapefruits per day wreaked havoc on my teeth...
Only oranges, eaten sporadically throughout the day (not in excess) is a nice way to stave off or shorten a Cold, I've found.

I think though, for the purpose of this thought experiment, I might choose Apples - depending on how sharp or mild the varieties available.  Or maybe Winter Squash.  Apologies if my hodge-podge answer throws off the survey.

You know what, can I change my answer to Miso soup?

Thai food too broad a 'kind' of food?
For much of the population, the greens are foraged, gardened, bought fresh from local market almost daily.
Wicked hot, sour, little sweet, salty, savory, pretty much all at once. Has to be about the healthiest diet on the planet. Heavy on vegetables and fruit, less on meat.

Felafel, served in a pita with all the fixins and a side of french fries. Pretty sure I could eat that morning noon and night for quite a long time.

I wonder whether I could get away with eating just green peas? Apparently they are a complete protein, and have a fair amount of starch and vitamins and minerals. I suspect as a single survival food they would work at least for a while, although out of season you'd need a freezer for the best peas.

 . In this scenario, each day, you can pick one food and have only that all day.  

day 1.sweet potatoes
day 2.whole grain sourdough bread
day 3.our asian pears
day 4.sauted tempeh (would need oil?)
day 5.avocados...I did this once hitching on the west coast at harvest time.
day 6.brown rice with olive oil
day 7.red lentils

I guess I think of carbohydrates mostly?
Are we thinking one food as one ingredient or one dish?

Tomato bisque.

Made at home, by me, of course.

Growing up lower middle class in Indiana, Campbell's condensed tomato soup paired with toasted cheese sandwiches made the dinner rotation quite often. My mom always reconstituted it with water. When I started dating my wife and would spend time at her house, her mom reconstituted it with milk and garnished it with black pepper. What an eye-opener.

Somewhere down the timeline my wife and I discovered bisque at a grocery store with a restaurant attached, like Wegman's on the east coast. It might have been Whole Foods. Both of us were instantly hooked, and I experimented with recipes at home until we were happy with the recipe.

j

Today I would have to say, "Nut/seed butter with homemade fruit spread*, on toast."  It's just one of those days!

*I call it "fruit spread" because I dehydrate the mashed fruit to thicken it and only add the minimal amount of sugar.