One of the more intriguing articles to come through Metafilter (an Internet-based news snippets feed) recently was a series of blog posts by Jeffrey Strain about a challenge to Eat Well on $1 a day -- now into its second month, with a rule change after the first month. What started out as a challenge from his sister becomes something of an obsession with finding the best grocery deals -- particularly ones where a certain combination of products and coupons results in getting more spending power than the total value of the products (a "money earner", of which Day 15's money earner causes him the most mental anguish).
Particularly in the USA it's relatively common to find combinations of specials, (paper and electronic) coupons, loyalty discounts, and other deals (including Catalina coupons printed at the checkout, at least partly based on what was purchased) that combined together carefully allow various products to be purchased for pennies on the dollar -- often popular brand name products (at least those with large marketing budgets). Similar combination deals are also possible on various electronic items from time to time. While it seems unlikely that anyone in the supply chain intends that people would get the items for, effectively, less than nothing the chaotic combination of discounts available means that this seems to be possible a few times each month on different products each time.
Many of these deals seem to have survived mostly because the redemption rates are fairly low (10% or less), presumably because most people figure the savings are small and often on items that they "don't want" so they figure it isn't worth their time to pay attention. Jeffrey Strain has hacked the system through a combination of collecting as many coupons as easily possible, and then doing some online research every week to find out what good combination deals are around. Effectively crowd sourcing the problem. (FlyerTalk does effectively the same thing for travel-related deals.) (Others have also caught on to the ability to shop for free.)
It'll be interesting to see if these combination deals survive contact with the ability of the Internet to bring people with a common goal (of saving money) together; possibly general apathy will keep the overall redemption levels low enough to be "noise". (A friend of mine is fond of remarking of people making their own art, devices, content, etc, that they "have too much time on their hands"; in contrast the people doing these things are prone to point out how much they get done "while you were watching television". Just one of life's choices.)
Amongst other things, Jeffrey Strain has used his (new found) skill with coupons and knowledge of online promotion, to attempt to turn a penny into a million dollars of goods donated to food banks; the start of which reads something like the plot of "One Red Paperclip" by Kyle MacDonald -- basically taken an item with little intrinsic value and adding sufficient enthusiasm for the end goal to get others to participate. Both are in essence "stone soup" approaches, but very effective if done well -- and it's something the Internet makes increasingly possible. So far they seem to have spent under $600 for goods valued over $13,000. Jeffrey Strain also donated many of the excess items he acquired as part of his "Eating Well on $1 a Day" challenge to local food banks -- and encourages others not to skip deals just because they don't need the products (or don't need that much of the product) but instead to donate what they don't need to a worthy cause.
Jeffrey Strain also actively writes on quite a few other websites, in addition to what seems to be working as a house sitter in the San Francisco Bay Area relatively frequently. And he's learnt a few things from eating on $1 a day, including more recently how to cook.
ETA, 2010-07-06: Step-by-step example of using one of these coupon deals
ETA, 2010-08-28: Time Magazine interview with Jeffrey Strain about the challenge; he's now finshed, at 100 days with both food and money left over.
On a somewhat related note, a recipe for raw food "bliss balls" based extensively on a recipe forwarded to me.
Bliss Balls
Makes 15-20 Bliss Balls depending on size you roll them out. Best kept in the refridgerator for consistency and food safety reasons.
Ingredients
1.5 cups dried apricots (one 350g pack of Ceres Organics "Dried Apricots: Ancient Super Fruit", is the right size and provides the best tasting apricots for this purpose I have found; easily worth the extra money)
1.5 cups raw cashews (pieces are fine, they get chopped up into tiny pieces anyway)
0.5 cup desicated coconut
0.25 teaspoon ground cloves
0.25 teaspoon ground cinnamon
pinch of salt
zest of one orange/two mandarins
Method
Spread apricots on a plate and place in freezer for about 10 minutes (to reduce stickyness for next step).
Place all items into a powerful food processor with cutting blade. Process until apricots and cashews are finely chopped up (approx 2mm by 2mm squares) and mixture starts to stick to itself. If necessary after a few minutes processing add a tiny bit of water while processing to catalyse the mixture sticking together. (You know it is ready when the mixture is adhering to the sides of the bowl and the cutting blade is basically spinning freely in the centre.)
Remove bowl from motor; remove cutting blade from bowl. By hand pick out portions of the mixture and roll into balls about 3cm in diameter. If the mixture has been processed sufficiently the apricots should be sticky enough and intermixed enough to hold everything else together.
Refridgerate. Delicious eaten straight from the fridge.
(I expect that any other combination of sticky, not too sweet, dried fruit combined with suitable nuts to balance the texture would work too, but it may require some variations in the other ingredients. The above is what I've made several times to great success.)