Dollarama Dinner #1

I've always been intrigued by the “grocery” aisle in Dollarama. I love shopping at Dollarama; I feel rich, knowing I could buy anything in the store. But really...food? Who actually buys food there? What's their food like? And what would be the health consequences of living on a “Dollarama Diet”?

I decided to give it a try, at least for an occasional meal. After all, how lethal could it be? I figured I could pick up a bunch of their products, use them to cook dinner and then evaluate their nutritional and aesthetic appeal. I'm not crazy enough to eat from there every day, but once in a while can't hurt. Or can it?

Here are my findings from my first dinner from Dollarama...

The Products:

Puritan Beef Stew

I planned to try this one out as a sort of “main course.” I pretty much knew what to expect: a sort of salty, greasy and generally comforting, bland dish. The sort of crap I loved to eat as a kid. The nutritional numbers were a bit shocking, though: a half cup of the stuff contains only 7 grams of protein but 13 grams of fat; 6 grams of which are saturated fat. They even managed to squeeze in one gram of the evil trans fat. That's not good for any food, and it's particularly bad compared to a nice, lean protein like salmon or turkey. But what really hit me was the sodium: a whopping 900 milligrams! Considering a reasonable amount of sodium for an entire day would be 1500-2500 mg, 900 mb in just half a cup of stew is insane. I knew canned food was salty, and let's face it, almost all Dollarama food is canned, but even by these standards it's lousy.

Primo Mixed Beans

Another pseudo main course, I figured the beans would help to fill in some of the nutritional impact that the stew was lacking. And for the most part, it does. Half a cup of these yields 8 g of protein (slightly more than the “beef” stew), and only 1 gram of fat, which is great. The sodium is still high, at 430 mg, but hey, that's half of what the stew had! It also offers a healthy amount of fibre; 7 grams. Beans are a healthy food in general, and these don't seem to be an exception.

Loretta Instant Mashed Potatoes

“Made with Idaho potatoes” claims the box, but I couldn't have cared less. As a kid, I always loved instant potatoes. Like the stew, they're salty, buttery, bland and comfy. But according to the box, pretty weak nutritionally. I felt like I needed some sort of potato/rice/pasta side dish to go with dinner. After reading the nutrition facts, however, I began to wonder why. 24 grams of the stuff (I probably ate 75 grams) weighs in with 25 mg of sodium, 2 grams of fibre, and 2 grams of protein. So, if we triple those numbers, we get values similar to the beans, but with much less sodium. The mix itself contains no fat, but the box recommends mixing it with 2% milk and butter, which does. It has no vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium or iron. It is bulky stuff, though, and the 75 gram serving I had was probably more than most people would want to eat. So, it is good for making you feel full. I guess.

Pecos Bill's Beef Jerky

Ah, another childhood favourite. Who doesn't love beef jerky? Okay, a lot of people don't. But I do. And it usually gets an undeserved rap as “junk food.” In reality, it's not exactly health food, but it is much healthier than many foods. It's extremely lean, for example: the 25 gram pouch has a measly 0.4 grams of fat, which is amazingly low for beef. And it's quite protein dense, with 11 grams in that tiny serving. Unfortunately, even though it isn't canned food, you can still expect a big sodium fist punching you in the gut: 570 mg is kind of a lot. Treat it as an occasional low-fat appetizer and you'll be okay.

Garden Patch Peas

In direct contrast to the other foods I picked up are the canned peas, a food that I always hated as a child. They didn't seem quite as bad as I remembered, just unusually tiny and unusually soft and unusually sweet. Okay, perhaps just unusual in general. And what's with that creepy olive green colour? Yeah, I still don't like canned peas, but I figured I had to work in some more fruits and vegetables. I couldn't exactly find the produce aisle in Dollarama, and that tiny carrot fragment I knew I'd find in the beef stew wasn't reassuring me. I wish the can contained just peas, but according to the label it also has water, sugar and salt. Sugar? What the hell? Well, I guess that explains that weird sweet taste. And I love the ironic name, “Garden Patch,” which helped to remind me these hadn't been anywhere near anything resembling my mom's garden in a very long time. Or ever, actually. Anyway, the peas are a bit gross and a bit salty, but reasonably nutritious: they'll give you 6% of your daily vitamin A requirement, 15% of the vitamin C, 4 grams of protein, 4 grams of fibre and (of course) a disproportionate amount of sodium (260 mg). All this in just half a cup! Yummy. No.

Fruitropic Tropical Fruit Salad

I was quite excited to see something so exotic in the Dollarama food aisle. I mean, come on, the word “tropic” appears not once but twice on the label! I couldn't wait to experience this amazing taste treat - all the way from Thailand – punching me in the pallate like a big, sweet fist of tropical goodness! Sarcasm aside, this is probably the most appetizing thing I purchased at the D'rama. And I was genuinely surprised to discover the ingredients list mentioned papayas, guavas and passion fruit juice. Guavas, in particular, are a little-known nutritional workhorse; even more nutrient-packed than oranges or blueberries. Too bad we're eating them out of a can. Lots of vitamin C in this can, unsurprisingly, and lots of sugar: 19 grams per half a cup. Not much of anything else, just plenty of tropical fruit taste!

The Preparation:

So I immediately scarfed down the pouch of beef jerky as a sort of appetizer before the real meal. I planned to work around the beef stew, and dumped half a cup of that into a pot, then added half a cup of the beans and peas. Then I boiled it for a while and simmered it for a few minutes. Dollarama eating certainly doesn't require much work, unless you hate opening cans. Incidentally, don't buy a can opener at the Dollarama, because I did, and it didn't work. The “instant” mashed potatoes were annoying. To make these, you've got to measure salt, milk, butter (have you ever tried to measure two teaspoons of butter? It's not easy) and boiling water. Don't measure your boiling water using a Dollarama measuring cup, because it'll crack. So I measure all this stuff, then I dump in the small-looking bag of dried potatoes. Surprise! You're not supposed to use the entire bag. Yeah, that's right – you have to measure the potatoes too. Good grief, what are we doing here, baking a cake? That's five different things I had to measure to make instant potatoes. So needless to say, I used way too many potatoes and not nearly enough liquid and the potatoes were incredibly dry until I added more water and milk. Then they resembled a huge mound of processed Pringles potato chips – probably enough for four or five people. Finally, for dessert I opened the Super Deluxe Exotic Tropical Flavour Salad and scarfed that down pretty much out of the can. I was hoping to reduce the salt/sugar content of most of these canned foods, so I rinsed the peas and beans before adding them to the stew. Too bad I couldn't have rinsed the fat and salt out of the stew, but the gravy is the only good thing about it, really. I also drained some of the syrup off the fruit salad, though it seemed like half the can was syrup.

The Eating:

The jerky was salty and chewy. I'll bet you're surprised. The stew was appealing in that generic “fast food” kind of way: salty, greasy and disturbingly comforting. The beans and peas seemed unusually soft, and the beef stew flavour overwhelmed them, so I couldn't really gauge their taste – if any – very well. The mashed potatoes were a disappointment. They had none of the yumminess I'd remembered from my youth. More than anything, they were just dry. And bland. I didn't have any 2% milk or butter, so I substituted soya milk and margarine. In hindsight, this product probably gets most of its flavour from the 2% milk and butter. However, it least it wasn't salty, unlike everything else. But y'know, if I made mashed potatoes from scratch, I wouldn't have to measure five different ingredients. Or even one. Dessert seemed to be the best part of dinner. The fruit salad was a bit too sugary (alleviated somewhat by draining the syrup) but it had the most refreshing flavours, and the guava and papaya had a crisp, unusual texture I found appealing. I'd planned to just eat half a cup, but I eventually just scarfed down the whole can. Overall, the whole dinner wasn't unappetizing at all – I've certainly cooked worse tasting dinners from scratch, and spent a lot more time doing it. But there was something vaguely unsatisfying about it. Even though I felt full – or more than full – I still felt like eating. This may be due to the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables, which I would usually eat at every meal. Or possibly due to too many vitamins being washed away by the canning, rinsing and reheating processes. Which brings up our almost-last criteria...

The Nutrition:

Based on this one meal, I couldn't really conclude that Dollarama eating is actually bad for you. Take a look at the numbers on the following table and you'll see the totals for everything I ate (except the fruit salad: the number on the table is just for half a cup, not a whole can).

		Protein	Calories	Fat	Saturated Fat	Trans Fat	Sodium	Fibre	Sugar	Vit A	Vit C	Calcium	Iron
Puritan Beef Stew		7	210	13	6	1	900	1	3	15%	4%	0%	8%
Pecos Bill's Jerky		11	70	0.4	0.2	0	570	0	5	2%	0%	0%	10%
Primo Mixed Beans		8	130	1	0.3	0	430	7	1	0%	0%	4%	10%
Garden Patch Peas		4	60	0	0	0	260	4	3	6%	15%	2%	6%
Loretta Instant Potatoes		6	240	0	0	0	75	6	0	0%	0%	0%	0%
Fruitropic Fruit Salad		0	80	0	0	0	0	1	19	0%	20%	0%	0%
Totals		36	790	14.4	6.5	1	2235	19	31	23%	39%	6%	34%

It looks like most of the nutritional bases are fairly well-covered. I'm large enough to handle a 2000 calorie diet, so 800 calories for one dinner isn't too crazy. 36 grams of protein is also a good amount, probably more than enough. I could handle about 60-70 grams of fat in one day so 14.4 isn't much at all. Saturated fat is a bit more of an issue. The less of that you get, the better, and you'll definitely want less than 20 grams in a day. Likewise, I'd prefer no trans fat at all. Sodium is clearly the worst offender: over 2000 mg for one meal is insane, considering that's more than you would (ideally) want to eat in an entire day. I may have managed to wash some of that away before eating, but who knows for sure? And there's no telling how much nutrition was also rinsed off in the process. The other numbers are in a pretty acceptable range. The fruit salad accounts for a bit too much sugar. The iron also seems a bit low, considering I ate two different kinds of beef in one meal. A few dark green vegetables might've helped that out, but there didn't seem to be any. Overall, this doesn't look too bad. You could easily do much worse. Eat one steak dinner in a restaurant, for example, and you could easily get 30-40 grams of fat (much of it saturated), over 1000 calories and nearly as much sodium. And you'd probably be paying eight times as much money for it too. Speaking of which...

The Value:

But wait... aren't we forgetting something? Isn't the whole point of Dollarama that it's...well...cheap? Ostensibly, it is: every item I bought was only $1, and there was plenty of food. In fact, the six items I bought would easily be enough for two meals (or five meals, if you're talking about the potatoes). So cut that big $6 total in half and the actual cost was a paltry $3 per meal. Not too shabby. There's just one problem: we're really only eating canned food. So it'd better be cheap. Shop around, and you'll discover you can get a whole pound of nice fresh apples for a dollar, or even less. And they would pack a much greater nutritional punch than a can of sugary canned fruits (guavas or not)! Likewise, potatoes are extremely cheap, plentiful and versatile to prepare, so there's not much point buying dried potatoes, unless you hate waiting and love measuring. The expensive part of most dinners is the protein, and Dollarama didn't really excel in that area either. The beef jerky was slightly cheaper than other stores, the beef stew was a nutritional disaster and the beans... well, beans are a healthy choice, but they're also always cheap. So is Dollarama dining a great value? Not really. At least, not that I've seen so far.

So that's it for this week. Stay tuned for more insights into the exciting world of Dollarama grocery shopping.