0 the most important or basic parts of something:
Teachers have a lot to do, but time spent in the classroom is the meat and potatoes of the profession.
If they're a meat-and-potatoes person, eating healthy may be reducing the amount of meat that they're consuming.
Because the site is relatively unmoderated, work that is more speculative and earlier-stage appears in the feed alongside meat-and-potatoes papers cataloging new exoplanet discoveries.