Use Perl instead perhaps?
perl -e 'print scalar localtime( time - 86400 ) . "\n";'
Or, use nawk and (ab)use /usr/bin/adb:
nawk 'BEGIN{printf "0t%d=Y\n", srand()-86400}' | adb
Came across this too ... insane!
/usr/bin/truss /usr/bin/date 2>&1 | nawk -F= '/^time\(\)/ {gsub(/ /,"",$2);printf "0t%d=Y\n", $2-86400}' | adb