You've probably been feeling some sticker shock when you've gone to the grocery store lately. Prices are
rising and there's no end in sight. Why all the hating on my pocket book, grocers? Well, it turns out that between gas prices and the rising costs of both corn and wheat, there's just no love for the bargain shopper. Also, economists suggest that countries like
China and India are feeling flush so their folks are moving up the protein ladder and eating more meat than they ever have.
The future outlook for your dinner table? Either cough up more dough or change the way you shop. But as we've
discussed before, energy-dense healthy food is
a lot more expensive than junk food. It's enough to make you cry, or force you to live off of 59-cent frozen Banquet pot pies (ugh).
Here are some strategies for retaining your standards and your sanity at the grocery store:
- Slightly change the stuff
you're buying. Buying frozen veggies
instead of fresh can be cheaper, but mostly, think about how many times
you've tossed a package of liquified toxic broccoli that you forgot
about. Also, ditch the bottled water. Not only is it horrible for the
environment, but often it's just bottled tap water from some other city
anyway. Get a water-filtering pitcher and just drink the stuff that
comes out of your own tap.
- Make a price book for the stuff you buy time and again. You'd think that prices would be mostly the same from store to store but we found out
the hard way that the same popcorn popper that was out of stock at
Target cost almost double (but was in stock) at another retailer, and
the same goes for groceries. The experts recommend looseleaf binders,
but a small notebook that you can tuck in your bag, a quicky spreadsheet or a little form on
your PDA is a good starting point for a few staples. It's a good
sanity check when you're contemplating that $6 jar of peanut butter at
Whole Foods.
- Try shopping for food at the dollar stores. I know, I wouldn't think
twice about buying something like party supplies or storage bins at a
dollar store, but healthy food? It doesn't seem possible, and yet, this guy made a gourmet meal out of ingredients that cost 99 cents.
- Find non-store alternatives for your must haves. If you've been buying fresh heirloom tomatoes from the grocery store,
sure, buying canned generic tomatoes is going to be a lot lighter on
your pocket book and certainly there are economic situations where this
becomes a necessity, but what if the idea of losing fresh heirloom
tomatoes is not the way you want to live? Check other options for
buying your fresh food. Farmers markets are obvious and trendy picks,
but CSAs can be a lot cheaper.
- Become a locavore. The whole "eat locally" rule is totally environmentally sound
but
it can usually be more expensive and time demanding. Clearly, you
have to figure out what's right for you, but in general, the local
specialties of your region are going to be cheaper than buying fruit
that had to travel 1,000 miles to get to your reusable grocery tote. It
depends upon your geographical
location, of course, but it also depends on what you're buying.
I tested out a few of these principles myself. Since I live in Wisconsin, I'm already a snob about my cheese products, but
mostly because I know that I can buy incredible artisan cheeses, like
my
beloved 5-year cheddar, for about $7 a pound directly from the source at the rural cheese
factory. Most suburban grocery stores lean toward the Kraft singles
buyer, and if I turned to Whole Foods, I'd pay four or six times that
amount per pound for the same block of cheese. A no-brainer for me, but
in another region, folks can buy supercheap fresh oceanic seafood at
the docks while I'm paying a premium for fresh scallops in the inland.
My decision: you won't see fresh scallops in my grocery cart. But Great Lakes salmon? Absolutely.
Also, I've been really contemplating our meat consumption. After reading Ruth Ozeki's
My Year Of Meats,
my wariness about the meat industry has increased. I feel as though I
don't want to eat meat unless it is organic and doesn't have a bunch of
hormones pumped into it, but at the same time, this stuff carries a
hefty price tag. Additionally, the nearest Whole Foods or Trader Joe's
is 120 miles away and in the end, my frugality wins every time.
Instead,
I investigated local organic options and found a farmer raising
grass-fed cows five minutes away from my office. I gave him a call and
while he's not slated to
butcher for a few months, he had some frozen stuff available. I bought
20 pounds of steaks (a mixture of sirloin, N.Y. strip, tenderloin, ribeye
and T-bones) and three giant roasts for $160, which ended up costing a
little over $5 a pound, which is insanely cheap considering that it's
grass-fed, organic, hormone- and antibiotic-free beef. Judging from the
sirloins we fired up last week, the taste difference is amazing.
While
I definitely wouldn't have forked out the dough for the pricey organic
meat from the store, it's still cheaper than the meat market or the
regular prices at grocery store. A cheaper option, of course, would be to eschew the meat all together and go
Meatless Monday
every day of the week, but I'm not quite ready move down the protein
ladder quite yet. Especially not when I can have my tasty organic beef
and afford it too.
The comments want to know your strategies for food budgeting!
![[Self's Reach Your Goal ad]](http://elasticwaist.com/ads/slf_goals08_275x225.gif)
FEED ME
Well, I still dispute the assertion that healthy food is fundamentally more expensive. Certainly you can spend a lot of money on healthy food, but you don't have to. That study in the NY Times article is ridiculous, because they just compared price per calorie of junk food vs. healthy food and didn't do any kind of consideration of the type of food! Since nobody eats a diet consisting entirely of produce or entirely of Cheetos, this is totally irrelevant to how people actually eat.
And in today's Times there's an article about how the cost of processed food has gone up dramatically over the past year, whereas fruit and vegetable prices have actually come down.
But even if this weren't the case, I think Alice Waters has a great point in the article when she expresses frustration about people's willingness to place budgetary considerations over all else when it comes to food. The food you put in your body is pretty much the single most important determinant of your overall health, not to mention a major factor in the health of our planet. I'd skimp on just about everything else before I'd skimp on healthy food.
We're all about checking the circular and comparing prices and buying a lot of canned and frozen veg. I bake from scratch and keep it real -- cakes go unfrosted and a lot of my cakes are vegan. I pack a lunch for the hub and I work from home so no one is spending five bucks a day on food. I will admit that our meals are very monotonous, but I like what we eat...plenty of veggies and fruits, but also pizza (from scratch!) and quesadillas (buy cheese in bulk!) and fun stuff like that.
I have to voice my agreement with La Wade, that "healthy" always equals "costly". When my boyfriend and I moved in together last year, he went from eating almost exclusively pre-packaged/pre-made foods (fast food and ready-made meals from the grocery) to eating meals that I cooked mostly from scratch, and he's remarked again and again on the change in his expenditures.
I should acknowledge that while I try to buy organic and local, I'm not entirely driven by it. It's worth checking out what produce is more affected when not organic (ex. apple growers apparently can use scads for pesticides and fungicides, so I always make sure that I buy organic apples, whereas carrots don't tend to absorb much of the nasties, so I buy the cheaper non-organic carrots).