It seems only fair to give you a sense of where I'm coming from, so first, let me share a little family food history. (The tips are below if you want to skip this bit.) For years (maybe decades) my partner and I lived pretty much on take-out. We could cook; he likes to cook. But, who had the energy or motivation when there was easy access to deep-fried things near by? This lasted, to slowly decreasing levels, through the birth of our second baby. By then, we had started cooking more often, eating take-out closer to weekly than daily. During that early period, I have no idea how much we spent on food, but at a guess, I'd say $20/dinner was typical.
As we cooked at home more often, we became more aware of what we were buying and cooking. After a conversation with a pediatrician about precocious puberty (which she was checking my baby for at the time) and the
possible connections to the hormones in the animal products, we started shopping more mindfully. Before we realized it, we were not getting take-out. We were buying nearly all organic, but were spending $200-$300 per week at the grocery store. Yikes! That's up to $1200 a month on food! Partly this cost was due to the fact that while we had changed where we shopped, we had not really changed how we shopped.
As life has moved and changed, so has our budget. While we still want to eat organically, still want food that is grown/produced and sold locally, we now need to think about how much we are spending. The budget I am aiming for is $400/month. This is a process for us, and I invite you to join us on this journey, and to offer your suggestions.
SO... to get started, here are some big-picture ideas that we have found helpful. Feel free to add your own!
Now the General Tips:
1. Don't waste. It sounds obvious. It
is obvious. But, before you skip to the next item, you might want to check your fridge. Maybe it is just my family (although the
statistics suggest there are a lot of us doing it), but we found we were letting a whole lot of food rot. Both food before we cooked it, and left-overs. As it turns out, much of the food
we thought was spoilt still has potential if cooked properly. In addition, many of the trimmings that you might throw in the trash could be consumed on their own, or be made into vegetable stock. The less we throw away, the less we need to buy.
2. Buy smart. The idea is to buy what you need and to use what you buy. I'm not the most organized of people, despite liking to make lists. Some weeks I make a list of what we'll cook that week before we go shopping and buy from the list, other weeks I make a list of what we can cook from the ingredients we have available, and some weeks I just wing it. As long as you manage to use what you've bought, however, it all works out in the end.
3. Reuse, repurpose. There is the obvious Left-Overs Night. There are also several recipes for reusing left-overs. From potato cakes (lightly fried mashed potatoes) to velvet butter chicken (reusing tandoori chicken), there are plenty of recipes that put to use other recipes. Better yet (or at least more likely in our house, as we rarely have left-overs of things in other recipes) write your own new left-over recipe. Recently we made butternut squash risotto; a few nights later it filled tortillas and became burritos.
4. Decrease the meat. Ok, I'll say it: Americans eat far more meat than we need, or is even good for us. Because meat takes
vast quantities of food to raise it to slaughter and produce one pound of meat (remembering all the pounds of waste), meat is and
should be expensive. If you choose to eat meat,
it should be weekly, not multiple times a day. This
better for your
body, the
environment, and your budget. If this is a challenge for you, let me know! I went from meat-and-potatoes, and I-can't-possibly-ever-feel-full, and I-don't-even-like-vegetables to a full-time vegetarian. We can talk about recipes that will be filling and tasty to omnivores so that you can reduce your meat without feeling like you're missing out.
5. Get creative. It takes some thinking to use the less-common/less-popular vegetables or cuts of meat that may be in season and/or cost less. Figuring out how to make these work for your family can be a huge benefit. They will increase your options without increasing your budget. You can cook and eat the greens of a lot of root vegetables (carrots, beets and radishes for example); you can trim and eat the stalks of broccoli and the cores of cauliflower, cabbage and lettuces. We regularly throw away lots of good food (see #1 above) because we don't see it as food.
6. DIY. Baking bread is less expensive than buying it baked; growing vegetables or even just fresh herbs cost nearly nothing after start up. The more you do for yourself, the less you have to pay for someone else to do it for you. If you only have a sunny window inside, you can grow herbs in pots. If you have a little patch of roof or corner of a yard you can grow at least some smaller vegetables, depending on sunshine and space. I will not cover growing food here, as I am horrible at it. (So far all I have learned from trying is that if I were a farmer, I'd have starved to death.) And, many others
cover it. However, I make our bread, pesto, hummus, pizza, soup stock, etc. And, just for the record, I am
not the crafty, Martha-Stewart sort at all. I wish I was more capable in these areas, and like learning, but cooking has come late in life to me, so if I can learn to bake tasty bread, et al, I'm sure you can, too.
7. Shop around. My friend's mom is the epitome of this. She'll have her daughter drive her all over town, buying this thing here and that thing there to get the best price on everything she needs. She does it because she has fed her own kids and however many of their friends and relations as drop by, and has been doing that for ages, on a very small income. I am starting to understand some of her wisdom. At least having an idea of what the difference is in price and for what categories of things (I find name brand, store brand, bulk, produce, and dairy as useful categories) allows me to make informed choices.
8. Go au natural. Perhaps this should have been first. The fewer pre-made, processed items you buy, the higher your nutrition/dollar ratio. The more food looks like real things
– eggplants looking like eggplants, meat looking like muscles
– the better. As Michael Pollan says, the food you want is "the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food" (before the popularity of the 1950's TV-dinner and processed food-like semi-edibles.) Go for traditional foods and recipes that work with them.
9. Buy upstream. By that, I mean buy from the farmer who grew or raised, collected or cultured the food items you buy. If not that farmer than as close to that farmer (with a few middle-men) as possible. Each dollar you spend goes to the person doing the work. That means that person makes something that comes closer to a living wage.
10. Be here now. Eating in season both makes shopping more cost effective, and comes as a result of buying directly from local farmers. By eating what is available now, we can decrease the costs of shipping or artificially growing foods. And the foods are worth the money when you get them. A tomato out of season, for example, is pale, tasteless and grainy. A tomato in season from the vine is divine. It can be a challenge, though; at the grocery store, it is almost impossible to tell what is in season. CSAs, farm stands and farmers' markets can help. Eat The Seasons also tells you what it in season right now anywhere in North America.
What else? What do you do to make your dollars stretch? How do you shop and eat in line with your values? I look forward to your suggestions!
