The idea of eating well on less money is always more complicated than I want it to be. Those who have gotten into making more food from scratch are especially familiar with this complexity. Does it save money to make your own bread? Absolutely. Does it save money to make your own everything? Well… how do you eat? Where do you buy your ingredients? Do you have access to free food? Are you giving up precious work time to can applesauce? Sure, sure, the easy answer is always the elevator pitch I repeat over and over in my head before every event or interview: Homemade is more delicious, easier than you think, and always saves you money. I’m an over explainer and an over thinker by nature, which can make me a less than perfect spokeswoman. But here, when we’re all in our kitchens with real groceries, real bills, and real sinks full of dishes, can we talk honestly about the ways we really make this all work? Or ways we wish we could make it work?
Today, thanks to the constant game of tug-of-war that has become the US Congress, cuts to food stamps kick in. Given the fact that 1 out of every 7 Americans are using food stamps to help pay for groceries, I’m guessing this is affecting many of you. I’ve been hearing more on this topic from you in comments and emails, so it seems clear that the time is right tackle this one. (Jennah and Margit, especially- I’ll hope you’ll chime in in the comments here!)
So let’s talk about how to eat well on less money. But before we get into it, I’d love to frame the question a little. Bear with me.
When I was on the selectboard in our town, my job was to help set policy and pass it down to the town staff so they could figure out how to carry out that policy. Most of this happened through the budget process. At the local level, just as, it seems, at the national level, we’d have all sorts of frustrating meetings on how to increase efficiency and make tax dollars count as much as possible. It became a mantra in every meeting: Do more, do it better, use less money. Times were hard (and still are), state aid was slashed, and revenues were way down. But the goal ways always to think in terms of reframing how we did things within the town, so that somehow, we could actually provide better services, even though we had less to work with. It seems counterintuitive, but my hope in those conversations was always that it would be the need and the lack that would fuel the creativity and innovation we needed to make things better–not just workable, but better than they had ever been.
In government, it’s hard. I think it’s possible! But even at the local level, it’s quite a machine. In our own kitchens, however, I think the process is much simpler.
With that in mind, I’d like to ask this month’s first of the month question: How do you eat well on less money? Has need fueled your creativity at some point in some way you can share with us? And what have you found that helped you to feel inspired and satisfied in the kitchen in times when you had to pick and choose your groceries? Or if you’re facing challenges now and are feeling at a loss, let us know. Maybe someone has a way to help, even if it’s just to reframe the issue or suggest a resource.
I also would like to say that I think this is something that has touched most people at some point, regardless of where they come from, what they do for a living, or how their lives look from the outside. It would be really helpful to hear from all sorts of people on this one. We often have a lot more in common than we think.
Occasionally I teach workshops, and I have one coming up this fall. Join me and stellar novelist 
I don’t really have anything brilliant to say but I am really making an effort these days to spend less when I shop, and to buy only what I need which leads to wasting less food. The most important thing for me seems to be having a plan when I go shopping: knowing exactly what meals I am shopping for, what exactly I need for my kids lunches, etc. A detailed shopping list really helps…
I find that too, Winnie. Although I’m not a totally reliable meal planner, when I do (at least a few days out), and I limit myself to exactly what’s on my list, it makes the biggest difference in my grocery money. Small action, but really tangible.
Amy Daczyn’s “The Frugal Zealot” describes how to make a price book, or how to look at sales and know when it is a good sale. If you start to follow prices, and compare with different stores, you’ll know when and where to shop. I don’t use coupons much because I buy a lot of staples. I know pancakes are much cheaper than cold cereal. And, that buying yeast in bulk at Costco is a great money saver especially when you make bread and pizza dough.
“The Frugal Zealot” was published in the early 90s (look for it in the library) and I still re-read it when I need inspiration. She also broke down the prices of recipes to show how much cheaper it was to bake from scratch. I make my own pizza and I have a pizza dough recipe that is ready in about 30 minutes including rising time. It takes less time to make the pizza than to call for delivery.
I am not a coupon clipper because I make so much from scratch. Flour, yeast, sugar, butter, etc. rarely come with coupons–although I can find them on sale in November/December. Good cookbooks like “Homemade Pantry”make it so much easier to find the good recipes for food you really eat.
Hi Kate, I just looked for the book so I could post a link here, and it looks like it’s out as The Complete TIghtwad Gazette? I found it here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Tightwad-Gazette-Dacyczyn/dp/0375752250/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383567865&sr=8-1&keywords=the+frugal+zealot
I’m a planner, too, and prefer to do one Saturday trip to the grocery store for the week (though it doesn’t always work out that way). On good weeks, I think about the family meals for the week as a sort of puzzle — how to create a varied, healthful (easy to prepare!) menu that makes the best use of leftover ingredients so nothing goes to waste. I try to freeze extras if I can’t use them before they’ll expire and then make a point of digging them back out of my freezer to incorporate into something else… so easy to forget them in there! Takes a bit more motivation, but I so dislike finding a moldy item or something too old to use.
I try to keep a list on my freezer/fridge of what leftovers are in it and then cross them off as they get used…that way they get less “lost” when they get shoved to the back and when I’m menu planning for the week I know what I don’t have to buy because we already have it.
Yes a list can do wonders! We have a huge chest freezer and, in the beginning, we actually kept a diagram of what was in there and where. We got off course with that one and we haven’t been able to get back on it, but it was so effective.
Having a list and a meal plan when you grocery shop will help tremendously. When you see a good deal on items you normally buy, pick up a few extra so you never have to pay full price. Purchase fruits and veggies in season, when they have the most nutritional value and are cheapest. Obviously we know cooking from scratch as much as possible will save you money, try to offer items like yogurt, string cheese or fruits and veggies for snacks instead of buying cookies, crackers, etc. When meal planning, it’s okay to have simple dishes. Or try to prepare dishes with like ingredients in the same week, that way you’re not wasting. Plan for leftovers too, try not to waste anything, make a game of it, be creative!
Since my husband deer hunts, I use ground venison in place of burger from spaghetti sauce to tacos to breakfast casseroles. I know this is a benefit for our family and something not everyone can do~but I almost missed out because when we first married I didn’t want anything to do with venison or cooking it. 😉 I also try to incorporate several meals at once, for example: I’ll cook up a ton of Taco meat/sauce- and will freeze it all in 1 lb baggies- for taco salad, then quesadillas, then on a pizza…..in other words, I try to rethink “leftovers” as part 2. Finally; the reason (and I firmly believe this) that whole/healthy foods and clean eating is cheaper, is simple: You eat less! The body gets what it needs and runs more efficiently so it requires less than it does from junk/processed and fast food. it’s true! So a pound of grapes may be pricey, but it’s a snack filler as opposed to a box of cheeze-its that leaves the body still hungry. Stay beautiful!
I garden; then I freeze and can and store. I invested in a drip irrigation system (read Home Depot) and timer and put it on the plants, so I plant them and forget about them. I do a spring, summer and fall garden. And when I don’t have enough of my own vegetables and fruits to put up, I buy them from local farmers. Herbs, celery, onions and carrots, can all be prepped, chopped and frozen for use when you need them. Kales and collards grow like weeds; I blanch and freeze them by the bushel. Cabbages store well in the fridge for months; I make sauerkraut, too. I buy three dozen ears of corn for a few bucks from the farm and blanch, de-corn and freeze. If the potatoes have bugs, I cut out the holes, wedge the potatoes, pre-cook and freeze in bags for later. If not, they, and winter squash, sit on the garage floor in bushel baskets covered with newspaper all winter. Root vegetables get layered in damp sand in picnic coolers that also sit out in the unheated garage. When my tomatoes didn’t materialize well this year, I bought two bushels for cheap and canned them instead. One hive of bees, maintained by two people who previously thought hives were itchy things, yielded 40 pounds of honey this summer. I finally understand what older folks say that when they were young, “they didn’t know they were poor.” They grew their own food. They preserved it. And they were never hungry. They probably ate better and healthier than many of us. I may be oversimplifying a bit, but I just started this over the last few years and it’s not hard. If I can do it (houseplants fear me), anyone can.
I do, however, confess to a weakness for pastured chicken, beef and pork. And I do not have the heart to kill anything, so I do spend on that.
My husband and I are vegetarians and rarely buy meat substitutes other than the occasional tofu or tempeh, which helps tremendously. We also cut back on cheese recently (a block of the organic stuff runs around $5.99 at our grocery store…ouch!) and have saved some money on that. I have a bit of an addiction to recipe researching and cookbook reading, and I think that if I didn’t meal plan every week and make a grocery list that we’d be spending much more.
I’ve been healthy and happy for these past ten years (now age 68), on a diet (all organic) of short grain brown rice, a breakfast hot cereal of mixed whole grains that I flake in a hand mill, a variety of legumes, raw fruit and vegetables, seeds, nuts, oil and nutritional yeast. I cook only the grains and legumes; I grate or finely chop the vegetables. Fruit I harvest from my garden and dry in a home-built dryer.
This diet might well not meet everyone’s nutritional needs, but it serves me very well, it is simple to prepare and inexpensive. I eat much the same food every day, and I never tire of it – I think that is because it is a perfectly balanced diet for me, so each meal every day tastes good, all over again.
It’s so great that you’ve found a system that works so well for you. I wanted to ask (because I’ve heard so many different variations), what are you using to dehydrate your fruit?
A home-built dryer. It’s a plywood box about 24″ square and 48″ high, with six removable frames inside, light bulbs inside at the bottom for heat, and screened holes at bottom and top for ventilation. The frames are strung with wire and covered with thin cloths. The berries and sliced fruit are spread on the cloths. Depending upon the size and moistness of the fruit, it can take from a few hours to two days to dry sufficiently. This works well for vegetables, too, such as for backpacking trips.
– Jm.steven at shaw dot ca
*beans and rice, one thousand ways. food rarely gets better than beans and rice.
*a chest freezer pays for itself twice over in the space of a year. and lasts for fifteen.
*ignore most modern food chatter, most trends, most “must-haves”, and focus on what feeds. grains, good veg,
*sniff out those irrationalities in food economics — there are soooo many. to wit: winter squash is a quarter per pound from farmstands right now, and keeps for months. buy bushels. you can eat it through the New Year. by contrast, it is $2 per POUND at my local grocery store. also: dried mushrooms (hardly a budget item, but still) are offered at two different prices at the same store, in my neighborhood. pre-packaged, they TWICE the price as they are in the bulk section. bulk often rocks.
Agreed, Molly. ESPECIALLY on the freezer issue, which I feel has been a huge money saver. It makes bulk buying much easier, too, because I can store flours and grains right in my freezer.
I stay away from the grocery store. I live in a place wherein the farmers markets last year-round, but I know that’s not a reality elsewhere in the country (world). If I have to go, I go with cash and a detailed list.
I also spend less by gardening high-yield vegetables. I used to use containers on our balcony, but now we live in a home with a yard that I’ve converted to food production. Kale, collards, tomatoes, zucchini, and lettuces all provide lots of otherwise expensive vegetables to our table. I find that buying canning-ready tomatoes (seconds, from a farmer) is well worth the pain of canning for hours since I get 30 lbs organic tomatoes for about $15.
I order a lot from places like Bob’s Red Mill. I have to eat GF oats, and even with the crazy shipping costs I find that I can stock up for several months easily without being tempted to buy a ton of other stuff at the store.
Lastly, and I know this is contrary to a lot of the other commenters’ practices… I DON’T meal-plan other than planning oats in some form for breakfast most days. I see what’s cheap at the farmers market or store, and figure out what to use later. I DO keep my pantry and fridge stocked with beans, grains, and spices so that I can use whatever produce I get easily.
I think it’s true that for a lot of us, the more we buy from other sources than the grocery store, the more money we save. Sometimes I’ll go to the store to buy eggs, milk, and cheese, and I’ll come out with three bags full of groceries and $100 less than I had going in. But all those other sources require work, driving, planning, making connections. It’s so hard for some people to integrate that into their lives, especially when they’re working full time or more outside of the home.
Oh, I definitely agree. I can’t imagine working and trying to get to our farmers markets here. (It’s on Friday from 10-2… Great for retired folks and stay-at-home parents, but horrid for everyone else.) It works for my family pretty well. Grocery stores are the pits for me, so farmers markets are worth the hassle. I always see something shiny and spend too much. 🙂
Another strategy I used when we lived elsewhere (near-ish DC) was to shop at the international groceries. No, not all of it was organic, but it was convenient and the produce was fresh (and REALLY inexpensive).
I also shop at international groceries, the prices are much lower! I can buy a 10 pound bag of brown basmati rice for $10, and fruits and veg for much less than I would pay elsewhere. It also helps to expand the variety of our diet since they have more choices, especially in the produce section.
I forgot potato onions. They are related to shallots, and you save “seed” from year to year…plant them in the fall, like your garlic. Each bulb produces about lb. of onions that will store in the basement for a year. They come in red, too. Homesteaders used them before the commercial farming of onions…once you build up a good supply of seed you’ll never have to buy onions again!
Use your apple cores and peels (save them up in the freezer if you have to) and make apple cider vinegar. It’s so much better than what you’ll find in the store. You can eat it and clean with it.
Plant asparagus. One bed will produce annually for 15 to 20 years! And it produces seed so you can create new beds or gift them.
And one last thing and I’m done. Plant pole beans, the Musica variety. They’re prolific and more tender and flavorful than green beans, and they take up less room. Plant, harvest, blanch and freeze. Let some of the pods dry on the vine and save the seed for next year’s garden. We planted 45 feet on trellises at the back of the garden this summer and harvested 50 lbs. of beans.
Apple cider vinegar from cores? This one is new to me. Will you share?
First of all, thank you Alana for bringing up the food stamp budget cut, it’s been weighing heavily on my mind this past week. We moved to the Berkshires about four years ago from Cape Cod and that alone helped in food savings. There aren’t many farms on the cape so fresh local food was expensive. Eating seasonly and freezing the excess is a big money saver, so is buying in bulk. Even making dog food from scratch is a money saver and my husband has it down to a science so it doesn’t take much time.
Well, I have to say that when we were barely ekeing by, I did not buy any extras when there were sales because I couldn’t afford to buy more of anything, not even an extra banana. I found that the best strategy was to go and see what was on sale and buy the bare minimum of plainest cheapest stuff. If there was anything in the kitchen cupboard, I would use that, making up crazy dishes. And then I learned to prepare the simplest ingredients in many ways with the help of library books. I think that the most important thing is to try and make your budget work, however small it is.
Right now, that we are comfortable, I try to buy on principle less is best. Extras that languish and go bad are a waste of resource and money.
I used to be an avid couponer. I could feed my family on next to nothing, but it was all processed stuff. Now that we eat ‘real’ food, I buy precious little from the grocery. I save money by:
* Making meat a part of the main dish, not the main dish itself. I buy beef by the quarter side directly from the farm for $5.25/lb. In the store, grass-fed ground beef sells for $9/lb.
* Preserving fruits and veggies in season. I have a garden, shop at farmer’s markets, and attend a weekly produce auction. There are canning jars in almost every room of my house, but come winter, there will be no need to pay high prices for off-season produce. If I do buy produce at the grocery store, it’s the mark-down clearance stuff that’s insanely cheap.
*Stocking up. There are a few items I can’t make for less, and prefer to buy. Pasta Sauce is at the top of the list. On sale, I can get Ragu (which has a very simple ingredient list) for .75/jar. I could never get the tomatoes required to make a jar myself that cheap, not to mention factoring in the time it takes. So when it’s on sale, I buy enough to get me through to the next sale.
*Co-Op. My oatmeal and grains come from a co-op. UNFI has groups all over the country, the west has azure standard. Prices are amazing compared to stores. I also do a lot of shopping at Amish/Mennonite Bulk stores whenever I’m near one.
*Thrift Stores and yard sales can’t be beat when it comes to buying kitchen appliances that allow us to prepare more foods at home. Some of my friends don’t own a food processor, or blender, or whatever… and so they are limited in what they can do at home. I once scored a $259 wheat grinder at a Salvation Army for $7.50 and it works like a charm. My Kitchen Aid Blender was $15. Etc, etc.
*Support Network. I have always had a friend or two (or ten) who cooks from scratch. It helps to have someone to talk to, bounce ideas off of, swap recipes with, barter with.
my city (in Germany) has a farmer’s market twice a week, I look for vegetables that are in season. I make my own jam from seasonal fruit, or fruit that I get from friends who have gardens.
Spending less money generally means buying less meat or buying less expensive meat, for example lamb from the Turkish store instead of beef. Baking cookies instead of buying sweets. Buying local fruit (apples, pears…) instead of mango and other imports. Drinking tap water, not buying juices or sodas, making my own juices from seasonal fruit.
Buying special items like spices and condiments at places that are cheaper than the supermarkte, like Asian food stores.
I do some meal planning but like keeping an open mind, so if I find something that’s fresh and reasonable I switch plans. Buying in bulk does not really work for me, except keeping the basic items in the pantry (pasta, rice, flour…) because things don’t get eaten and / or spoil. So I do some shopping every day, meaning that I can walk and carry things instead of having to use the car.
oh, and everybody (not only the people on a budget) relies on the supermarket chain ALDI here, a discount store carrying a limited choice, but offering decent quality at low prices. That’s where I buy stuff in bulk (tomato sauce, oil, sugar…)
where I insist on good quality and pay higher prices: coffee, chocolate, cheese, organic eggs and chicken.
We garden, freeze, and can; I think this makes a huge difference in our budget (and our garden is bigger than our house, so August around here is really quite ridiculous). Throughout the year, I spend a day every 3-4 months in the kitchen making oodles of beef and chicken stock, then freeze it in old cottage cheese (etc) containers. We have soup once a week in the fall, winter, and spring. It is cheap, it is healthy, it is great for taking to school/work, and it is infinitely better than anything from a can. I use “soup bones” and get every bit of meat off them so the only investment is a Saturday morning setting up the stock pots and crock pots, and an evening getting the meat separated out. The rest is a breeze!
I can echo all the above, I garden, and I freeze, and bake our breads. We don’t eat much meat. I’ve accepted that eating well, but cheaply, takes time to do so. I recently moved from central Kansas to northern New Mexico. The area I live in is not on a major highway, so therefore, all food is more expensive. I was shocked to find the flour I buy in Kansas costing almost twice as much here! This was my first personal experience in that not everyone is raised in an area (like I was) where food is 1. easy to grow or 2. cheap & easy to buy. I’m fortunate that I was raised with a knowledge of growing a garden, baking bread etc… and I try to remind myself each time I have to spend an afternoon cooking up pots of tomatoes into sauce or baking bread, that I’m lucky to know how to do all of this, despite not always wanting to spend my time doing it.
I want to stress the importance that creating a pricebook and making my shopping list and menu plan from the sales flyers have in meeting my budget and eating well. Choosing recipes wisely (that is, ones that use inexpensive, on-hand ingredients and allow for substitutions and flexibility) is also extremely helpful. This is one of my favorite topics; thanks for writing about it.
I think the most important part of making do with less is to find moments to be grateful. Maybe we’re about to eat the same thing AGAIN, because that’s what was cheap at the market; but we have something to eat. Maybe the unending challenge of filling young (picky) bellies with nourishing food can be wearisome; but we have health enough to try. I try to let what I have be enough–and then I don’t feel like I’m making do with less at all!
Well said, Alyssa. Thank you.
Honestly, I’m very lucky. We both have school-year jobs, so we have summers off and we live out in the country, so there’s plenty of dirt. I can work in the summer to buy food for the year or I can grow my own. I prefer sunshine and setting my own hours, so I grow darn near all of our produce and barter/trade most of the rest. Produce-wise, if we don’t grow it, we rarely eat it. I buy a quarter side of beef from a friend of ours, dry goods in 50lb bags, meal-plan by the semester and grocery shop every 2-3 months. Main things I buy from the grocery are dairy, corn chips, raisins, nuts and the occasional banana as a treat. I also cook on Sunday for the entire week – having breakfast and dinner on hand means we don’t have any excuse to be too tired to cook and I’ll prep lunches so we just have to toss those in our bags. In general, we just refuse to waste – we carve pumpkins the day before Halloween and pop them in the oven after trick-or-treating the next night, always cook bones/carcasses down to soup stock, freeze leaves from summer celery for stews, etc.
Meal plan for the semester! Your notebooks must be totally inspiring. I’m fascinated in these discussions how different we all are- how some can plan for months ahead, while others rely on being spontaneous. I love having these different perspectives.
This is a large echo from everyone else’s comments, but: I try to make from scratch when possible, such as baking my own bread, using dried beans over canned. And I try to reuse when possible. Example: saving chicken/duck/beef bones and unused vegetable ends for broth. Making my own juice in the morning, then using the leftover pulp to make vegetable broth, or to augment my dog’s food. If I’m cooking something with any kind of squash, I’ll roast the seeds for snacks. I buy no salad dressings, using flavored vinegars instead (that also brighten up my morning juice and sauteed greens). And I try to use meat very minimally to stretch it across as many vegetable gratins, soups or stews as possible. And I never buy lunch at work, always bringing in leftovers of last night’s dinner.
Growing up we sometimes had 25 dollars a week as a food budget. No farmers’ markets then. We ate lots of green potatoes, that is potatoes twice baked with frozen broccoli or spinach and a tiny bit of butter and cheese. These were really popular with the neighborhood kids. I have gardened for many years, and I now shop the farmers’ markets and know people there who give me good prices. Our daughter eats a budget whopping amount of fruit so her dad has planted her an orchard in the yard. I have stared to can and plan to buy beef with a friend in bulk. Today we spend too much on food but it is one of my chief pleasures and I want my toddler to try many things. Soon when we can cook together I will show her how to bake and preserve, I did everything from raw material in grad school and can’t wait to make pasta by hand again, and to show her how to do all from plant to plate! My life in food is a privileged one these days but I cannot stand waste so I always plan for left overs for lunch or future meals and buy things I know we will eat.
Oh goodness! You certainly asked a loaded question this month. I suppose I’ll just jump right in here and give my two cents. We have a budget of $400 pr/mo for a family of 5. Having such a low budget for food, we have had to make changes to the way we eat and buy. We make it work, but it takes discipline and life style changes.
One of the ways we cut down on expenses is we eat less red meats. We eat veggie burgers instead of hamburgers.
We purchase ground turkey over ground chuck for tacos.
I roast my own chickens and use the meat for multiple meals.
I make soups w/bread for lunches. We don’t eat a lot of sandwiches. For our lunches, it’s soup, bread and cheese OR salads and fruit.
We also use simpler recipes that just require basic ingredients. eggs and toast for breakfast. soups/salads/for lunch.
Dinners are heartier, but still simple. Vegetable pot pie, for example.
Okay. I’ll stop there before this comment becomes any longer. lol. 😉
I echo so much here – garden, can, buy in season, meal plan, reuse what you can (chicken carcass into stock). A book to check out is “Make the bread, buy the butter” for a good breakdown of cost effectiveness vs time in many home made items. Plus, I found myself loving the author’s voice and stories mixed in.
I just got my first real, grown up job and I’m trying to save money–especially with food. I’ve seen a lot of help for canning, planning meals and other money saving tips for a family, but that doesn’t really work for me. Does anyone have advice for people cooking just for themselves?
Hi Brittany,
I’m so glad you bring this up, because I think the challenges are different when you’re cooking for yourself. How about focusing on bringing lunches and snacks to work, and making sure that you’re making enough yummy things you can take along with you when you out? Or do you tend to stop in for a fancy coffee on your way in to work? Just going through the simple step of making a great cup of coffee and putting it in a thermos cup can save so much money.
I second Anna on the suggestion to freeze individual portions, too. You can cook on the weekend, and make a few things that you can draw on for both lunches and dinner over the week. This also helps to ward of the temptation to get takeout after a long day of work. If you know you’ve got a piece of lasagna waiting for you in the fridge, pizza or Chinese food usually doesn’t sound as exciting.
Do you like crepes? All you need is eggs, milk, and flour (of really any variety…. gluten free or wheat-y). Crepes keep pretty well, wrapped, in the fridge. You can make them sweet or savory as you feel, and one batch could easily supply several meals for a single person.
When I was living alone I’d also cook a big batch of beans on a weekend and do eggs/beans/vegetables (or grate cheese, etc) and make various things with a pound of beans all week.
I HIGHLY recommend Tamar Adler’s book, The Everlasting Meal. Even cooking for one, she has a ton of strategies.
Oh, good suggestion. Tamar Adler has some amazing tips especially when it comes to storing and reusing scraps, and she focuses on simplicity, which is great when you want to put together dinner for yourself.
I would like to recommend investing in some small ramekins that can be used in the oven or freezer…make a dish like lasagna, or your favorite casserole and get a little assembly line going. You can make it once and then freeze the smaller portions. They defrost more quickly than large dishes and it’s always nice to have something hot from the oven. A toaster oven is more energy efficient when you’re cooking for one as well.
Brittany, make an entire recipe of a dish and freeze the extra portions for future lunches and dinners. Canning may not be cost effective for you, but you can pick up a small (college refrigerator-sized) upright freezer for not too much money and you can freeze a lot of things. If you’re not adverse to leftovers, a pot of soup made on the weekend can be a whole week’s worth of lunches, for very little money, especially if you swap out proteins — beans for meat.
Timely topic! We just decided we have been spending too much on groceries and are trying to cut our weekly bill in half. So far, I’ve been focusing on cutting out the processed snacks where they aren’t needed. So apples in the lunchbox instead of packaged smoothies, cheese for snack instead of a cereal bar, homemade muffins instead of frozen waffles. That sort of thing. I think our dinners are actually pretty inexpensive for the most part, but using the leftovers for lunch the next day instead of buying a frozen meal is a good idea. Watching how many times we “treat” ourselves to take-out or restaurant meals.
Cutting out meat! We are exploring a mostly vegan diet (Mark Bittman’s VB6) and replacing the chicken in curries with sweet potatoes – eating refried bean tacos – etc have already had an impact.
I love VB6. I never feel deprived but I’ve found that I purchase less and eat more healthful meals. The upside, when I want a bit of meat for dinner, it’s no big. It’s a treat now, not the standard. That and trying to buy from a local farm or the farmer’s market have had a huge impact.
I have always stocked up on staples like the various types of sugar, oil & rice plus flour, oatmeal, yeast, dried beans, etc., etc. just because I know they are generally cheaper in bulk and learned something hugely valuable by accident just by having all of that in the depths of the recession when our household income took a serious dive. I spent my tiny grocery budget on whole food. You have so much more variety if you spend your money on the basics when you don’t have the money for a shopping list. Out of bread or wish you had tortillas? Make some. Think flavored rice is only Rice a Roni? I got on the internet for seasoned rice recipes and found I probably wouldn’t buy a box of that again because I now like mine better. A whole chicken goes miles further than the equivalent amount of boneless skinless chicken breasts for the same cost. I laugh about the “rubber chicken” concept but it’s true. You can do so much with a roasted chicken and the remaining bones go right into the soup pot. Soup always stretches your budget and helps use up leftovers. Carrots, potatoes and celery can be purchased cheaply. Having peanut butter makes a sandwich if you are out of other alternatives or an ingredient for peanut sauce at adventurous times. I learned many new salad and marinade recipes because I couldn’t afford “The Hidden Valley”. Stovetop popcorn at 2:00am was a memorable instant date with my spouse when we both woke up concerned about our circumstances. I have always canned and frozen produce but found much better prices on larger quantities of vegetables & fruit just by keeping my eyes open and not being afraid to ask questions. I also found ways to cut time by freezing pizza dough and using the crockpot. Along with dinner waiting for my return it is great for dried beans, baked potatoes (and weirdly even lasagne). Alana, I wish I would have had your book during that time. It would have given me inspiriation.
So many good ideas here, Sharon. And I just want to emphasize the whole peanut butter thing, too. We’re lucky not to have any nut allergies in our family, I know, but I always have a big jar of peanuts in the back of the fridge, and I can make peanut butter in just a few minutes. The I’ve got sandwiches, peanut sauce, and a bunch of ideas ready to go.
A slightly different prospective. I will be 30 in January, I have a husband, a 2.5 year old, and a baby boy on the way. I’ve been blessed in my “adult” life to not necessarily have to work within the confines of money when it comes to food. I’m the kind of person who has more money in Le Creuset pots and pans than in clothes and shoes.
When it comes to food, I started eating local, growing my own, buying organic – for health, environmental, and political (?) reasons first. We don’t eat GMOs, modern grains/wheat, nor much dairy. I’ve found that it’s impossible to compare homemade to store bought in a lot of areas because there simply doesn’t exist in the store what I’m making at home. Hand ground spelt bread (with flax seeds and local honey and some mashed sweet potato) is more expensive than Wonderbread, no matter where I source the ingredients from.
I can lots of things – not because of cost but because I know whats in them and I can also greatly reduce my waste by reusing glass jars year after year. I live in a rural area of Iowa – I drive 1 hour to meet the Azure truck, 1 hour to (a different direction) to go to my very awesome, if not slightly expensive food coop and an additional 45 minutes to the nearest Whole Foods or Trader Joes. I frequent my local farmers market every Wednesday and Saturday- though I’ve found that most of what is available there, I am already growing. We buy local grass fed, chemical free beef by the 1/2 – both because of economics and also because the (half) life of that one cow will feed our family for two years. We don’t have enough grass to raise a cow, but we are going to raise chickens for meat and eggs, and I’m new to lamb and rabbit but ultimately someday I’d like to raise all our meat here. And harvest it here. I just bought two local chickens at my coop for about $17.00 each. I plan on buying a pastured turkey there as well for Thanksgiving. You can be assured that every morsel of that will be put to use once over. Maybe it’s the addition of local, or knowing who it came from and where, but I feel much more connected – especially to my meat- than ever before.
Two years ago we bought our acreage in the trees and so far we have established 3 nice large gardens, planted 16 fruit trees, blueberries, raspberries, three asparagus patches, horseradish, etc. I support Seed Savers and am committed to growing open pollinated varieties because I think it’s the right thing to do, both politically and for self sufficiency in the long haul. Because of this I have suffered a little in yield, but mostly because I’m still working on understanding soil, etc.
Instead of being a money challenge for me (though I do consider that ALWAYS – especially when I’m buying local sweet potatoes. Oy!) it’s more of a challenge to see how much food I can grow myself. How much waste I can save. Even the process of acquiring local/organic foods has become kind of fun – instead of the total inconvenience it typically is.
Eating seasonally acts like my compass when planning meals. I’ve tried over and over again, even spent money on an online course about meal planning, but I’ve found for me personally – the biggest factor in getting a meal on a table is 5 minutes of forth thought the night before and then at 4:00 every day (or whenever) putting everything down and saying “Okay – time to make a meal.” If I wait until 5 – my brain stops working. 🙂
We don’t have a budget each month, because it doesn’t seem to work that way for us. Going into November with a pantry full and a stocked freezer (and some kale, lettuce and parsley still growing strong outside) what we spend on food will be substantially less than what it will be say….April! By then our make shift root cellar will be long empty and we’ll be ready for a change from our winter diet.
My favorite book about this topic is Animal Vegetable Miracle, which most of you have probably read. But if you haven’t – it is without a doubt my number one source of inspiration.
Heather
I understand your perspective clearly because of my career on the management side of food manufacturing. I have actually seen the artificial colors & flavors plus chemical stabilizers, non caking agents, etc., etc. being dumped into the production of the packaged food that ends up in our supermarkets first hand and the testing that goes into making certain foods more “craveable”. With that I have always tried to leave that stuff alone but I still have had a few vices like jarred spaghetti sauce and purchased salad dressings for the time savings and white flour for alot of my baking. Our economic situation has also improved dramatically which gives me much more choices for what we eat and I can buy much more of what I want (plus Azure too) but you would be surprised how fast things change when your “financial floor” drops out from under you and you quickly have to learn a whole new way of eating cheaper. I never got to the level many do with only a “beans and rice” budget but I had to cut out about 70% of what I was previously spending. Words like “free range”, “grass fed”, and even “organic” quickly disappear along with most all special ingredients and if you run out of something you can’t currently afford to replace you have to get creative. It’s something I would not have understood at all without being there and it makes me feel very sorry for those on food stamps who have to cut even more from an extremely tight budget.
I completely understand that and I’m also aware that income can change quickly. That is why, while there is money, we are investing in our future self sufficiency. Obviously it’s different for city dwellers, but that’s a conscious decision in itself.
I’m also careful to plant perennials and fruit trees anywhere anybody will let me. I have many gardening friends and hope and know that they would be there for me. I also live in the trees so if I was desperate I could eat deer and wild turkeys.
Everyone is different but I feel so strongly about good food, I’d sure do everything I could to get it. I definently rank it above medical health insurance, which most people probably do not. Its also true that it’s easier to start younger, than waiting until your 70 to decide that grow your own food. I’m on year five of this journey and I have a long ways to go.
Heather, thanks for this great window into how you’re making things work. One thing especially that comes to me from your comment (in addition to my own experience doing things similarly) is that while this kind of prioritization on food can be done on not so much money, the main investment comes in the form of time. Before food became so convenient, people often spent most of their days in pursuit of/ preparing/ growing their next meal, and that’s been such a huge shift in the last 100 years or so. I struggle with this. I know that I’m lucky enough to do all of this for a living, which provides me the time and flexibility to make bread in the day, garden, drive to a farm to pick up some milk, etc., but I feel like there has to be a way for these practices to become more accessible to those who work full time, or who are budgeting every dollar. (And by *there has to be a way*, I don’t mean it in a judging sense, I mean it more like “How do we help this to be more mainstream and possible?”) I feel like social and government programs might be helpful here if the systems can be reformed. We see a little bit of it with WIC and senior farmers market checks, but that honestly seems like a silly token action. How do we bring farmers together with people who need fresh food? Create programs where people learn about accessible growing practices? Big questions, I know, but your comment and those who reacted to it bring them up for me. Thank you.
Your readers are mostly mothers with families or younger adults, whereas I am in (actually over) my mid-60’s. I am retired and living on a rather tight budget (due to cost of rent) so lately rather than “borrow from Peter to pay Paul”, I decided to downsize and get rid of unnecessary payments. I also decided to try to eat on the $135 a month that was the SNAP level for a single adult. I’ve been eating-down my freezer and pantry and its been OK, although I give myself a bit of a splurge with a slice of pizza or a Chinese take-out every couple of weeks. Its hard to do when you are limited on the amount you can spend on food (this does not include paper, cat, cleaning products – they are in separate line items) – I went to the local farmers market because I had “senior coupons” (in late summer we get 5 $4 coupons to spend for fruits and veggies) so I used those one week but $20 doesn’t go far at farmer markets – good quality but higher costs. I have one more set of these coupons to use before the end of November and I’ll buy winter squashes, cabbage and apples to take me through December/January. I search the internet for good wholesome recipes and substitute where I need to. Its been a challenge but almost a part-time job – it takes me calling up the two markets (one huge and one small) that are close to my little village. We also have a Walmart where I buy my bananas and check out any specials – they also have day-old meats that a discounted. It fills about 6 hours a week to check the flyers and sales online, compile my list, check my pantry and freezer and then go with the senior bus to buy the items. I’ve begun making a menu at the beginning of the month, which also helps A LOT. I also have begun buying dried beans and rice – and making from scratch (oatmeal with diced apples and cinnamon or a small applesauce left over from my senior center lunch mixed into pancake batter with butter and no syrup. I do splurge on certain items at the market, Al Fresco chicken sausage with apples and bacon when its on sale. Or honey crisp apples rather than the regular ones – I can’t wait until clementines are on sale by the small box or when I get to go to a healthy food store where they sell nuts by the pound.
That is impressive Patricia! Four dollars a day is not much, especially when you have to buy most of it. I hope to someday have my monthly expense for food I have to buy to be 100 dollars or less, for our family. Great to read about your situation.
I was wondering since eating this way have you and your family seen any health benefits. I also look at a site called 100 days of real food and they noticed health benefits when they started a real food eating plan.
That was predominately the reason we do it.
What kind of benefits have you seen? Just curious. I think the amount of preservatives and additives that are added to commercial food is why this country has such a problem with obesity and other health problems.
Yes, I know Lisa (at 100daysofrealfood.com) has experienced a big change in her family’s health, and the site has some great resources for getting started.
Encouraging story: http://agirlcalledjack.com/
Very helpful receipes: http://agirlcalledjack.com/category/recipes-food-etc/
enjoy
r
Ah- this site looks great, Regine. ANd totally new to me! Thanks for bringing it into the conversation.
This is an ongoing discussion in my own head. Several years ago job changes greatly reduced our income. My children were small and we received WIC coupons. They stipulated you could buy milk, but only the cheapest. Same with eggs, etc. Since then I have learned so much (thank you, Animal Vegetable Miracle, Michael Pollan, and others!) and my cooking style has completely changed to eat with the seasons. Money is slightly better, but not by a lot. Yet now my focus is on how to eat the best way for the least money. I grow many of our own vegetables, bake all our snacks and treats, buy in bulk, freeze lots. The children (now 10 and 12) never ever take anything packaged for their lunches. Chicken bones become stock. Leftovers are lunches. Often we have “must-go” for dinner to clear out the refrigerator. Apples and peaches from the orchard are seconds.
And yet, some days I find myself buying fair-trade organic coffee that costs a huge percentage of our weekly food bill. Or desperately wanting take-out for dinner. Because what no one talks about when eating this way is how much TIME it takes. I often feel like a prairie wife, preparing three meals plus snacks, bread, desserts from scratch. I work from home, so I can fit it into my schedule. But how many people really can? And how can you expect someone working two low-wage jobs and receiving food stamps to come home and chop fresh veg for half an hour before even beginning to cook?
Something else I’ve learned — it’s just plain simpler to have meat in a meal. It’s filling, everyone likes it (as opposed to some vegetarian entrees), and it’s quick to prepare. I recently bought 20 pounds of ground beef at Whole Foods when it was on sale for $3/lb. I’m lucky to have a freezer (and to be able to splurge like that once in awhile). And during leaner money weeks I’ll be leaning heavy on that meat. Other weeks we’ll have several meat-less meals. I try to do the best I can without being too hard on myself. But I still crave store-bought treats. . . and try to buy them on sale.
Also about time — as someone else mentioned, I spend a lot of time reading flyers and planning trips from my rural town to find the best deals. Am I spending the money I save on gas? What is my time traveling worth? I try not to drive myself crazy thinking about it.
Oh boy, this is soooo timely for my family! I’ve begun to wonder the same things Kristen, is it cheaper if I’m driving further? It’s become work to cook and plan and and and. At first it’s like yeah I can do this! Stick to the man and eat on a budget, then I’m exhausted and succumbing to the cheap sale on bread that is filled with less than stellar ingredients. Making my own in the bread machine today to help stave off that guilt trip again. Then there is the guilt of not sticking to my usual high standards of organic, etc. since we really really really need to save money. I’ve done a bit of bartering, neighbor with eggs who can’t have a garden trades for our carrots and beets. Need to plant more next year. It’s challenging and important and time consuming and mentally draining but I’m sure we’ll get better at it. Sigh.
It is definitely all of those things — challenging and important and time consuming and mentally draining. And just plain hard. Some days it’s joyous, too. I think I need to remember that anything I do do is good rather than focus on what I’m not doing on any particular day.
Most people used to live in this way we now idealize: growing, canning, baking, cooking EVERYTHING. But there’s a reason (well, many reasons) that changed. And one of them is that a lot of women didn’t want to be tied to all that labor any more. That never-ending, starts all over in the morning, really hard work. And though I think society has swung too much in the opposite convenience direction, maybe those of us who are feeling all this guilt about trying to do it all need find a balance (I’m raising my own hand here). Yes, once again I realize it all comes back to balance. Seems to be a theme in my life. And I wish it for all of you!
Oh, and funny money-saving story. Once in all of last year good butter went on sale at the grocery store for only $2 a pound. There was a limit to buying 5 a day. So my dear husband went every day on his way home from work and bought five pounds. It freezes wonderfully and helped so much with baking costs. Still waiting for it to go on sale again this year. 🙂
What a wonderful discussion. Thank you for bringing it up, Alana. I am a full-time working Mom of two young girls living in the suburbs north of Boston. My husband and I are blessed to have jobs, but my husband’s job is in food sales and our income has dipped a little lately. We have been trying to spend $125-150/week on groceries. We try many of the techniques listed above; making a list, setting a budget, freezing what we don’t eat, making soup (lentil is a favorite at our house). We had a garden this summer, but we have a small yard and not a lot of sun, so the garden was small and probably didn’t save us much money. We did do a CSA at a local organic farm, but it was pricey (though I think the experinece of bringing my girls to the farm for PYO weekly was invaluable). I make a lot of snack items like hummus (from dried garbanzo beans) granola, cereal bars, cookies and homemade popcorn and I think those items have saved us considerable money at the grocery store! We also cook from scratch every morning, noon and night and I think cooking from raw products is a money saver (rather than buying frozen pizzas, canned soup, etc). I spend most Sunday afternoons preparing these snacky foods for the week while my girls rest and my husband works. When the girls wake up from naps they usually join me by pulling kitchen chairs over the counter and helping pour items into the mixing bowls. Lastly, as my husband is in food sales, we occassionally get free food samples and we do our best to use, freeze or give away anything we get through his job.
First of all, if you cut out processed foods, you will notice a difference almost immediately. I lost weight and immediately began to feel better, my murderous endless migraines lessened. Firstly, I should have known better, I’ve been into health,/organic food most of my life and was working in an organic grocery store for years. But I was so exhausted working there that I did not have time to cook with all the free food I got. I would eat some of the organic ‘junk’ food, even though I read the ingredients, and then I would occasionally get real junk food. I bike everywhere so felt I was ‘burning’ it off. Maybe I was depressed, it made me feel better? I noticed the ingredients were always changing too. Sometimes it went from well that’s okay…to that’s nasty! I finally said that’s enough and stopped buying it and eating it partly because I was so broke I could only buy basics. Much processed food organic and conventional is full of additives and nasty things, many of which are addictive! They are engineered to hit reward and pleasure centres in the brain. Plus the high use of corn derived additives and sugars loads you up with Omega 6 which makes the body hold onto fat. Once you cut the cords of the addiction, you are free!
Canada does not have a food stamps program, but there are food banks. I have yet to go to the food bank, yet we really should. The problem is from experience is that the food is very poor quality junk. Not food I’d willingly eat, and in fact when I was forced to go years ago I actually ended up with piles of stuff I would/could not eat. Add a vegan gluten intolerant husband and there’s nothing from the food bank he can eat.
So, being very poor but also wanting high quality mostly organic is tough. Food in Canada is also very expensive(especially in British Columbia), you have no idea. One thing you can do is look for 1/2 price and stale dated goods. I just got a huge big tub of good yogurt for half price. I normally make yogurt, but was totally out. I got 1/2 price chocolate milk for a treat too. I always frequent the stale dated dented tin section. Unfortunately at the moment we are so broke that we can only buy what’s on the list and cannot stock up on dented dins for our pantry and such. As much as I love to support local farm stands, they charge so much and have not been able to do so this year as much as I’d like. I grew what I could in my garden, was best ever. No canning for me thus far. But my husband just made rice milk for the first time, and granola which is fun. I want to make him tofu as it is his staple food, but have to source some soy beans.
One thing, if you are looking for work, try get a job in a grocery store, especially an organic one. You should be able to get piles of stuff for free or discount, but also could like I did endure food fatigue and not want to do anything with that massive bag of kale you brought home.
Heather, you bring up so many good things here, but I wanted to speak specifically to a point you make about the quality of the food at the food banks. I had a similar challenge when I was on WIC (Women Infants and Children), a program that helps pregnant woman and mothers with kids under 5. I think they’ve changed the standards a bit, but back then, they wouldn’t let you buy products that were organic (or other more nutritional options) EVEN if they were less expensive than their conventional counterparts, which sometimes they were. Of course I was grateful for the help with the groceries, but it was interesting to me that in a program specifically geared to pregnant women’s nutrition, there seemed to be very little consideration of what pregnant women might actually be trying to eat. Like I said, I think there’s been some movement there since my girls were little, but I think that there could be some big policy changes that would help both the people who are using food banks, food stamps, etc. and the people who are growing or creating organic (or again, more nutritional options) food.
In addition to planning my weekly meals, I’ve recently joined a local produce delivery service. That may not sound like a cost-saving method, but it greatly reduces the number of trips that I must make to the grocery store and where I inevitably spend more money buying things that I don’t need. It’s $35 every 2 weeks for a decent amount of seasonal produce. I also make a pot of soup or a stew each week and we take the leftovers for lunch. Our area (Indianapolis) has numerous locations of the German-owned supermarket chain called Aldi. I always used to poo poo the idea of shopping there, but there prices are fantastic and the quality is the same as any other supermarket. (The chain was started by two brothers. The other brother owns Trader Joe’s.) They’ve even started carrying several organic products. For everyday things like pasta, Greek yogurt, toilet paper, cheeses, and things like crackers, the prices cannot be beat. My big splurges are free range eggs and grass fed beef.
Mary, I totally want to second the fact that for a lot of us, the less you go to the store, the less money you spend. I buy a ton of bulk for that reason alone.