Often, our food budget has a huge entertainment/creative fudge factor in it. That is, while I routinely spend less than a family of four on food stamps for our meals, I know we could eat more healthily on less dollars if that was my only purpose.
So...starting August 1 through August 31...my goal is to eat well on the fewest dollars possible. I will post meals and dollars spent here.
Join me?
author of A Holy Errand
What kind of meals did you have in mind?
I have a picky family with two pre-teens in it, so my flexibility to make the kind of inexpensive food I love is limited. Left to my own devices, however, I like to eat a lot of Indian food -- brown rice, (though when I visited India, almost all the meals used white), dal made from yellow split peas, and some kind of green thrown in the pressure cooker with it at the end of cooking. We do eat a lot of burritos made with pinto beans cooked in our solar cooker and brown rice. According to my kids, putting brown rice in burritos is my own personal quirk not shared by the parents of their Northern New Mexican friends from school.
I get a lot of mileage out of the rice cooker and the solar oven.
Good luck! I'd be up for a challenge like this, but to be honest, I think I'd have better luck in the colder months. Our grocery bills always seem a little higher in the warmer months. We don't eat any chili, hot cereal, soup or economical hot dishes in the summer. It's just too hot to turn the oven on and we try to keep the A/C off as much as possible.
Plus, I can't resist buying all the summer fruit available- raspberries, blueberries, cherries, melons, peaches, plums, etc. We seem to go through a lot of fruit!
PS- I reread my post and I sound like such a whiner (i.e. here are the reasons why eating cheaply just. isn't. possible).Originally Posted by cattledog
I think my grocery bill could stand a trimming, even in the summer. I'm curious to see your menus!
I'm not sure what to add to this at the moment but I certainly will be following along looking for ideas!
Gretchen Rubin-- The Happiness ProjectI didn't want to look back at the end of my life or after some great catastrophe and think, 'How happy I used to be then if only I'd realized it.'
I actually did this a couple of years ago as my own pet project. I calculated how much most of the healthy foods I could buy cost per calorie, then I entered different menus into a nutrition software program to see how low I could get a total cost of a days worth of food for 2000 calories and get all of the protein, vitamins, minerals, not go over the fat and salt, etc. If I really watched the sales and stockpiled, a couple of years ago I could do it for a $1 a day or a little over. But prices in my area have gone up since then so I think if I did it this month I would have to go to $1.50 - $2.00 a day. This requires a freezer, and room to stockpile sale foods including 50 pound bags of bulk food from Costco. It doesn't require any coupons except the store coupons that you can get from the weekly ads which are usually available at the front of the store.
I guess I could call this my version of extreme whole food shopping.
Just curious before I post any specifics, but what is the definition of healthy diet? Does it have to meet all of the nutrition guidelines in the U.S.? That gets a bit tough because I think the U.S. guidelines tend to favor the dairy industry and calcium is set artificially high. Or by healthy would that mean whole foods, low salt, high fiber, sufficient protein, and 7 or so servings of fruits and vegetables be good enough? I eat very little dairy, get regular bone density tests and they always come out better than average, if anything.
Last edited by try2bfrugal; 8-1-12 at 11:54am.
For $16.50/2weeks Bountiful Baskets gives me(one person) all of the fruits and veggies I can eat.
Correction: I looked ay my spreadsheet from a year or so ago, and it was $2 a day minimum to get a perfect score on the nutrition software. So this year it would probably be $2.50 - $3.00 for the best I could do since many of my local prices have gone up.
Great idea for a challenge, Fawn! How low do you think it might be possible to average per person, per day?
Would love to hear more about cooking with the solar oven, Paul. Seems like that would save a lot on cooking costs too.
On the brown vs white rice, it’s somewhat of a toss up. Brown rice has the advantage of more fiber and micronutrients and sometimes a fuller flavor. On the other hand, white rice is usually enriched to a higher level of iron—usually double that of brown rice, is less apt to go rancid, can be flavored in more diverse ways, and is usually cheaper. Usually we eat brown rice though mostly for the benefit of the micronutrients.
Cattledog, I’d be interested in how low you *could* go even if you don’t actually do it or do all of it. A few things that I can think of that might help with the heat related issues would be to make
1) Rice and bean salads that are good cold—usually with a vinegary dressing
2) Sushi like wraps with lettuce instead of seaweed, and with cooked meat if used.
3) Roast something like a chicken in the evening say from 7 to 8:30 pm or early in the morning if you are getting up early and serve it cold the next night/that night.
For the long term if you could get a lot of nut and fruit plants into the landscaping of your yard, eating fruit/nuts would be a lot more frugal. Or if you have access to free fruit in wild areas or at neighbors who are not interested in it, that could help too.
Also if anyone puts a bit of money into garden seeds, you can have a lot of cool salads for very low cost.
Try2bfrugal, your definition of a healthy diet sounds good to me. I’d be interested in however people define their healthy diet. It might be vegan, wholefoods oriented, scratch cooking oriented, mostly raw, fresh/seasonal, natural foods oriented, include lower fat meats and fish, etc. Calcium requirements are set pretty high in the US. From what I have read if you have a high meat, high dairy diet, you actually need more calcium than you would if you ate a diet that that was higher in plant foods. There is a lot of good info in the book One Circle: How to Grow a Complete Diet in Less than 1000 Square Feet
http://www.bountifulgardens.org/prod...umber=BEA-0370
on nutritional needs. In the book they noted that international nutrition oriented groups tend to set the calcium requirements much lower than the US, though many of the other nutrients were the same.
Here’s an example of a person, Bob Waldrop, who did a challenge for healthy food using good shopping, scratch cooking, and gardening techniques. They were going for the food stamp level of about US$31 per week per person as their goal. The first link explains strategy and the second shows what they ate.
http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/foodchallenge.htm
http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/challengetable.htm
As a side note, Bob has turned his yard into a permaculture food garden landscape over the last several years.
The 2000 calorie target goal would be a good one to use for our calculations so our equivalents would be the same. In our actual meals we might be feeding a person who is small with a sedentary job and needs only 1200 calories a day or at the other end of the spectrum someone training for a triathlon eating 5000 calories a day.
Try2bfrugal, would you tell us some about how you juggled the various foods as you worked out what combination would give you the nutrients needed? I’d be interested in reading about your original diet as to what foods were the best and what things cost, and the recalculation of what they would cost today. Also were there any nutrients that were especially hard to get in a frugal way?
And having you on a food shopping show would be a really big eye opener I think. My usual response to the usual coupon shopping spree is “Wow, they have a bunch of calories, but not much that’s particularly worth eating.” And then the second important component following an extreme whole foods shopping expedition would be showing what you cooked for meals throughout the week. And in addition to some healthy food shoppers like you, I would love to see a whole new series that combines gardening, whole food shopping, and cooking.
Aqua Blue is that a sort of CSA or more like a co-op? Sounds like a really frugal way to get the fruits and vegetables. What's in this week's basket?
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