I’m going to talk about money for a bit, so if that makes you uncomfortable, you may want to skip this post. But part of the point of this project was to talk about how much it costs for one couple to cook the majority of their foods at home, locally and organically, so here we are. :)

For January through June, we spent $2135.20 on groceries. This is just food for us, not any of the other numerous things you can buy with food, such as paper products or cleaning supplies; I keep track of that elsewhere (I may think of our three cats as children, but their food goes into another category. :) ). $1907.81 of that, or 89%, was purchased locally (not meaning that this total is for local foods, but that 89% was spent at local businesses, mainly our farmer’s market and Deep Roots.) 84% of the total spent, or $1802.58, was spent on local or organic foods (the other 5% was spent on non-local or organic foods purchased locally.) According to Quicken, I’ve also spent $129.33 on “dining”; most of that has been when we’ve had friends in from out of town, or we got caught out while we were running errands and one or both of us ended up needing to eat sooner than expected; that also includes my going out to eat when I was on the West Coast for a dear friend’s wedding. I’ve no idea what Jeff’s total for dining is; we keep separate books. For the sake of the discussion and to overestimate, let’s call it $200; he’s out of the house at lunch time more often than I, and ends up buying lunch on the (fairly rare) occasions when we don’t have leftovers or other lunch materials to send with him.

So, total on food for the two of us for the first 6 months of the year: $2464.53. That’s $94.79 a week for 26 weeks. According to the statistics from the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge, that puts us halfway between the “1 person in the family, one wage earner” and the “2+ persons in the family, one wage earner” categories. We’re at two people (who both really like food) and 1.5 wage earners (I’m a graduate student who’s on a 20 hour per week graduate assistantship, during the school year). So, we’re below the national average, for 84% local and organic food. And that total includes just about everything: our morning coffee habit (we go through a pot a day), drinkables (juice, milk, soda [of which we’ve been drinking too much lately], but not alcohol), lunches (I eat at home most days, unless I have a reason to be at school at lunch time, and then I’ll pack a lunch; I pack Jeff’s lunch 5 mornings a week), etc. We are lucky is some respects; I like cooking, and I don’t mind spending time in the kitchen. I’m home during the day, so I can start bread dough or whatever early in the day if I need to. But if that weren’t the case, I’d figure out how to make it work anyhow; we’d do more cooking and freezing on weekends; I’d start bread dough one night, keep it in the fridge overnight, and bake it the next night; things like that.

Anyhow, at this point, I’m rambling. The basic point (and the point of this whole blog) is that we were substantially under the national average for food spending for the first six months of the year, and most of our food was local or organic. If you’re trying to eat more locally and organically, and nay-saying friends or family say that it’s going to be too expensive, point them this way. :)

I’ve some catching up to do this weekend, but I just wanted to make a quick post about something that one of our wonderful readers, Teena (to whom I still owe email, sorry about that!) pointed out to us this week: Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge. I thought it might be of interest to our readers and wanted to point it out.

The numbers they have, however, made me chuckle a bit. For 2+ family members and 2 wage earners, one is allowed $144 a week. For the record, we’re two adults, one of whom has a part time job, and one of whom is a graduate student and is on a graduate assistantship (that pays well for the number of hours I work, but it’s still grad school wages.) Realistically, I suppose we count in the “2+ family members and 1 wage earner” category, between the two of us, which is $121. That’s $484 a month. In January, 89% of our food dollars were spent on local or organic food, and we spent $291.03 on food. In February, it was 77% and $348.24. We eat virtually all of our meals at home (I think there were a couple of fast food incidents each month when we were out running errands on weekends, and we went out to dinner once in February with friends.) We eat well on sub-$400 a month (as you’ve all seen so far this year.) $484 on food in a month? For the two of us, I’d have a hard time spending that much money. Granted, these are national numbers, and national averages, and 2+ family members is a pretty broad category - we don’t have two-legged children, and I tabulate the cat food in another category. :) Still, the numbers seem high. Are groceries really that much more expensive in other areas of the country, do people eat more specialty items than we do…? I’m confused.