List making and the reality of grocery shopping don’t always align, particularly when you’re shopping locally; you’re not always going to come home with what’s on your list. For example, until you get used to the seasons and what’s available when, it’s easy to plan for something and then not have it available - last summer, Jeff and I had no idea that you couldn’t buy locally grown lettuce around here during the summer (it’s too hot.) It was available when we first moved here for a few weeks, and then it wasn’t. We were used to being able to walk into the normal grocery store and buy whatever whenever we wanted, and that was frustrating for the first few months of eating more locally and more organically. There are other forces at work to confound your planning besides the seasons. While most vendors are out most weeks, things happen: the farm gets busy, family emergencies come up, whatever. Not every vendor will be out every week.
We’ve been getting used to the seasons and having to be flexible, however, and figuring out what we don’t mind doing without (junk food has virtually disappeared from our house, except for the occasional bag of Reese’s cups or Breyer’s incident), and what we’re comfortable compromising on. Sometimes that changes from week to week, depending on how much running around we’re willing to do and what we’re cooking. (For example, we can get local flour, but our options for buying it are limited. We’re probably going to run out to the mill sometime in the next few weeks and stock up, but until then, we buy organic all purpose and normal bread flour at Harris Teeter, a regional grocery store chain. To me, one of the biggest things to remember about any lifestyle change is that it isn’t about absolutes - any positive change you make makes a difference.) We’ve learned that we’re most comfortable with a meal plan for the week, but that having some flexibility is healthy and necessary.
Most of this past year, we ran at about a third organic foods, a third local foods, and a third conventional, non-local foods, a ratio that we were happy with. Finally, in the great war of local versus organic, we prefer local, but figure that either is doing better than most of the food consumed in the United States.
Now, I’m going to talk about time. I probably spent 15 minutes on making the grocery list this morning, another 15 on getting bags and egg cartons and such together (we take our own cloth bags when we go shopping, our egg cartons back to the chicken farmer, and we reuse our bulk containers at our local co-op. Less waste is generated, and it saves the farmers a little money, because bags and egg cartons aren’t cheap), and another 15 minutes deciding on meals last night. We spent an hour and a half this morning between the ATM (cash only at the farmer’s market), the farmer’s market itself, and the co-op (we try to combine the two trips each Saturday and save some gas), and I spent about 10 minutes putting away the day’s take. We spent something like another 15 minutes in Harris Teeter this evening. So, so far this week, we’re in for about 2.75 hours of labor related to food.
And now comes the money. If you’re not comfortable talking about money, then you’ll want to skip most of the rest of this post. Part of the problem with discussing eating locally and organically is that people think it’s more expensive, and to an extent, it is. This is going to be more expensive if you typically eat things like store brand mac and cheese, or pb&j sandwiches, or what have you. However, whole foods are not more expensive than convenience foods, once you get used to cooking, and for the quality and variety of foods that we consume, we do pretty well, I think - I’m certainly under or at budget for what I used to allow when we were shopping at a normal grocery store all the time, and I shopped sales and clipped coupons and made our dollars stretch. It’s certainly cheaper than eating out all the time, and we’re eating healthier, too. That’s part of the problem with not talking about money in this country - I have no idea what’s considered normal for food spending for most people. Which is a shame, seeing as how food is one the major expenses for any family, right behind lodging and transportation.
So, from the farmer’s market, we ended up with:
- 1 gallon skim milk from Homeland Creamery: $3.95
- a half gallon of eggnog, Homeland creamery: $3.50 (off list treat)
- country ham from Faucette Produce, as well as potatoes and tomatoes. The ham is $3.59 a pound, the potatoes 75 cents a pound (we eat a lot of potatoes) and the tomatoes, 1.75 a pound. Often she has cucumbers, but she didn’t today, and I forgot to look at Deep Roots. No cucumbers for us this week. Total damage: $11.65
- 2 dozen large eggs, Ward’s Farm: $4 total. We normally get a flat of 2.5 dozen mixed medium and large eggs (we eat a lot of eggs, too; cheap protein) for $3, but the flats had sold out by the time we got to the market this morning. No sausage this morning either, but we have the tail end of a roll and part of last week’s box in the freezer.
- cheese from the Molners: cheese is one thing we don’t skimp much on anymore; we’ve gotten spoiled by the good cheese that we can get from our market. I don’t snack on cheese anymore like I used to; it goes into meals, so we can buy better cheese. It works out. We got a block of Vintage (kind of a like a sharp cheddar), a block of Muenster, and a block of marble (mixed Colby and something white) for $10.20 total.
- green peppers, 2/$1.
Total at the farmer’s market: $34.30. We did not get beef, as our local beef farmer was not out today. However, last week, I bought 2 packs of ground beef, just in case, so there’s one in the freezer, which means that we still have beef for taco night.
Then it was off to Deep Roots for the things that you can’t get at the farmer’s market. Deep Roots is a cooperative; many co-ops require that you be a member or owner to shop there, but that isn’t the case at Deep Roots; it’s open to the public. Once you’re owner, you’re an owner forever, and you get discounts and special sales; if you volunteer for the store, you get an even bigger discount. We haven’t gotten around to joining yet, but will early this coming year.
So, we ended up with:
- organic red lettuce: $1.99
- organic tomato puree, 2 cans: $4.98 (1 can will actually cover both meals that need tomato sauce this week. The second can is extra.)
- organic coffee: .88 pounds at 10.59 a pound: $9.32. This bag will last us about 2 weeks (I think; I intend to track this one), and we kill a pot of coffee a morning. So that’s 33 cents a day apiece for coffee, if it lasts two weeks. I can handle that.
- pure bulk vanilla extract: 0.29 lb at 24.78/lb (yeouch): $7.79. However, it will take me at least 6 months to go through this vanilla.
- organic cream cheese: $2.69 for 8 ounces. Again, ouch, and if I were making something that required massive amounts of cream cheese, I would probably trot over to Harris Teeter and get the non-organic stuff. But I’m making one small cheesecake for dessert on New Year’s Eve, and it will directly reflect the quality of the ingredients.
- bananas, organic (and so not local; I think these were from Peru). 99 cents a pound, 2.54 pounds: $2.51
- bulk olive oil, 0.48 pounds at 8.29 pound: $3.98. This will last at least two weeks, with what I already had in the pantry.
- organic red delicious apples, 2.39/pound: $2.20
- organic garlic: 49 cents (for one head, though I’m pretty sure I grabbed 2, so maybe he missed one)
- organic tangerines, 2.29/pound: $1.60
- organic oranges, 99 cents/pound: $1.02
- wasabi peas, bulk: $1.39
- organic quick oats, $1.09/lb: $0.43
- organic rolled oats, 99 cents/lb (they have non-organic ones for 69 cents a pound, but oats are so darned cheap that the extra 30 cents a pound is no big deal): $0.43 (for a zippy bag big enough to provide 3-ish breakfasts for 2)
- organic bulk sugar, 0.99/lb: $2.36
- organic bulk chai tea (the real stuff, not the powdered stuff, and the best chai I’ve had outside of Indian restaurants), something insane a pound: $2 for 1.12 ounces
- sales tax: $0.98
Total at Deep Roots: $49.30
Finally, at Harris Teeter, we ended up with:
- green beans (there being no green vegetable other than lettuce and green peppers at Deep Roots earlier, and me badly wanting something green in my dinner tomorrow night): $1.26
- graham crackers: $2.99
- bread flour, 2 bags: $3.98
- organic all purpose flour, 2 bags: $5.58
- 2 liter Cheerwine (which they just don’t sell anywhere but places like Harris Teeter): $0.89 (we don’t drink much soda anymore, but we have a bottle of rum for New Year’s tomorrow)
- 2 liter Pepsi: $1.25
- sales tax: $0.76
Harris Teeter food total (there was also some store brand Nyquil in there - Jeff is nursing a cold): $16.71
Week total: $100.31
Of course, some of the things that we’re going to be eating this week are not on this list, because I have stuff stocked in the freezer and the pantry. This includes the steak for tomorrow night (sirloin steak, normally $5 a pound, but she’s had it buy-one-get-one often lately, so we grab 2 whenever she does and chuck them in the freezer, and get to have steak for the same price as ground beef), the ground beef for Tuesday, some odds and ends of vegetables, and canned corn and beans that were purchased for another use. Either day by day (or at the end of the week, I haven’t decided), I’m going to post an estimate of meal by meal costs, to show what’s a cheap meal and what’s an expensive meal for us typically. Also, much of what we brought this week won’t be consumed this week; we won’t go through 4 bags of flour this week, or all the olive oil, or the oats or the coffee. I prefer to stock up when I can and have to buy individual items less often.
