With a little effort, anyone can make healthy meals on a budget. But the real success (or downfall) of feeding the family lies in the snacks. What's that you say, "Why do you need snacks if you are feeding the younglings three square meals?" Ah, my fine feathered friend, welcome to the land of the little people. They live on snacks.
If you add up all the food consumed between meals, those little growing bodies really eat about five meals a day. And there's not an ounce of fat on any of them (except JoJo--he's still got that cute baby fat). Between growing like weeds and running all over the neighborhood and the forest behind the house, they consume it all. When the Olympic commentators informed us that gold medalist Michael Phelps consumed 12,000 calories per day without gaining weight, we were not surprised: it happens here every day--no swimming pool needed.
Let's face it: snacks are mostly junk. So this is where the big challenge lies. Step one: (almost) no candy. We ration the candy intake using an arguably sensible rule: candy is a treat, not a food. In its place, the daily staple snack is a piece of fruit. Bananas are a favorite. Apples are popular too. Add raisins, oranges, and the occasional pomegranate, and you've got the basis for sustainable snackdom.
The bread family contributes to the snack party too. Crackers, home-made whole wheat bread, and cookies add to the party. And of course, ice cream. Yes, the real thing--but only upon special occasions.
Chef Kat
For everyday use, we make our own 'ice cream' that is (believe it or not) just as satisfying as the store bought kind,
BX makes dessert
with no sugar added. We wash/peel fruit and put it in the freezer. We then run the frozen fruit through a Champion juicer (with the blank instead of the filter) so that it comes out looking just like frozen yogurt. Everyone loves it. It tastes great, and it passes the 'water test' (you're not thirsty after you eat it). Fruit ice cream is inexpensive and popular year 'round. When we're feeling formal, we buy cones to put it in. Deeeelicious.
We always wonder just how much the children understand when we try some new project. Do they really understand what living on a strict budget means? You can ask them, of course, but they may well say that they get it without really getting it. It's their actions that tell you the real story. So when we witnessed an unscripted scene in the kitchen yesterday we allowed ourselves the luxury of a smile.
Rebekah was making herself a sandwich, slathering on mayonnaise onto a piece of bread. She used so much that the bread became soggy and fell onto the counter in a gloppy mess. She tossed the whole oozing pile into the trash and blithely proceeded to get out another slice of bread to replace it (the sandwich must go on!). That's when the trouble began.
Erik, Elisabeth, and Katharine descended on her.
"Beka, that is so wasteful! After all, we ARE on a budget!" cried Elisabeth
Erik piggy-backed on her sentiment, "Yeah, we should start charging five cents for every piece of food you waste!"
Rebekah's eyes grew bigger as she realized that she'd been caught by the Junior Food Police. Then Kat chimed in,
"Maybe you should not get as much food for dinner because you are being so wasteful."
That did it. The scared look appeared on Rebekah's face. It seemed to say "Were they REALLY going to charge me or take food away from me?!" Peer pressure had its desired effect.
When you're on a strict budget stretching those dollars to feed the family, you've got to make some tough decisions. But if cost is the main (or only) thing driving food choices, healthy food will likely be the casualty. Consider these two shopping carts:
Shopping Cart #1 (Standard American Diet)
2 2L Soda $2.00
1 loaf of White bread $1.50
1 bag of Doritos $3.00
4 Boxes of macaroni and cheese $3.00
1 box of Hamburger Helper $2.00
1 lb Ground beef $2.00
1 box Cake mix $1.50
1 can of frosting $1.80
1 pkg. Lunch meat $2.50
32oz whole milk $1.50
Shopping Cart #2 (Health on a budget)
4 pounds of oranges $3
5 bananas $1
15 lb bag of potatoes $8.00
1 box of Vegetable broth $2.80
1 lb of Carrots $1.00
1 Leek $1.50
1 Garlic head $.50
1 pkg. of Frozen peas $1.00
1 pint half and half $1.50
1 6oz yogurt $.50
The total price of each cart is the same. But for both quality and quantity, the second basket is the clear winner. What do you do with all those vegetables? Make soup, of course. Here's one that was a hit in our house:
Hearty Vegetable Soup
Autumn dinner
6 to 8 potatoes, cubed
3 cans (14 1/2 oz each ) of vegetable (or chicken) broth
1 to 2 carrots, thinly sliced
1 to 2 leeks (white portion only) chopped
1/4 cup butter, cubed
1 to 2 gloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp. dried thyme
3/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. dried oregano or marjoram
1/4 tsp. pepper
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 cups of half and half cream
1 cup of frozen peas or corn or a mix of both, thawed
In a big pot, combine the first 10 ingredients. Cook until vegetables are soft. In a small bowl, combine flour and cream until smooth, add to the pot. Stir in peas or corn. Cover and cook on med to high for about 30 minutes or until slightly thickened.
We all know how television has seriously damaged reading. Not as much as email has destroyed letter writing, mind you, but the effects are widespread. The TV is on in the average American household for an average of five hours per day; when was the last time anyone read a book for five hours in one day? In much the same way, going out to eat has had a crushing effect on cooking--especially among young people.
Before we could all afford (or think we can afford) to eat out so frequently, home cooking was the norm. Children (especially girls) learned to cook by working with their mothers in the kitchen. But between going out and nukeable 'wave cuisine, young people today can barely open a can, much less cook a meal from scratch. So it was bound to happen. The natural consequence of our self-imposed home dining had to stir the creativity that had lain dormant during our restaurant-hopping days.
The older children love to cook, and are getting pretty good at it. Elisabeth makes a Caesar Salad that is to die for. She makes her own dressing, and even makes the croûtons from scratch. Erik is getting into the act too:
"What, no cookies?" Erik moaned.
"Make 'em yourself!"
"Ok, I will"
Chef Erik displays his creati
And he did. By himself, Erik baked up a batch of a few dozen chocolate chip cookies. They were pretty good! He was very pleased with the result. Imagine that: you can have cookies any time you want, without driving to the store. One problem: warm cookies go even faster than warm bread. Most of Erik's batch didn't even get to cool.
The little girls are always eager to pitch in with the cooking too. They're good at mixing, stirring, and, with some careful supervision, chopping. Oh yes, and of course eating. They're always enthusiastic about that.
We went out to lunch today. Yes, yes, after all that chatter about the budget-busting effect of going out to eat…But today was different. A local sub sandwich place had a one-day special and was offering their overpriced $4.75 eight inch subs for $1.00. Since we were already in town, we availed ourselves of this wildly in-budget opportunity. Eight subs for eight bucks. Not bad.
We got there at 11:00 a.m. just as they were opening for lunch. There was already a line out the door, and the queue snaked out into the parking lot in just the few minutes we were there. It seems that this obscure new sandwich shop was immediately well known and popular as soon as they cut their prices by almost 80%. Are people that cheap that they would show up in droves on dollar day to a place they had never been and would never go to the rest of the year? In a word, Yes.
Charlottesville has a frozen custard place named Kohr Brothers that celebrates its mid-April founding date each year by rolling back their cone price from the current $2.75 to the original price for a cone back in 1905: a nickel. You should see the mob scene that ensues: a line of people two or three wide that stretches around the building and into the parking lot, all day long. A substantial number of our fellow citizens are in fact that cheap. It’s hard to beat indulging a family of seven having two rounds of custard cones for less than a buck. Vive le Budget!
We eat out too much. Most Americans do. And through the power of denial, we don't worry about it because we don't recognize it as a problem. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average household expenditure for a family of four for food away from home was $4,000. When we finally checked the real figures, our family had been spending at least that much eating out. A meal or two out every week; add it up and pretty soon it starts to be real money.
Let's face it, it's easier to have someone else prepare the food for you. We found that most of our 'going out' meals were in the evening, after a particularly hard day. We looked at each other with that 'I really don't feel like cooking' look, made the easy decision, and listened to the bad-habit-reinforcing cheers of the children as they piled into the car with alacrity that you never see on they are told to wash the dishes or fold laundry.
We marched into our favorite Mexican or Chinese restaurant where the staff knew us well ("Norm!"). Hmmm, perhaps that itself should have been a budget-busting warning sign--like when we took Erik to the hospital Emergency Room and the doctor on call greeted him by name as soon as he walked in. Of course after the meal, the children (professional wheedlers!) would angle for some expensive and unnecessary (but the fried ice cream really is good) dessert. Fat, dumb, and happy after another over-indulgent meal, we'd acquiesce--and make sure we got a few spoonfuls ('spoonsful' if you are a grammar Nazi) before the childabeasts devoured every crumb.
43% of American families spend more than they earn each year. Ask anyone to name one of their top cost-savings measures and they’ll likely tell you they eat out less and enjoy more meals at home. That's precisely what we're doing now. We're clean. Laying off the stuff. Abstinent. Riding safely on the domestic culinary wagon. Eatin' the good home cookin'. Everyone seems to be ok with that. We'll see how long that lasts.
Most of the six out of seven Americans who are not part of the Food Stamps (SNAP) program don't know how it works. As stated in the opening of the Food & Nutrition Act of 2008, the plan has a laudable goal:
"To alleviate such hunger and malnutrition, a supplemental nutrition assistance program is herein authorized which will permit low-income households to obtain a more nutritious diet through normal channels of trade by increasing food purchasing power for all eligible households who apply for participation."
The following items cannot be purchased using food stamps funds:
- Beer, wine, liquor, cigarettes or tobacco
- Non-food items, such as: pet foods, soaps, paper products and household supplies
The following items can be purchased using food stamps funds:i. Foods for the household to eat, such as:
- breads and cereals
- fruits and vegetables
- meats, fish and poultry; and
- dairy products
ii. Seeds and plants which produce food for the household to eat.
No one can by force determine what you eat. But through restrictions on how the funds are used, the SNAP program discourages 'vices' and promotes shopping the edges of the grocery store where you will find more nutrition and fewer heavily processed foods. Having gotten in line with both the budget and most of the intent of the program, our family needs to implement the last item that was intended in the plan: growing some of your own food.
That last clause in the 'can be purchased' list is (we suspect) ignored by nearly everyone. Other than boutique or hobby gardeners, who grows their own food? In our post-agrarian society, who grows their own food even as a supplement their diet because they need to? With this in mind, we're going to mirror the plan by planting a winter garden and starting to grow a portion of what we eat.
Ever since we started our project to eat poor but not poorly, our friends have been worried about us. They want to know if we are facing desperate financial woes where it's either cut the food bill in half to make the mortgage payment or face losing the house. We have assured them that we're doing fine. The house is paid for, and we don't need to cut the food bill in half (although whose budget couldn't stand a healthy cut in expenses--who among us who turn down a $1,000 per month raise?). We're dedicated to seeing the project through the whole year, in no small part just to see if we can do it. Can we reign in our desires and our spending and be creative enough to make it all work? And can we improve our nutrition and health while doing it? At the end of the year, perhaps we will have discovered some ideas that we will carry with us. The lessons of frugality and health can only really be learned by doing.
SNAP Debit Car
Several friends have asked if we are on Food Stamps (no one seems to know the snappy new name of the program; to the over thirty crowd it will always be known as 'Food Stamps'). No, we aren't, but one in seven Americans are. Over 40 million of our fellow Americans are now part of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program--an all time high. The old Food Stamps program used brightly colored paper bills that looked more than a little like Monopoly money. The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 replaced the paper paper coupons (and the stigma of handing them over to pay for your food) with a sleek debit card called an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card, thus allowing the rich and the poor alike to swipe through the checkout, no one being the wiser as to their financial status.
Anyone can apply for Food Stamps. To qualify, you must have a monthly net income below the poverty level (currently $1,838 for a family of four and $2,773 for a family of seven like ours) AND have less than $2,000 in assets. Your house doesn't count into this calculation, but just about everything (including your car) does. In order to be eligible, you pretty much have to have almost nothing. And over 40 million people have qualified and are in the program. Times are indeed tough.
Our oldest daughter Elisabeth recently proclaimed that she had become a vegetarian. Her brother instantly responded with a classic 'law of the jungle' cry: "More meat for me!"
We have toyed with vegetarianism over the years. Real vegetarianism, mind you, not just the usual junkatarian who eschews flesh in favor of ice cream, cookies, and pasta. We've toyed with veggies in their raw, steamed, brazed, and juiced forms. But mostly we've excelled at backsliding. The chef at Adobe Systems' cafe used to taunt us with his carefully crafted meat dishes. Meat is easy to pass up if you're a veg-head, so he really had to work at it. But his persistence paid off upon occasion, and he was rewarded with the throwing in of the culinary towel: "Emil, you have awakened me from my vegetarian stupor!"
So now we're partial vegetarians.
We've even got the children buffaloed into believing that a dinner without meat on the table is normal. It's certainly good for the budget. It doesn't last long though. With the exception of our lone holdout, we cave after a few meals and take the .50 caliber down to the market to hunt down some ground beef and a dead chicken or two. We make steaming hot plates of fajitas and torment Elisabeth. She's showing signs of cracking.
Mediterranean Pasta Salad
Mediterranean pasta, roasted veggies, and mystery mush
Cook 8 oz of dried farfalle according to the package instructions. Meanwhile, combine zest and juice of 1 lemon and 2 tsps olive oil in a large bowl; whisk.Add a can artichoke hearts, drained; 8 oz fresh part-skim mozzarella cheese, chopped; ½ cup cherry tomatoes , cut in half; and ¼ cup chopped bottled roasted red bell peppers; toss to combine. Place 1 cup frozen peas in a colander; drain pasta over peas. Add pasta and peas to artichoke mixture; toss. Garnish with chopped fresh parsley if desired; serve.
Roasted vegetables
Set oven to 375 degrees. Take one small eggplant, remove skin and chop up in small cubes;cut 1 large onion in half and then cut into slices; seed and quarter 1 large green pepper; slice thin 2 carrots; peel at least 6 garlic gloves; take 1-2 small zuccinis, cut them in half and slice them up like the onion. Spread all these vegetables onto a large nonstick baking sheet. Drizzle at least 2-4 tablespoons of olive oil on top and make sure to mix the oil all over the vegetables so they don’t stick to the baking sheet while cooking. Sprinkle the vegetables with some salt, pepper, and rosemary( no more than a couple of pinches of each). Roast for 20 minutes in the oven, then turn them over and roast for another 10 to 20 minutes until tender.
Being on a budget makes you creative. You start looking for ways to supplement your food supply. This week we attended a seminar that had a table heaping with food, much of which was left over. We asked permission of the staff (it's good form), and when they heard that we have a gaggle of children, they were happy to send it home with us (it's also less for them to clean up and throw away).
Catered windfalls being rare occurrence, supplementing our food supply takes on other forms. We have tried for several years running to grow a family garden--with varying degrees of success. It's a matter of finding what grows well in your area, and then being more persistent than the bugs and the weeds (and the squirrels and the birds and the deer).
So far we've had no success with blueberries. Oh, we found the right acid soil and plenty of sunshine for our row of blueberry bushes, and treated them with the fertilizer they love. And they've reciprocated by sprouting some good-looking berries. Whether they taste good or not is something we couldn't tell you, because right before they are ripe, they squirrels and birds tag-team it and decimate the whole crop in a single day. Next year we're going to imprison the bushes in mesh and then sit back and laugh at the miserable would-be thieves.
Buried Treasure
Our friend Josef assures us that that he has grown a wealth of broccoli and blackberries. Other things that
we've grown with modest success include potatoes, tomatoes, and beans. The children especially love the potatoes. "Look Daddy, 'tatoes!" they gleefully shout when we're digging the shovel into the ground and turning over the harvest. They're so impressed to find all that food waiting for us under the soil. The adults take turns turning the earth, and the children paw through each pile looking for the buried treasure, screaming with delight with each discovery. We've rarely seen them get so excited about anything.
Once our meager gardening skills are exhausted, we head to the farmers' market. For fresh, locally grown produce at a decent price, it's hard to beat a farmers' market. We've gotten to know some of the farmers, so it has become something of a social event too. We try the latest crops in season, and swap recipes for how we're going to process whatever we don't eat raw. Hat tip to our friend Laura for the idea of scooping up the bruised $4/lb tomatoes for $1/lb at the end of the market to make into sauce for pizza, pasta, etc. This stretches the food budget almost as well as bringing home the catering.
Kristie soaked dried pinto beans and made a delicious pot of home made chili in the crock pot. Upon seeing dinner simmering away,our youngest daughter said, "Mom, I want the REAL chili, the kind in the can." We pointed out that the homemade chili was the REAL kind. She still wanted the chili that comes in the can. What has happened to us when our expectation is that food comes from a can? How did we get here?
Preserving the harvest has been a concern and a goal since there were harvests. How do you keep food available year 'round when most of it only grows for a short season starting in late spring and going until early fall? Drying food has been around since beyond memory. Beef jerky, dried peppers, dried beans...Hey wait a minute, that's starting to sound like the ingredients for our dinner!
Canning food, however, is relatively young. It dates back to the early 19th century when Napoleon's quest to feed his armies led him to offer a reward to anyone who could find a better way to preserve food. Frenchman Nicolas Appert took up the challenge. He found that food could be preserved against spoilage by first sealing it in an airtight glass jar, and then heating it. Appert set up his own factory to produce and distribute his preserved foods. The French government gave him an award of 12,000 Francs. Although Appert's method clearly worked, nobody knew exactly why at the time. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that it was found that bacteria were the cause of food spoilage, and that these were destroyed by heating.
Formerly the domain of the wealthy, food in cans is now enjoyed by all--except perhaps the wealthy. Food in cans has become cheap and easy. And since World War II, eating food out of metal cans has become ubiquitous. But by adding the layer of processing to our food, we have become that much more distant from the food itself. Our little girl thinks chili comes from a can. If you ask her what chili is made of, she'll tell you "chili," as if that is an ingredient.
"Where does chili come from," we query.
"The store."
"Where to the ingredients in chili come from?"
"I don't know. May I open another can of chili?"
Economics: Feeding our family of seven a pot of chili for dinner costs $13.65 ($1.95 per can times 7 cans). Starting with dried beans and adding spices and fresh ingredients to make our own chili runs less than $8.00 . Money wise, it's a no-brainer. In fact, this meal is a microcosm of our whole food/economy project. If we can reduce the bill for this one meal by 40 percent, and extend this throughout everything we do, we'll just about hit our goal.
The genuine article
The home made chili tastes great, and the fresh ingredients (and lack of preservatives) have got to be much better for us than chili that's been sitting in a can on a shelf for who knows how long. But the real cost of canned food may well be in the disconnect from food's origins to what we eat each day. As we work to get back to basics in our diet--removing the processing plant as middleman and using fresh whole foods to create our own meals--perhaps we will discover that real food and real economy are in fact the same thing.
The look. You know, the one that children get on their faces when they realize (perhaps not for the first time) that their parents are flippin' crazy. Call us perverse, but we kinda like it. It's nice to still be able to surprise them. When we told them about our project for a large family to live (as if) off the largesse, their initial reaction was to wonder if we were putting them on. As it dawned on them that we were for real, they started testing the limits of our proposed madness. They were already mourning over the loss of Chinese takeout and 'fun' foods. The younger children asked if we were poor because we wanted to cut down our food bill. "Why would you want to save money" they asked. That was when we knew that this project had real value.
We had obviously set the example that there were no limits when it came to buying food. We bought whatever we wanted at the grocery store, and went out wherever and whenever we wanted. We're Americans. It's our right to eat, and eat well. We're entitled. Ok, that's nonsense. No one is entitled to anything. We know that. Hard work, responsibility, blah, blah blah. We've given the speech so many times even our eyes are starting to glaze over. But evidently our strong work ethic hadn't carried over all that well as a strong food ethic. Time to work on that...
When we decided to inaugurate our year of food thrift by splurging at a restaurant (way to confuse the kids!), we called it the Last Supper. Our literal child Katharine (9 years old, future District Attorney and Judge) earnestly wanted to know "Will we be eating any more suppers, ever?" Erik is a little more world-wise and has a few more years of experience with the Parental Units. He wanted to know if this was in any way a reprise of our foray into eating raw foods. He still has macrobiotic emotional scars from when we made and dined on most of the recipes in Alicia Silverstone's book The Kind Diet. What can we say, it's a rough economy, and we're doing our part to make sure that therapists have a little job security too.
Home made muffins
In addition to getting the message across to the children that culinary consumption and economic consumption share more than just a last name, we have already seen some healthy dividends from our brief investment: They've learned that spending less on food means the money we have set aside will buy more food. The children have begun to understand the idea of a unit price (price per oz or lb) by reading the labels and doing the math, or just looking at the unit prices that have already been calculated by the store. The older children have made it a challenge to discover the lowest priced item. We reward their success with what children want most anyway: our look of approval.
Erik said that he realized that homemade meals mean healthier food. If this turns out to be the only thing they get out of our experience this year, then it's all going to be worth it.
A lot of kids grew up with Wonder Bread. It's dirt cheap (Walmart: 98 cents), but at least it has no hint of nutritional value. Nearly all of the bread at the supermarket is the same sort of nutritional wasteland. If you can find healthy bread at the store, it's gonna set you back $3-4 per loaf. This adds up when you've got at least five hungry hatchlings. I say "at least" because the neighborhood 'village' comes and goes through our house. We gave up counting long ago; we just feed whoever happens to be there at mealtime. We might be feeding someone else's kid the same day as one of our offspring is dining at some other household. It all probably works out in the end, and even if it doesn't, we're doing our part to feed the world.
Fresh and hot: it won't last long!
The upshot of it all is that we go through a minimum of a loaf of bread every day. So for economy, health, and freshness (the Europeans quite properly show disdain for the American practice of bread stored in plastic for weeks rather than baked fresh daily as it ought to be), we have begun to bake our own bread. Do this completely by hand a few times, and you'll find out the knead that prompted the invention of bread machines. After we finished over-researching (it's a thing we do), we picked out a good one: the Zojirushi BBCC-X20 Home Bakery Supreme. It's got two paddles and bakes bread that actually looks like a loaf of bread, not some alien-looking bread cylinder that defies making a normal sandwich. Baking bread in the machine is easy and economical, but there's just something about hot, freshly baked bread that causes it to disappear with a rapidity that must be seen to be believed. Oh yes, and it makes a fantastic apple cake too. What could be better--and better for you-- than freshly made whole wheat bread? Freshly ground whole wheat flour, that's what. We have a hand grinder in the basement that does double duty. For the obvious function it is second to none: it turns human power and whole wheat berries into fine flour suitable for baking. It is arguably even better for its other purpose: punishment. When the children transgress the rules of the house and civil society, there must be consequences; we don't want to raise bad citizens. Sending them to their room is ineffective at best. Sending the iPod on vacation for a day makes them wince, but it's not causing any remorse-inducing pain nor is it productive in any way (other than the fact that your child can actually hear you that day). But grinding seems to be the perfect solution.
Our household punishment usually takes the form of a stern look, a short(ish) lecture clarifying the wrong and proclaiming the right, and the finishing flourish: "Two cups." A major infraction (hitting in anger comes to mind) gets you four. And down you go, into the bowels of the house--the lonely basement where the grinder lives. It is there that our juvenile gladiators face off in physical combat with hard red winter wheat. Group offenders take turns grinding in a festive prisonyardlike exercise; solo offenders generally finish their work a whole lot faster because they are motivated by solitary confinement in a lonely basement to achieve early parole.
The end result of our efforts is a more peaceful household, children with well-developed upper arm muscles, and heaps upon heaps of freshly ground whole wheat flour. The bread we make then gives them the energy to invent new ways of exhibiting miscreant behavior. When we sense an infraction in progress, sometimes we even go so far as to taunt them: "Bring it on, short stuff: we need a couple more cups to make waffles tomorrow!"
We're lazy. We all are. The TV remote overtly reminds us of our slothfulness; if we had a remote that would work just as well with food, we'd use it. Enter the mega food processing companies and fast food chains. It's just good business to give the people what they want. Why is McDonalds (noun--death on a plate) so wildly popular? Because Mickey D's gives the people what they want: ready-to-eat jumbo doses of fat and sugar.
Food processing is about making the product appealing to the senses and shelf-life.The one ingredient foods in the produce section don't last very long, and many take a little work to make them look and taste appealing to the average person. Raw broccoli shoots, anyone? How about Chicken Broccoli Florentine? Now we're talking! But which will it be? Gathering all the required ingredients and then spending an hour slaving in the kitchen, or picking up a frozen package that you take home and nuke? It's hardly a fair contest.
Our own food processing plant consists of a well-stocked kitchen and a child labor force eager to make yummy food and have fun. They make messes, to be sure. And they break things. Especially our daughter Rebreaka. That girl has single-handedly taken out more glassware (and other glass items: we now know that a new windshield costs $289) than all the other children combined. But even accounting for the collateral damage, our little food processors are starting to be useful. They can crank out home-made pizza, tacos, and a variety of salads. Elisabeth has mastered the art of home made croutons atop a fantastic Caesar Salad.
With the children learning the basic tools and getting the idea that the best food processing happens at home, we are ready to discover what tasty things we can concoct from the edges of the store. We all love salad. We make a big bowl of it nearly every night for dinner. Each of us eats a whole plateful before moving on to the main course. The romaine salad with tomatoes and peppers is a standard, garnished with some small cubes of cheese. We don't do iceberg lettuce, because it's one of the 'white foods'--"The whiter the food, the sooner you're dead!" (more on this later). In the summer when fresh veggies are bursting out all over, we make a salad of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions, with a Greek dressing. It goes fast.
Our current favorite of the salad genre is Orzo Salad. We can feed the whole family for $11.50with one large bowl. It varies according to what we have on hand, but here's the recipe for this crowd pleaser: Mediterranean Orzo Salad
1 lb orzo, dry
Mediterranean Orzo Salad
6 tbsp olive oil, divided
3/4 to 1 cup of pitted kalamata olives, each olive cut in half
3/4 to 1 cup of feta cheese, crumbled
10 basil leaves, thinly sliced
1/4 to 1/2 cup pine nuts, toasted
3 tbsp of lemon juice (fresh)
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp of pepper
Cook orzo in salted water according to package directions. Drain and place on a cookie sheet. Drizzle with 2 tbsp of olive oil, toss, spread out and let cool. Toss the olives and the rest (next 6 items) of the ingredients in a large bowl. Add cooled orzo and 2 to 4 tbsp of remaining olive oil and toss again.
Supermarkets are not in the business of selling food; they're in the business of making money. The whole physical layout of a supermarket tells you their game plan. They know you're going to want some basic foods such as bread, milk, meat, and produce. None of that is front and center when you walk in the store. It's all on the edges. You are drawn through the stuff in the middle to get to your goal, much like people looking for the $2 casino buffet dinner stand in long, slow moving lines that wend through rows of slot machines. What you buy in the middle (of a supermarket or a casino) is where they make their real profits. Coincidentally, the stuff in the middle isn't all that good for you. Neither the Cocoa Puffs nor the Royal Flush poker slots are going to help you with your physical or mental health. But both will cost you a heap of money.
Saving money and finding foods that keep us healthy means that we lurk around the edges of the supermarket, staying clear of the center swamp that is trying to lure us in with it flashy packaged goods. Unless you just have to buy diapers or pet food, you can stay pretty much clear of the center. Of course you wouldn't even need diapers or pet food if you had just followed the most important of all financial adages:
"Never take financial responsibility for any thing that eats."
But we didn't know any better, so we made a pile of children and acquired 1.5 cats (Peepers is 16 years old and hardly qualifies as a whole cat any more). With the children being so cute and all, we might just as well go ahead and keep feeding them.
The bread section is littered with nutrition-free baked things that are best avoided even though cheap. A little more spent on whole grain bread is a good investment in health. Ditto for the meat section. We buy the better (read: less fat) meat and make up for the increased cost by buying less of it. At $4 a gallon, milk is a luxury that we could afford, but lactose intolerance lets us sidestep the issue. BTW, why is milk more expensive than gasoline?
Feeding the masses
Health and economy converge in the produce section. We make an effort to spend at least half our grocery dollars there. One ingredient foods aren't anywhere near as convenient as processed ready-to-eat foods, nor do they have the flashy taste. But produce is going to drive the whole success of our efforts. We'll mold and shape the raw materials in the produce section to create healthy meals that are far more affordable than anything the mega-factories can package.
For a family of seven, the Food Stamps (we still call it that) subsidy is about $900 a month. Divide by four weeks (discrepancy noted) gives us $225 to work with each week. We've put the kibosh on going out this year, so the whole $225 goes to groceries. So with cash...er..credit card in hand, we head off the to grocery store.
The only problem is that there are no grocery stores. We're surrounded by mega-markets that have everything--including food and "edible food-like substances" (read Michael Pollan's terrific little book Food Rules for a great explanation). We're on a budget, so the upscale stores like Whole Foods and Harris Teeter are definitely out. We love those places, but going there contributed a great deal to our food expense bloat. In our neck of the woods, that leaves Kroger, Food Lion, and Walmart.
Did I just say Walmart? For groceries?! How is it that we now buy our food from a store started decades ago by a man who made his fortune selling cheap womens' underwear? Yes, Walmart--former all American goods store turned cheap import giant--is now seriously in the grocery business. In fact, Walmart is the number one or number two seller of groceries in most areas of the United States. And since they just plopped down a Walmart Supercenter not even four miles from our house, we buy most of our food there.
Did I just see your nose elevate a degree or two? Oh come now, you shop at Walmart now and again, don't you? Americans love Walmart, or it wouldn't exist. Remember, denial is not good for you. Come clean with it. Just pretend that you're at a G.A. meeting:
"Hello, my name is Jonathan S. and I buy groceries at Walmart."
It turns out that the quality for the price is as good as you'll get anywhere else. And we can still splurge at Whole foods if we just gotta have that organic starfruit. We assuage our guilt by going to the local farmer's market as often as we can to buy local and (sometimes) organic produce.
Having chosen the venue for spending our food pittance, timing is next. Don't bother grocery shopping on the weekends because they don't restock produce nearly at much as they do during the week. And yes, the store may be open 24 hours, but that's only helpful if you have a late night craving (which you should probably ignore anyway as such cravings are always for food you shouldn't eat). The best time to shop for groceries is on a weekday during the late morning hours because the produce has been freshly restocked and hasn't been picked over by your fellow shoppers.
When someone asked us what our monthly food bill was, we thought for a moment and tossed out a figure like $1200. We knew it was a little bit higher (we eat a lot!), but it might be embarrassing for the full figure to come out in the open. Our fear was validated when the person asking the question gave a little gasp at hearing $1200. Their bill, of course, was much lower. Never mind that they didn't have seven mouths to feed; their bill would surely be lower even if they did.
Since no one was forcing the issue, we cruised along in self-appointed ignorance/bliss until the invention of credit card loyalty programs. We want the miles, points, or whatever the credit card companies are offering when you use their card (doesn't everyone?). So for the past year we've bought just about everything on the credit card. Even groceries (in my parents' day, buying food on credit would have been absolutely unthinkable. Now we do it routinely). But with great power comes great responsibility--and accountability.
We now have this piece of paper that comes from the credit card company every month detailing how much food we really consume. It's all listed right there so we can't help but acknowledge how much we spend in groceries and going out to eat. That $1200 was really $1800, just as we kind of suspected all along. Ah, the power of denial.
Is there something bad you don't want to face? Simple, just deny that it exists. Just tell yourself that it isn't so. Someone else might challenge such a blatant falsehood, but we are oh so forgiving of ourselves. Even the truthful among us lie like crazy to ourselves:
"I don't watch much TV..."
"I'm only going to eat one handful of chips from this bag..."
"I exercise enough every day..."
Riiiiiiiiight...And the government is here to help you. Our food denial caused our food bill to become our number one expense. Totaling it up with the help of our friendly credit card bill gave us the satisfaction of knowing the truth--so we could start dealing with it. But wait, there's more: we'd only hit the first level of denial (there are always at least two). We hadn't accounted for the food items that we had paid cash for. Generally, these are small purchases that we forget immediately, but they do add up.
Ok, so we've come clean. The real monthly food bill is closer to $1900. That means we're going to run at the poverty level this year by shaving off a full $1000 each month. We can do it--really.
Yesterday our family had our Last Supper--out, that is. Eating out contributes to our overall food bill that has become outrageously high. It's our single biggest monthly expense. Our total monthly food bill for our family of seven is over $1800.00. That sounds like a mortgage payment!
Are we living too high on the proverbial hog? The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as Food Stamps) that provides food aid to people in poverty provides an average benefit of around $900 for a family our size. We could stand to economize. Could we live on what the government would give us if we were part of the SNAP program? Thus was born the challenge:
Eat at the poverty level for 12 months, cutting our food budget in half. Do it with good healthy foods. And make it fun.
BX gets set to devour a stack
We called a family meeting and explained to the children (ages 2-13) what we were planning to do. They readily understood the idea, complete with skeptical looks on the faces of the older ones, and questions about whether we were going to have dinner any more from the younger ones. Assurances of future dinners brought us around to talking about the details of how we're going to pull it off.
First, going out to dinner has got to come to a screeching halt. Dinner for seven of us, even when we're careful, always sets us back $50 to $60. That's two days' food budget for one meal! Dining at home is a must. As for the grocery shopping, the strategy starts with decreasing expensive processed foods, opting instead for simple meals that we make ourselves with produce and grains. Basic strategies in hand, we're embarking on a family journey of saving money, discovery, and creativity. It'll take some serious work. It won't be a SNAP.
