The Daily Grind

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!"

Food Processing

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 $11.50 with 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.

The Grocery List

What to do while in the queue...

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.

Grocery Shopping

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.

Denial

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.

The Plan: Eat poor but not poorly

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.