Eating Out

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.

Son of Food Stamps

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.

Food Stamps

Food Stamp Coupons

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.

Vegetarian

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.

Grow Your Own

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.

Can I eat?

Real chili?

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.

Out of the mouths of babes

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.