How We Afford Organic, Real Food

Apparently Chef Mario Batali recently took the “Food Stamps Challenge” where he had to feed his family only with the amount of money they would receive if they were on food stamps for a whole week. In the article he whines about “starving” and having to live on rice and beans for lunch every day.

Sure the $31 dollars a week sounds extreme, but add it all up. For a family of five like mine–we would receive about $700 for a month for our grocery budget. That is a pretty sizable budget. I was just this last week reading a number of posts written by a mother feeding her family of 11 people  on a budget of about $700 a month or $150 a week. And her kids are home-schooled, eating lunch at home, not away at school like Mario Batali’s two kids were.

At the end Batali explained: Subsisting on food stamps, especially when food is made from scratch, is doable, he said, “as a way to live, but certainly not as a way to thrive. You can always have pasta with tomato, but that’s not thriving.”

What bugs me about this is that he fed into the false-argument that it’s impossible to feed your family well without a lot of money.  He also said: forget organic and anything pesticide- or hormone-free. “The organic word slides out and saves you about 50 percent.”

People use that argument as an excuse to buy junk food for their family and not feel guilty about it.  I talk to people about real food and they just say to me, “Yeah, but it’s just too expensive.” (And then they answer a call on their i-phone.)

The “too expensive” myth is just not true.  My family eats very well, and we eat on a budget.  There’s a lot of ways to make it work, but here are a few reasons why I believe we are able to do it within a budget.

#1 Eat Less Meat–  My family eats very little meat.  When we do eat it it is in the context of a flavoring ingredient for the meal, rarely do we sit down with a big steak or even a whole chicken breast per person.  Last time I needed chicken breasts for a recipe I was shocked to see that It cost $7.99 a pound for boneless skinless chicken breasts–I turned to my husband and asked how people could even afford to eat meat all time!  Then I promptly moved over a step and picked up a whole chicken for $7.99 for the whole thing, which had enough meat for two meals and made broth for two more meals.

#2 Eat seasonally–  When markets sell food that is in season locally, that means they didn’t have to ship it in from as far away as other foods.  It also means that the food was easier to grow, and didn’t need special hothouses or aquaponics facilities to get the food to grow.  It also means that there is an abundance of that kind of food at that time.  All these factors means that the market sells that food for cheaper prices.  Most seasonal produce  can be found for 99 cents a pound or less.  Even $1.99 a pound is still way less than the $7.99 a pound chicken breasts, or $5.00 a quart mid-winter strawberries.

#3 Buy Whole Foods– The other day on the rice aisle I heard a man on his cell phone telling his wife that Rice-a-Roni was on sale for 79 cents a box.  A box of Rice-a-Roni is 6 oz.  I reached down and got a 1 pound bag of rice for 89 cents.  Pasta is also under $1 a pound which means I could try a recipe for homemade Rice-a-Roni and get three times as much for the same price as a box.

#4 Shop the Sales and Clearance– If you shop at a market it is run on the supermarket model.  Which means, that most of the time food is slightly overpriced, but if you wait for the rotating sales you can get really good prices on just about anything.  I also find that sometimes organic and natural foods don’t move or rotate through the shelves as quickly as other products, which means they have to sometimes be quickly clearanced out before they spoil.

Here are a number of the on sale and clearanced organic and real food purchases I came home from the store with the other day.

1.5 pounds of organic fingerling potatoes for $.99.  These little potatoes have such a wonderful buttery flavor and texture when roasted with olive oil and salt and pepper.

Over a pound of mushrooms for $.99 that Jeremy used to make Sausage-stuffed Portobello Mushrooms with some ground pork we got in our pasture pork bundle from the farmers’ market.

Organic whole milk for $4.25.  The sale wasn’t as good this week, usually it get’s clearanced for 50% off which makes it $3.13–the exact  same price as non-organic milk.

In order to find jams without high-fructose corn syrup we’ve been buying “fancy” jams.  They are pretty expensive, but like everything else at the market, they occasionally go on sale or clearance.  This was $1.99 instead of $3.99.

I was so excited this week to see that the IZZEs were on sale.  The sale only comes up every 3 months.  I had been thinking it was about time and have been religiously checking the aisle with the IZZEs for the last few weeks.  IZZEs are soda pop made from fruit juice and sparkling water.  Normally they are over $6.oo for the four-pack, but every 3 months they go on sale one week for just over $3.00.  That’s when we buy it.  One pack of each flavor, and drink it occasionally as a special treat–usually splitting two bottles between the five of us.

(That natural brew root beer was bought a few weeks ago, when it was being clearanced out.  That frequently happens in the natural foods section as well — items will be cleared out for a different product the store want’s to start selling. )

So here in the case of the jam and the soda pop I recognize that it’s not always cheaper to buy real foods (I could get a 2-litre of artificially-flavored HFCS-filled soda for $.99) but, contrary to many peoples’ arguments, though not always “the cheapest” it is doable.  And part of that is that we don’t always buy strictly organic, but it is definitely possible to include many organic, all-natural, and whole foods into a family’s meals without maxing out the food budget.

We may not be eating truffles in our pasta sauce, but my family eats well.  We are surviving while living on student loans and my husband’s teaching assistanship stipend–and I dare I say even thriving?  We eat whole, we eat healthy, and short from wishing that I could grow all my own food in the back yard–I’m completely satisfied with the food that crosses our table these days.

Chickens and Gardens

We always have to keep our chickens locked up quite a bit more than normal while our vegetable garden is young. Most of the time we prefer to let the girls have a lot of “free ranging.”

They scratch around quite a bit, but then spend lot’s of time in dirt holes they make under our shrubs.  They love to be out in the yard.

But most of the time we try and keep the chickens away from the vegetable garden, because they like to eat tender young greens, and generally trample over everything on their way.   But our chickens do have one important garden job: grub duty. As I turned the soil in our front yard beds last week, I had my boys break up and clods and look for white grubs.

They are the sick-looking younger (larval/pupae? I’m not really an entomologist–just a beekeeper) versions of the noisy summer cicada. They eat the roots of grass–it that’s what they’re under– and make brown, dead areas, and their juicy presence attracts moles. So as the boys searched for the little grubs, we collect them and then take them round back for the chickens.

Chickens LOVE grubs.  It’s like a chicken fiesta when we toss them the little curled up grubs!

So we remember on the occasion we need to buy supplemental eggs, and don’t spend any extra money on “vegetarian diet”-fed chicken eggs, because that isn’t really doing the chickens a favor. And we also try and support keepers of free-range chickens–because that is worth an extra buck.

We’ve been coming to realize that the way we feel best about keeping chickens for our benefit, while allowing them to live life as they were created to, is not for us to fence them in, but for us to fence our garden in!

Eating Less of More

Michale Pollan wrote that 2/3 of our daily calories come from just four foods: corn, soy, wheat,  and rice  (In Defense of Food, p117).   Jeremy and I have been talking a lot lately about actively trying to increase the number of species we eat.  I read something once about a hunter/gatherer man who had been frozen or mummified and there was around 47  different species in his stomach, which were eaten in the last 24 hours before he died.   I’m not sure we’ll ever reach that level of food diversity in our home, but we have been making progress.  We’re finding that the key is to eat less of more.

Milk

I am a milk drinker.  I just love milk.  Cold cereal and milk helped me through the 9pm munchies of three pregnancies.  Since switching over to buying milk in the glass half-gallon bottles, we’ve noticed that we drink less milk than when we were buying milk in gallon jugs.  It just kind of happened because we were buying a similar number of total bottles of milk but there was less milk in them so we were unconsciously altering our milk intake accordingly.  (Michael Pollan talks about how Americans eat with our eyes instead of our stomach.  As in we stop based on external clues like: our plate is empty, rather than internal clues like: I feel full or satisfied.)

Once Jeremy and I noticed our milk consumption had gone down, we talked about it, noting that we didn’t believe it was a bad thing.  I would never deny my children the joy of drinking milk, and I also believe milk is very healthy for children in particular, but I don’t want them filling up their tummies with milk so that they are not hungry for other foods.

Bread

We’ve recommitted to making homemade bread this year.  (I’m always really good about it in January, but when the summer with 100 degrees and 90 percent humidity with no central air conditioning roll around. . .  my resolve waivers substantially.)  Another woman was noting the other day that they eat less bread because they are making it homemade.  (I’m not talking about the initial homemade bread gorge-fest because you realize how delicious is is compared to what you’ve been eating!  That frenzy will subside after the first loaf or two.)

We are definitely eating less bread because we are making it homemade.  I make two decent-sized loaves at a time, and when they are gone they’re gone–I don’t always have time to make another batch up.  So some days we may not eat bread all day.  That’s not bad.  I wonder about the recent influx in gluten intolerances, and wonder if it’s not really wheat that’s to blame, but perhaps it’s because we’ve eaten too much of it along with just corn and soy and rice, and now our bodies are rebelling at that fact.  But if we eat wheat along with dozens of other species our bodies can “tolerate” it better.  So in our house we don’t demonize wheat or gluten, but we are actively working to include more grains in our diet.

And More

Drinking less milk means we drink more water–which is good.  But less milk also means less cold cereal, which is good for two reasons.  First of all cold cereal is expensive, but secondly it gives us the opportunity for more variety in our diet.  We have oatmeal often for breakfast, steel-cut oats are our favorite, and wheat or buckwheat pancakes, or grits.  (Ok we’ve not actually eaten grits for breakfast but we do enjoy polenta for dinner.)  We’ve been working with barley a little bit, mostly as a side-dish and in soup.    St. Patrick’s day is coming up so we’ve got our annual loaf of marbled rye coming up on the radar as well.  (It’s a starting point right?!)  Even though polenta and corn bread are both “corn” I still feel like using them in more applications in their natural form (rather than their oils and starches in processed foods) is a good thing.

I always try and use more beans.  Beans are just really healthy and really nutritious ( and pretty cheap as well). I always feel good about using more beans in our eating.

Eating seasonally is the best way to add variety to our diets.  Not only is it good for us but it keeps us from getting bored with our food as well.  We’re excited for the CSA to help “encourage” us to eat more seasonally this year.

Gardening is a great way for us to eat more seasonally and have more variety.  It’s curious to hear that all over the country it’s the same variety of carrots, and tomatoes on every grocery shelf.  One reason we like gardening is being able to try the different and heirloom varieties of vegetables–like yellow carrots!–adding variety and interest to our diets.

Urban foraging is the last place we plan on finding variety for our diet this year–and that is just plain fun.

: : :  So how do you do it,  what have you cut back on and what have you made room for in your diet to eat more healthy? : : :

Frugality or Not

Does frugality have a limit?

This is my steamer basket. We use it quite frequently to steam vegetables and an occasional dumpling or two. But it’s long been dying a very slow death.

First it lost the three little legs that acted as stilts to hold the basket up out of the water. I’ve improvised since then by placing a wide-mouth canning jar ring in the water and setting the basket on top of it.

Next it lost the little rod and ring standing in the very center which allowed you to lift the basket out of the pot when the vegetables were done. I’ve improvised since then, by simply scooping the vegetables out of the basket with a slotted spoon. This is a little bit tricky though, since the basket is collapsible and since it is now on a very unsteady base (see above) I sometimes have trouble with the basket collapsing on my spoon while I’m trying to scoop.

Finally it has lost one of it’s “petals” which means that it no longer can open and close in one motion, because some of the petals always fall down. Also this leaves a hole so that when I am placing vegetables in the steamer basket, or scooping them out (see above) that I sometimes loose vegetables down the hole into the boiling water.

Now none of these problems are devastating, obviously I can “make it work” still. But do I really need to? If I take this steamer basket down with our recycling and throw it int he scrap metal bin can I just go buy another one already? Or do I need to use this one until it is actually rendered completely useless? (Or has it already passed that point in your opinion?)

What would you do?

Natural Toothpaste

I like to experiment, and try things out. As the daughter of a dentist, and a bit of a DIY geek, I was intrigued by recipes I was seeing online for homemade toothpaste. I had to try it.

Some of the recipes had really strange ingredients in them. I went with a recipe that made the most sense to me (without fake sweeteners or anything) It was a basic paste of baking soda, coconut oil, and a little bit of peppermint oil. Honestly, the first time I tried it I was amazed with how clean and smooth the surfaces of my teeth felt.

My dad (the dentist) was in town and I decided to ask him his “professional opinion” about my homemade toothpaste. He didn’t recommend it–but not for the corporate sponsorship conspiracy reasons you may assume–so read on. The reason is that baking soda is just too abrasive for teeth. My teeth felt smooth and clean at first but eventually that baking soda would wear down tooth enamel creating grooves and making the teeth sensitive without their enamel protection.

It’s like different grits of sandpaper, a superfine grit sandpaper will polish a wood tabletop nicely, but a coarse grit sandpaper will just turn the tabletop into a scratched up mess. He said the only people who might need toothpaste that abrasive are smokers whose plaque literally gets baked on to their teeth by smoking.

The good news was, after recommending that I not use my homemade baking soda tooth paste, he said that the paste he had seen that I had for my boys was another story.

He gave his full recommendation for me to continue using Tom’s natural toothpaste.  (There’s adult versions too.)  He said this toothpaste has been around since the 70s when my dad was in dental school and has a really good reputation.

My dad commended me for trying to use more natural toothpaste.  He, himself, will often use children’s toothpaste over adult toothpaste because it usually contains less extra chemicals.  He said for each extra thing your toothpaste claims to do, other than just clean your teeth, that means another set of chemical complexes is added to the toothpaste.  So if you have toothpaste that is, tartar-fighting, and breath-freshening, and teeth-whitening all in one paste, then you have a paste that is full of chemicals.

I did recently see a homemade recipe for tooth soap that does not use the abrasive baking soda.  So now my curiosity is piqued again.  I’ll have to ask my dentist father his professional opinion on that one.  Though at first glance I myself can see that the Castile soap it calls for would contain glycerin, which is one of the ingredients that people promoting other homemade toothpastes are trying to avoid.

But for now we will just be using the natural alternative Tom’s of Maine toothpaste for our family.   (And as I wrote before, this is all just my own non-sponsored or affiliated opinion.)

Getting the Most out of It

Does your dinner ever begin like this?

In my homemaking experiments I have been amazed in how many meals I can stretch a single broiler/fryer chicken into.  We are a family of five. Two adults and three children.  I can cut the two breasts off a chicken and use that much meat along with other things to feed my family dinner.  Then I can get a second dinner from the legs and thighs.  Then I can boil the rest of the chicken (on very low heat for at least an hour) and get 8-10 cups of chicken broth and another cup or two of meat picked off the bones.  That broth can be used for a least two pots of soup, and the meat can go in a pot of soup calling for chicken meat or even used to add to a separate meal.

Our home grown chickens haven’t ever given us quite this much, because they are smaller birds, but using our own chickens has encouraged me to find ways to use up as much of the animal as possible and to find ways to appreciate and extend it, rather than just devour it in one meal.  And I feel like I have.

Some people say that it is simply unsustainable to use animals as a source of protein and variety in our diets.  I just wholeheartedly disagree.  Like many things in life it simply depends.  It depends on how the animals are raised, how they are processed, how they are used, and how much of them are used.

For my family of five using one whole chicken every month (more in the winter less in the summer) is sustainable (especially when we aren’t afraid to raise our own) and it’s economical.  So, though it occasionally feel’s like I’m head cook in a Charles Dickinson era house, dinner around here sometimes begins with a whole chicken in a boiling pot on the stove.

Why I am not Devoted to Organic (part two)

The organic movement has important and valuable goals, but it doesn’t cover everything. I already explained my choice for buying less-processed food over more-processed organic food products. Today the rationale is about sustainability and community.

We’ve been buying organic milk for a while but recently decided to switch to milk from a local farm and creamery instead.  The farm is within a half hour from us, but all the local stores carry the milk.

They sell all varieties of milk–whole down to skim.  They even sell “creamline milk” which means it is non-homogenized and is what our home cheesemaking books recommend for best results.  They also sell flavored milk (like chocolate) and even sell eggnog from November through the New Year (though I prefer mine homemade).  They also sell little quarts of cream.

The milk comes in glass bottles which help to naturally keep the milk cooler and more fresh, you return the bottles to the store for a $2.75 return on the bottles.  So while it seems like the milk costs as much as organic milk –you get half of it back.  Plus it is just really cool to send the bottles back to be reused–even though we took all our plastic milk cartons to the recycling center–this still seems better.  The dairy trucks drop off fresh milk and pick up the rinsed out bottles in the same trip, so though I’m sure it uses more fuel on the return trip, they aren’t making extra trips for the bottles.

The cows of this farm are fed a diet primarily grown by the farmers themselves on their farmland.  If cows are sick they are treated in seclusion until they are healthy and their milk is clean.  All the milk from the farm is lab-tested on-site to be antibiotic-free.  So–though it is not “organic” there are a lot of things that we really like about this two brothers, plus wives, plus children-run family business.

Supporting local agriculture and communities is something we value highly.  It’s interesting to read about the farm and their ideals and how they felt like they could choose to become a big factory-farm or just try to really specialize and do something really well, providing a great resource to the community and actually being members of the community by things like holding farm tours, and fall-festivals, and even selling soft-serve ice cream from the on-site farm store for fun.

So maybe it would be better if the milk was organic-but maybe not.  Maybe it would be better if it was raw? I’m not so sure–I do know of a local farm that sells raw milk (which can only be sold direct from the farm in the state of Kansas) but I’m still un-decided on the topic of raw.  Jeremy wants his own cow and I’m sure if we had our own cow we would drink the milk raw. . .   But the last issue is that of grassfed versus everything-else-fed.  If we could find a source of dairy products from grass-fed cows that would be my first choice–what I would consider to be the best option–even if it was not organic.

So generally I am choosing to support local and [more] sustainable over organic.  The same holds true for a local flour mill–it’s not organic, but it’s local, it’s supporting family-sized businesses, and the flour from the local mill comes in 25 pound-bags which is more economical and has less waste.  (That is another big pet peeve of mine for organic products–many of them are packaged in such small portions as to not make the price overwhelming–but for my family of five those portion sizes are not realistic and mean a lot more packaging waste by my using them.)

I didn’t get to the “what” and “whys” of the organic that I do buy, so that will have to be another post for another day, but now I’m off to  spend time with my family and enjoy our Christmas festivities.  I’ll return to writing my Urban Pioneer Story here later next week.

Happy Holidays!

Why I am not Devoted to Organic (part one)

For a long time I just bought the basic generic brand peanut butter for my family.  I recently decided to take a peek behind the label and really wasn’t sure what I would find.

 

It didn’t look so bad and I was pleased, at least, that there was no high-fructose corn syrup.  But I decided to check at the store to see if there was a “better” peanut butter to buy instead.  At first I skipped over the “Natural”  crunchy peanut butter (because we all know that the word “natural” has no regulation on it) and was looking to find perhaps an organic peanut butter.  I put a few jars of the same generic brand “organic crunchy peanut butter” into my cart before stopping to actually look at the label.

The organic peanut butter’s  ingredients list looked nearly identical to the original–it just had the word “organic” in front of everything.  “Organic peanuts”,   “organic cane sugar”, “organic soybean oil”.  It was one of those record-scratching music-stopping moments for me as I quickly returned the organic peanut butter to the shelf and took a closer look at the ingredients of the “natural crunchy peanut butter.”

 

Peanuts and salt.  I don’t see the word “organic” on there but I don’t see a long list of unnecessary additives either.  I wonder why peanut butter even needs to have sugar, or molasses in it?  When we use peanut butter it’s always paired with something sweet (jelly, honey, or bananas for sandwiches or apple slices, or raisins and celery for snacking) so there’s no need for the peanut butter itself to be sweetened.

The natural peanut butter is a little different because it needs to be stirred and refrigerated, but I was relieved to discover that it really only needed to be stirred well once, then once it is refrigerated it holds itself together so you don’t have to stir it every single time or anything.  And really, the product requiring refrigeration actually inspires confidence in me since Michael Pollan has warned of eating food-like products that lack the ability to ever  go bad.

Basically what it comes down to is that I value fewer additives and less processing over the “organic” label here.  The natural peanut butter just is more like a “real food” than the alternative.  If I come across an organic brand of natural peanut butter that’s cost-effective for my family I will probably switch to that, but meanwhile I’m ditching the organic.

 

Come back next time for another situation where I have recently decided to abandon the organic label for a superior option,  but also a discussion on my positive feelings for supporting the “organic” products that I do.