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June 5, 2008
Food Prices
I keep hearing all these stories on NPR about food prices. All these people who eat a lot of grains, meats, and processed foods are now sacrificing organic vegetables because their food bills are just too high.
I don't think our food bills have changed at all. MR keeps the receipts, we could check. The cost of my Neutrogena face wash and sunscreen moisturizer may have gone up, but we buy our organic veggies at the local Giant (that's a normal grocery store) and we don't buy processed foods or grains. Aside from the occasional Lean Cuisine for when one of us is on the road, we make our own food. One NPR interviewee said that her family used to buy 12 grain bread and now can only afford white. Hmmmm... we don't buy bread.
I really wonder how much money people are spending on processed foods, which cost a ton not just in ingredients but in all the cost of transporting those ingredients to process them all together. When I look at the chips and snacks aisle, or the cereal aisle, I am shocked at how much these products cost. If I felt like I had to fill my cart with baked goods, frozen dinners, chips, cookies, cereal, and all the things I see in my fellow shopppers' carts, I'd probably be feeling budget-crunched too. As it is, our food remains just about the same as a year ago. And we eat a lot of organic veggies, all organic dairy, and quite a bit of Quorn.
Now before you call me classist, please remember that I am a union organizer. I am not just aware of class politics, I am actually doing something about it. I know how it feels to work 12 or 16 or 18 hour days, to be on the road, to not make a lot of money. I spend every day talking with women who have to work several jobs, feed a family, and make do on a middle class income. My mother spent my childhood working three jobs at almost all times. I went to a good college on a shoestring of my father's hard-saved money, what my mom could scrape together, the federal student loan maximum, and an extremely generous scholarship. I'm not a pampered princess, nor a short order cook. But we make our own food and we don't spend a lot of time doing it. We use whole ingredients, some of them organic, and we actually put together our own dishes. MR batch cooks his legume based stews and freezes them in advance. He makes my lunch salads in the morning when he makes his breakfast salad, and I make our dinners. It takes me about 20 minutes to put together a dinner for him that is exactly 639 calories, 30% fat, 30% protein, and 40% carb, crunched on free nutritional software. If I can do that, and not see our food prices go up, why can't your average American figure out a way to eat healthy on a budget?
The reasons are to my mind pretty obvious: lack of information, and aggressive marketing. People aren't taught how to cook or anything about nutrition in school, and the food companies market so well, especially to kids, that people think that bread and chips and cereal and cookies are reasonable to be included in a daily diet.
Anyone who has been reading me for awhile knows that I am no "natural foods" zealot. It's all about calories and nutrition for me, and taste, of course. But I am realizing as food prices go up that the fact that we favor whole, real foods in their natural state is actually saving us money.
Now it's time to make dinner.
Posted by april at June 5, 2008 4:28 PM
Comments
Your food bills aren't affected necause YOU DON'T HAVE KIDS! Get one or two children and it'll be a MUCH different story.
Oh, and being on a semi-starvation diet doesn't hurt, either.
Posted by: Kate at June 5, 2008 3:14 PM
Now Kate, that doesn't make much sense. Sure, our food bill would be higher, all the time, if we had kids, just as it would if we were feeding four instead of two adults, but why would that cause our food bill to increase dramatically relative to the same bill six months ago? Are there special kid foods that are becoming more expensive, while the adult foods are not? There's no law that says you have to feed kids the processed crap that is most affected by increasing food prices. In fact, maybe if parents fed kids more real foods and fewer processed "kid" foods, we might not be faced with an epidemic of childhood obesity.
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Posted by: April at June 5, 2008 3:38 PM
I wish I lived where you are. You try feeding a family of 5 on the same budget as last year, including three young and very hungry children. It's just not possible. And no we don't eat processed foods, and yes I make everything from scratch.
Food inflation is frightening. Yes even the vegetables. I bought some asparagus yesterday. 8 sticks of asparagus tips cost £2 UKP That's $4USD. Eggs cost $5 USD for 6 high quality omega 3 eggs. Scary. I'm considering keeping chickens.
Posted by: Lindsay at June 6, 2008 1:09 AM
I agree with April, and I *have* a nine year old daughter.
My daughter utterly adores my home-made vegetable soup (with mostly organic and some home-grown ingredients). She won't touch "wonderfluff" type white bread, relishes salad greens fresh from the garden with lemon juice and organic olive oil dressing, eats maybe 20 or more pieces of fruit per week (mostly organic), [and so on]
For entertainment she occasionally wanders into the processed food aisles in the supermarket and reads the lists of ingredients from random packets, and counts those that have numbers, and loudly wonders why anyone would buy them. She is also horrified by some of the shopping trolleys she catches sight of (piled high with "non-foods" and unnecessary planet-polluting "disposable" items).
It's all in how you bring them up.
Posted by: Alison at June 6, 2008 3:33 AM
Lindsay - I live in England too.
I've noticed some food products have gone up alarmingly in price - Total 0% Greek Yoghurt, for example, has got up by 1/4 in my supermarket and I eat a lot of that, relying on it for a lot of my daily protein. But then *sigh* it's imported and really, I shouldn't eat it with local yoghurt producers just down the road. I guess my point (not directed at you personally!) is that while food inflation is frightening, it is happening, it's not going to go away, and we need to adapt to it. Keeping chickens isn't a bad idea if you've got the room! Currently I am getting quite obsessive about growing my own veggies, esp salad leaves because they are so expensive to buy for the quantity I eat, and I've even planted an asparagus bed. I keep away from supermarkets as much as I can, and try to eat seasonally when I can, and buy from farmer's markets and the regular weekly market small producers (I am lucky that I have that option where I live, and also that I am just feeding myself.)
Asparagus is always expensive though, and more so this year because the yield is lower than ever because of the bad weather the growers' have had. :-(
Posted by: Sara at June 6, 2008 6:29 AM
Frozen veggies are still pretty much the sam price, and they almost always have comparable nutrition to fresh veggies-- they are great for soup, stirfry, etc. You could throw some over pasta even for the non-CR'd. Shopping when stuff is on sale saves a ton of money. Even using coupons on the processed gak-y stuff will save money. And if people need 'filler' foods like wonderfluff bread, beans and legumes are extremely cheap but have good nutritional values. And buying in-season veggies is always cheapest. Even as far as cereal goes, a huge bag of puffed rice, corn or wheat is less than a dollar. I think with careful budgeting and avoiding impulse buys it is still very feasible to eat healthily.
Posted by: Kat at June 6, 2008 7:17 AM
My food bill has gone up significantly, and yes vegetables, nuts and fruits have gone up in price too. Doesn't fuel prices also drive up all food prices...
Posted by: Matt at June 6, 2008 8:34 AM