Food Troubles

I just got back from Wild Oats with groceries that will last for the week, at least I hope so. I have some other staples here to supplement that, but our goal is to stop eating out as much, and to eat more meals at home.

My problem is that I tend to like really good food. I have a hard time cooking unless the food is good; I use fresh spices, organic produce, and try to use hormone-free beef, lamb and chicken as much as possible. I love really fresh, good food, the kind that was mooing or growing in the sun recently. The problem is the cost. I spent $100 on groceries today, and I hope that will get me through Wednesday or Thursday. I rarely make it through the week on less than $200. I don't know how bad that is for a family of four.

The Motley Fool makes some recommendations, including joining a CSA. Our CSA, unfortunately, has a waiting list! Our name finally came up on the list in August but were unsure if we were staying in Tucson. Since it is an upfront cost of nearly $300, we decided to wait (and need to get back on the list now).

Get Rich Slowly also had a few articles on saving money at the grocery store: Tips and Tricks to Save on Food and How to Feed Yourself on $15/week. Here's another one from We're in Debt: Eight Ways to Save at the Grocery Store.

I had hoped to get by on $75 this week, but I had to buy chlorine-free diapers (my daughter gets rashes otherwise -- she struggles with eczema) and we started buying organic milk. Mostly I think the cost has to do with Tucson, and the fact that water for agriculture is expensive and most items are shipped in, increasing the cost. I know when I visited my family in Idaho, I was practically drooling at the fruit stand, the costs were so low. And my parents used to buy a side of beef every year, too. Along with the deer or elk my dad killed hunting, it usually provided meat for the entire year.

One of the difficult things for me to adjust to is city living. When we ran out of milk as a kid, we drove to my grandmother's dairy farm and dipped a couple of glass jars into the stainless steel tank. We rented a pasture and raised our own beef one year. I ate so much wild game (pheasant, grouse, deer, elk) that I did not even know these things were unusual (or in some cases, a delicacy). I feel like a foreigner in most cities; what, exactly, is normal here? Butchering my own beef and skinning the carcass was normal growing up. I raised and helped butcher my own chickens. Living in the city where everything is under cellophane is much cleaner, I'll admit, but also a lot more expensive.

For me, one of the difficult things about saving money is that you have to try, over and over, to make a concept work. It's a lot like learning a language; repetition makes for ease of use. For me today, I went into the store with a definite list, I had a budget, and I still went over my budget by $25. I could have stopped when I got my organics and chlorine-free diapers, loaded the kids up, and driven to Safeway to buy my apple juice and cheddar cheese, but I did not. It seems like a waste of gas and resources to do that, too, in addition to taking twice as long.

I suppose I ought to congratulate myself on small triumphs. Today I found myself putting back the bunch of organic kale ($1.99) and the organic leek (yes, that's leek, singular, for $2.49), even though they were both in plastic bags already. I bought nearly no produce there because it was outrageously expensive. That saved me $4.49 (plus tax) on my total. I also bought a jar of apple juice because I needed a big glass jar to make sun tea, so for $5.49 I got apple juice AND a reusable jar, when I planned that much for just a jar.

Just like debt becomes a ball that grows, reducing our costs is also a ball that grows slowly, over time. I need patience, as well as discipline, to get through this period.

*sigh*