For the first time, this week, I made active changes in what I was buying at the store as a concession to inflation. I had been conserving and trimming luxuries for a while, but yesterday marked the first time I downgraded in the selections I was making. It’s not that we haven’t been making changes for a while; the biggest shift we have made in our household since I (voluntarily) stopped teaching has been in the way we eat. We no longer eat out, for primarily budget reasons, and I cook almost everything we eat at home, primarily for health reasons. For the first year of our plan, my partner still frequently bought lunch or coffee at work and we would eat out with friends. We joined a CSA in order to receive organic produce on a weekly basis, nearly all year round. As our savings dwindled and inflation started climbing we’ve trimmed luxuries, like cookies and soda and juice (not that we purchased these frequently, but we now purchase them only in times of desperate need). When we learned my partner’s cholesterol levels were dangerously imbalanced, we cut out the purchased lunches and I began cooking nearly everything we put into our mouthes in an effort to change the cholesterol profile through diet (which we did).
Through all of this, though, I have remained committed to certain principles of food purchasing and consumption. I don’t buy industrial meat, and with the higher cost of free range and pastured or organic meat we hardly ever eat it. From the local organic market, we buy basics — oils, flour, légumes in bulk, peanut butter, milk, butter — and fair trade items when they’re available — coffee, sugar, and spices. Several of the companies we support are cooperative businesses, namely Organic Valley, King Arthur and Frontier. While I’d likely be choosing their products anyway, it’s important to me that our household dollars are going to support ethical labor practices and helping to keep workers and farmers in control of their own livelihoods (yes, all my bank accounts are with credit unions, too).
With the close attention I’ve been paying to cost, I’ve noticed that the local market is consistently less expensive than Whole Foods for the items I buy regularly; not that Whole Foods is inexpensive, it’s just usually the only option for processed organic food. For our household cleaning supplies, we use almost exclusively Seventh Generation products: in addition to being free of fragrances and dyes, they are vegetable-oil based and use a large amount of post-consumer recycled paper and plastic. I could draw you a map of which stores carry them at the lowest prices: toilet paper at the Giant (by about $3 per package, surprisingly); dishwasher detergent at Whole Foods (only because they are the only store to carry the larger size since Target stopped stocking the products); Whole Foods again for paper napkins (because the organic market stopped carrying the brown option in larger packages); dish soap, trash bags, paper towels, laundry detergent and bathroom cleaners, all at the local organic market. I won’t bore you with the list of what we use for shampoos and soaps: suffice it to say that they all cost the least at the local organic market, too. When I buy produce beyond what comes with our farm subscription, I get it from the weekly farmers’ markets (fruit, mostly) or the organic market (onions, mostly).
The non-organic things that I buy at either the Giant or the new competitor are all related to my partner’s new cholesterol-busting diet: Cheerios (it really does help lower cholesterol, we’ve found), pretzels (the no-fat alternative to corn chips), bread (Roman Meal Double Fiber has the best fiber-to-sugar ratio of sliced wheat bread), and egg substitute. This week, for the first time, I chose the store brand egg substitute over Egg Beaters: it was a dollar less expensive per container. It’s not like the Egg Beaters chickens are any less crowded and warped than the store brand, right? Industrial egg products are industrial egg products. I also bought, for the first time in years, regular garlic at the Giant rather than organic garlic at the market. It’s garlic, right? Also, it was less than half as much.
Neither of these are major substitutions, but the fact of the choice I was making gave me pause. While I admire people who stretch their family budgets by buying in bulk or clipping coupons from the Sunday circular or stocking up on food close to its expiration date, that isn’t me. I keep — and use! — store coupons for the things we buy regularly, but I’m not going to switch to mac and cheese dinners (or ramen noodles) just because they’re 10 for a buck this week (they’re not, as far as I know, by the way: no need to rush to the store). I would prefer to winnow down to an ‘all lentils and brown rice all the time’ diet rather than buy the processed crap that’s the cheapest.
Over the past two years I’ve already learned that I’m willing to do a lot more cooking, and the attendant lot more dish washing, than I previously realized. I’ve always liked to cook, but never before have I had to make such a stark choice to commit to more labor in the kitchen to gain the freedom from laboring for someone else, as well as the resources to spend on the products I value. Garlic at $6 per pound, I learned this week, is apparently not one of them. I’m not ready to say that I’d get a job in order to keep buying fair trade organic sugar, but I’m also not sure that I wouldn’t.
