Saving Money on Food

David Trammel's picture

Its Spring and alot of things are now in season and cheap!

For those of us with gardens we are still a few months from harvesting but in the mean time we can benefit from the professionals and shop at local Farmer's Markets to get great local produce as well as use some tricks and tips to eat healtier and save money.

Share your tips in this thread.

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Here is my first, I ran across this post on Root+Revel

https://rootandrevel.com/save-money-eat-healthy-budget/

Some of them I do but there are several, using online coupons and discounts, as well as comparison shopping online versus local, that have me thinking about taking the time for a tutorial/example post. I especially like the idea of buying discounted store gift cards, then using them to stay within my budget.

Know your price point, and only buy when an item falls to it. I shop Kroger; their label butter usually sells for $2.79 lb. Generally I won't buy till it hits $2.29, and I watch for coupons. They have extra-specials on weekends and butter was $1.99 with a digital coupon. I bought three pounds and put two in the freezer. The week before, they had a special on meat: $.99 lb on chicken breasts/thighs and on a half pork shoulder. I think I bought 6 lbs of chicken and 6 of pork. I ate on the pork for a week. I don't really like tomato sauce, but I have discovered that I love salsa, and I buy a jar whenever it's on sale. A couple of tablespoons of salsa liven up grits, rice, whatever...

Know when they mark down meat, produce, bread, etc. and regularly check out all the places where they pile the markdowns. And watch for mark-down stickers. Last week a woman had my brand of bread in her cart with a discount sticker. I made the ole bee-line for the bread aisle, and sure enough, there was my flax and fibre bread ($1.88) marked down to $.39!

Use markdowns to try out new items. One of the rare times I was in Wal-Mart, they had in the produce department, little baggies of Green Giant cubed spaghetti squash. Just nuke it in the microwave for 5 minutes, break it into "spaghetti" and enjoy. Of all the stupid... But it was marked down, so I took it. Worked really well, I froze what I didn't eat, and used a little bit at a time in my morning grits. And I will definitely buy some squash in season, nuke it, and put it in the freezer.

I should add that I only shop Kroger, and I usually shop just one particular store, because I know exactly (almost exactly) where everything is, and I don't spend time wandering through aisles.

I am all over the fresh cheeses! A friend of mine has a lot of health issues and has had to cut out carbs. I tipped her off about the joy of cheeses in the deli. On a good day you can find them marked down at much as 75% off. Her husband was marveling that he was spreading $25 lb cheese on his Sunday toast for a fraction of the cost.

Finally, condiments are your friends. I discovered "truffle dust" (marked down): powdered mushrooms, garlic, and something Japanese and mildly spicy. You can eat pretty low on the food chain if you can dress it up with salsa, spices, cheese, etc.

Magpie's picture

I've seen a lot of lists of tips on how to save money on food, and this is definitely one of the better and more comprehensive ones I've come across.

I have found that I save a lot of money by being flexible in my eating, and not just by eating things that are in season (though I do that as well). In the past 18 months, the price of butter has more than doubled locally. My husband and I use a lot of it--500g (about a pound) every week. The increase in price was making a noticeable dent in our food budget, so I explored other options for cooking fats. I now get pork leaf fat from a local butcher and render it into lard. It's less than half the cost of butter and, if rendered light, can be used in a 1:1 substitution with butter in cooking and baking. I also prepare a breakfast spread for my husband with it by cooking down minced onion until crisp with land and salt. This is a common eastern European condiment (called schmaltz amongst other names), and he loves it. As a bonus, it's kept him from eating teaspoons of butter, as he had previously been in the habit of doing. Additionally, when avocados are in season (they are grown locally), we can get them for $0.50-1.00 each, and that's cheaper than butter by volume as well, so we have options.

Growing a garden has been a big help, as has shopping around. In our previous city, we went to 13 different places on a regular basis (more than once per six months) to get the lowest price on good food. Here we visit about 10, as it's a smaller city. I do barter with some of my coworkers for milk/meat (sometimes in the form of live animals), though, which helps keep cost low as well. The two of us spend NZ$40-50 (US$27-35) per week for food, which is less than half of what the typical couple spends, and we eat very well. The other night, we made baklava for a potluck, with from-scratch phyllo, which was a big hit.

I find that the biggest thing helping me to save money on food is that I approach it with a sense of adventure, and not self-deprivation. I could just eat rice and beans, but that gets old after a while. Learning to make tasty, varied dishes out of basic components has been key to my personal satisfaction--there is little better than home-made tamales, tacos, potstickers, bao, uszka (a polish ravioli with mushrooms & onions), lasagne, pizza, double dumpling soup, danish pastries, and other wholesome, tasty dishes. After experiencing these dishes home-made, there is no temptation to go out to eat or buy packaged, premade items from the store.

David Trammel's picture

"I find that the biggest thing helping me to save money on food is that I approach it with a sense of adventure, and not self-deprivation. I could just eat rice and beans, but that gets old after a while. Learning to make tasty, varied dishes out of basic components has been key to my personal satisfaction--there is little better than home-made tamales, tacos, potstickers, bao, uszka (a polish ravioli with mushrooms & onions), lasagne, pizza, double dumpling soup, danish pastries, and other wholesome, tasty dishes. After experiencing these dishes home-made, there is no temptation to go out to eat or buy packaged, premade items from the store."

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What a great quote that will make when I get around to the tutorial on frugal cooking. It sums up what I think the green wizard phylosophy on that is, that eating for less doesn't mean you have to settle for bland and monotonous meals.

I don't know how many times I've seen ads for survival pantries which consist of 50 pounds of beans and 50 pounds of rice. I suspect that for most people with a limited experience with living on less, cutting the cost of your meals means just that, beans and rice. When its not.

As you say, learning to cook from scratch using easily bought and less costly basic components, is not only cheaper but more nutritious. And can be loads of fun as you experiment and try out new recipes and dishes.