>>Also, I notice that a lot of the food you eat is healthy, but not necessarily the most frugal. Like, mac and cheese would probably be cheaper to make than stuff with nuts, etc. And that soy bean oil is cheaper than coconut oil. But, for the healthy food you buy, you make sure to buy it in the cheapest way possible. So my question is this:
Are you frugal because a healthy lifestyle is important to you, and this is how you make it affordable? Or would you be just as frugal if healthy food wasnt as important to you? If you had to make a choice between frugality and health, health would come first, correct?<<
This is a hard question to answer directly, maybe because I don’t understand it very well.
I often hear people complain that it’s so expensive to eat a healthy diet. While healthy food can be more expensive, I don’t think that a limited food budget should equate with low quality food. Right now I’m spending about $600 on food monthly for a family of 11, but that’s a pretty generous amount and it allows me to buy more than a month’s worth of food. Since my monthly food budget is lower than most people, even those who don’t keep kosher or eat healthily, it would seem even if I wasn’t particularly concerned about health I’d have to be frugal to eat well on this amount.
My food budget is what it is because that’s what I have. I can spend it any way I want and on whatever foods I want, but in the end, that’s the limitation. I choose to buy foods that nourish us because I think health is important. But staying within my financial constraints is primary to me – I believe in living well with whatever you have, so having limitations doesn’t denote deprivation to me.
I’m frugal for two reasons – 1) my financial resources aren’t unlimited; 2) I believe our resources are sent to us by H-shem (G-d) and it’s our responsibility to use them well. There’s no joy for me in spending more than I need to just because I have it. My dh once asked me if we were millionaires if I’d shop the same way, and I told him there’s very little I would change.
By being careful I have fewer choices to make between health and frugality in regards to the foods I buy. But if I didn’t have as much money to spend as I do – if the choice was between going hungry and having healthy foods – rather than let my family starve I’d feed them cheaper and less healthy foods. (But as I said above, I don’t think this is usually the choice.) I already make this choice to a degree – my strong preference is to eat only grass fed meats, pastured eggs, and raw milk from grass fed cows. Also, I’d like to only use organic produce from local farmers. If I had the money, I’d gladly spend more for all of these choices, but I won’t financially overextend myself for them. I do the best I can and I’m okay with that.
Avivah
I, too, would love to get 100% organic everything, but it’s still possible to eat well on a small budget, as you’ve demonstrated. Unprocessed food is not expensive. Organic convenience foods are expensive, but they’re not necessary to a healthy diet.
Exactly – most of the expense lies in the processing. As far as organic convenience foods, I’ve looked at a number of them and they don’t seem significantly better than their junky counterparts.
Examples of what I meant is-
If you eat noodles, and are buying them instead of making them from scratch, whole wheat noodles are 2 times the price of regular noodles, at least in my area. Whole wheat, even ground at home, is more expensive than regular white flour. Sucanat/honey/agave nextar is more expensive than white sugar. Coconut oil and olive oil are more expensive than soy bean oil, etc…
So you don’t only buy what is cheaper, you do buy what is more expensive when there are health concerns. Yes, you manage to buy the cheapest of the healthier foods, but it still would be cheaper to buy less healthy, but you make that decision to spend more on something more nutritious. Some people would call that “non frugal” choices, but I see it as spending money on what is important to you, as in health.
I think its amazing that you have a low food budget, stick to it, and manage to get healthy foods with that budget. But if someone doesnt have enough money to go around for certain things, would you suggest to them to buy things like coconut oil when they can buy soy bean oil, a less healthy but much cheaper option?
I really think that it’s kind of a fake market. I don’t know quite how to explain this, but when buying lower quality products that are cheaper, many end up paying more in the end, in terms of health, doctor’s bills, etc.
what a fantastic, concise point, Chava!
Do you get grass-fed beef? I am pretty sure given your location that you know of Kol Foods, just wondering if you’ve ever tried their meat. I am hoping to make a purchase soon when they start shipping.
Also, If I am remebering correctly I think I’ve notice that you don’t serve very much, if any fish. Is this for frugal reasons or do you not like it? I know wild fish is much more expensive, but I often use cans of salmon or tuna.
No, I don’t get grass fed beef because of the cost – I found an Amish farmer who will sell a whole cow directly to me but logistically it’s complicated to arrange the shechita and processing. I haven’t heard of Kol Foods, so I’ll do a google search and see what I come up with.
You’re right, I don’t serve much fish, but not because I have a problem with it. I buy wild frozen salmon – that’s what we’ve had for Shabbos lunch the last couple of weeks (which is why you don’t see it on my weekly menus) – and sometimes canned tuna or salmon. I like to keep the salmon for Shabbos, yom tov, or special weeknight dinners because of the cost. If I see a great sale on canned salmon I’ll stock up but it’s been a long time that there’s been a sale so I’ve long since used up what I bought, and it’s been eased out of our regular menu until I can get it at a price I find reasonable.
Mamamoomoo – I wouldn’t tell someone to eat foods that will harm their health, like soybean oil or margarine. I’d give suggestions for ways to frugally eat well, much like what I’ve shared here over time. For example, bone broths are ideal for the person on a strict budget and will drastically boost the value of their meals when eaten. As far as oils, you can use the shmaltz from the chicken you roast on Shabbos to cook with, and butter isn’t cheap but it’s cheaper than coconut oil for most people and is also good. There are always more expensive and less expensive choices, and a person has to learn to recognize them.
Chava – I totally agree, and considered addressing this when I wrote the post – I call it false economy. That’s why it’s so hard for me to answer a question like this, because I don’t believe that inexpensive food is low cost food. As the saying goes, ‘If you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other’, meaning that you’ll reap the consequences of whatever action you take. If you eat food that is unhealthy, you’ll have higher doctor or dentist bills, lowered quality of life due to low energy or pain, kids with increased behavior problems, etc. To me that’s not a savings.
Thanks aviva.
My father the cardiologist would FLIP if he knew I was making stuff with shmaltz. 😛
mamamoomoo, if you can get a hold of the book “Real Food” by Nina Planck, I think you will see a lot of research about saturated fats, that really might make your father flip, but not for the reasons you might suspect. I second the Mary Enig recommendation Avivah already gave you.
Avivah,in case you did not find kol foods, here is the link to their website:
http://www.kolfoods.com/
Mamamoomoo – your father the cardiologist would benefit himself by doing some reading on the research! Think about this for one second from a purely logical perspective – if for many centuries native peoples across the globe were eating only fats like shmaltz, why didn’t heart disease show up until processed oils were introduced into American diets in the 1920s?? Nina Planck’s book is a good read – last week I was mentally composing a list of nutrition related books I found helpful, and this was one of them.
Dina, thanks for the link. I never heard of this company and I think it’s fantastic that they’re doing what they’re doing. I’m going to give them a call tomorrow and see what they have available and what the prices are like, since the website doesn’t yet have that info. It looks like just the kind of meat I’d love to buy – the only question is if I can afford it!
While it’s true that you can hold certain foods side-by-side and see that the healthier choice is the more expensive (e.g. whole wheat vs. white flour, free-range vs. battery eggs), this is not the most significant place for most people to cut costs. Most people squander a large portion of their food dollar on processed foods, salty snacks, and just plain waste (discarded leftovers, spoilage, etc.) Those are the areas to tackle first, rather than fretting over a few cents’ difference between white and whole wheat flour. I can make a loaf of ww bread for about 50 cents. I could make the white bread loaf for maybe 30 cents. Meanwhile, I could easily blow 3 dollars or more on a carton of ice cream or a bag of chips (and sometimes I do! I’m not perfect!). The point is to be honest with yourself about which costs can and should be cut, and which are a good value for your money.
Frugality is about getting the best *value* for your money, not necessarily spending the smallest amount possible on every purchase. In this example, ww flour is a much better value because of the higher nutritional value, higher fiber, and lower glycemic index. Free-range eggs may be twice the price of battery eggs, but keep that in perspective: a 1-egg portion still only costs 25 cents, and it would be hard to come up with a 25-cent portion of another food that had as much nutritional value.
When I really need to cut costs on my food bill, I totally shun the junk food and processed food, and feed my family a lot of lentils, pea soups, rice and beans, whole baked potatoes, oatmeal, whole wheat bread, pastas, and cheap veggies (carrots, cabbage, etc.), supplemented with smaller amounts of cheese, eggs, yogurt and milk. Because I shop carefully and stock my pantry, I have always had enough slack in my budget to buy the organic milk and free-range eggs I strongly prefer. But of course, if someone is living very close to the edge, they might need to use powdered milk and battery eggs for a period of time. If they followed the rest of these suggesions, their diet would still be *far* better than the average American’s.
Aviva, again, that book sounds like a good suggestion, if I can manage to find it…
And about educating my father- he’s a lost cause, so “towing the party line” that he’s unwilling to hear any other perspective, and would just call it quackery.
The most I can do is educate myself, which is what I’ve been doing. Thanks for helping with the process.
I just received an email about the inquiry I sent for the grass fed beef – yikes, it is so expensive! Not that it comes as a huge surprise, but I was hoping it might only be double what I pay for regular meat. The cheapest meat they have is the box of ground beef – it contains 9 one puond packages of ground beef and about a pound of bones, for 9.25 lb. I would so much love to order this but it’s just not in the cards for me now. I’m glad to have the contact info, though, and when something changes I’ll know who to be in touch with!
I couldn’t remember the prices I was quoted, but I knew it was high. Trying to somehow work an order into my budget and hoping it might work out, although, unfortuntaley, i know it will not be able to be our sole meat source.