How to Save Money on Your Groceries ©
Posted: Thursday, September 01, 2011
by Arlene Wright-Correll
http://www.learn-america.com
I rarely get to read best sellers until they are about 5 to 10 years old and usually after I have found them in a yard sale for 25 cents. It is not that I do not use the library, but simply because I have a back log of 25 cent best sellers plus whatever other books people hand down to me.
Recently I was given an old New York Times Bestseller titled, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral” by Barbara Kingsolver and it was about their year of food life and how she and her family decided to try and leave less of a global warming footprint on our planet by growing and raising their own food and supplementing what they could not grow or raise with buying from local farmers or farmer markets. This included harvesting, canning and freezing seasonal crops and meats for future use in this family of four’s designated year.
Regardless, the book was a good and interesting read and it caused me to look at what I was putting on our own kitchen table.
Raising a family of 7 over the years and living in an area that easily got snowed in for a week or so, plus raising them through a “duck and cover” and a couple of economic lean times our credo for many years was to keep a 2 year supply of food stuff on hand, constantly rotating it while using it and even having a complete store room for it.
As time went on and the “chicks” left the nest we eventually came down to 2 people and as of this writing though we are not “ducking and covering”, we have entered into global warming whether one believes it or not and an economic crisis that I do not think we, this country or even many countries will ever recover from thanks to all our elected politicians. God bless us and we must take the blame because we elected them believing in our country’s credo, “By, for and of the people”.
Let me say that reading this book did not cause me to give up meat, run out and raise my own chickens, turkeys or forage in the woods for mushrooms. What it did do was make me look long and hard at what we were doing to feed ourselves.
One of the things we were doing and had always been doing was buying locally whenever we could and that did not mean our local grocery store, but it did mean our local farmer’s markets. It did not mean canning, but it did mean freezing. I no longer do canning. It did not mean plowing up the north forty and putting in veggie gardens, but it did mean planting a few less perennial flowers and putting in some tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, radishes, onion sets and cucumbers. Even though I had thought I foiled our local rabbit population by planting lettuce in waist high planters the planters were the perfect height the night our neighbor’s steers got out and visited our gardens proceeding to eat all the lettuce.
The 12 tomato plants produced more than I could give away so I did make a lot of spaghetti sauce and freeze it. The onions went into those sauces and the peppers into the fresh salads each day and some even made it into the freezer.
We are fortunate to have nearby, several Amish run salvage stores and we use them. We do not have a problem with a small dent or a torn label if the “use by” date says Nov. 18, 2014and it is only July 11, 2011. At 45 to 90 cents a can for items that are usually 1.98 to 2.95 a can I will buy all that are on the shelf providing it is something we use regularly to say nothing of the fact that it would cost me more than that to can it. As I have always checked the ingredients, I now check the sell by dates. What harm can a slightly dented package of our favorite spaghetti do to us if the sell by date is 2 years away? Since we no longer keep a 2 years supply of food stuffs on hand we do have a 3 to 6 months supply to get us though whatever disaster looms ahead.
We try to buy free range eggs from our neighbors who have hens simply because they are better for us, taste a lot better and it gives them another customer to help pay for their feed. We buy local cheeses and though we do not eat a lot of meat any longer, we still do eat meat and only buy what we like when it is on sale and we freeze it. We have local growers of goat and lamb but we do not seem to like these thus they do not go into our freezer. I know we can get local beef, but it would take us 10 years to eat a whole steer! We simply do not eat meat every day but only about 4 to 8 ounces of it a week because that is all our bodies really need.
While we have not gone, pre-book reading, or post book reading, crazy, we are just trying to live within our budgets and deal with this crazy inflationary spiral as our social security checks buy us less and less each month.
Upon further reflection I decided to figure out what it costs me to feed 2 people at each daily meal and since I keep track of every dime we spend I went into our computer and got a grocery report from 1/1/2010 to 12/31/2011 and it worked out that we spent $2179.02 for groceries divided by 365 days summed up to $5.97 per day or 99 cents per person for each of the 3 meals we consumed 3 times a day.
I also decided to find out what we had spent for the first 243 days of 2011 and that came out to $1823.77 to date or $1.25 per meal per person which indicated a 26 cent increase per meal and that just about covers the cost of prices raised from 10 to 40% since January 2011 at least on the things we normally buy.
These figures do not include wine (a wholesome food product we cannot do without), cleaning products, paper goods or anything else. I also know at some point one of the readers of this article will point out to me that I am using energy to run our freezer and even this computer to write the article with. Yes, yes, yes, but we try to turn off the lights whenever we leave a room for more than 5 minutes, we only put on our heat and air conditioner when we can not longer put on any more clothes to sit, stand or walk comfortably or take any more off without being labeled nudists! We make a long list in what we term is a “route order” and only go to town once a week or even less in order to not only use less gas but to try to keep within our monthly gas budget with has taken on the dimensions of a monthly mortgage payment! In other words we are trying to do our little bit to leave less of a footprint and to help our local economy and to save money so we can comfortably live in the style we have grown into!
I was in the grocery store the other day picking up some local fresh peaches and plums when the woman in front of me started to put her groceries on to the cashier’s counter. It contained at least 6 twelve to twenty four packs of soft drink, assorted chips, Little Debbie type products, hot dogs, no fresh fruit or vegetables, cheeses or nuts. The total was $143.87 and I was amazed that someone would constantly pay that much each week to commit suicide or un-internally shorten her family’s lives.
Oh well, different strokes for different folks and if you can find Ms. Kingsolver’s book I highly recommend it.
May the Creative Force be With You.
Arlene Wright-Correll
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