Posted by Dave on August 24, 2010
I picked up 272 pounds of beef from a farm on Saturday, which cost me $1,088 ($4 per pound). I recently purchased a freezer (9 cubic feet) to put the meat in. Which if used only for this load of meat would increase the cost per pound marginally, but it will get additional use over the years that I own it, reducing the cost of purchasing it. Other than the freezer, I have basically pre-purchased most of a year’s worth of meat for my wife and I. We will still probably buy chicken and pork (mostly bacon), but not significant portions of it. There are a few reasons why I decided to buy my meat straight from the farm rather than going through the grocery store:
- It was cheaper: My wife and I have significantly increased our meat consumption over the past few months, as I discussed in a previous post around paleo/primal eating. Eating this way was having a very positive impact on our health, but was significantly more expensive than eating beans and rice a few days a week. The $4 per pound its cost is less than the majority of cuts of meat we were able to find at the store, even when it was on sale.
- I know where my food comes from: I visited the farm where my meat came from and seen the herd that my animal was coming from. When we went and picked up our frozen meat, we were given a tour of the farm. We walked the pasture that the animals were grazing in, discussed with the farmer his philosophy on the business he was in and saw the condition that my food grew in. Couple this experience to what I had been eating – that meat had probably grown up in something like this, which requires significant antibiotics. Likely because of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions and also because the grains that the cattle are being fed make the animals sick. Instead my beef had never been given drugs – it grew up on a pasture with plenty of room.
- My beef is “green”: Part of the problem with conventional farming is that it requires significant resources to produce a pound of meat. It takes a lot of energy to create the grains that are fed to livestock. The growing of the grains have a significant impact on the environment from tilling of the land, as well as the inputs such as seed, fertilizer, and pesticides. At some point in the future this is going to become a significant problem, which is discussed in two books I’ve read “The Vegetarian Myth” and “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization”. Instead I bought grass-fed and grass finished-meat. The grass just keeps growing with little inputs. When talking to the farmer while walking through his field, he noted that the land we were walking on was essentially bare 2 years ago when he started farming. Currently, it is an incredibly lush pasture that supports his herd of cattle – this farmer is actually helping the land rather than removing needed topsoil.
- It is Healthier : Grass-fed beef has been found to have a higher quantity of conjugated lineolic acid, which is thought to have anti-cancer properties.
These were the main reasons why I bought the beef from where I did. As a side-note, if you were to purchase the same amount of meat from a farmer who raised their animals in a grain-fed feedlot, you could save approximately 50% over what I spent. So, although the beef I bought was significantly cheaper than what can be found at the grocery store, it is possible to find cheaper meat straight from the farm. I chose to pay a premium for grass-fed beef because of the reasons noted above.
Do you buy your meat in bulk? Do you take an interest in where your food comes from? Do you pay a premium for organic or other specialized food?
Posted by Canadian Dream on July 21, 2010
Our $25 food challenge has come to a close. The final spending numbers are as follows:
- Margarine $4
- 8 L of Milk $8
- 1lb Coffee $1.98
- Fruit (5 nectarines, 4 plums, 3 apples, 5 peaches) $5.82
- Fresh Tomatoes (5) $1.27
- TOTAL $21.07 (84% of budget)
So you can see we actually didn’t even hit the total budget during our 18 day experiment. In total we spent $0.29 per day per person. What surprised me about this challenge was how easy it was to pull off with a bit of planning and focusing in on what we had in the house to eat. To be honest I think the fact we had two packages of veggies from my farmer which made this so easy (which included green onions x 2, radishes x 2, small bag fresh greens (spinach etc) x 4, parsley). If you included the retail value of that food that would bring us up to $0.71 per person per day. Our diet was actually fairly normal for the entire couple of weeks and we ate fruit and veggies fairly regularly.
Actually my wife like the idea of cleaning out the pantry and freezer so much that she wants use to do something similar at least twice a year going forward to prevent food clutter from building up. By the way, I define food clutter as that stuff you buy to try something new and then forget about for two months before you use it again (like rice paper wraps). So overall the challenge can’t have been that difficult if she wants to repeat it.
Yet the challenge was useful for me to realize a few new lessons on how we approach our food:
- Forget Name Brand - It’s all about what is on sale, not the name on the package (especially for generic items like pasta) . If you follow that rule you can cut back a fair amount on some grocery bill. When in doubt look for the cost per unit mass/volume on the shelf tag to find out what is the cheapest, when you hit a sale load up the pantry.
- Junk Food is a Budget killer – I don’t think I really understand how much a bag a chips is until you realize how many potatoes or apples you can get instead. Cutting back on this will make a huge difference to your grocery bill and likely improve your health.
- Eat around what you have, not what you feel like – Most people know that dangers of impulse shopping what is interesting is we don’t consider how often we do impulse cooking which requires picking up something from the store. I was guilty of doing this a fair amount, but now I realize if you plan your meals around what you have you will make less waste and throw out less leftovers. Also you can then shop by the sale to restock your pantry, rather than paying full price for things that keep for a long time (can soup, oil, flour, etc).
- Plan Your Meals Weekly – This is likely the key to eating on the cheap and ties into #3 as well. By planning what to eat in advance you can make themes for a week. For example, I had some ham in the freezer so we planned chickpea ham salad, chef salad and carbonara for one week. Also you can plan to eat your leftovers. This can be a huge amount of savings in money and time since you don’t have to think about what to eat. You can walk in the door get your defrosted meat from the fridge and start cooking.
- Get Creative – Perhaps one of the more interesting dishes I made involved me looking at our pantry and trying to figure out what to do with a can of pork and beans and some pasta. Thanks to Google I managed to dig out a recipe a template and then just adjusted it to what I had in the house. It was surprisingly good to eat despite my concerns of trying it.
In the end, eating on the very cheap is entirely possible, especially for short periods of time. The trick is to do an inventory of what you have and plan around that. Also with a bit of work I think most people could cut their food bill in half just by shopping sales and eating what you have. So would you try something similar? If you have, what did you learn?
This post is now part of the Carnival of Personal Finance.
Posted by Dave on July 13, 2010
With Tim in the middle of his $25 food challenge, I thought I would weigh in with how I am currently eating. I had previously written about my $50 grocery bill back in February, but much as changed since that time in my household budget. I became really interested in what was actually healthy to eat and started reading books (as I normally do). The first book I read was “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. The “story” (it is a non-fiction book) told was a real eye-opener to me – it essentially puts into question the vast majority of what could be described as conventional wisdom and the human diet. Essentially, the author of the book goes through dietary studies from the 1950′s and on and explains how, for example the fat-cholesterol hypothesis (eating fat and cholesterol makes you fat and increases your rate of heart disease) was formed as well as how the science used in the studies to reach what is now conventional wisdom, was incorrect.
Secondly, I read “The Primal Blueprint” which basically states that humans are not meant to eat grains of any kind, rather a diet of meat, vegetables and fruits is what we as a species ate as we evolved the consumption of grains, rice, legumes and other carbohydrates is making humans fat and unhealthy. An excellent summary of the argument can be seen here as a trailer to a similarly argued movie an excerpt is as follows:
“If you could pack all of human history into one year, we’ve only been farming and eating grain since about yesterday which is when we became shorter and fatter. We only started consuming processed vegetable oils about 10 minutes ago, which is when heart disease became our number one killer. So, after examining all this human history, the experts came to the obvious conclusion….we need to eat a lot more of these – and so they convinced us that human health depended on foods that we hadn’t eaten for more than 99% of our existence”
As a result of reading these two books, my diet changed significantly. I ate only meat, fruits and vegetables for a 4-week period. Over that same period I was monitored by my naturopath, having what is essentially a cellular health reading done at the beginning and end of period to see what my change in diet had done. Over the 4-week period, I lost approximately 10 lbs. Some of this weight was water, but approximately 11 lbs was fat. I gained 3 lbs of muscle, which was interesting as I had curtailed weightlifting from 2-3 times per week to once over the period (I ran a 10 km race in the middle with no training and didn’t want my legs to be sore for the run). Additionally, my internal cellular health had improved significantly over the 4-week period. Carrying the diet through to today, I have lost approximately 20 lbs and have noticed no loss in strength lifting weight (I’m actually lifting more mass than ever). My wife had very similar results, and there are many people on message boards all over the internet who have found that this diet has reversed their diabetes, significantly reduced cholesterol and blood pressure as well as other positive side effects.
So, what do I eat? Most mornings for breakfast, I eat 3-4 scrambled eggs with a vegetable smoothie. For lunch, I eat some kind of meat (usually from the previous night’s dinner) and some raw vegetables, and for dinner, I’ll usually have meat with a salad or cooked vegetable.
What is the impact on my $50 per week budget? From tracking it over the past few weeks, it has gone up approximately 50% (from $50 to around $75 per week). This number should get lowered significantly over the next couple of months, as I ordered and should receive approximately 300 lbs of meat from the half a cow from a local farm, which will reduce the cost per pound of meat significantly.
The total impact on our household food budget is basically $0 however, as we don’t eat out at all anymore, as most restaurants that we would normally go to don’t offer the food at a cheap enough price to make it worth eating there (2 steaks at a restaurant is very expensive).
Although gimicky, the diet itself makes sense – why eat food that we aren’t meant to eat? Why not eat like the cavemen? Just because we can eat grain, doesn’t mean we should – it doesn’t really seem to be helping the health of North Americans over the past century.
Although secondary to eating “properly”, “The Primary Blueprint” also advises to workout like a caveman, as in short bursts. Rather than running on a treadmill as hard as you can go for an hour (as I used to do) – going on a brisk walk for an hour or so a few times a week is a better way to lose fat. To increase cardiovascular capacity, sprint like our ancestors did after their food once or twice a week. Lift heavy weights once or twice a week to build and maintain muscle and you should be in pretty good shape – it’s worked for me.
Have you heard of this way of eating? Would you try it? Would you spend more money on food to gain better health?
*Another good video can be found here describing the primal/paleo way of eating
