Grocery shopping

Let's talk about food and grocery shopping again. It's one of those topics which fascinate people in regard to large families. I know this because it is one of the usual questions I get when people find out how many children we have. And even just with six children at home now, that is still more than is typical. There are two other reasons, though, that I want to revisit this topic. The first is my grocery bill this past week and because I recently finished reading Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food by Chris Van Tulleken. 

[I realize that a definition of ultra-processed should be added here. It is any food that contains ingredients that you wouldn't find in your kitchen or have names you don't recognize and cannot pronounce.]

Before I begin, let's just address the elephant in the room and that is that RFK, Jr. has a vendetta against ultra-processed food. Frankly, the man is a loon and shouldn't be in charge of matching his own socks much less the health and well-being of the United States. But don't dismiss the dangers of ultra-processed food out of hand just because he has jumped on the bandwagon. Remember, a broken clock is still right two times a day, and even a loon will hit upon sound science every so often. With that taken care of, we'll continue on. 

In some ways, me reading this book is a bit like preaching to the choir. We eat very little processed food either from the grocery store or from fast food type restaurants. This was for a combination of preferring real food and because processed food is just more expensive. It was cheaper to make our own bread than to buy it, but the whole wheat-grinding thing was because it was more nutritious. It's kind of a both/and. As the number of children we were feeding grew less, I'll admit to being happy to jettison some of the scratch cooking that we would typically do. I bought a little more prepared food than I had, though I realize in comparison to many others, it was still a marginal amount. 

That's changed in the past few weeks for a couple of reasons. The first is that having read the book, I find it very difficult to buy any processed food. The science is just too alarming. Probably the biggest takeaway I had was that no one really knows what the psuedo-food is doing to our bodies long term and what they do know is not good at all. I was most struck by the studies which show over and over that real food is more than the sum of its parts. You can't just extract the "good" stuff and reconfigure it because the science shows that it never is as beneficial as having just eaten the actual food. We need real food. (Read the book. It is well done and covers a lot more science and history and sociology than the title would lead you to expect.)

The second reason I'm thinking about grocery shopping is that this has been a hard year financially, between inflation and far too many and expensive vet bills and car repairs, what little margin we have in our budget seems to have disappeared. Lowering grocery costs has become more than just a nice thing to do. I'm also sure that we are not the only family who is finding things are a little tighter budget-wise than is really comfortable.

I've been here before, though, and know what to do to lower costs as much as possible and it fits very nicely in with the recommendations of the book. An easy thing was to cut out ultra-processed food as much as possible. To clarify that last statement I'm still buying mayonnaise and peanut butter and crackers, but pretty much everything else has been cut. Breakfast foods seem to be the area where I veered towards convenience over the past few years. So, when I looked at the bagel packages for example, there were just too many questionable ingredients for me to be comfortable with it. This means that we're using up the homemade granola from last week and tomorrow Y. has volunteered to make a big batch of homemade bagels for the week. G. has been making our bread recently. 

And finally, we get to my grocery bill from yesterday because it surprised me. My weekly total for Aldi for the week was $119. This was low even for me. Let's talk about what that covered. First, it was only for five dinners. Our church's Inclusive Game Night is this Friday so on those nights everyone just scrounges for dinner because there isn't enough time to have our usual meal. I'm feeding people, but it isn't a planned meal. Then Sunday is our church's monthly dinner, so the week has one fewer meals than is typical. Two meals this week are meatless (typical), one uses chicken that was in the freezer from a half off sale I found a couple of weeks ago, and another uses a pound of ground beef. The beef is in the freezer from having bought a side last year. The chicken for last night I found at half off, but bought more for the freezer. And two meals make use of the ten pounds of potatoes I bought last week, so were already in the pantry. All in all, a fairly typical week of using what I already had combined with things I needed to buy. 

The biggest difference was that I bought no bread products. I've been vaguely aware for a while now that bread is tremendously overpriced compared to what I spend to make it ourselves. So I stopped buying it. Of course, I have quite a few children who enjoy baking, are good at it, and are more than happy to spend a couple of hours to supply the family with various bread products. This did contribute to the exceptionally low total. Now, in full disclosure, I also spent another $35 at H-Mart, one of our area Asian grocery stores. I had to buy those red beans that Y. needed yesterday for the moon cakes and while I was there stocked up on a couple of things we were out of. That brings the weekly total to ~$155 which makes our budget a little happier than it has been. 

This has been pretty meandering, but I wanted to write it out because I know grocery costs are one of those areas of growing concerns. One way to try to gain a little control over them is to buy ingredients. I know it's more work, but it is better for you and your budget.