We are having an Uber Frugal Month here at the Slow Home VT abode. (#slowhomeVT is what I use on Instagram to label our slower life experiments and experiences as a family.)
A big section of our monthly expenses has been our food budget. Its second behind our mortgage (and health insurance but our business pays for that) as our biggest expense.
In the past few years we have had the mentality that
#1 we like food and cooking so why not buy what we like (edit: Torrey likes cooking, I like eating tasty food)
#2 we are trying to eat better; local, organic, less processed food
#3 we often have people over for dinner as a way to socialize with small kids at home.
But all this led to
#4: a monthly food expense of over $1200 a month. Yep. Truth.
Over the last year we have implemented some better habits. But we really haven't even tried to lessen our food bills every month. Here is a short list of what we have been doing:
1 - Produce less waste: I have been buying from bulk bins, buying items in glass/cardboard packaging, getting CSA's, shopping the farmers market, buying loose produce, make our own pizza dough, broth, pasta sauce (not as much as we should). Generally cutting down our waste by so much that we just dropped our garbage pick up because its WAY cheaper for us to just drop off our 1-2 bags at the dump every 2 weeks.
2 - We loosely meal plan 4/5 meals a week and shop once a week. We eat leftovers for lunches and at least one night a week. Usually I would grocery shop with the kids on Weds morning if we didn't do it earlier in the week. We would plan our meals around what looked good in the cookbooks and websites - we use (pioneer woman, smitten kitchen, my pinterest board and The Cooks Illustrated cookbook as our favorites) occasionally looking at what we had in the house first but mostly by what looked tasty.
3 - We have cut down quite a bit on buying random things or storing random food for weeks for no reason. We used to have a full pantry and full fridge all the time. I wish I took before photos. I honestly don't know what we had lying around. Lots of canned random things, jugs of juice, lots of boxed things.... Trader Joes impulse buys....honestly who knows. Things would wilt, mold, rot or go stale before we could finish them often.
4 - We tend to cook from home, eat whole foods, are omnivores (we eat bread, dairy, meat...ya know all those things) we have a small garden in the summer, we try to limit our white sugar and processed foods but other than that we eat everything.
5 - We do eat out maybe once every two weeks or so. This could mean a ladies night for me, or a family dinner at the local burger joint, or once in a while a more fancy night out ($$). Also travel can affect this as well.
6- We have a bad habit of thinking we have nothing to bring to work for lunch so we buy from the salad bar and hot lunch bar of the co-op on the way into work. This means 1/3 of our food cost is coming from random spending like this. I hope we can cut this out!
So basically I thought we were doing pretty well. But our bills were still so high. I understand that buying whole foods can be expensive but I know people who do it for much less (Frugalwoods) and I also am not going to sacrifice the quality of the food so much, just the quantity. The Average Cost Of Food Plans are available through the USDA and said the most liberal plan (highest) was about 1100 a month for a family of 4. Its not like we are that far off, but why couldn't we spend less? We were putting things like CSA's and buying in bulk in place. Something else is going on here. So we started an experiment on Monday (cuz who has time to wait until the next month?)
GOAL: EAT ALL THE FOOD IN THE HOUSE
Currently this is our fridge and pantry:
Sure as hell not as stocked as it used to be, but also not empty. I am very aware that having extra food is a privilege. And there is so much food waste in developed countries that is a damn shame. (link:In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply.) So its time to eat what we have and not act like chipmunks always storing it away for a rainy day.
I haven't bought groceries since June 7th. This week, every day, we have just been like "lets see how long we can go" We even ran out of milk, eggs and yogurt yesterday and just keep going. Today we got our weekly CSA food share so it feels like we hit the jackpot. Torrey is loving the fun challenge of mixing up what we have to make a tasty meal. I will get milk + eggs tomorrow because those are staples. But damn... this feels good! We haven't had crappy meals either. There was so much food just lying around!
Anyways I have added a few links below that have been big inspiration. I will keep you all updated on how it goes! This month we are at about $780 for food but we just started this in the past week so I am hoping we can keep it under $1000 this month and see how next month goes. I figure if we eat down what we have eventually we can just shop for the food we will actually eat in a week and it will be much less $$!
Related links/inspo:
Slow Home Podcast : 50 Ways to reduce your food waste
Simple Families Podcast: Exactly How I Feed My Kids
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