It would be silly of me to reduce food costs only through buying dry goods in bulk. Having wiggle room in the budget is nice, so these are things I have been brainstorming as potential ways to save some cash:
Find alternate, cheaper sources for meat and plants.
- Buy part of an animal directly from a farmer, freeze for the year, if less than $2/lb.
- Join a CSA or visit farmer's markets to find veggies cheaper than $1/lb.
- Raise Japanese (Coturnix) quail? It isn't really that cost-effective just for organic meat, but eggs are 40% cheaper, and we can go through a LOT of eggs. (Plus free manure to compost for the garden.)
Eliminate
waste. I am ashamed to admit, food waste happens in my house!
When both people in the household are working 12-hour (or more) days,
it means a lot of veggies and leftovers go bad because we are just too
darn tired to care. This is probably where we could most easily/quickly save money.
- Invest in a deep freezer, buy fresh ingredients in bulk when on sale.
- Keep a bag of veggie bits (old stuff, cut-off ends of onions, etc) for use in stocks.
- Learn the art of the casserole, to use up leftovers.
- Use all parts of the animal. We've been
experimenting with making chicken bone broth lately, which is
delicious. The puppy also loves treats made out of the organs, and a tiny bit of bone broth sprinkled over her food really whets the appetite (for this reason I leave onions/garlic out of the base broth).
- Can, freeze, or dehydrate all extras.
Max
out the garden to the extreme. My ambitious goal is to grow half our
fruit/veggie needs for the year, 456lbs. So far with amazing neglect the garden (4 tomato plants, 1 mint, 1 oregano, 4 chards, and 1 papaya squash) has produced 119lbs of veggies in up through August 2013. It is probably just dumb luck, but since I'd pay $1/pound for non-organic stuff, this is pretty awesome.
- Use 5 times the space as in 2013, including new garden beds, currently-unused areas, and indoor and outdoor pots. They say you can get 0.5lb per square foot usually, or 1lb with really intensive gardening. Currently we have about 200 square feet of nice beds recently put in, and only 70sqft of it was fully used. If I truly get my act together, we will have another 200 square feet prepared for next spring. It is theoretically doable!
- Succession planting = more harvests per year
- Square-foot gardening = more plants per garden bed
- Preserving extras: canning, dehydrating, freezing for later in the year (so far I have 4 gallons of tomatoes canned, and 1 gallon in sun-dried form!)
- Long term goals, such as planting fruit trees/bushes: fig, pomegranate, lemon, blackberry.
If 2013 is any indication of harvests to come, 2014 should be plentiful.
(The bucket pictured above holds 2 gallons.)
Make our own beer, cider, and mead. We do this on a very small scale (about 10 gallons a year, mostly used for gifts).
We already have the equipment and carboys, so the only cost would be
ingredients. This will cut our alcohol costs by half... and the husband
does like the expensive stuff. ;)
Compost. Random
newspapers and inedible foods go in here. I've been doing this for a
few years with a small, neglected vermiculture tub in the kitchen.
Recently I've been more attentive to the tub, and the worms are
beginning to thrive again. Free fertilizer = more free garden food.
Eat
less. Easier than it sounds! Even though I have lost 95 pounds so
far, I have been stuck at the same weight for a while and could stand to
lose at least another 20. Maybe this will give me the little push I need.
Make coffee and breakfast for my
husband (and myself) every morning. At $0.26 per 8oz cup for coffee,
this is a much cheaper option than stopping by Peet's. For the cost of the protein powder we currently drink for breakfast, I could make giant omelettes filled with veggies and bacon.
Go non-organic with oil and animal products. This would save about $1 per day per person ($730/year). I don't want to do it if we don't have to! When I was on a small income during/after college and trying to pay off school loans quickly, I practically lived off of Bisquick, fake sliced cheese, frozen high-carb veggies, eggs, bagels, Mountain Dew, and coffee, on about the same budget. This time around, it is going to be SO much healthier.
How else would you create more wiggle-room in the budget?
