Who can afford to eat anymore?

[Evo]

It's got to stop, the price of food has been skyrocketing the past few years and it's killing me because I am such a cheapskate.

I used to hit the salad bar at the grocery store at least once a week a few years ago, but at a cost of $4.69 a pound now, it's cheaper to eat a fast food hamburger combo with fries and soda.

I went grocery shopping today and missed last weeks sales by one day, so put half of what I planned to buy back on the shelf. Due to fads, what was once the cheapest cuts of meat like skirt steak and pork shoulder steaks have gone from 49 cents per pound for pork shoulder steaks to $6.99 per pound, that's outrageous!

I was just speaking to the Evo Child, she's been trying to eat healthy but she said the other day she had to decide between a package of chicken breasts for $9.00 or a box of corn dogs for 69 cents, she had to go with the corn dogs.

I'm wondering if other people are changing their eating habits due to the high price of quality food? I know I have. Eating healthy or having a decent number of choices is just getting ridiculous.

 

[turbo]

My wife and I still buy from local sources as much as possible, and my violent medical reactions to glutamates forbid the use of pre-processed foods, for most part. We have a custom butcher shop about 10 miles away where we can get flat-iron steaks, ox-tail, minimally processed picnic hams, bacon, etc. It's only marginally more expensive than the supermarket stuff, and often cheaper. When you factor in the food I can grow in a 1500ft garden and gather through berry-picking, fruit-picking, etc, we get by OK.

Decent food is getting really expensive if you are apartment-bound, which is one reason that I disagree with the government's decision to deny a cost-of-living increase for SS beneficiaries this year. Anybody who doesn't think that the cost of buying food has been increasing hasn't been living in the real world. Of course, DC isn't the real world. Our elected representatives haven't realized that they aren't in Kansas anymore.

 

[Evo]

I can't wait for my sushi shooter. I won several hundred dollars worth of gift cards at work, so I am waiting for my cards to buy it. MIH will finally get her Birthday present for 2005. I told her it would be a surprise, I think 5 years late will be quite a surprise.

 

[lisab]

I can't wait for my sushi shooter. I won several hundred dollars worth of gift cards at work, so I am waiting for my cards to buy it. MIH will finally get her Birthday present for 2005. I told her it would be a surprise, I think 5 years late will be quite a surprise.

She's going to need to register, if she plans to carry that thing concealed.

 

[rootX]

What's more important [STRIKE]with [/STRIKE] than food?

(I don't know how I wrote "with")

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Amen to that. The price of Chateaubriand, Lobster Thermadore, Eggs Benedict, etc. have gone through the roof. And don't get me started on the finer wines. Crepes Suzette just went up another 10% in the last month alone. My wife and I are at our wits' end to know what to do about it.

 

[Pythagorean]

I think Alaska was already expensive so it was a smaller percentage rise in overall living costs here. What hurts us more is heating fuel.

Our produce sucks, though. The mass of it is shipped up from the lower 48 which means it gets picked early and travels more.

 

[lisab]

I think Alaska was already expensive so it was a smaller percentage rise in overall living costs here. What hurts us more is heating fuel.

Our produce sucks, though. The mass of it is shipped up from the lower 48 which means it gets picked early and travels more.

Maybe you could burn the produce for fuel.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Yeah I go to the value grocery store and still manage to average around $50 for three small plastic bags full of food. I go through that in 3-4 days :(

 

[DaveC426913]

Yeah I go to the value grocery store and still manage to average around $50 for three small plastic bags full of food. I go through that in 3-4 days :(

This week's grocery bill: $233. A record.

 

[DanP]

This week's grocery bill: $233. A record.

For how many persons ? I spend like ~120 EUR / month on food / person.

 

[leroyjenkens]

a package of chicken breasts for $9.00 or a box of corn dogs for 69 cents

I'd have a hard time finding one corn dog for 69 cents. They must have been expired.

 

[Borg]

A quick look at mine showed $132 for the last two weeks for two of us but, I was stocking up on meat. We go to different grocery stores 3 -5 times per week. We mainly buy what is on sale and very little processed food. We also use coupons but only if the item is on sale and cheaper than when the store brand is on sale. With coupons, I have walked out of the store with "$100" worth of groceries for less than twenty bucks. We do have the advantage here of a store that doubles up to 99 cents with occasional tripling or doubling up to $1.98. You have to put in some time to clip and organize but it can really pay off.

 

[GeorginaS]

Decent food is ghastly expensive. And any time I've spent time in the States, I've always been surprised at how much cheaper good food is. (All food, actually.) I don't buy fast food and a whole bunch of processed food and I don't buy junk food. Fresh ingredients are super expensive. Being alone, I have a habit of making large batches of things so I can am-out the cost of ingredients over several meals. Try to find a decent loaf of bread around here for under $3.00. Since when did a scrawny little roasting chicken cost $12.00? A package of four drumsticks will cost you, easily, $7.00. A large portion of my monthly budget goes to food. And I rarely, rarely dine out. I don't know how families manage. I truly don't.

 

[MotoH]

I buy bird seed in bulk and live off of that over the winter.

 

[turbo]

My wife would love to use coupons and save some money, but stores rarely issue coupons on staple dry-goods and never on fresh fruit and vegetables. Every Sunday, our newspaper is packed with coupons, but the coupons are for things like Hamburger Helper, Prego, cereals, etc, and we don't buy any of that stuff. There can be decent sales on flour and sugar at times, but those are in-store specials.

The frosts that hit Florida will have a pretty heavy impact on fruit and produce prices for some time to come. Not good for people on fixed incomes.

 

[jobyts]

I remember, when the gas price went up few years back, that was the reason all the economists said as the reason for increasing food price. But when the gas price went down, the food price still remained the same.

 

[ThomasEdison]

With the exception of certain foods like diary, food is about as cheap as it has been since I can remember. Yogurt can be 69cents a serving which is pretty extreme but ignoring cheese and yogurt and organic milk our store bought meals are usually about a dollar or so per person. Those 69cent yogurt snacks and drinking nonfat organic milk or adding expensive cheese will double the cost of a meal though.

My wife and I own a freezer in the garage. When prices are low, example whole fryer chickens for $1 each, we buy several and cook them for the dogs because dog food is very expensive. Feeding the dogs actual meat and grains saves us a lot of money and the dogs are extremely healthy. We just boil a chicken with some rice and pick the meat off the bones and add throw away greens (mashed broccoli stems or yam skins etc.)

During and after the holidays when Turkeys are practically free (they are free with grocieries at many stores and others they are cheap) we buy about 6 or so then eat them all during the year. We also look for sales like sometimes when pork chops are dirt cheap and then buy five to ten pounds of them and store them.

For high dollar items like organic milk we buy them from the health stores its the only thing that's cheaper there. The only thing reasonable at a health store compared to other stores seems to be organic dairy. Organic milk might be no different than regular milk healthwise but I can taste the difference between them (weird but true) and I have a problem with regular milk. Yogurt I don't notice.

The vegetables we either grow them ourselves or pick our own from farms nearby(which is cheap) or during winter months shop at the Mexican store where they cost pennies. Right now where we buy our veggies, limes are 12 for a dollar and avocados are 25 cents each.
Never, ever ,go to a community farmers 'flea' market. Those places are scams. They are crazy expensive so avoid them! The ones in California have cheaper stuff but outside California Farmers markets are ghastly expensive.
Ehtnic markets are good though especially anything Middle Eastern or Mexican; but
avoid Korean/Japanese Markets for anything other than exotic items because they tend to jack up their prices very high.
I think most Americans are frightened to shop at 'ethnic' markets but there is very cheap and good quality produce at those places if you know how to pick out the correct markets.

Also the marinaded grilling meats at some of the better Mexican supermarkets are better than anything in a restaurant.

Edit: I should have mentioned we don't eat many pre-prepared foods they are very expensive and less healthy too. For preprepared foods fast food might actually be healthier and cheaper. When I have no time and have to eat something out I will occasionaly get a single dollar burger/chicken sandwich without sauce or cheese and nothing else. This is hard to do because the teller won't stop talking about my other choices and all I want is to spend one dollar. Or they will say something forcefull like "How many burgers?" as If I am supposed to buy five at a time.

Another food tip is that instead of ordering pizza we pick up a ball of the dough from a pizzeria next door, and my wife adds toppings and cooks it. The dough for an extra large size pizza is about $5 which is admittedly a lot, but it is still cheaper and tastes better than a $20 pizza. With toppings it probably brings the cost to about $7 to feed two people twice. You can't really find good pizza on the West Coast so making your own is a solid option.

 

[turbo]

I have a large vegetable garden and do a lot of pickling and canning. No need to buy sweet or sour pickles, salsa, chili relish, etc. We have two large chest freezers, and freeze lots of string beans, spinach, chard, garlic scapes, chilies, sweet peppers, etc. We had a bumper crop of wild blackberries in the woods a couple of years back and there are still gallon-sized bags of those in the freezer. We also use our trusty apple peeler/corer to process apples and freeze those.

There is a health-food store in the next town, and spices, rice, and whole grain flours are much cheaper there than in the supermarkets. They order those in bulk and repackage them for retail sale. The custom butcher shop let's us place orders and they call when we can pick up the meat. Flat-iron steaks are far more flavorful than any of the loin/rib cuts and just about as tender at a fraction of the cost. They are a very low-yield cut, so we place standing orders for them. All the beef there is from local grass-fed cattle. The meat is FAR better than supermarket meat and usually it's cheaper, too. They have their own smokehouse and they make bacon, smoked shoulders, hams, etc, without commercial preservatives. Their sausages (sweet, garlic, hot, etc) are wonderful, and since the butcher's wife has a strong sensitivity to glutamates, we're well-assured that they don't use them in their processed meats.

When making casseroles and sauces, getting herbs, chilies and sweet peppers out of the freezer is a huge savings. If we want to buy fresh produce for the occasional stir-fry, that's OK because we've offset the cost by using mostly frozen home-grown vegetables for other meals. The cold cellar keeps winter squash firm and dry for months and months (well into February) and is a wonderful place to hang large bunches of German and Russian hard-neck garlic from the rafters. We've still got 'way more garlic than we can use down there, so I'm considering pickling them in a dill-based brine and canning them.

Lately, my wife has been getting really enthusiastic about making European-style breads (rye, pumpernickel, black bread), and she has gotten into baking cookie-style treats for our dog. He's pretty nuts for the treats made of liver and whole grains, as is his buddy Max. No more commercially-made treats for Duke. We eat very well, and both love to cook, and if we had to buy all our ingredients at the supermarket, the cost would be astronomical.

 

[billiards]

I can afford to eat at the moment with my cushy oil industry job. But I won't be able to afford to eat when I start my PhD (yes, news just in, billiards has just received a PhD offer -- to use new data and new methods to constrain the thermodynamics and mineralogy of the lowermost mantle by seismology and geodynamics -- watch this space).

 

[turbo]

I can afford to eat at the moment with my cushy oil industry job. But I won't be able to afford to eat when I start my PhD (yes, news just in, billiards has just received a PhD offer -- to use new data and new methods to constrain the thermodynamics and mineralogy of the lowermost mantle by seismology and geodynamics -- watch this space).

Congrats! Don't slide into the Ramen noodle trap!

 

[DaveC426913]

For how many persons ? I spend like ~120 EUR / month on food / person.

That's for 4 adults. And we were away last week so we skipped groceries.

Nonetheless, our typical bill is about $150-$175 per week for 3 adults.

 

[dacruick]

I agree 100%. I remember I was at the grocery store looking for a bit of a snack with my friend. I saw a box of double stuffed oreos on sale for 2$, what a steal. And my friend went the healthy route and picked up a bag of red grapes. We decided that to maximize our enjoyment we would share the grapes and oreos. Once we got to the cash, the cashier put in the grapes and weighed them. 7 dollars. ridiculous. absolutely ridiculous

 

[Pythagorean]

Maybe you could burn the produce for fuel.

It doesn't deserve such an important role.

 

[gravenewworld]

It's because the government indirectly subsidizes the production of low quality, cheap, and unhealthy foods like oreos, chips, and soda. I pretty much only eat organic chicken and it's $14-18 for a six pack of breasts, so I don't eat meat that much. I would love to eat more beef, but good quality stuff that is grass fed and free of antibiotics is hideously expensive unless you buy a whole cow. However, you can get grass fed beef for about $3.00-4.00/lb if you buy it by the cow directly from the farmer, the only problem is that you need to have a place to store it. You can save lots of money by buying directly from the local farmer and cutting out the middle man.

 

[billiards]

Congrats! Don't slide into the Ramen noodle trap!

Haha thanks! What's that then?

 

[turbo]

Haha thanks! What's that then?

That's the trap of stocking up on cheap, not-very-nutritious food that is easy to fix.

 

[billiards]

That's the trap of stocking up on cheap, not-very-nutritious food that is easy to fix.

Ah I know it well. Whe I first started work I fell victim to that trap; I had to go on a cooking course to help lift me out of it. I think that trap is made all the bigger and more unavoidable if you live on your own -- and I like living on my own! Oh dear.

 

[turbo]

Ah I know it well. Whe I first started work I fell victim to that trap; I had to go on a cooking course to help lift me out of it. I think that trap is made all the bigger and more unavoidable if you live on your own -- and I like living on my own! Oh dear.

Luckily, I learned to cook when I was a kid, so when I went off to college and got my first apartment, I had pots and pans, cast-iron frying pan, small bean-pot, etc to stock my kitchen. It was all mismatched old stuff, mostly hand-me-downs from aunts. Good enough to keep me in nutritious food like lentil soup, baked beans, vegetable soups, chilie, pizza sauces, home-made breads, etc. My biggest expenses were for fresh produce and dairy products. I did a LOT with dried bulk staples like beans, lentils, peas, rice, etc, and bought canned vegetables when they were on sale, especially house-brands.

 

[Evo]

I had to go to the store today to pick up a new prescription and they had asparagus on sale for 99 cents! It was a large bunch and even looked fresh. I grabbed the next to last one, I saw a woman barreling down on me with her shopping cart, pupils dilated and her teeth bared, so I figured I'd let her have the last one.

 

[turbo]

I had to go to the store today to pick up a new prescription and they had asparagus on sale for 99 cents! It was a large bunch and even looked fresh. I grabbed the next to last one, I saw a woman barreling down on me with her shopping cart, pupils dilated and her teeth bared, so I figured I'd let her have the last one.

Wuss!

 

[DaveC426913]

With the exception of certain foods like diary, food is about as cheap as it has been since I can remember.

You're shopping in the stationery department? Well that's a novel way of keeping costs down...

 

[fluidistic]

Here in Argentina the real inflation -as opposed to "official" which isn't internationally recognized- is about 30% by year. A few weeks ago the price of meat increased by 30% in a day. It will never go down. Meat consumption decreased but it can't really decrease by a lot since meat is one of the most consumed food. When I came here in 2006, a kilogram of tomatoes was worth about 2 pesos. It has gone up as high as 18 pesos/kilo in a month (900% inflation) but is now around 8. Everything, absolutely everything has increased drastically and will continue to increase. The poverty has consequently also increased.
So to answer the question posed, I can afford to eat, but not a lot nor what I'd "love" to eat. I'm thinking about fishes, beef meat now, chocolates and vegetables. In other words, it's hard and most of the time I don't have a dessert, like today. I used to eat a lot when in France or Canada but here I usually (unless I'm lucky and I have some rest of the last night) eat once a day -at night- and I drink a cup of milk in the morning (I used to eat some croissants which coasted 35 cents, but they're worth 1 peso each now so I don't even consider it).

 

[ThomasEdison]

You're shopping in the stationery department? Well that's a novel way of keeping costs down...

That is a funny typo.

 

[Proton Soup]

if you want cheap food, you generally have to pay for that in your own time. dried beans and rice can be had for cheap, but it takes time to fix it. bananas are cheap, potatoes, apples and oranges by the bag, whole chicken fryers, eggs by the box (i used to buy these in 5-dozen boxes), frozen bags of berries, fruit, and veggies, etc.

where things get more expensive are when you pay for convenience (microwavable, individually packaged), shipping (dehydrated is much lighter, individual packs are bulkier), spoilage (much fresh fruit and vegetables gets thrown out, even before you get it), etc.

maybe not the healthiest, but on a pure calorie basis, fast food isn't a bad deal. i guess you could take a multivite and exercise and hope for the best.