Food: dollars and sense

Over the last couple of years, there has been considerable attention given online (and even in the traditional press) to more than one blog focusing on the writer's goal to eat well, or subside at the very least, on far less money than one would ever think possible. The most extreme of these examples, like this one and that one, were experiments where the people involved documented their efforts to dine at the cost of one dollar per day.

While those websites make for fairly fascinating reading, they also make me want to pick up the phone and order a pizza, because the recurrent theme found amongst their pages is hunger. If one were to take the time necessary to read about such endeavors in detail, it would be learned that the participants ultimately found that their stomachs gradually adapted to less food and that the hunger pangs began to subside. Well, no kidding! I am sure that any poor stick thin, bloated-belly starving child in Ethiopia would be able to report the same thing, except in that instance, sadly, the starvation is not voluntarily induced.

On the other hand, I am well aware of the fact that Americans, for the most part, are gluttons. Our idea of portion size is completely distorted. Additionally, the sorry fact is that too many of us eat far too many meals out of a bag grabbed while on the go, and "cooking" too often involves heating up packages of precooked and/or overly-processed foods, be they from a box or frozen. While the economy has been disastrous in the last couple of years, one would never know it by cruising past most any locale's assortment of chain restaurants on any given night. Aside from the lack of good nutrition and the increasingly far ranging obesity that stems from such trends, the reality is that these types of eating habits are terribly expensive.

In terms of our own routine, while Scott and I are far from perfect, I would objectively have to say that we do better than average when it comes to eating habits and, more to the point here, eating expense. Unless we use a gift card given to us for some special occasion, I can count on one hand the times we eat out per year at a restaurant when not traveling. Our absolute worst vice is carryout pizza, and I will readily admit that we also occasionally give in to a late night Taco Bell or Burger King craving. Overall, though, we eat fairly healthily, and also fairly inexpensively (acknowledging that "inexpensive" is a term that's certainly relative to income level).

But there's always room for improvement. Because my recent mid-year budget review showed that we were doing pretty well, but not perfectly, when it came to meeting the financial goals set at the year's beginning, I began to look for ways to tighten the purse strings. Among other things, our food budget was one area in which I decided we could cut back.

From a review of my records, I know that we eat extremely well (sometimes overly well) on the approximately seventy-five to one hundred dollars per week that we routinely spend on food and drink.

To the extremely frugal, that may seem like an outrageous expenditure. At the other end of the spectrum, we know many couples at our general level of income - or lower, for that matter - who regularly drop forty bucks in a restaurant a couple of nights weekly, and co-workers abound who do not blink at spending at least five dollars per day on lunch during the work week. We fall in between the two extremes, in the category of persons who enjoy good food and cooking and, while we don't eat out much, we do tend to spend a good chunk of change at the grocery store on fresh produce, quality cuts of meat, expensive fish and seafood, and specialty ingredients for recipes we want to try.

In any event, without doing any real analysis in advance, I am hoping that we can reduce our food budget by twenty-five to fifty dollars each week. Doing the math, our new target budget will fall between fifty to seventy-five dollars per week, meaning that the two of us will have to share an average daily food budget of $7.14 to $10.71. (To be entirely clear, by "food budget", I am in fact referring to all meals, each and every day, not just to food we buy to eat at home.) Slicing that extra twenty-five to fifty bucks a week will put lots of extra dollars in our pockets (or our savings account), and trimming the fat from our food budget may also help trim a little fat from our waistlines.

And, so, with the start of a new month two days ago, our own experiment began.