Three tiny ways to save on your grocery bill...and sometimes help the environment

I am not going to pretend that I am the thriftiest shopper in the world. 

Despite my declaration that I wouldn't buy organic grapes again (see July 29 post), I've broken down and bought them a couple of times (on sale). And despite my continued efforts to clip coupons, I almost never manage to use them; a few days ago I cleaned out a whole drawer of coupons that had expired in 2005.

Still, there are a few things I do here and there that help a little. The added benefit is that such measures sometimes have eco-benefits. Here are three of them:

1. I make my own yogurt. A half gallon container of milk makes 2 quarts of yogurt, with a little milk left over. (For instructions on how to make yogurt, see May 11 post).

Cost benefit: A half-gallon of organic milk costs around $3.50, while 2 quarts of organic yogurt costs $7-8. (A gallon of organic milk is currently going for around $6, which offers greater cost advantages).

Eco-benefit: I'm not using or throwing away plastic yogurt containers. I make the yogurt in glass jars I wash again and again. (Making yogurt uses a minimum amount of electricity).

2. I make my own foaming liquid hand soap. "Make" is relative—I don't make soap from scratch, but refill foaming liquid soap containers with water and dish soap. It works fine and most people can't tell the difference.  Here's the recipe:

• 1/4 cup unscented liquid dish soap (I use Seventh Generation Free and Clear)

• 3/4-1 cup of water

• 1 tsp. of glycerin (you can get glycerin in bottles at the drugstore)

• scented oil, if desired (I've been using either lavendar oil or grapefruit oil)

• In the winter, I add a squirt of aloe vera gel, for my chapped hands.

Cost benefit: This is about $.25 soap, $.20 of glycerin and maybe $.10 of oil (at the most), compared to a store-bought container that costs $5-8.

Eco-benefit: You're not throwing away all those soap containers. HOWEVER, the foaming capability of most re-used containers seems to give out after 4-6 uses, so this isn't something I've been able to keep going perpetually; I have to buy new soaps occasionally.

3. I buy some of my household goods and bulk items through a wholesale distributor, Frontier. Some friends and I put our orders in together so that we don't have to pay postage (postage is free is you spend $250 at a time). The downside is that it gets pretty time-consuming for the person who puts the order in and sorts through all the items that are shipped since they are not separated per individual order.

Cost benefit: I just purchased 16 oz. of Frontier bulk Irish breakfast tea for $12.95 vs. ~$3/oz. in the natural foods store; 48 oz. of Seventh Generation dish liquid was $5.05 compared to $7-8.00, retail.

Eco-benefit: There's some slight benefit in that I don't use gas to drive to a natural foods store for the specific things I can order through the coop.

Grocery shopping as the new luxury experience

After going grocery shopping last night, I'm not sure that anyone is going to be able to shop cheap anymore. Why?

A large jar of mayonnaise was ON SALE for $7.90. I bought the small jar, which was on sale for $3.59. I think that is what I used to pay for the large jar. 

Worse, most of the pies in the freezer case were $10. Ten bucks for a pie? I bought one on sale for $7.99, only because I needed a quick dessert for a get-together the next night; otherwise, I would not have paid $8 for a pie.

We are a middle-class family and in the past, I've never worried about buying the occasional pie when we were having guests over. In the earlier part of the year, the price of pie was hovering around $5.99, and I stopped buying them then because I thought that was too much. 

It's even worse at the natural foods store. Last week, at the funky health food store I go to every now and then (because it seemed cheaper than many of the slicker natural food stores), a 5-lb. bag of whole wheat pasty flour was $12. Organic milk was $7/gallon. The cheapest apples were $2.99/lb. I used to squirm (even last spring) at spending $5 for a 5-lb. bag of organic flour. I left with few things in my bag, mostly bulk organic teas and other things I can't get elsewhere.

This has me fleeing more and more to BJs, a wholesale club I belong to, where prices are a little better for things you buy in bulk, as long as you're not particular about whether something is organic or not. It looks like the 50/50 organic/non-organic compromise I wrote about in my Sept. 1 post is already giving way to something more like 40/60 or even 30/70.

But the worst thing in all this, for me, is that it's starting to hurt to go food shopping. Buying food used to be the one thing I could spend money on fairly guiltlessly—new clothes for me can always wait, furniture can wait, the latest DVD can wait. But food was a necessity and healthy/organic food was a reachable goal, for the most part.

Maybe it would be easier to adjust to this new price scale if our electric bill hadn't doubled this year (due to state restrictions on pricing being lifted, not on our suddenly using more electricity), gasoline wasn't hovering around $4 a gallon and our first heating oil bill of the winter is expected to be somewhere near the cost of a semester of college tuition in the 1980s.

There's something wrong when you have to examine your budget in order to buy a frozen pie. We can still manage to put wholesome food on the table, for the foreseeable future, simply by avoiding such old luxuries as high-end cuts of meat and expensive wine, and such new luxuries as frozen pie and organic grapes. Yet, we're still going to be struggling just a little bit to pay for groceries in the coming months—and we're not poor. What are poor people going to eat?