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?

A 50/50 (organic/non-organic) compromise

I’d like to eat only organic food, but I don’t (as I've said in previous posts)--not only for cost reasons, but also for lack of accessibility and convenience.

Some organic foods are more expensive (see post about organic grapes) than I can justify for the health benefit--I’m not sure it’s all that healthy to buy a couple of pounds of organic grapes and then munch on them with clenched jaw, stressed over the hole they’ve put in the family budget.

And, if I insisted on only eating organic food in restaurants, I would have to travel to downtown D.C. and eat at Restaurant Nora (America’s First Certified Organic Restaurant) or some other such fancy-pants restaurant, meaning that our family of four could only go out to eat once or twice a year. (And PE probably wouldn’t eat anything anyway, unless they offered organic chicken nuggets). Or I wouldn’t be able to eat out at all when traveling to rural North Carolina, where I’m from.

If I only ate organic, I'm afraid I would be like I was after I returned home from my first semester in college--I was a militant vegetarian and a pain in the neck to all. I refused to eat most of my family’s Christmas dinner. I didn’t eat ham or turkey, I wouldn’t eat the rolls because they were made with bleached flour. I probably ate the cooked vegetables (not even knowing the difference between organic and non-organic produce since it wasn’t readily available in N.C. in the 1970s) and maybe one of the whole wheat carob brownies I was always making and carrying around with me then. I remember my grandmother’s hurt look at this or another family dinner, when I again lectured her about the danger of bleached flour and she said, “I thought all food was good.”

Just that one comment had a huge effect on me later in life. I have tried to approach grocery shopping and restaurant eating with that philosophy. In the grocery store, I may steer my way past corn-syrup-laden food (except for cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving…) but I will buy non-organic, canned pinto beans since the organic beans there often run a dollar more; I buy regular whole wheat sliced bread for school lunches when organic bread isn’t available; and I justify eating what I know is not going to be organic chicken or meat in a restaurant because I usually eat organic or free-range meat at home.

I call this approach the 50/50 compromise—what is, essentially, a half-a**ed approach to organic shopping/eating/living (but 50/50 is a nicer tag for our family readers). It allows me to eat almost anywhere (when we occasionally go to McDonald’s, I’ll guiltlessly eat salads or fish sandwiches there, not worrying where the vegetables or meat came from) and to buy groceries from almost any store. There are only a few items I rarely compromise on in the grocery store, like organic milk and free-range eggs. Out of the house, though, I’ve eaten frozen custard and IHOP pancakes, never giving it a thought about where the eggs and milk came from.

Fifty percent (or somewhere thereabouts) organic is better than no organic at all, I tell myself. Maybe only the super-rich and super-sheltered (or people who live on organic farms) can truly afford to be all-organic. The rest of us can do what we can, arriving at whatever ratio of organic/healthy food we can afford or muster, whether it’s 60/40 or 25/75 percent, etc. The 50/50 compromise has helped me think, within certain boundaries, that all food is good.

The dairy dilemma

For a long time, I kept dairy out of my diet. I had been allergic to dairy products as a baby, and I became sensitive to milk products again after a chronic illness as an adult, so I figured that all dairy was bad. I bought into the idea that milk is for baby cows. And, to a certain degree, I still believe that. I still can't eat cow's cheese (except Swiss, occasionally, for some unknown reason) and I have a hard time digesting nonfat milk products. But gosh darn it, I love whole milk yogurt and eat it almost every day.

Back in the day when I believed that milk was evil, I kept it out of my son's diet for the first couple of years after he was born. His milk intake was restricted to breast milk, supplemented with goat's milk after I went back to work (which I fortified with iron and calcium, since he didn't seem to tolerate any commercial formulas). When he hit preschool age, I sent a box of soy milk for him to drink during snack time, so he wouldn't be drinking the skim milk than the other kids drank.

All this was an effort on my part to keep him from developing an allergy to milk. The result, according to a broad allergy-panel blood test he took a few years ago, is that soy is one of the few things that he is allergic to but milk is no problem at all. That's good, since he now hates tofu and won't drink soy milk. So, maybe this effort paid off in a backwards kind of way.

By the time my daughter was born, my feelings about dairy products had swayed since my own dairy allergy was waning. Even as a baby she begged me to taste the maple-flavored yogurt I was eating. (Yogurt was one of the few things I could eat that wouldn't give her an allergic reaction when I nursed her--her worst reaction was to wheat). After a certain age, I let her have whole milk and she never showed any signs of a sensitivity. Now she begs for a glass of milk or a banana-milk smoothie at least once a day. She is very healthy, so I see no harm with this. In some ways, I have made my peace with milk.

My biggest concern with dairy products these days is with bovine growth hormone (rBGH or BGH). It seems unnatural to stimulate cows' udders to produce more milk than they would naturally produce. I won't be surprised if a link is found eventually between BGH and breast cancer in women who drank BGH as children--I don't see how it might not have some effect on developing breasts. Some people on the Internet are also worrying it could cause prostate cancer.

Even if that doesn't prove true, the other worry about BGH is that, according the Christiane Northrup and others, milk produced with it is allowed to have more white cells than non-rBGH milk, which is, in other words, pus. Yuk. Because cows given BGH have a higher incidence of udder infections, they're also more likely to be given antibiotics.

If you can't always buy organic milk, you can check which U.S. dairies are rBGH-free on the Organic Consumers Association rBGH info page.

If I had the money (and time to run around shopping only at health food stores), I would only buy organic cheese, ice cream, sour cream, cream cheese, etc. Right now, I will spend $6 on a gallon of organic milk at the grocery store (I can get it cheaper at Whole Foods usually), but not $6 on a small hunk of organic cheese. I console myself with the idea that I make my own yogurt from the organic milk I purchase, and that most of the non-organic dairy products I purchase are BGH-free. Maybe BGH-free is a meager consolation, at best, since it ignores the pesticides, other hormones and antibiotics in non-organic milk--as well as the probably inhumane warehousing of the animals forced to produce most commercial milk. But given that BGH-free is hard to even find sometimes, it's a meager consolation that is better than no consolation at all.

I'd like to buy organic, but... have you bought organic grapes lately?

Yesterday, for almost the first time in years, I bought something at the grocery store without a coupon, without it being on sale (as far as I knew), without even knowing the price per lb. or how many lbs. I was purchasing. I was throwing caution to the wind and buying organic grapes. I wanted some grapes, they looked fresh, they were organic and at my local grocery store. It wasn't a gia-normous bag or anything, but held a couple of bunches of grapes. (My daughter and I, fresh from the pool, were freezing in the produce section, which may also account for our rush through the section).

I like grapes and my kids like grapes, but non-organic grapes (actually, imported non-organic grapes) are on the Dirty Dozen list of non-organic produce to avoid on the Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce Wallet Guide by Environmental Working Group. 

Today I was putting away the bags and pulled out the receipt. It turns out the grapes were on sale but the cost was still $8.65. "CardSav .79" the receipt helpfully noted. That was 2.63 lb. of grapes at $3.29/lb. (normally $3.58/lb.).

I can justify the purchase only because my fridge is still on the fritz and we're desperate for fresh produce. But I don't think I can ever buy organic grapes again. I'll buy non-imported, non-organic grapes and spray them with a produce cleaner and hope for the best. I'm also fantasizing about a grape arbor somewhere in my shady yard.

I'd like to buy organic, but... (Pt. 1)

In a perfect world, I'd buy all-organic food—not so much from paranoia, that everything else is poison, so much as wanting to support non-polluting and (hopefully) more humane agriculture and pasturing practices.

I don't like the idea of farmworkers being sprayed with pesticides, or chickens stuck in cages all day, or pigs packed into barns, their waste products deluging groundwater and local streams.

Of course, it's also nice if the food I eat doesn't contain a potentially lethal combination of chemicals and additives.

Long ago, I worked at the EPA Office of Pesticide Programs and was horrified to discover three things:

• That pesticides are regulated and tested individually; few, if any, studies at the time were being conducted on how combinations of different pesticides would affect humans. (Some crops used more than one pesticide, but you're also getting exposure to more than one pesticide, usually, when you eat more than one food at a time or in a day, and as a cumulative effect, as well). I'm not sure if this has changed—my assumption is that it has not, at least as an EPA effort.
  
  
• That the pesticide companies themselves are responsible for the tests for safety. The government was not conducting independent tests themselves, that I could tell. All the lab reports submitted to the EPA docket on a particular pesticide were submitted by the manufacturer. Tests were conducted on animals—the worst being, I thought, on dogs whose vocal cords had been cut so the researchers wouldn't have to hear their cries of pain. [I hope this has changed since I was there].
  
  
  
• That most pesticides on the market have been grandfathered in. So, the EPA has to prove that individual pesticides that are questionably safe (and which are already on the market and have been used for years), should be recalled—here's the kicker–using safety studies from the manufacturers themselves. Any talk of recalling a pesticide was sure to bring protests from the farmers already using it (as well as intense lobbying from the manufacturers themselves).
  

But I can't afford to buy all-organic, all the time. So I make choices, sometimes based on what's the least bad non-organic vegetable to buy, sometimes based entirely on budget.

A web site that I've found helpful with this process is the Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce produced by the Environmental Working Group, which lists the commercial (non-organic) fruits and vegetables they've found to be the safest and least safe. The full list is at: http://www.foodnews.org/walletguide.php. An abbreviated/wallet-size guide is also available from this page. I've downloaded it and have added it to all my computerized shopping lists. The page also offers refrigerator magnets and shopping bags with the list printed on it.

In a future post (or posts), I'll discuss some of the other factors I weigh in my decision-making processes at the grocery store. I'd like to hear from other people on what affects their grocery-buying habits. Is it all budget-based, or do you also get little nudges of conscience that help you justify spending $4 for a dozen free-range eggs?

5 Foods to Make/5 Foods to Buy

5 Foods You Can Easily Make Yourself

1. Tomato sauce (from canned, crushed tomatoes)

Recipe in separate post.

2. Bread crumbs

When bread is getting stale, throw it in a blender. Freeze in small containers.

3. Pizza crust

If you have a bread machine, it only takes about 5 minutes to put the ingredients together and another five minutes to roll it out or stretch it.

4. Ranch salad dressing

This is a no-brainer if you already make your own yogurt. 

Recipe: Mix half yogurt and half mayonnaise (1/2 cup each or more). Add lemon juice or vinegar, then a few shakes of garlic powder. It should taste at least as good as store-bought.

5. Bread for meals

If you have a bread machine, it only takes 5 minutes to toss in ingredients and get bread in 2-3 hours.

5 Foods to Buy

We've tried to make these things at home and it's either too messy or time-consuming to make them ourselves, or they just don't come out as good as store-bought.

1. Stuffed grape leaves

(Even with canned grape leaves available, making the stuffing and then putting it into each individual leaf takes a LONG time).

2. Sandwich bread

If you're packing a sandwich for school, it's going to hold up better if you use commercial sliced bread. I've been experimenting with adding xanthum gum and/or gluten to my bread to make it hold up better, but it's still not as crumb-free and malleable as commercial bread.

3. Potstickers/dumplings/pierogies

Again, very time consuming and the end-result at home is no better.

4. Salsa

Noted, with exceptions: Unless you're using fresh tomatoes, making salsa from canned tomatoes will not taste as good as a store-bought jar of salsa.

5. Crushed tomatoes

Unless you grow your own tomatoes, it's more economical to buy them in a can rather than canning them yourself.

Desperation dinners

There are those times when you absolutely don't know what to make for dinner. For me, it's usually around Wednesday evening. Weekend leftovers have been completely depleted, as has my ability to come up with anything new.

Or maybe you don't get home from work until 6 and everyone is hungry at 6:15.

Or, for once, you wanted to play, too--you've been out throwing a frisbee until dinnertime, and then you realize when you walk back into the house that there's no dinner waiting for you.

At such times, it's best to have on-hand a few "desperation dinners"--things your family will eat without much complaint and without much work on your part. Most of these will be frozen and ready-made. Some can be tossed together from things in cans.

As long as you don't rely on them everyday, I see no reason to feel guilty about serving them occasionally, even if you are a stay-at-home parent.

Here's what we have on-hand or make quickly for such occasions:

Trader Joe's Orange Chicken (frozen). PE loves this and can eat it again and again; the rest of us are getting sort of sick of it. You can cut the sugar in half if you use only one of the two flavor packets.

Frozen pizza. All can eat this except M., who can't eat milk. On such evenings, she might eat scrambled eggs or some small portion of a previous dinner she had squirreled away in the freezer. 

Burritos. (Assuming you have tortillas on-hand, in freezer, etc.). You also need to keep cans of pinto beans around. It helps if you have salsa and cheese, too. If you only have cheese and tortillas, make quesadillas.

Omelets. This works for everyone except TA, who hates eggs. M. makes hers with goat cheese.

Spaghetti/cheesy pasta. We try to keep small portions of pre-made tomato sauce with meat in the freezer. When we don't have it, we can make a quick, meatless sauce using a can of crushed tomatoes. If in a real rush, we'll just cook noodles and grate some cheese over them.

(Still quick but less desperate--and limited availability)

Pesto. In the summer, when we have pots of basil growing on the deck, this makes a quick meal that, unbelievably, everyone likes. We use pecorino (sheep's cheese) rather than parmesan, for M.

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I'll post additional Desperation Dinners lists in the future. I'm also soliciting ideas for other things to serve. Please feel free to share via comments.