So the idea of eating real food is all well and good in theory, and reading more on the topic could probably easily convince me to go in whole-hog, if you will. But the thing is, I’m cheap. Not so cheap as to have actually made and abided by a budget, but cheap enough to always buy the generic brand. If eating real food is going to double our grocery bill, I’m probably not going to do it. We already eat fairly healthy as it is, so I’m not willing to spend double on a gallon of milk for example. Especially when food costs are already increasing.
But since I realized I was making an assumption that eating real foods would be more expensive (and you know what they say about people who assume), I decided I needed to investigate for myself. So during my regular grocery run last week, I took along my notebook to figure out exactly how much more eating a little bit more healthy would cost us. And today's post is me working out the math.
Now of course, the ideal is not to be going into the grocery store at all, but buying from farmer’s markets, local farmers, etc. And that sounds great, and is something I’d really like to do. But we won’t be buying half a cow until we have a deep freeze to store it in (and we likely won’t own a deep freeze until we own a house). And our local “Farmer’s Market” is not the most authentic. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch people selling stuff they bought wholesale - I asked at both the poultry and dairy counters, and they aren’t raising this food themselves. (They also have cell phones and cigarettes and braces, so my husband’s convinced they’re just actors dressing up as Amish folks.)
Just last night we ate with some friends and they mentioned Farm to City. I hadn't ever thought about using a CSA, since we have our own garden in the summer, but apparently you can get much more than vegetables from buying clubs associated with CSAs! Including pastured meat, dairy, and eggs - exciting! We'll definitely be looking into that in the future.
But for now, I'm still sticking with my local grocery store. To my knowledge, nothing there is actually grass-fed or pastured. But even within the supermarket, there are baby steps we can take towards eating “realer” foods.
Poultry
The USDA prohibits adding hormones or steroids to chicken, so there’s no need to get excited when that’s on the label. Really all you can look to see is if the chicken cage-free and/or vegetarian-fed. Here’s what Planck has to say about chickens that are vegetarian:
That may sound good, but it’s actually not ideal. Recall that chickens are not natural vegetarians. Omnivores like us, they need complete protein and thrive on a diet of grain plus plenty of insects, worms, grubs, and other foods like sour milk. “Vegetarian” means the chickens were not fed cheap protein in the form of ground-up pigs, cattle, and poultry; that’s good. But it also means something else. You may be certain that a vegetarian chicken has never been outdoors. If it had, it might have eaten a bug or two. If you can’t find pastured eggs, barn-raised birds (not in cages) fed omega-3 are second-best. (Real Food 214-5)
Good to know.
Here are my grocery store options for boneless, skinless chicken breasts:
Store brand $4.59/lb
Perdue (cage-free, vegetarian) $4.99/lb
Nature’s Promise* (vegetarian, no antibiotics**) $5.49/lb
For an extra 40 cents a pound, I think I’m actually willing to pay for the name brand and not be eating chicken that could have eaten chicken. Plus I can just keep an eye out for when it’s on sale and stock up then. (Today I got Nature's Promise for $3.99/lb!)
Beef
It seems like cattle are the biggest food you have to worry about having extra stuff (hormones, steroids, antibiotics, etc.) in. (The biggest actual food that is – as opposed to processed “food-like products” to go Michael Pollan-style.) So I am surprising myself by again deciding that it’s worth the extra 60 cents to go with the brand name ground beef above the store brand. This is also something I can catch on sale and freeze above my fridge, so overall it shouldn’t actually make a noticeable difference in our budget.
Lean ground beef:
Store brand (90%) $4.09/lb
Laura’s/Nature’s Promise (92%) (no growth stimulants or antibiotics, vegetarian) $4.79/lb
Pork
Oh pork, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Pork tenderloin, pork burgers, and pork steaks; breakfast sausage, smoked sausage, and sweet Italian sausage; BBQ pulled pork, and let us not forget bacon! (Oh bacon – I honestly have an entire post on how I love bacon in my drafts folder, so perhaps I should save my ode to bacon for another day.) Unfortunately there were no healthier alternatives for most of the pork products we eat. I could basically only compare prices for pork chops, which we rarely buy.
Pork chops:
Store brand $5.29/lb
Nature’s Promise – vegetarian, no antibiotics $5.49/lb
Only a 20 cent difference? Well then that’s a fairly easy change to make.
I did see that Nature’s Promise now has bacon in our store. It was too expensive the other day, but it’s on sale this week so I’ll pick some up. It would be hard to compare prices on that, because I only buy bacon when it’s on sale anyway. (Noticing a trend here? Buy on sale and freeze. That's how I roll.)
Eggs
The same thoughts apply to eggs as to poultry: basically pastured/local < cage-free/barn-raised/vegetarian < regular. If you want to know more about your egg options, read this article at Kitchen Stewardship - she also provides a bunch of links to other posts on the topic.
A dozen eggs:
Store brand $1.79
Name brand (vegetarian, cage-free, even omega-3 supplemented) $2.99+
I have a hard time justifying spending over a dollar more for a carton of eggs. We don’t eat that many eggs - while I really like them, my husband thinks they’re gross, and he won’t kiss me after I eat them, so I don’t eat them all that often.*** So maybe in some people’s eyes that would make it not so bad to spend more when we do buy them, since it’s not quite as frequent of a purchase. But since it’s my husband’s health I’m more concerned with rather than my own, I’ll be sticking with the generic eggs for now. Maybe when Miriam is old enough to eat them it’ll be a different story; but hopefully by then we’ll be buying them from a local person anyway!
All that said, I have been finding coupons for Land o Lakes eggs lately, so when I have one of those I do go ahead and buy their “all natural” vegetarian eggs, or some version thereof.
Milk
Now of course the all-in real food folks say go raw or go home. But seeing as it’s a major change for us just to go from skim to whole, we won’t be trying raw milk any time soon. (Unless of course you have some you’d like to share with us. I would like to at least see what it tastes like!) Also, Katie at Kitchen Stewardship explains that organic is not necessarily better when it comes to milk (which is good, because I really wasn’t wanting to shell out that much more).
Gallon of whole milk:
Store brand $4.04
Brand name (no rBST) $4.32
Organic $6.47+
Even though the FDA maintains that there’s no difference in the milk with or without hormones (rBST/rBGH), that’s one of those things that I’m just wary enough not to want to risk. So it’s an extra 28 cents for us!
Butter
Since margarine is not an option, the only thing I can see to compare in my local grocery store is the store brand butter vs the name brand butter. And I don’t see any real food-related differences on the label: nothing says grass-fed, hormone-free, etc.
4 sticks of butter:
Store brand $3.89
Name brand $4.79+
I will be keeping that extra 90 cents. (Although butter is yet another thing that I buy on sale, when it’s 2 for $4, and freeze. We might need to get a deep freeze sooner than I thought!)
So what’s it gonna cost me?
I am really surprised to realize how much more I am willing to shell out for and how little it would actually cost us. At the most, we’ll be spending an extra $122/year on the above foods (including the expensive eggs). Click on the table below for details - when you break it down by price per serving it seems like nothing. And that's all before sales!
Do you stick with generic foods or splurge on the best you can afford? Anyone try to buy mostly from farmers (markets) and CSAs, and have any advice or comments to share?
* Nature’s Promise is my grocery store’s brand of “natural” and organic products.
** I’ve still got to look into the whole antibiotic issue. Sure, you probably don’t need to just include it indiscriminately in the feed, but what if you have an animal that’s sick? What do you do with it? How do you prevent the other animals from catching the disease? As long as the antibiotics are out of the animal’s system by butchering time, I don’t really have a problem with them.
*** Isn't that how you make your food choices? I haven't had Doritos in years just because of that!