Hanging out for an unexpected weekend in Vermont reignited my green streak. I went to college in a "crunchy" area. My husband used to be vegan. I used cloth diapers with baby number one and banned all sweets. By baby number three, we've greatly slipped off this lifestyle. A cloth diaper has ne'r touched her bum and the mere crinkle of a smartee wrapper in church on Sunday made the wee lass scramble for candy.
I've gone all over the grocery budget debate. This summer I started shopping at Aldis & Bottom Dollar. I loved practicing my Spanish while waiting in line at these stores, I loved the friendly sense of humble community. (So different from what are you doing squeezing three kids behind me in my aisle I feel at my closer Safeway store). Yet I hated the food. It was cheap, but it was tasteless. It was impossible to buy natural peanut butter there. The organic milk I bought for cheap turned sour in my fridge. Jon and I had this huge debate about the problems of Bottom Dollar & the poor. The poor are the most stressed people who need the best diet. Yet here we are filling their shopping carts with rotten oranges, over-processed meat and hunks of cheese devoid of real milk.
After months of food dieting, I've found there are no easy answers. I cook all three meals a day, seven days a week. There are no quick measures of cutting out fast food, brown-bagging lunches or skipping the shrimp for Sunday dinner. If we go with the "cheap" food, it's mostly pre-packaged corn-syrup junk. We can do that for a two week stint if the money is super duper tight. Everyone feels the pinch, however. Everyone is cranky, and gains weight from over-snacking on cheap junk treats.
What's a city girl to do?
Vermont gave me an unexpected answer. I'm encouraged to go organic. As a Catholic, I'm supposed to avoid sin. The sins of the current agriculture business is pretty huge, everything from pesticides, to collapsed honey bees, to underpaid migrant farm labor, to foam containers landing in a landfill. It's hard, so hard for me to plunk down $4.00 for a pound of beef stew when I know Safeway usually has a special where ground pork is $2.50 a pound. Yet I can do it if I know that the cow was healthy, treated humanely. I can do it if I know that the farmer wasn't ripped off or sold his soul to mistreat a Mexican farm worker. I can do it if I know that by eating meat only 3 nights a week instead of 6, is better for my children.
I don't know how this fits into the food budget exactly. Currently, we spend about $130 dollars in groceries to feed a family of 5 for a week. Shopping at Whole Foods isn't a fiscal option, right now. Yet I'm going to do a small part and trust the Lord to make up the rest.
The advantage of being a City Girl, is that while having a home vegetable garden isn't an option, low-cost home delivery of organic food is an option. I found a local dairy which can deliver milk and eggs at below grocery store cost for a weekly delivery charge of only $3.50. (Meat can also be added but it's more expensive that at the store).
I also found an organic produce farmer who can deliver produce to our door. It seems expensive at $45 dollars a week. I'm telling myself that right now I'm skipping all fruit except apples, bananas, carrots and brocolli because the produce seems like such a "bad value" in my tiny grocery budget. This move can't be good for our health.
My hope is that if I can get the whole organic bill under $80, and that covers all our milk, egg, meat, fruit and veggies-- that's most of our needs. I can always go to the store to buy some extra rice, twice a month. Less trips to the store, never going in with distracting young kids, that's got to be some sort of "savings" right? Even it it's just saving Mama's mind?
Here are the two links that I'm using this week.
http://www.southmountaincreamery.com/home.php
http://www.doortodoororganics.com/
Has anyone else found that "going green" actually helped save them money on the grocery bill.
