How Expensive are Kids? -- Part III

Lately the price of food has been getting me down. It seems that every time that I go to the grocery store, the bill is higher. Meanwhile, we are eating much less meat than we used to, rarely buy canned beans, make our own bread and soy milk... What is going on?

The higher price of food is all over the news. Milk is higher, which has made all milk products more expensive. The price of wheat is higher, which has made pizza places and bakeries raise their prices. I have not really noticed a higher price on flour, but the high price of milk really hurts. I have 3 young children, and the youngest can really put away some milk. We decided to switch to organic milk, and the price of organic milk (not the happy stuff in glass bottles, mind you, but just regular factory organic milk) is from 4.99 to 5.49 a gallon, depending on where I buy it. That's at LEAST 40 dollars a month in milk. Then there's cheese. About $5 a pound, and lots more if I buy organic.

This week's Newsweek has an article about people changing back from organic because of the rising cost of food. There are certain things that I am consistent about with organic -- I like the organic milk, but can't bring myself to pay for the cheese. I buy organic yogurt (2.99 for a big container) but not ice cream (don't buy much of that because I would just eat it all). I can't afford organic green peppers, so I usually just leave them out. I'm waiting for them to grow in my garden. I only buy grass-fed beef, so I buy really small quantities. Depending on what I'm making, sometimes I mix it 1/2 and 1/2 with veggie crumbles.

I'd like to buy more organic produce, but I just can't afford it. The grocery bill keeps going up... not just because of higher prices, but because my children eat more as they grow. So I pick and choose. I experimented with CSA, but it just wasn't worth it for me. It cost $30 a week for vegetables that for the most part were not things that my family would normally eat, and that my kids generally didn't touch. The last week I had to toss a few things because they rotted before we could eat them. We NEVER throw away food, so that was the breaking point for me.

My kids eat lots of fruit, so I spend a good deal of money on that. Sometimes organic -- usually not. Who am I kidding? I can't spend $5 on a pound of strawberries that will be gone in 5 minutes. At the same time, I know that conventional berries are sprayed with a lot of pesticides, so I try to emphasize fruits with peels and/or fruits that are not on the "dirty dozen" list. So we eat lots of bananas, oranges, grapefruits, organic apples and mangoes. My kids also LOVE canned peaches and pineapple, which are quite affordable, but lately I've been wondering if I'm slowly poisoning them with the plastic can lining.

What about you? Have you noticed higher prices? Have they changed the decisions that you make at the grocery store?

Driving Update, More CSA, Plastic Bags

I have two updates today. This week, we drove 180 miles. ACH! C, although he is divorced from the car, drove about 170 of them. Over the course of 2 days, he drove 100 miles for business, and then he had to drive an extra 30 to go visit his mother, who is sick. He could not have taken the bus to visit his mother, because he had to bring her lots of food. He could have done the business by bus and walking, but it would have taken several days, instead of one afternoon.

My students debated the advantages and disadvantages of various modes of transportation yesterday. For the bus, they said that the advantage was the price, and that was it. I thought that was interesting, because for me safety is a major reason to take the bus. I feel very secure. My students, however, feel that the bus is not safe because of 1) the type of people that ride the bus, especially late at night and early in the morning and 2) because of unsafe walks home from the bus stop. I am spoiled because I have a bus stop in front of my house and because I do not usually ride a city bus, but a university shuttle. Obviously, Cap Metro needs to work on their PR campaign.

So, as far as the car driving, 180 miles is a huge disappointment, but there was very little we could do about it. Today is the first day in two weeks that I have driven, and it was mainly out of laziness. I feel bad.

CSA
Week 2 of CSA today. The basket contained:
1 bunch spinach
1 bunch lettuce
1 bag mixed greens (with arugula?)
kale (traded for more spinach)
chard (!)
2 green onions
8 asparagus
baby carrots (they are very cute, but there are only about 6, and they are 2" long)
a couple of cauliflower florets

I'm not overwhelmed. We still have lettuce left over from last week. We are going to have to go crazy with some salad. My current feeling about CSA is that it's not worth it for us. In addition, I got a total of 5 plastic bags in my CSA box. Grrr.... Granted, 4 of them are biobags, but I am not currently composting bags, and I would really just rather have naked greens.

Speaking of bags, my friend alerted me that a group called Ban the Bags is calling for a ban on plastic bags in Austin. Yeah! According to their website, it takes 430,000 gallons of oil to produce 100 million plastic bags. Guess how many bags Austin uses in a year? That's right. About 100 million.

A woman quoted on the news said that she was too busy to bring her own bag. How can that be? I'm pretty darn busy. You know how much time it takes me to bring my own bag? None. You know how many times my cloth bag breaks, spilling the stuff onto the sidewalk? Never. Did it take me a few tries to remember to bring the darn things in the store? You betcha. But now it's a habit, and I haven't looked back. Now I'm working on remembering to bring my own bags for bulk stuff. It's just a matter of making it a habit. Her comment just doesn't make sense -- it's like saying you're too busy to wash the dishes, so you should just use plastic. Or too busy to wash towels, so just dry yourself with paper after a shower (Don't get any ideas!).

Experimental Thursday -- Butter
I thought that for Thursday I could make my own organic butter, but I don't really see how it could be worth it. The cheapest organic butter at the store is 4.49 a pound. A pint of organic cream is 2.29. How much butter does a pint make? I don't know. But unless it makes 1/2 a pound (which doesn't seem possible), it's not a better deal. In addition, since the cream that comes in glass containers is even MORE expensive, I would have to buy a plastic container. So it seems better to buy butter that comes packaged in waxed paper and wrapped in a cardboard box. Several bloggers have been making butter, and it seems like fun. But it doesn't seem like a better deal, or a reduction in plastic waste (at least in my case).

If anyone has made butter, let me know what the yield is like. If I'm wrong about the cost, I'd love to give it a try.

Eating Food -- Day 1

Right off, we had a problem on the first day of the "Eat Food Challenge". C bought chocolate donuts with sprinkles for the kids. Boo! That's okay though. It's the first day, and it's a little hard to get into the habit. Here is a rundown of what I ate today (what C ate is pretty close; the kids had the same except for school lunch, a popsicle each, and the very last of the graham crackers):

Breakfast:
oatmeal with raisins & milk, coffee
Lunch:
beans & rice, chard
chocolate
homemade bread with organic strawberry jam
Snack:
banana
Dinner:
baked tofu
couscous curry
salad with homemade balsamic dressing
more chard!

It was a lot of veggies, but it actually wasn't too hard. I came home to a chocolate donut sitting in the middle of the table, but since I had some happy chocolate in the cupboard, it was easy to resist.

I ate a ton of food today (as you can see), and discovered that baked tofu is the GREATEST -- it totally eliminates the problem of tofu squishiness that has previously turned me off. C and I polished off the tofu in just a few minutes (the kids had a taste & then opted out). I just marinated it in a sauce I made & then baked it at 400 for 30 minutes. It did seem like a lot of oven use for not very much food, however.

What was a problem? Salad dressing. I have a favorite balsamic vinagrette that I use, but it is full of weird ingredients. So I made my own. I just mixed up some balsamic vinegar, some olive oil, a little salt & some grapefruit juice. It was delish. I also got excited about DIY salad stuff and made croutons from some weird bread I made the other day. They were a hit.

But.... dinner caused a kitchen explosion. I used a ton of bowls, pans, and the chopping board was like a veggie explosion.

The homemade bread may seem like over-achieving, but it's really easy. I feel like a cheater because I use a bread machine. It takes maybe 2 minutes to put the ingredients in and then 3 hours and 10 minutes later -- awesome bread! We started making bread because we were inspired by some friends of ours. We couldn't believe them when they told us that they don't buy bread at the store. Now... neither do we! The breadmaker has been totally worth it even if only to make pizza. The pizza that we make at home is better (not to mention healthier) than most delivery pizza and is very economical to make. What's also nice is that we almost always have the ingredients -- bread stuff, some sort of tomato sauce, cheese, and random veggies.

What's funny is that a lot of the things that seem way out there to me (like making all my own bread) are pretty normal for a lot of other bloggers. It just shows that you can be an example to others--maybe even somebody that you don't know. After a while, what seems weird starts to seem normal, and hopefully the world gets a little greener.

That's a lot of chard
Yep. Sure is a lot of chard. We still have some more to eat. And artichokes (all 7 of them)... and more lettuce... and cabbage. Tomorrow is going to be another veggie heavy day because we have another CSA box on Wednesday. I'm still up in the air about continuing CSA after this trial month.

How much does CSA run in your area? Do you think it's worth it? How much more are you willing to pay for local food?

Kids
I think this challenge is pretty hard with kids, unless you love to cook. We are out of snacks now, except for pretzels. So, it's either fruit or toast or .... fruit. The morning is tough too -- the kids are addicted to Honey Nut Cheerios. We'll see how tomorrow goes.

Eat Food

I just finished reading Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food. It's a quick read and brings up some interesting points about what he calls "nutritionism", which has been the fairly recent rise of science in deciding what we should and should not eat. Pollan claims that many of the "western diseases", such as cancer, diabetes, etc. are due to eating processed foods and not following traditional diets. Most people who follow a traditional diet (regardless, it seems, as to what that diet includes) seem to be healthier than people who have a western (ie. American) diet. Another interesting point was that science is telling us, for example, that the Mediterranean diet is particularly healthy (my doctor just told me this). But we don't know what it is about the Mediterranean diet that makes it healthy. The food industry would like to find some specific thing -- say olive oil -- and just add it in to our regular foods, but outside of the context of the traditional Mediterranean diet, olive oil alone may not have the same (or any?) benefit.

Pollan's advice is to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

I love this advice. He distinguishes between food and food-like products. Food-like products are most of the products in the grocery store. For example, fat free cream cheese. How is that possible? Or a cereal bar with a white line of "milk" running down the middle.

Pollan defines "food" as:

• something your great-grandmother would recognize. (Hallelujah! My great-grandmother would recognize chocolate, wine, bread... :) )
• something that has less than 5 ingredients & has recognizable ingredients.
  
• Something probably found on the periphery of the grocery store, not in the middle aisles.
• Preferably, something not found in the grocery store, but in a CSA box or at the farmer's market.

One way to be sure that you are eating food is to make it yourself. He gives a great example -- would you make a spongy snack cake, inject it with cream filling, and clean up all the mess just so you could have a Twinkie? Probably not. So give it a miss.

My family has been eating more and more "food" lately -- we make all our own bread, thus ensuring whole-grain bread without a lot of weird ingredients and preservatives, we only buy organic peanut butter (I love this... I looked at the ingredients and it said "Peanuts"), we changed yogurt brands because I decided that the old kind was too artificial. BUT I have a hard-core pastry habit (from a store that I know uses trans fats.. not from a real bakery) and I put Splenda in my coffee every morning. Many things in the cupboard probably have high fructose corn syrup (would great-grandma recognize this? Probably not! Would she recognize the bag of potatoes? Yep!)

So, as of tomorrow, we are going on a week-long Eat Food Challenge. We will be eating food. Actual food. Not "food-like products". I will put sugar in my coffee (gasp!). I will either make my treats myself or buy them at a real bakery that uses real ingredients (which would involve a longer bike ride than the current source). I will continue cooking dinner, but not use funky mixes or frozen fish sticks. This is a week-long experiment because I want to see what the problem areas are. I know there will be a big adjustment, but we want to give it a try.

The kids?
That might be a problem. They eat school lunch, which is a total nutritional disaster. The menu reassures me that the hot dogs are made of low-fat turkey (which I refuse to eat after reading about turkey farms)... and that's just a start. There is also still some Easter candy, which I know I could not reproduce in my kitchen (what exactly IS the cream filling in a Cadbury egg? Don't know, but it's like a drug! Must be a "food-like product".) I think that most of the after-school snacks (with the exception of fruit) would also fail to qualify as food. But, my kids love home-made muffins and I found a recipe for granola bars...

Making these changes at home and taking away school lunch might cause a revolution. So, we'll start with home. By the end of the week.... who knows?

How about you? Are there any food-like products that would be particularly hard to eliminate from your diet? Or do you eat food all the time?

*I love that "food" now has a special meaning :)

Car Update, CSA

So.... today's an exciting day in Grad Greenland. The worm factory is here. Which means that I ordered the worms. There are many worm sources, but it seems like they run from 25 to 30 a pound, usually with shipping included. OUCH. They'd better work. Sometimes I fantasize about selling the excess worms once they start making worm children, thus becoming a worm farmer, and pretty soon independently wealthy. Then I remember that I'm grossed out by worms and that the only reason that I decided this was doable at all was because my husband said he'd deal with the worms. :)

Today was also my first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) pick-up. This is another of those things I had been thinking about a lot before starting the blog, and the blog gave me a kick in the pants. A quick internet search and I found a CSA open to subscriptions -- they're certified organic, and the drop-off house is about a mile from my apartment. So I rode my bike over, picked up my stuff, and sampled the first off it today at dinner.

I have wondered about the price of CSA. The one I'm using is 120/month (30/week), and is supposed to feed a family of 4. It will DEFINITELY feed my family. It's a lot of vegetables. But... is it less expensive than buying the same thing at the grocery store? Hmmm...

Here's what was in my box:
swiss chard
collard greens (I switched these for more chard in the "trade" box)
asparagus (7 spears)
lettuce
cabbage
leeks
spinach
beets (3 with greens)

I don't think it's really less. The chard is 1.99 (organic) this time of the year. Lettuce is 2-3 (organic). Asparagus is 2.99 a pound at WF (not sure if organic or conventional). I got a total of 8 items. They would have to be less than 3.75 each to be less expensive than the store. BUT... they're all local (5 miles from home... pretty darn local) and organic. And I will be eating a LOT of veggies. I'm still not sure. Maybe it's a better deal later in the season, when it's not just greens. If you subscribe for more than a month, the price per week is lower, but I wanted to test it out first. So far, I'm happy, but not wowed by the price.

Car Update
Last week I posted about my husband "divorcing" the car. He has stayed pretty faithful to the terms of the divorce, bike/bussing all over town. He has also guilted me into riding my bike a lot more. Since last week, we have driven a total of 60 miles. That total includes:

• Driving with the kids to look at a house.
• Driving to work with my sick son. (can't bring him on scooter)
• Driving to the bus stop to go to my brother's house.
• Bringing the kids to my MIL's house (left car & rode bus home)

That's it! I think it would be harder to make the total go lower, as other weeks might not have sick kids involved, but they might involve trips to the grocery store or something like that. In addition, this 60 miles does not include the 30 miles of driving I caused b/c I missed the bus (or.. the bus missed me!)

If we could keep the driving under 100 miles/week (including camping trips... maybe "save up" for those) that would be a HUGE reduction of our driving and reduce our spending on gas by about half. So, I'm going to aim for that.