Two Second Sangria

Have you ever been in a mood for a quick glass of sangria… when all you've got is just regular red wine? Or are you the kind of person who doesn't especially like red wine--especially dry reds--but that's all there is available?

Well readers, you're in luck: I have a brilliant solution for you, thanks to my very clever cousin Karen:

Go ahead and pour that red wine. And then top it off with a generous splash of orange juice.

That expression of disbelief you have on your face right now? It's exactly the face I made at my cousin when she first told me about the idea. It just seemed wrong, somehow, to add orange juice to red wine.

Then I tried it.

And it literally tastes like sangria, with just the right mix of sweetness, citrus flavor and dryness. I couldn't believe it.

Two seconds. That's all you need. Splash some OJ into that glass of red!

Two Second Sangria

1) Fill a glass 2/3 full with any red wine (white wine works too by the way).
2) Top off with orange juice.
3) Wipe that expression of disbelief off your face and enjoy!


Related Posts:
Red, White and Blue Sangria
Wait... You Can DRINK An Apple Pie?
Countdown: The Top Ten Alcoholic Drinks of Summer
Countdown: The Top Ten Best No-Alcohol Drinks


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

The Six Core Principles of Healthy, Inexpensive Cooking [FULL ARCHIVE]

Here it is! The complete archive of my series on Casual Kitchen's six core principles. I hope this series has helped change how you think... and how you eat. As always, please feel free to share your thoughts and feedback in the comments.

Core Principle #1: Avoid Branded and Heavily-Advertised Foods

Core Principle #2: Embrace Low-Meat Cooking

Core Principle #3: Identify and Exploit Simple, Scalable and Minimalist Recipes

Core Principle #4: Focus On First-Order Foods

Core Principle #5: Understand the True Nature of Retailing

Core Principle #6: Be An Empowered Consumer



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Casual Kitchen’s Core Principles: #6: Be An Empowered Consumer

This is the final part of a six-part series on Casual Kitchen’s core principles. Find the beginning of this series here.
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Core Principle #6: Be An Empowered Consumer

Despite what you might think from most media coverage of the food industry, there's no grand conspiracy out there to make us all fat. There's no smoky back room filled with evil Mr. Burns-type executives plotting schemes to screw the consumer. Even the euphemism "Big Food" itself is an artificial construct of the media designed to make the food industry seem more all-powerful and evil than it really is.

The real truth is we consumers choose all of the foods on our store shelves because we make the final decision to buy or not buy. Foods that don't sell don't survive in the marketplace. Big Food cannot sell us any food without our direct consent.

Sadly, the previous statement Big Food cannot sell us any food without our direct consent, as excruciatingly obvious as it is to Casual Kitchen readers, is considered an outright lie by many food pundits. It's awfully easy to submit to conspiracy theories if you decide to give your power over to them.

Note, however, that my goal in this post isn't to convince you that Big Food is good or evil. Instead, my goal is to get you to think about the nature of your beliefs: about the food industry, the consumer products industry, or about the entire world around you for that matter. I want you to adopt beliefs that empower you as a consumer.

Let's talk about beliefs and power for a moment. The fascinating thing about our beliefs is how surprisingly self-fulfilling they are. This is especially true for beliefs about our personal capabilities. If you believe you can't learn French, you'll be right. If you believe healthy food has to be expensive, you'll also be right. If you believe consumers are hopelessly outmatched by the power and the money of the food industry, you will be right.

This self-fulfilling nature of many of our beliefs has some severe implications. Believe it or not, (heh) it suggests that the selection of your beliefs is more important than the observable truth of those beliefs. Furthermore, once we adopt a belief, our brains tend to notice evidence supporting that belief, and ignore evidence contrary to that belief.

This is why it is essential for us to select empowering beliefs over disempowering beliefs. If we decide to believe the statements "Big Food is too powerful for the average person" or "I have no power as a consumer" there is a high likelihood that these beliefs will be self-fulfilling.

In short, then, believing you have no power is literally an act of giving away your power.

Needless to say, I don't want disempowered readers. I want you, my dear readers, to take your power and use it to live better, to eat better, and to set an example of empowerment for your family and peers.

And here's where we tie together all of Casual Kitchen’s core concepts. It all starts with you and the specific beliefs you select. I want readers to believe they can learn the true nature and rhythm of food and consumer products retailing. Those readers will be able to find the best values in food and in their retail purchases. Likewise, I want readers to believe that healthy food can be laughably cheap. Those readers will be open to ideas like part time vegetarianism, and they'll be perfectly positioned to find exactly the kinds of scalable and inexpensive recipes that meet their needs.

I want consumers to believe, deeply, that we, not Big Food, have all the power, because we are the ones willingly choosing the foods and products we buy. Those consumers will be in the best possible position to make informed, empowered and financially savvy consumption decisions.

Once again, everything hinges on which a priori beliefs you choose. Go ahead: feel free to choose a set of limiting beliefs if you like. Just know that those beliefs will likely be self-fulfilling. Which means you'll be hiding under a metaphorical blanket, all fearful and disempowered in the face of Big Food, while millions of other consumers with more empowering belief sets are actively applying effective strategies to eat healthy and live well for less money and less time.

Fear and powerlessness are feelings. I cannot convince you that your feelings don't exist. But understand that most of our power--in the world of food as well as in every other life domain--derives from the beliefs we hold about that power. So… do we take our power? Or do we give it away? Which will you choose?

Resources:
How to Give Away Your Power By Being a Biased Consumer
The Sad, Quiet Death of Campbell's Low-Sodium Soup
The Food Industry Should Only Sell Bad Tasting Food
Do You Let Yourself Be Manipulated To Buy?
Survivor Bias: Why "Big Food" Isn't Quite As Evil As You Think It Is


Next up! Casual Kitchen's Core Principles: Full Archive


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Casual Kitchen’s Core Principles: #5: Understand the True Nature of Grocery Store and Consumer Retailing

This is part five of a six-part series on Casual Kitchen’s core principles. Find the beginning of this series here.
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Core Principle #5: Understand the True Nature of Grocery Store and Consumer Retailing

There’s a rhythm to retailing. Everyone knows the cheapest time to buy Christmas cards is right after Christmas. Clothing prices go to extraordinary discounts when retailers misjudge demand. And an excellent time to buy a car is when the dealer wants to move excess inventory.

This same discounting rhythm exists in grocery stores too, with one key wrinkle: food is perishable. This idiosyncrasy makes your local grocery store the source of some of the best values in retail. Sometimes.

An example: think about ground beef approaching its sell-by date. Sell-by dates present enormous problems to retailers: the product rapidly becomes worthless as it reaches that date, and this often drives increasingly aggressive discounting behavior from the grocer. After all, it’s better for them to sell this food at a partial loss rather than throw it away at a total loss.

From the consumer’s standpoint, however, the sell-by date for ground beef means nothing! You can easily freeze this meat and eat it weeks or even months later. And so it goes with many perishable products: an alert, opportunistic consumer can almost always avoid paying full price.

There’s one problem, however. Grocery retailers and consumer products companies also use certain pricing tactics to make you think you’re getting a better deal than you really are. You have to know what an attractive price really is for a given item, or you’ll get fooled into buying products that seem attractively priced but really aren't. And of course if you buy items you don't need just because they’re on sale, it’s a waste of your money no matter how much you "save."

Therefore, you’ll want to have a good working knowledge of the normal cost of the products you buy, so you can instantly recognize--and stock up--when your grocery store offers merchandise at prices well below normal. Which it often will.

Thanks (uh, I think) to my former career on Wall Street, I have a freakish memory for prices. Normal humans, however, might find it more useful to keep a price book to help remember prices for typical, frequently purchased grocery items. It’s surprisingly easy: all you have to do is carry a pocket notebook (or even a simple text file on your smartphone), and each time you shop, just jot down the prices of four or five items. It takes just a few seconds, but in a matter of weeks you’ll have a surprisingly extensive and complete price book.

Then, whenever you see an item priced at what appears to be an attractive level, just check that price against your price book before you buy. You’re now in the enviable position of always knowing when prices are attractive--and when they’re not. This empowers you as a consumer: it makes you informed and prepared for any surprise opportunities.

Let’s move on to the pricing rhythm of fresh produce items, which offers consumers yet more opportunities. Consider another example where the produce department took delivery of far more potatoes than they could normally sell, leading to a buy-one 5lb bag, get-two-free sale to move product. Deals of this sort are surprisingly common in grocery stores, and while they are a boon to value-conscious consumers, they also offer yet another challenge.

Why? Well, produce items spoil too, and unlike our meat example above, many produce items can’t really be frozen without damaging the structure or taste of the food. In order to capture the value of a sale, you’re going to have figure out a way to eat that extra produce... before it rots in your fridge.

But the solution here is also surprisingly easy: bias your upcoming weekly menu towards potato-centered recipes. Recipes here at Casual Kitchen that would fit the bill might include Viennese Potato Soup, Quick Scalloped Potatoes, Vegan Potato Peanut Curry, or even Tapas-Style Potato Chips.

The nuance here is this: Stay a bit flexible with your menu plan. Tilt your upcoming recipes toward foods that happen to be on sale. This means keeping a relatively small list of easily scalable recipes in your mind (or on your smartphone) that can take advantage of whatever foods are priced most attractively that week.

With dried, canned or non-perishable commodity foods you can compound the value you receive by waiting for sales and stocking up. With these types of foods you don’t have to worry about spoilage, which means over time you can gradually stock a gigantic pantry just by waiting for the very best sales. Best of all, along with saving enormous amounts of money, this process puts you in the enviable position of always having the option to cook from your pantry--which means during some weeks you’ll hardly need to go to the store at all. Result? Still more savings.

A quick tangent: it goes without saying that if you make additional impulse buys along with these steeply discounted food items, you are playing right into the hands of the discounting strategies of the retailer. Retailers typically price certain items as loss-leaders in order to get you in the store in the first place (you’ll often see the word "doorbuster" used for these types of loss-leader sale items). Just remember, there’s no rule that says you have to buy extra, not-on-sale items just because the retailer wants to make more money off you. Buy what you need, take advantage of the doorbuster item, and walk out of the store with a satisfied smile on your face.

Finally, readers, here’s where you’ll begin to find synergies across all of the core principles we’ve discussed so far. If you begin building a moderate sized collection of basic, easy, scalable recipes (none of which contain long, complicated lists of ingredients), built around first order foods and basic produce items, you’ll have a good sense of which recipes can be built around food items that happen to be on sale. Thus, you can let the grocery store’s sale items dictate the bulk of your weekly (or even monthly) menu items. This flexible approach to cooking and shopping can cut your food bill tremendously, while saving you enormous amounts of time and effort.

Resources:
1) Why Do Products Go On Sale?
2) Retail Industry Ninja Mind Tricks
3) Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker -- see in particular the section "Limit order price book" and the chapter entitled "Eating."

Next up! Core Principle #6: Be an Empowered Consumer


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Casual Kitchen’s Core Principles: #4: Focus On First Order Foods

This is part four of a six-part series on Casual Kitchen’s core principles. Find the beginning of this series here.
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Core Principle #4: Focus On First Order Foods

There’s an important framework I use here at Casual Kitchen to explain why certain foods are much more expensive than others. Before I can explain it, I need to briefly explain two terms that might be unfamiliar to newer readers here: first order foods and second order foods.

First order foods are the basic building blocks of our diets. These foods are generally unprocessed, they’re relatively easy to cook, and consumers purchase them in basic form. Examples of first order foods would be unprocessed fruits, vegetables, grains, commodity staple foods, rice, beans, legumes, and so on.

Second order foods are foods derived or manufactured from first order foods.

A standard example of a second order food would be something like a TV dinner, or packaged cookies or snacks. Even meat can be thought of as a second order food: after all, the meat producer has to feed first order foods (grasses, grain or feed corn) to his cows, chickens, hogs or other animals, and then several steps of processing must occur before that animal becomes meat shrink-wrapped in your grocery store.

Pretty straightforward so far, right?

Whenever you buy any food, there’s a stack of costs baked into that food’s price. Processing, branding, advertising, packaging, transport, ingredients and so on are all components of the purchase price of the foods you buy. What this means, then, is this: first order foods have a small cost stack, and second order foods will almost always have a much larger cost stack.

Okay, one more core concept: In Economics 101 they teach you about “perfect competition”: a theoretical illustration of a market with commodity-like products and little or no difference between producers. Compared to less competitive markets like oligopolies or monopolies, these markets are less profitable--thus they offer much more value to the consumer. In highly competitive markets, the consumer always gets a lot more value per dollar spent.

Which brings us to our conclusion: in the food marketplace, it’s the first order foods that most closely resemble perfect competition! Think about the foods you buy where you don’t really care about branding and where there isn’t much differentiation across producers: fresh produce, staple foods, commodity products like canned tomatoes, beans, pasta, and so on. These foods typically offer consumer lots of value at very attractive prices.

Obviously in the produce section, you’ll find the best values of all by focusing on in-season produce. This concept is already widely known and discussed in the frugal food blogosphere. But with dried or canned or non-perishable commodity foods you can significantly compound the value you receive from your purchases by waiting for a sale and stocking up. (Note: we’ll get into more detail about sales and the rhythm of food and consumer products retailing in core principle #5.)

One last thought: There are clear, extensive and well-known nutritional reasons for avoiding heavily processed foods. Therefore, if you can bias your diet away from second order foods and toward first order foods, you will not only save an astonishing amount of money. You will eat better too.

Which means we’ve stumbled onto yet another win-win situation in the food we eat: simple, first order foods aren’t just less expensive, they’re healthier for you too! Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?

The paradigm of first order and second order foods gives us a simple model to explain why some foods cost much more than others. It explains why basic produce and undifferentiated simple food items are almost always far cheaper than processed, branded, heavily advertised and highly differentiated second order foods.

Focus your meals and your diet around first order foods. That’s where all the value is.

Resources:
1) Stacked Costs and Second Order Foods
2) The Farmer's Kitchen: The Ultimate Guide to Enjoying Your CSA and Farmers' Market Foods by Julia Shanks and Brett Grohsgal. An extremely useful guide on how to cook, store and generally make the most out of in-season produce.


Next up! Core Principle #5: Understand the True Nature of Grocery Store and Consumer Retailing


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Casual Kitchen’s Core Principles: #3: Identify and Exploit Simple, Scalable and Minimalist Recipes

This is part three of a six-part series on Casual Kitchen’s core principles. Find the beginning of this series here.
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CK Core Principle #3: Identify and Exploit Simple, Scalable and Minimalist Recipes

Many recipes are "bad" in the sense that they’re labor intensive, require lots of prep work, contain a long list of costly ingredients, and are a general pain in the ass to make.

If you enjoy spending all day in the kitchen making recipes like this, go for it. But if you’re like most Casual Kitchen readers looking to get delicious and healthy dinners on the table with a minimum of time and fuss, it's a critical skill to be able to identify "good" recipes. Meaning: a recipe that’s both easy and delicious.

This skill isn’t hard to develop. All you have to do is ask yourself three quick questions as you read any recipe:

1) Does this recipe involve lots of prep work, several steps or a long list of ingredients?
2) Does it contain expensive or difficult-to-find ingredients?
3) Will it be difficult to double this recipe?

If you answer yes (or even maybe) to any of these three questions, "next" this recipe. Immediately. There are zillions of recipes out there that are shorter, easier and equally delicious. Go pick another one.

Now, am I telling you never to cook challenging and difficult recipes? Heavens no! I’m merely saying this: if you want an easier experience putting healthy food in front of your family, proper recipe selection is 90% of the battle. Short, simple and easy recipes have enormous advantages over complicated and difficult ones. They cost less. They take far less time. And they can be just as as delicious. Moreover, the shorter and simpler a recipe is, the less likely you’ll make a mistake, skip a step or otherwise mess up the recipe. Result? Dinner is on the table with a minimum of risk.

Okay. Let me share a quick thought on the double batch rule--one of the best sources of efficiency in cooking. Here at Casual Kitchen, we’re always on the lookout for what we call "scalable" recipes: recipes that can be easily doubled (or even tripled) with minimal incremental work.The point to making double batches, of course, is a double batch gives you not only dinner for tonight, but also dinner for future nights too. After all, there's no easier way to put a good dinner on the table than to reheat a dinner you've already made.

Generally, any simple recipe that meets the three questions test above will be a good candidate for the double batch rule. Go back and take another quick look at those three questions: you’ll find that for any given recipe, whatever answer you come up with for questions 1 and 2, you’re likely to get the same answer for question 3 as well.

Many recipes offer still more scale opportunities if you keep your mind open for them. It takes next to no time to slice up, say, six stalks of celery rather than three--just pile them up together and make the same number of cuts. Further, your costs per serving often go much lower thanks to scale benefits. Those incremental three stalks of celery came with the full-size package of celery you bought in the first place, right? Better to eat them now rather than have them rot in your fridge. Another example: Does it take any more effort to open a 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes rather than a 14-ounce can? Nope, and yet your cost per unit for those tomatoes is significantly lower.

One last thought: There are dozens of highly scalable recipes here at Casual Kitchen that are both easy and excellent doubling candidates. All are available to readers for free. For a few prime examples, see my Chicken Mole, Black Beans and Rice, Smoky Brazilian Black Bean Soup, Navy Bean and Kielbasa Soup, Thai Pasta Salad and Viennese Potato Soup. These recipes are glorious gold mines of cooking efficiency and they can help you make tons of healthy food for your family with surprisingly little effort.

Resources:
1) Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home contains a staggering collection of easy, interesting recipes.
2) Jules Clancy’s books, such as Five Ingredients, Ten Minutes and her blog, Stonesoup, offer classic, easy, minimalist recipes.
3) Jay Solomon’s Vegetarian Soup Cuisine: 125 Soups and Stews from Around the World
is an exceptional resource for simple, scalable and hearty soups and stews. Perfect for part time vegetarians. Note that this wonderful book is getting increasingly difficult to find!
4) For more context on the principles above, see:
How To Tell If a Recipe is Worth Cooking In Five Easy Questions
How To Get Faster At Cooking
Seven Rules To Ensure Mistake-Free Cooking, and
Casual Kitchen’s 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes, which is quickly becoming my all-time most trafficked post.

Next up! Core Principle #4: Focus On First-Order Foods



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Casual Kitchen’s Core Principles: #2: Embrace Low-Meat Cooking

This is part two of a six-part series on Casual Kitchen’s core principles. Find the beginning of this series here.
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CK Core Principle #2: Embrace Low-Meat Cooking

We’re not vegetarians here at Casual Kitchen--and we most likely never will be. We've got nothing against eating meat, and nothing against not eating meat.

But even the hardest of hardcore meat-eaters have to agree with the following two truisms: 1) the vast majority of us consume far more meat than necessary to meet our daily nutritional needs, and 2) meat is almost always the most expensive element of any meal.

Which brings us to a solution that improves your health, helps the environment, and saves a lot of money too. Here at CK, we call it part time vegetarianism, and we practice it by building at least half of our weekly meal plan around low- or no-meat recipes.

If you typically eat meat-centered meals and you’re looking to eat healthier for less money, the easiest way to do so is to replace 2-3 meat-based meals each week with vegetarian meals. Several years ago, we made this transition here at Casual Kitchen, and we saw an instant 25-30% reduction in our weekly food bill. Better still, our diet became healthier and we felt healthier.

Is there a rule somewhere that you have to be a militant vegetarian to take advantage of the all the benefits of vegetarian food? Duh, of course not. Instead of thinking of vegetarianism as a lifestyle, or as some kind of irreversible dietary choice, why not think of vegetarian food as just another menu item--a menu item that’s delicious, healthy and surprisingly inexpensive?

Finally, the biggest surprise of our part-time vegetarian experience was this: we never missed the extra meat. We had our misgivings at first about cutting back on our meat intake. Ultimately, however, it was a surprisingly easy transition to make, and the results (not to mention the savings) were so compelling and obvious that we never went back. We've been committed part time vegetarians ever since.

So, if you want to eat better and spend less at the same time, try out part time vegetarianism. You’ll miss zero nutrients from your diet--in fact, your diet will likely improve--and you'll save a ton of money. This is as good a win-win as there is in food.


Resources:
1) For great sources of delicious low- and no-meat recipes, start with Mollie Katzen's iconic Moosewood Cookbook and Joy Manning and Tara Desmond's excellent cookbook Almost Meatless.
2) Other excellent cookbooks for part time vegetarians include Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant (focuses on ethnic foods) and Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home (features easy to prepare meals).
3) Mollie Katzen’s latest cookbook The Heart of the Plate is excellent and contains hundreds of easy, elegant vegetarian recipes. Note: I wrote a rabidly positive review of The Heart of the Plate here.
4) A link to all the vegetarian recipes here at Casual Kitchen
5) On the Benefits of Being a Part-Time Vegetarian
6) Anticipated Reproach, And Why Vegetarians Are Such Jerks
7) Eight Myths About Vegetarians and Vegetarian Food (humor)


Next up! Core Principle #3: Identify and Exploit Simple, Scalable and Minimalist Recipes



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Six Core Principles of Healthy, Inexpensive Cooking

Readers, for a long time I've wanted to articulate Casual Kitchen's most important core concepts in an easily accessible format. That time has come. I've put together a megapost, broken down into six bite-sized short essays, each discussing one core concept. I'll run these posts over the next two weeks, one post every other day. After the series is over, I’ll create an archive post with links to all six essays for your convenience.

Today’s post covers branding, advertising and consumer empowerment. I hope you find this series useful, and as always, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below or privately via my email. Thanks as always for reading.
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CK Core Principle #1: Avoid branded and heavily-advertised foods

There are more than 50,000 separate products in the typical grocery store, and for nearly every item, there’s a market segment pre-designed for every income level and customer type. This is true for everything from low-cost commodity foods (lentils, dried and canned beans, pasta, frozen veggies, etc.), to higher-cost processed foods (branded snack foods, pre-packaged ready-to-eat foods, frozen dinners), right up to the most expensive consumer product items (pain relievers, vitamins, branded boxed cereals). The price differential between the highest cost market segment and lower cost or unbranded market segments can be as much as double. Sometimes more.

And yet, shockingly, there's often little to no difference in quality between these products, despite this enormous price difference. In fact, in some instances, the branded product and the unbranded product come from the very same factory, both made by the same third-party manufacturer. Don't believe it? Then read my article The Do-Nothing Brand. Therefore, when a "brand" is little more than a sticker slapped on the product, an empowered consumer stands to benefit enormously by trying alternative products and by not making habituated purchasing decisions.

There’s really only one instance where the purchase of branded food products is fully justified: when you’ve tested it against lower cost alternatives in an true blind taste test. Why a blind taste test? Because branding techniques play off our deepest emotions: we associate various brands with our childhood, with comfort, with aspirational feelings, or with some other deep and usually subconscious emotional need. If you don’t blind test, you’ll automatically favor the branded product. Worse, you’ll most likely rationalize a reason for your preference. After all, that’s why companies spend so much money to create the brand in the first place!

Last and most importantly, understand that you, the consumer, ultimately pay for all branding and advertising activity. These excess costs are passed through to you whenever you buy a higher-priced branded product or any product that's heavily advertised and marketed. This is why I counsel readers to change how they react to advertising: once you grasp how advertising and marketing ultimately increase the prices you pay (and therefore reduce the value you receive for your money), seeing ads for a product makes you not want to buy.

Make the consumer products and food industries compete for your dollars. Don't let their advertising bilk you out of your money.

Resources:
Brand Disloyalty
Prices, Zombies and the Advertising-Consumption Cycle
How to Blind-Taste and Blind-Test Brands
How To Be Manipulated By a Brand

Next up! Core Principle #2: Embrace Low-Meat Cooking


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.