“Learn to Live on Lentils…”

The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils."

Diogenes replied, "Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king."

***********************
A few years ago, I saw perhaps the most staggeringly condescending remark ever on the topic of eating healthy. It was a comment under an article in the New York Times entitled "A High Price for Healthy Food"--one of those typical media articles supporting the ugly, offensive and entirely false narrative that healthy food has to be expensive.

The article opened with the phrase "Healthy eating really does cost more" and went downhill from there, citing a hilariously unrigorous cost-per-calorie study performed by "researchers" who concluded, somehow, that healthy eating therefore must cost a lot more than unhealthy eating.

Now, looking at food costs in cost-per-calorie terms is dumb and deeply misleading, and if you're interested you can read more about why here. But sadly, because this study supported the "healthy food costs too much" narrative that's so strangely popular throughout our media, the New York Times ran an article about it.

But here's where it got interesting. The thing is, regular readers are often a lot smarter than journalists and "researchers"--particularly innumerate journalists and researchers. And readers began leaving comments with helpful solutions contradicting the article's false narrative that healthy food costs more. They began offering ideas for many different kinds of nutritious yet inexpensive foods--exactly the kinds of foods the article author and the study researchers seemed to think didn't exist.

One of the more popular examples given of a healthy, nutritious, yet inexpensive food was--you guessed it--lentils. Nutritious, satisfying, delicious, and laughably cheap lentils.

Somehow, the very idea of the existence of lentils angered the author of this article, Tara Parker-Pope, causing her to make the following statement in the comments:

"The solution that people live on lentils which are healthful and affordable is just ridiculous to me. Nobody wants to live like that." *

This is why the beautiful little story above about Diogenes and Aristippus--and lentils--has both literal and metaphorical meaning to me.

Isn't it interesting, in the modern era, how we are buried with study after study from SCIENCE!!! telling us what and what not to eat, telling us which foods cost too much and which foods don't cost enough--when the ancients had already figured everything out for us? We just had to stop listening to twisted, false narratives like "healthy eating costs more" and instead embrace a far more empowering and far more effective narrative: that healthy food does not have to cost more--in fact, healthy, delicious and nutritious food can quite often be laughably cheap and easy to prepare.

This is why lentils, for me, are a metaphor for solution-minded thinking, and for the rejection of false narratives.

In stark, stark contrast, the "healthy eating costs more" narrative literally hurts people. It teaches that low cost and high nutrition somehow must be mutually exclusive. It kills off solutions. It blinds people to all kinds of healthy and incredibly inexpensive meals, like the many healthy, laughably cheap recipes you can find right here at Casual Kitchen. And yet for some inexplicable reason, this untrue and unethical narrative is wildly popular with "researchers," the media--and with journalists who make condescending remarks about lentils.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth. "Healthy eating really does cost more" is one of those lies. Don't support it and don't spread it.

Readers, what do you think?


Read Next: Cooking Up Advantages Out of Disadvantages


And: Bonus Reading!
1) Does Healthy Eating Really Cost Too Much? A Blogger Roundtable

2) Avoiding the Yes, But Vortex

3) The "It's Too Expensive to Eat Healthy Food" Debate

4) Dumb and Dumber: The Flaws of Measuring Food Costs Using Cost Per Nutrient and Cost Per Calorie

5) Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food


[*] The Times has since made it somewhat difficult to find this specific comment. You have to dig around a bit for it, but it is there. However, note: if you’re not a Times digital subscriber, each time you click for a new page of comments under this single article, it counts as an extra "free article" toward your monthly quota of ten free Times articles. Pretty lame if you ask me.



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
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What Is An Antifragile Diet?

So if you agree that we need "balanced" nutrition of a certain combination, it is wrong to immediately assume that we need such balance at every meal.
--From Nicholas Taleb's latest book Antifragile

The idea that every meal should consist of, say, a salad, a vegetable, a meat, a piece of fruit and a dessert is pretty much a complete fiction created in just the past few centuries of human existence.

Yes, you need a balanced diet. But you don't need every single one of your meals to be balanced. Moreover, your diet may actually be better balanced if you subject it to imbalances from time to time.

Roll this idea over in your mind and you'll arrive at some interesting implications. For one thing, it supports one of the fundamental pillars of the food philosophy here at Casual Kitchen: you don't need meat at every meal. Over a period of days and weeks, yes, of course, your body has specific protein needs you'll need to fulfill. But you do not need a fixed amount of protein every single day. In other words, consider that your body's protein and amino acid needs can be met flexibly, creatively and far less expensively without a daily helping of high-cost meats.

Further, we can find intriguing support for other central elements of low-cost eating. There's nothing wrong, for example, with building your diet almost entirely on low-cost, in-season fruits and vegetables. Don't worry if you eat mostly tree fruits, leafy greens and summer vegetables in the spring and summer--when, conveniently, these foods are least expensive. And don't worry if you completely switch away from these foods when they go out of season (and their prices skyrocket) in the fall and winter. After all, that's when you'll switch to those seasons' least expensive foods, like healthy cabbage, potatoes and root vegetables.

The idea that a "real" meal has to have a broad range of specific elements--that it must contain things like soup, bread and a salad of mixed greens with three and half grape tomatoes on it--is just an artificial expectation created for us by restaurants, the food industry and by our own presumptions of a proper life of modern convenience.

And of course, basing meals around these artificial expectations costs us an unexpectedly large amount of money, with little nutritional return. Long before the modern conception of a "balanced meal" ever came about, humans survived just fine. Your body will survive too.

We can go still further. There's nothing wrong with completely leaving out certain high-cost elements of our diet that we think we need. Consider your family's daily glass of refined, deoxygenated and overpriced Pure Premium orange juice. The idea that your day should start with citrus juice is nice, sure. But it's also an arbitrary idea created for you by modern society. Orange juice is just one example among many of foods and beverages modern eaters consume, most of which are heavily advertised, high-cost, and promoted to us to the point where we assume they are natural. You can safely eliminate these foods from your diet.

Thinking about food this way can be immensely freeing, not to mention immensely less expensive.

Here's the punchline: dietary variation is a positive stressor for your body and for your health. Try it. And remember: everything in moderation. Including moderation.

Related Posts:
Is Organic Food Healthier? Or Just Another Aspirational Product?
The "Don't Buy" List For A Low-Budget Kitchen
How to Blind-Taste and Blind-Test Brands
Thoughts On High-End Cookware





How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to 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.

Cooking Up Advantages Out of Disadvantages

Back during the early days of my former Wall Street career, I literally had no time to cook. None. Not only was I stuck at the office for a zillion hours every week thinking up investment ideas in a delusional stock market, I spent what little time I had outside of work enjoying things like my hour and a half (each way) commute.

Oh man, thank heaven those days are over.

But that wasn't even the worst of it. The worst part of this era of my life was how unhealthily we ate--and how we blamed it on not having enough time. We were eating too many prepared and processed foods, ordering takeout too regularly, and generally spending much more money on our food than we really wanted to.

Quite frankly, after a long day and a suckishly long commute, I just couldn't bring myself to cook. Hell, I'd rather gouge my eyes out. And I can't describe how depressing it was to arrive at home and then realize that I'd have my first bite of dinner about an hour after I needed to be in bed.

But here's the irony, and it's a rich one: During this period of my life, when I was too busy gouging my eyes out to have time to cook, I actually figured out most of my solutions and techniques for cooking healthy meals quickly and efficiently.

We took the serious disadvantage of having insufficient time, and we turned it into an armload of advantages. And we did it by applying a small number of relatively simple ideas:

1) We began doing all of our cooking on weekends, making two or three large meals, and then alternating leftovers of those meals over the following week. Result: we never got sick of the leftovers, and we had plenty of food for days and days of lunches and dinners.

2) We focused our weekend cooking efforts on a smallish collection of 6-8 favorite, easy, scalable and laughably cheap recipes. With practice, we became extremely efficient at making these meals, which made our weekend cooking projects a breeze. Before long, weekend cooking became something we actually looked forward to rather than dreaded.

3) We took advantage of economies of scale and began making these favorite recipes in double or triple batches. With the right kinds of scalable recipes, you can make two, three or even four times the food with minimal incremental work.

4) We emphasized one-pot soups and stews that involve minimal cleanup and are easy to reheat, store and divide into leftovers.

5) We began using energy-efficient and low-labor cooking items like crockpots and rice cookers to create meals that didn't require us to stand there and monitor things. This enabled us to cook still more food with still less of a time commitment.

6) We looked for ways to save time and money by shopping more efficiently. We bought bulk volumes of simple whole ingredients for our double- and triple-batch meals. We biased our purchases away from higher-cost prepared and processed foods. We'd go to the store once a week instead of several times, which helped us cut back on snack buying and impulse purchases.

There. Six general principles and processes, created from a position of disadvantage, which collectively produced powerful results: Soon, we were eating healthier, we enjoyed cooking more, and most shockingly of all, we spent far less time and money on food.

And yet, many people cling to an instinctive belief that there can only be zero-sum tradeoffs between cost, time and health. Eating healthier has to cost more! Cooking at home is time-consuming! After all, there's no such thing as a free lunch, right? Right?

Wrong. Too often people cling to seemingly rigorous concepts--like the idea that healthy food has to be expensive, or that there has to be a zero-sum tradeoff between time and cooking at home--and they then miss opportunities to think creatively about a problem. Our experimentation with cooking habits and practices actually yielded positive-sum tradeoffs, allowing us to optimize time, money and the quality of our food. Sometimes there actually are free lunches. (A totally unrelated side note: my favorite "seemingly rigorous" concept from Wall Street is markets are efficient. Bwahahahahahaha!!! Oh, mercy me.)

The point is, don't let a general concept that seems rigorous and logical cause you to ignore opportunities and solutions. That isn't rigor--that's intellectual laziness.

A final point: I didn't write this post to brag about how brilliant and creative I was to figure out how to save time cooking. By now, most CK readers have probably figured that I'm just an average guy of (lamentably) average intelligence. The thing is, my average-ness is exactly the point. I'm nobody special, and you don't have to be either to try out a few new ideas with an open mind. Anybody can do this.

Experiment a little bit and add some new processes and practices to your life. Adopt the most effective ones as permanent habits, and maintain those habits while you try out still other ideas. Let necessity be the mother of invention, and your disadvantages will become advantages too.

Readers! In your lives, what kinds of disadvantages have you turned into advantages? Share your thoughts!

Related Posts:
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Food Costs
How to Use Leftover Ingredients
Why Spices Are a Complete Rip-Off and What You Can Do About It


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The Ick Factor: Balancing Cost with Time and Effort in Your Kitchen and Home

What tasks do you refuse to do in your kitchen--regardless of the costs savings?

I had a reader once tell me that raw chicken meat grosses her out so much that she gladly pays extra money for pre-wrapped chicken breasts.

Sure, she could de-bone her own chicken breasts at home. It's not that hard to do, and it's meaningfully cheaper. The problem was it crossed too far into "ick" territory for her. And despite the fact that she's on a tight budget, this particular job grosses her out enough that she's happy to pay extra to avoid it.

In truth, we all have our own Ick Factors. We all have some gross or highly undesirable task in our kitchen or home that we will happily pay to avoid.

What's yours? Some people draw the line at making certain foods at home. The idea of making homemade hummus (and dealing with the cleanup afterwards) could be a preposterous "ick" exercise for some--especially when it's so easy to pick up a tub of decent hummus in your local grocery store. (On the other hand, if making homemade hummus is definitely your kind of thing, be sure to visit Casual Kitchen's huge blogroll of hummus recipes.)

Perhaps you'd rather pay extra for store-made hamburger patties because it skeeves you to handle raw ground beef. Maybe you're happy to pay extra for store-baked cookies, muffins or cupcakes because you can't bear to spend the extra time and mess of making them by hand at home.

Heck, I've got a great homemade tortilla chips recipe here at Casual Kitchen, but sometimes, when I think about the effort it will take to deal with the hot oil and the greasy cleanup (and when I compare it to the incredible convenience a $3.99 bag of Doritos), my Ick Factor alarm goes off too.

Where do you draw the line? And is it always a cost-based decision? Or are certain tasks so undesirable to you that you completely ignore the cost?

The thing is, in the world of frugal cooking, there's a mentality--a home-cooking samurai code, if you will--that we should always do everything at home. After all, most foods made at home are cheaper, healthier and of better quality (once we get good at making them, that is).

But is this true in all cases? I don't know for sure, but I don't think so. Heck, here's an obvious example: Homemade ice cream. For me, the idea of grappling with eggs, cream and an ice cream maker will never match up to the ease of buying Ben & Jerry's. And this will remain true for me no matter how much a pint of Cherry Garcia costs.

The Ick Factor question shows up outside of the kitchen too. One of the most popular posts in Trent Hamm's The Simple Dollar is his "recipe" for homemade laundry detergent. I absolutely love reading Trent, but for me, this particular post had Ick Factor written all over it.

Sure, many people gladly pay extra to have their cars washed, their toilets cleaned, their shirts ironed, their driveways shoveled, their burgers pre-made or their chicken breasts deboned. If there's a gross or irritating task that you are dying to avoid, it very well might be worth it--in terms of time, money and happiness--to pay extra to have someone else to make it or do it. You can then apply your time and effort towards accomplishing things that are more important to you.

Readers! What jobs or tasks set off your Ick Factor? What are the tasks in your home or kitchen that you just flat-out refuse to do yourself?

Related Posts:
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
Speed-Weaning: How to End Your Caffeine Addiction in Just Three Days
Why Spices Are a Complete Rip-Off and What You Can Do About It
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs
Malcolm Gladwell Was Completely Wrong About Cooking

Casual Kitchen would like to thank the Kitties x 3 blog for the spurring the ideas behind this post.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The "It's Too Expensive to Eat Healthy Food" Debate

There are some views held by well-meaning reporters and food bloggers that are so specious that it makes me want to hammer a nine-inch nail into my head.

The worst of these shibboleths is that it's too expensive to eat healthy food.

I've seen studies that attempt to prove Doritos cost less than lettuce by measuring foods on a cost-per-calorie basis (by this logic, tap water and zero-calorie diet soda have a cost of infinity). I've seen people compare the high cost of out-of-season organic produce with the low cost of dollar meals at McDonald's and consider it proof that healthy food always costs more than junk food. I've seen professional journalists make profoundly ignorant statements like "The solution that people live on lentils which are healthful and affordable is just ridiculous to me. Nobody wants to live like that."

That last statement is so negative, and so deeply arrogant, that I don't even know where to begin.

Look, if you want to eat both cheaply and healthily, you can't suffer from intellectual arrogance. You can't be close-minded. And you can't be in the profoundly negative habit of making blanket statements like "healthy food is too expensive." It is simply pointless to have a defeatist, all-or-nothing mindset like this.

Of course there are instances where unhealthy foods are cheaper than healthy foods. A simple example: 80/20 ground beef is 30-50c cheaper per pound than 90/10 ground beef, isn't it? And yet 80/20 beef has double the fat content of 90/10 beef. Therefore, 90/10 is "healthier" and--no coincidence--it costs more.

If you really think this is evidence that healthy food costs more than unhealthy food, then you haven't opened your mind enough to consider all your options. Why not entertain a creative and more open-minded third solution? Eat half your normal serving of meat (you can use either type of beef and the cost will be, well, half), and then make up the difference with a side dish of inexpensive greens sauteed with a few cloves of garlic. That solution is tastier, costs the least, and yet it's by far the healthiest of all.

Long time readers of Casual Kitchen know how to think about stacked costs and second order foods. They know that, all else equal, if a food has been processed, transported, advertised, or packaged, it will contain extra costs which are almost always borne by the consumer.

This is why if you want to save money and eat healthy, you'll want to focus your diet on whole, unprocessed foods, bulk grains and legumes, and simple, in-season and reasonably priced produce. You'll want to avoid buying branded foods, especially heavily-advertised branded foods, because those advertising costs are passed on to you in the form of higher prices. You'll want to avoid being the type of consumer who thinks food can't be truly "healthy" unless it has a magic organic sticker on it. And you'll want to read food blogs like this one offering a steady diet of laughably cheap, delicious and easy-to-make recipes. [See Casual Kitchen's 25 best "Laughably Cheap" recipes.]

And there will always be pricing idiosyncrasies in your grocery store. There are regular times each year when some healthy fruits and veggies go out of season and their prices skyrocket (and, thank heavens, every so often Doritos go on sale too). But, remember, pricing idiosyncrasies are opportunities, and you can take advantage of them if you stay open-minded and flexible. Don't go into a grocery store demanding grapefruit in October and blueberries in January. But when you see grapefruit at half the normal price in February and local blueberries on sale in July, stock up!

Casual Kitchen was founded on the idea that healthy food can be fun, easy to prepare and inexpensive. In fact, there are lots of foods and recipes out there that are be so inexpensive that it simply makes you laugh out loud--which is why I created the tag "laughably cheap" to categorize all of the best low-cost recipes here.

And no one says you have to live on lentils. That's just ridiculous to me. Nobody wants to live like that.

Related Posts:
Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food
If It's So Cheap to Cook at Home, Then Why is My Grocery Bill So Huge?
The Casual Kitchen Food Spending Poll: Results and Conclusions
Make Your Diet Into a Flexible Tool
When High-Fat Food ... Can Actually Be Healthy For You
The Pros and Cons of a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet
Does Healthy Eating Really Cost Too Much? A Blogger Roundtable Discussion

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me from your own blog, or by subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Dumb and Dumber: The Flaws of Measuring Food Costs Using Cost Per Nutrient and Cost Per Calorie

A (trick) question for readers: Which of the following is a better value?

1) Two pounds of collard greens (about 300 calories) for $1.49

2) Two pounds of 85% lean ground beef (about 1,300 calories) for $4.59

Which would you pick?

Looking purely at the raw cost of each item, the collards are, duh, obviously cheaper. But there are other, more complicated, ways of looking at food costs.

You could consider the cost on a per calorie basis. If you consider the two foods this way, then the ground beef becomes the better deal. Sure, it may cost three times as much as the collards, but it yields more than four times the calories.

You could also consider the cost on a per nutrient basis. This yields a different result yet again: the collards, which are loaded with vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants, dominate the ground beef.

So, when we try and look beyond the simple dollar cost of two simple foods, we come up with completely contradictory results. Confused? Me too.

Which brings me to the point of this post: Be careful. When you are considering the relative value of the foods you purchase, don't put all your faith in either cost per calorie or cost per nutrient. Both measures have their merits, but both can also be extremely misleading. In this post I'm going to focus on the problems and deceptions that can occur when we look at foods in these two ways.

Let's start with the weaknesses of cost per nutrient. I'll start by confessing that I like this measure and I believe it provides useful value. If consumers could see easy-to-understand information in stores about the rich range of nutrients in inexpensive foods like lentils, carrots, potatoes, beans, as well as other in-season fruits and veggies, they'd likely buy these foods a lot more often.

But which nutrients are we measuring, exactly? And how do they compare? Is Vitamin A worth more than Vitamin C (which I guess must be worth more than Vitamin E)? Is precious Lutein more valuable than boring old fiber? And if we were to slavishly measure everything by cost per nutrient, then mega-vitamin pills would be the best bargain of all. And that, unfortunately, would subvert the entire purpose of using this measure in the first place: to encourage people to eat healthy and inexpensive greens, fruits and veggies.

Furthermore, the cost per nutrient measure could be gamed quite easily. An example: what's to stop the branded boxed cereal industry from aggressively promoting the vitamins, minerals and nutrients they chemically add back to their cereals? Who knows--they might even take the next step and make the claim that their sugar- and salt-laden cereals boost immunity! (Wait, you say they already tried that? Oh.)

Let's now address the weakness in using cost per calorie, which is in my view the dumbest and most deceptive way to measure food costs.

Here's why: at $3.99, a 12 ounce bag of fat- and salt-laden Doritos should seem like a ripoff, considering all the processing, packaging, transport and marketing costs that make it one of the most expensive second-order foods in your grocery store. But on a cost per calorie basis, things start to look a little screwy. Once you divide your bag of Doritos by 1,600 (that's the calorie count in a 12 ounce bag), and then you divide your collard greens by their measly 300 calories, you'll be horrified to find that collards cost 1/2 a cent per calorie, while Doritos only cost 1/5th of a cent per calorie.

That's right, by when you measure by cost per calorie, collard greens cost two and a half times more than Doritos! Only in the utterly confused food industry can we manage to make a two pound armload of collard greens at $1.49 look more expensive than a $3.99 12-ounce bag of Doritos.

Let me savage on this ridiculous cost per calorie metric further. Think about this: on a cost per calorie basis, zero-calorie diet soda is one of the cruelest ripoffs in all of food--it literally costs infinity. And negative-calorie ice water doesn't compute at all--in theory the store should pay you for buying chilled water!

It can be useful to look at these non-typical ways of measuring food value, but don't get too wrapped up in them. They can mislead, and they can be easily gamed by skilled food marketers. Use them as additional information to consider, never as the only consideration.

Related Posts:
Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule
How to Feel Less Hungry on Fewer Calories: Hacking the Satiety Factor of Foods
How to Resist Irresistible Food
How Food Companies Hide Sugar in Plain Sight
15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The Food Spending Poll: Results and Conclusions

A quick backgrounder on today's post: In response to my recent post on how food spending has fallen to all-time lows (Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food), I asked Casual Kitchen readers to share their own personal food spending data.

Read on to find out how real people handle their food budgeting decisions, and how their spending compares to the national averages.
****************************************
So what were the results of our food spending poll? After running the numbers, it's clear that Casual Kitchen readers spend more on food than the national average--quite a bit more, in fact.

Percent of Disposable Income Spent on Food:

Total Food Spending
CK Readers: 14.7%
US Average: 9.6%

Spending, Food at Home:
CK Readers: 9.8%
US Average: 5.6%

Spending, Food Away from Home:
CK Readers: 5.0%
US Average: 4.0%
*********************************
I know my readers take their home cooking seriously, but I never expected our food spending to be five percentage points higher than the national average. I assumed this survey would generate misleadingly low results due to selection bias (i.e., lower-spending readers might be more likely to respond, skewing the results downward).

So much for my assumptions.

Details on the responses:
1) I had 28 responses via blog comments, email and Twitter. While this sample size is too small to draw much more than anecdotal conclusions, it's worth noting that the results were relatively normally distributed around the mean, and the mean and median of this sample were nearly the same.

2) The responses ranged from a high of 25% of income spent on all food to a low of just 6%. There were quite a number of you in the 8-11% range--at or near the government averages. And I had one respondent (the head of a family of 12 whose food spending exceeds her mortgage payment!) who was so far off the charts that I had to exclude her from the data set.

3) Quite a few of you spend very little eating out. There were several respondents who spent 2-3% (some even less than that) in the food away from home category.

4) A few of you took care to differentiate between your budgets and what really happens each month, an impressive feat of both accuracy and candor.

Which takes us to some final thoughts: Who would guess that the readership of a frugal food blog--one that specializes in laughably cheap recipes no less--would spend that much more than the national average on food!

What does this tell us? Does it imply that there any inefficiencies in our food spending that we can exploit? Are we really spending more than we need to on food, or are we spending just the right amount?

Related Posts:
Brand Disloyalty
Does Healthy Eating Really Cost Too Much? A Blogger Roundtable
If It's So Cheap to Cook at Home, Then Why is My Grocery Bill So Huge?
Spreading the New Frugality: A Manifesto

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

A Question of Food Quality

I had an interesting question put to me by a reader in response to my Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food post:

What about the quality of the food consumed?

What a great question. If one can make the case that the foods in the 1930s and 40s were higher quality than the foods available now, it would clearly undermine the value of food being so much more affordable than it was in the past.

But how do you measure food quality? It can't be measured objectively or quantitatively in the way food costs can be measured. And I wasn't alive in the 1930s to eat overly-salted mushy beans and peas with my grandparents.

Here are some metrics I'd consider in order to think about a qualitative assessment of food quality:

1) Range of foods available/choices for the consumer.
2) Foods available out of season or from far away.
3) Food flavor, taste and texture
4) Food nutritional content
5) Food purity, or food pesticide or hormone content
6) Food safety/health risks

A few thoughts:
Regarding points 1-4: Clearly, the range of foods and the choices available to the consumer have expanded massively in recent decades. Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics, once said that the average number of products carried by a typical supermarket has more than tripled to 50,000 since 1980 alone, and the range of produce, meats, cheeses and specialty foods available to consumers today is of a level our great-grandparents would find inconceivable. And no one thinks it's a big deal any more to find apples or strawberries in the produce aisles during the middle of winter or pineapples at any time year round.

This is a good thing, albeit with some accompanying drawbacks--for example, we need to face up to the environmental and economic costs implicit in routinely buying produce out of season, since that produce comes at higher prices and with an incremental carbon footprint.

In fact, the sheer choice available to us year-round in our grocery stores has driven a new and unique form of ignorance among many consumers--many consumers have no idea what fruits or vegetables are "in season" at any given time, and some are unaware that most produce has seasons at all! It makes me wonder if sometimes our extremely efficient food industry, with its unparalleled shipping and logistics capabilities, has given us a bit too much convenience for our own good.

Of course, if you're oblivious to the produce seasons in your area, you will pay more for poorer quality food. But that particular form of ignorance can be largely cured by paying attention to the ebb and flow of prices and products in your local grocery store over the course of the year. And while the nutritional content of some of the 50,000 foods in our grocery stores may be suspect (e.g.: "shelf-life enhanced" products like Twinkies or Doritos), these are foods consumers have a choice to buy--or not buy.

Again, when we can walk into nearly any grocery store anywhere in the USA and choose from a range of fruits, vegetables, grains and meats that our grandparents could only dream of, we likewise have access to far better range of nutrition than was available during our grandparents' era.

Points 4-6 are much more difficult. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s nobody used hormones, antibiotics or CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) when farming animals. We may be paying an unknown price for cheap meat. On the other hand, there was widespread use of DDT as an agricultural insecticide beginning shortly after World War II. Modern pesticides, fortunately, are required by law to be biodegradable and thus are less likely to compound in the bodies of humans--or wildlife, for that matter.

My thoughts on health and safety are mixed. Clearly, it seems like there's been a rash of e. coli and salmonella contaminations over the past few years. But has there really been an increase in outbreaks, or does it just feel that way because our media industry has found this subject to be a particularly effective attention-grabber? I'd be very curious to see if there is any data on deaths due to food safety issues over the past several decades. My guess, based on admittedly pure speculation, is that per-capita food safety deaths are probably a fraction of what they were decades ago, despite the contrary impression we get from our media.

Readers, what are your thoughts on these subjects? Where am I wrong?

One final thought: One of the best things about blogging is the opportunity for give and take with readers, especially with inquisitive, rigorous and insightful readers like the ones I'm so lucky to have here at Casual Kitchen. Thanks, as always, for your comments and opinions.

Related Posts:
The Problem with Government Food Safety Regulation
Make Your Diet Into a Flexible Tool
Brand Disloyalty
Ten Tips to Save Money on Spices and Seasonings


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

What Percent of Your Budget Do You Spend on Food?

Update to readers: This poll has now been closed, and I've analyzed the (surprising) food spending results of Casual Kitchen's readers here.
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I wanted to explore further our recent discussion of food costs by taking a quick poll of my readers:

1) What percent of your budget do you spend on food?
2) And what percent of that spending goes to restaurant meals and other food not cooked at home (e.g., takeout meals, bought lunches, Starbucks, etc)?

Be honest now. :)

I'd like to do two things with this information. First, I'd like to run a sanity check on the government data in the chart in my Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever On Food post, and find out if there's any real anecdotal evidence supporting the assertion that only 10% of disposable income goes toward food.

Second, if I can gather a decent number of responses, there might be some helpful implications that emerge from the data that we can all use to help optimize our food spending.

To clarify one term, assume that "budget" means your monthly household take-home pay, not your gross pay. This is how the government defines disposable income.

If you don't want to respond publicly, feel free to leave an anonymous comment below, or even better, send me an email with your response. I'll also post this question on Twitter.

Fair is fair, so I'll go first. As it turns out, our food spending is almost exactly 10% of our total budget. And interestingly, it's stayed surprisingly close to 10% of our budget, regardless of the level of our household income.

However, the percent of our food spend that goes toward restaurant meals and dinners out fluctuates wildly. When I worked on Wall Street (and was making a lot more money), we simply ate out more often, spending perhaps as much as 50-60% of our food budget on restaurant meals. Now that I have more time to cook at home, our restaurant spending is running well below 25% of our food budget.

Readers, please share your thoughts on these two questions in the comments below!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food

It's pretty easy to find articles in the media and in various food blogs complaining (or worse, whining) about how expensive food is these days. But the chart below tells quite a different story:

--chart courtesy of Professor Mark J. Perry's Carpe Diem Blog

This chart says that Americans spent well more than 20% of their disposable income on food during the 1930s and 1940s. Since then, food costs have plummeted relative to our income--so much so that we now spend just 9.6% of our budgets on food.

Now, long-time CK readers know I hate to be faked out by charts that, oh, might be rigged by, say, a biased journalist who massages data to make a point. In order to control for this, please take a look at the source data behind the above chart. You'll be rewarded, because the data gets even more compelling once you explore it a bit further.

The USDA breaks down aggregate food expenditures into two categories: food expenditures at home (includes purchases from grocery stores and other retail outlets as well as purchases with food stamps) and food expenditures away from home (includes meals and snacks purchased by families and individuals).

Over the past eighty years, the food expenditures at home category declined from 20.3% of income to a paltry 5.6% of income. A decline of this magnitude is quite simply remarkable, especially considering that this is the least discretionary portion of our food spending. Imagine our grandparents and great-grandparents spending almost four times as much of their disposable income on food.

Equally intriguing is the food away from home category. This kind of spending is highly discretionary--if we'd like to make meaningful cuts to our food budgets, eliminating a few monthly restaurant meals is the quickest and easiest way to do so. Yet this category of expenditure grew from 3.1% to 4.0% of income. Those numbers may look small, but the key point is this: while our spending on at-home food plummeted, our spending on discretionary away-from-home food increased to nearly half of our overall food spending (4% out of 9.6%). That to me is a staggering insight, and it suggests that we could spend still less--possibly far less--on our overall food budgets by eating out less and eating at home more.

Furthermore, this chart doesn't address the massive range of food choices available to consumers now that were unavailable decades ago. Admittedly, some of these choices include fattening and expensive second-order foods, but that doesn't mean we have to buy them.

A side note: for a shocking perspective on how insanely wealthy we've become as a society, consider the increase in absolute dollars spent on food away from home: it grew from $2.6 billion in 1929 (a local peak, right before the Depression set in) to $422 billion (!) in 2008. That's a 162x increase. The next time you feel like life is unfair, please have another look at these numbers.

All of a sudden, I have a lot more admiration for my grandparents and their era's culture of intelligent thrift.

Readers, what are your thoughts?

Related Posts:
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
How are You Adjusting to the Economic Crisis? A Question for CK Readers
Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule
How to Enjoy Wine On A Budget
What Have You Given Up That You Don't Miss?
All Casual Kitchen recipes tagged with laughably cheap

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!