Friday, August 20, 2010

Eating on a Budget

As a general consequence of no longer living with your parents, you must learn to provide food for yourself. Takeout is always a fail-safe alternative to cooking (an alternative I chose a lot in college), but when you have to eat on a budget, preparing food yourself is always cheaper.

I manage to keep my food budget pretty low by shopping at a combination of places: the dollar store, farmers’ markets, and Trader Joe’s. With a little forethought and careful shopping, buying good food and keeping to a budget all at the same time is doable.

I kind of stumbled into shopping at the dollar store by accident. There’s a store five minutes from my apartment, and this is where I went a few days after I moved in. If you don’t have a dollar store right around the corner from you, check Dollar Tree and 99 Cents Only for locations. In general, the dollar store is best for pantry staples, like pasta, canned goods, and condiments. I’ve also, surprisingly, bought produce there. You have to be quick, though, since fresh batches of produce will be gone within a day (and if they’ve sat for more than one day, you’re not going to want them anyway). When buying produce, I try to stick to the Environmental Working Group’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides (available as a printable wallet guide or iPhone app at http://www.foodnews.org/walletguide.php). That means that at the dollar store, I tend to buy only produce in the "Clean 15” category, on which the least amount of pesticides has been used. Included in this category are kiwi, mangos, eggplants, and avocados, all of which I’ve bought at the dollar store. To buy produce in the “Dirty Dozen,” I head to the farmers’ market, where I can get organic.

I’m also lucky enough to live a 15-minute walk from the Farmers Market at Fairfax and W. 3rd Street, so I can buy fresh produce every day of the week if I want to. The first time I went, I budgeted myself $10, just to see what I could get for that much. This is what I bought:

* three yellow peaches
* one Hass avocado
* one ear of sweet white corn
* one red bell pepper
* two large sweet potatoes
* one small honeydew melon
* one large cucumber

I took my cues from what was cheapest, since that’s what’s in season and what would taste the best. I find just having fresh produce in the apartment makes me more creative in my cooking. I can throw together some very simple dishes because the produce tastes so good on its own.

I round out my food supply with some careful shopping at Trader Joe’s. I try to plan what I want to buy before I go, and I always compare prices when faced with lots of choices (like with bread or yogurt). There’s always a lot of great cheap stuff at TJ’s. Overall, though, I find the store’s produce department lacking, so go support your local farmers’ market instead.

And if you have indulgent parents, like I do, who somehow feel sorry for you now that you have to be an adult and feed yourself, a trip home always yields care packages filled with leftovers and whatever else my mom has on hand. While my mom is emptying the contents of the pantry and refrigerator into bags for me, my dad will stand by, joking that he’s keeping tally of what I’m taking and that the bill will be in the mail. *sigh* What I have to put up with to get free food ☺

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