Eating (Pretty) Well on a Budget: Stop Wasting Food

A couple of years ago, I would see random articles that would talk about how much food Americans throw away. The numbers I'd see ranged from 1/3-1/2 our food being thrown away. Even if 1/3 of your groceries go to waste, that's a lot of money being thrown out! If you spend $300 a month on groceries every month and throw away a third of your food, that's going to be about $90 you're throwing away. After seeing some of these numbers, I started paying attention to how much food we were throwing away. Stale boxes of crackers only 3/4 gone, produce we let go bad, stuff stuck in the back of the freezer we forgot about and were full of freezer burn by the time we found it, etc. Once I started putting dollar amounts to the food we were throwing away, I started to freak out about all the stuff we threw away. So, over the last couple of years, we've been working on improving that. We're still working on it, but we've definitely improved. And our wallet thanks us! We spend about the same amount we do per month on groceries, but we're eating better food now! Seafood once a week makes us both really happy! Here are a few of the things we started doing to try and cut back on our food waste.

1. Buy less food
           This seems like it would be pretty obvious, but how do you know what food you can go without? We started by not giving in to cravings and buying crackers and other snacky foods (which we'd already decided previously not to buy anymore to try and save money) because we'd eat half or most of it, but then end up throwing away stale crackers or pretzels. So, we practiced self control and quit buying that stuff, even when cravings struck. Now, I found out about a year ago that I have a small heart problem that actually requires more salt in my diet, so we do regularly keep pretzels on hand now so I have a quick, salty snack to keep me from passing out on occasion, but I always eat the whole bag now! Produce was the other thing we threw away a lot, so we decided to start only buying the produce we thought we'd eat in half a week and then if we needed to make another trip to the store for produce, so be it. Turns out we would always overestimate how much produce we'd eat. By buying less produce, we were still eating produce, but we ate all the produce we bought. We still occasionally have berries go bad on us, they're tricky ones, but we've gotten a lot better about not throwing out so much produce.

2. Plan your meals using the same ingredients
           Anything really perishable that you buy should be used multiple times in your meals that week. If I want to make one dish that uses cilantro, I plan at least 2 other dishes that will use up some of that cilantro. Or if I buy a bag of potatoes, I'll cook with the potatoes a couple of times that week and then plan to finish off the bag the next week before they go bad.

3. Eat all the produce you buy
           Again, pretty obvious, but I was notoriously bad at using all the veggies we would buy. I consistently would throw away half the lettuce we'd bought because I'd also bought broccoli and green beans. This goes sort of in hand with "buy less food" because if you don't buy the broccoli in the first place, you would have no choice but to have salad another night and finish the lettuce.

Eating (Pretty) Well on a Budget: Meatless Monday

My great-grandfather was a cattle rancher. In our religion we have a health code and part of it says to "eat meat sparingly" which is pretty much left up to interpretation. So to my cattle rancher great-grandpa, eating meat two to three times a day every day was sparingly because he would snack on meat too, but that wouldn't be sparingly. So 3 generations later, that's how I grew up. My husband didn't have a cattle rancher grandpa, but he grew up in a meat and potatoes kind of family, so when we got married, that's how we continued to eat. Fast forward a few years and we're doing research on eating healthier and saving money on food. We found going meatless once or more a week can help a lot in both areas. As an added bonus, it's good for the environment to cut back on meat consumption. Not long after, I heard about a movement that started during the Great Depression, called Meatless Monday. So for 2016, one of our resolutions was to have Meatless Monday every week. We did really well with it and have continued with it ever since. We try and have one or two meatless meals over the weekend as well.

I am now a huge believer in Meatless Monday. It challenges me while meal planning to think of delicious, filling meals that aren't centered on meat. I usually feel really healthy after eating a Meatless Monday meal. I say usually because one of my favourite meatless meals is mac & cheese which doesn't usually qualify as healthy... Focusing more on vegetables and less on meat has really expanded my tastes and helped me branch out to more than just carrots, green beans, broccoli and asparagus. I've now branched out to making butternut squash mac & cheese despite hating squash, loving lentils, and I learned there are more beans besides just black and pinto beans. One goal for this year is to try more vegetarian cooking and branch out to meat substitutes (I'm sure my cattle ranching great-grandpa is rolling over in his grave).

Feeling healthier is a great feeling! But I'm not going to lie, the main reason we stuck with going meatless in the beginning was because of the potential for savings. Aside from Meatless Monday, we also cut meat from one weekend meal, so we went meatless twice a week. If you replace 2 pounds of chicken at $4 with two cans of beans at $1 each, that's half the cost each week. A difference of $2 a week ends up being $100 a year. Of course these numbers are going to be slightly different depending what meal you replace your meat with, but hopefully this at least gives you some idea what your savings could look like.