Later on, when my friend Josh went vegetarian, I made a point of eating my meat with vigor in front of him. I thought my showy enjoyment was both original and hilarious. Yet the more reading I did, the more troubled I became by the dissonance between my love for animals like cats and dogs, and my love for eating cows, pigs, and chickens.
Over the next year or so, there were several experiences that forced me to find a solution to my internal discord. Like the time I had blood drawn after eating my value meal at McDonald’s, only to see a half-inch thick white layer of fat floating at the top of the vial; or the time when I toured with a friend’s band and ended up staying the night at our host’s home and meeting their small pig, whose fluttering wet nose woke me up in the morning (much like my dog’s). After reading more about the modern food system and the treatment of animals, reflecting on that information, and searching my core for what felt right, inevitably it was music that helped me choose to become vegetarian. Driving in the car with friends on our way to a show, I heard the song “Cats and Dogs” by Gorilla Biscuits, a quintessential hardcore band from New York. I read the lyrics in the liner notes, and the truths they described about our attitudes toward animals distilled the issue for me: We love cats and dogs, and yet we slaughter pigs, cows, and chickens, even though they also have distinct personalities and feel pain. Having recently met a pig up close, this struck a chord.
This newfound sense of clarity regarding what I ate was my first realization that what I did in the world, and how I lived, was a direct extension of what I believed. Soon after deciding to become vegetarian, I found that there were also several academic philosophical arguments supporting the rights of animals. When I gave up cheese as well, I became vegan.
Over the years, my sense of identity and my lifestyle changes eventually led to other questions about where our food comes from. I also learned that eating habits are not all that difficult to change, if you have a good enough reason to change them.
Kerri’s ten-year journey to becoming a vegetarian, and then going vegan, was much different from my own. As a young woman surrounded by recreational hunters, anytime she brought up the idea of straying from a meat-centered diet, the notion was laughed off. Our different eating histories only help to underline how personal our relationships with food are. I am sure that whether you ask an ardent meat eater, a person living with celiac disease, or a devout locavore how they came to decide what is for dinner, they will each have a very individual food narrative. As stated earlier, recently we had become more keenly aware of issues like unpaid labor practices and environmental concerns related to industry.
During our experiments with low-budget menus, these issues were all starting to come into focus in a sharpened way. I knew, for instance, that eating animal products was the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, but I was unaware that by choosing to be vegan, we were doing far more for both humans and the environment than even the most dedicated locavores. I knew that working in a slaughterhouse was one of the most dangerous jobs in America, where human rights abuses were rampant, but I had no idea that in Immokalee, Florida, illegally trafficked migrant workers were living in modern-day slavery. (In one documented instance, a farm worker was walking along the road and one of the labor contractors “decided the worker was probably trying to escape, forced him into their van, broke his knees with a hammer, and threw him out of the moving vehicle.”) I knew that buying organic food was better for the environment, but had never considered that, as the World Health Organization reports, “Three million cases of pesticide poisoning occur every year, resulting in more than 250,000 deaths.”
To learn that these issues weren’t isolated but part of the larger reality involved within the modern food system was startling. No longer were we just thinking about issues like cost and convenience. Even though these remained important to us, our concerns stretched beyond our desire to lower our grocery bills; we wanted to help with hunger issues within our community.
In light of these revelations, we decided we could spend a little more on food during our healthy eating plan. Before we started the dollar diet, we bought local and organic whenever we could. But during our experiments, this ceased entirely. We were vegan, which was simple on a low-cost budget, but we still tended to overeat when we could. So the goal for the new plan was to be as healthy as possible, using our money to support practices that are best for people, animals, and the Earth itself, while not going broke. Unlike half of the world’s population, we had more than $2.50 a day to live our lives, and so our challenge would be to navigate the modern global food system, to stay healthy, and to do so affordably. Through lots of reading, talking with people in our community, and transforming the way we saw our meals, we knew it was possible.
By the first week, it was clear that the largest challenge would be trying to stick to healthy eating patterns. While we learned to eat less on the dollar diet, overeating had been a continual challenge, and it was hard to give up snacks such as chips and cookies. This is one of the reasons why I decided to take a more active role in planning and preparing our meals, which prompted me to sign us up for our local CSA. I longed for a deeper connection with what we ate.
To start living this way, I needed something that would keep me interested in cooking, a task that I usually avoid. I picked up a copy of Bryant Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen. My touring across the country to play music had allowed me to eat all kinds of wonderful food, but from the first time I ate soul food in the Deep South, I was crazy about it. When I planned our menu for the first few weeks of this new endeavor, I included things like Jamaican stuffed veggie pockets and barbecued black-eyed peas. Kerri had been obsessively making seared kale with a light tahini dressing, which rounded things out perfectly. I set to work cutting and chopping fresh carrots and potatoes and soaking them in a specially seasoned roux, adding peas and corn as it thickened. The warm aromas transformed the house, and Terry’s recommended cooking music, a punk band known as Bad Brains, reminded me of how that community shaped my life.
I rolled out my chilled wheat flour pastry dough and scooped the filling into each pocket, pressing the edges closed with a fork. I let my black-eyed peas simmer in the homemade barbecue sauce that Kerri put together a couple days earlier, and sampled each item as I went along. As I tasted the marinated black-eyed peas, I noted that this meal was prepared with our ethics, our health, and our wallets in mind. Dried black-eyed peas are high in protein and fiber, low in fat, and at two dollars a pound, they were more than affordable—especially since we only needed a fraction of that for this meal. I wondered if this process was something we’d be able to replicate in the fall, given our busy teaching schedules.
So far, we had mostly had small fruit smoothies for breakfast, usually including frozen strawberries, bananas, and, when we had it, kale. We would use some orange juice or soymilk to give it a smooth consistency. While people in our area spend anywhere from four to six dollars for this treat, I could whip them up in minutes for a fraction of the cost. We continued to eat small servings of cereal every now and then, but we had moved on from the store-brand cornflakes in the Thrifty Food Plan and were now buying whole grain cereals that were high in fiber and protein and low in added sugars. If a cereal had a long list of ingredients we usually put it back on the shelf. When we wanted to sweeten it up, as these types of cereals can, at times, seem bland, we would add some chopped fresh strawberries or white nectarines; blueberries were also a common addition.
For lunches I tried making some new things that would be relatively easy, inexpensive, and last us for a few days. My first batch of lentil stew fit the bill perfectly. This high-protein dish was easy to put together in our Crock-Pot and, since it simmered all day, the house smelled fantastic. The crushed tomatoes and spinach gave the lentils some extra kick, and the rice helped give it a lighter texture. Since we had a good amount of lentils, we also used them in tacos, seasoning them with jalapeños, onion powder, and garlic. The recipe c
ame from a back issue of Home Cooking magazine that Kerri’s grandmother had sent us a year earlier. Since we were getting all kinds of produce, we often ate salads just to keep up with our CSA deliveries. When we planned to make more traditional dishes, we’d look for ways to make them healthier, like making mashed potatoes with sweet potatoes instead of russets due to their higher levels of fiber, foliates, and carotenoids (a source of vitamin A).
Kerri also prepared some inexpensive and healthy options for dinners (which ended up being lunches the next day), such as a kale soup that included barley, carrots, and garbanzo beans. All she really had to buy were those few ingredients, as she had been saving vegetable scraps in a freezer bag to make her own broth. This big batch of soup cost us about five dollars to make, and filled each of our bowls on three different occasions, coming to eighty-three cents per serving. One week, Kerri had an abundance of tomatoes and zucchinis growing in the backyard, so on Sunday night she put together dinners that would last us the whole week: vegetable lasagna; Tuscan-style pasta with chickpeas, zucchini, and rosemary; and a zucchini-chickpea-tomato curry. The lasagna, which was by far the most expensive, ended up being about $1.25 a serving, the pasta came to fifty-eight cents a serving, and the curry came in at forty-three cents a plate. Each of these dishes lasted us all week, and we ended up alternating them for lunches as well. There was so much food that Kerri took some to her friend Gail, and we sent my sister home with half of the curry leftovers.
While the cost of our healthy eating during the first few weeks had put us at about $6.80 each per day (right around the national average), this week, when we used a few ingredients for several different meals, costs went down considerably. Cereal for breakfast (including soymilk) totaled about sixty-eight cents; if we had lasagna for lunch ($1.25) and curry for dinner (forty-three cents), our daily total was about $2.36, or just under a third of the national average. Of course, this cost does not include any of Kerri’s harvest. If we considered all of the garden supplies, this would have made our meals far more expensive. In addition to saving money, everything we ate was either organic, local, or both. We have posted some of our sample menus and recipes on our website for you to enjoy.
But tonight was my night to cook, and we were having Jamaican veggie pockets. Once things were ready, I scooped reasonably sized portions onto our plates. I lifted the warm pastry pocket and glanced over at Kerri. The look on her face as she took her first bite was all the validation I needed to give me confidence in this new plan. It was possible, and it would be delicious.
15
Overrun by Produce
Kerri
At the end of our first month of healthy eating, Christopher and I sat down to plan our grocery shopping for the week. It was obvious that there had been a significant change in the way we approached our weekly trips to the grocery store. Before any of our eating experiments, it wasn’t uncommon for us to spend between $125 and $150 per week, or up to $600 a month for just the two of us. Often we’d fill our carts with boxes and cans of processed foods. We had now made it through the month spending $411.41, 30 percent less than before, including two weeks’ worth of fresh organic produce from our CSA. We were trying new foods and working on eating healthfully. Not only that, but we were seeing that as we stocked up on staple items, we were getting fewer and fewer items at the store with each trip. Our weekly grocery bill had become progressively less expensive.
“I really liked those seitan cutlets with homemade barbecue sauce,” Christopher said. I grabbed the cookbook off the shelf and flipped to find the recipe.
Scanning the ingredients, I said, “Let’s see, we only need to get the chiles and some tomato sauce; we have all the other stuff.”
Christopher jotted down the items. “Let’s have the chard with it. Don’t you have some in your garden?” I nodded. He made a note and continued, “We have everything we need for polenta.”
With the rest of the week planned, we headed out to the store with only about ten items on our list and one bag in hand. Before we started this journey, our list would have been five times as long, and we would have needed at least five or six of our canvas bags. Now things were far different.
When we walked through the door, I reflected that I felt as if half of my life had been spent wandering grocery store aisles. My decision to work at a grocery store when I was eighteen had little to do with the fact that it was my first choice, and much to do with the fact that I knew I would be hired. When I turned in my application, I was embarrassed, but my grandpa had insisted. The manager towered over me, and I was intimidated by his booming voice. I handed my application over to him with a note attached to it with a paper clip. It said: “Jim, this is my granddaughter.” The manager took one look at it and let out a bellowing laugh that made me cower. “So you think this will get you a job?” He winked at me and told me he’d let me know when there was an opening.
Close to thirty years earlier, my grandfather had hired the tall teenager who worked his way up in the business and would now be my boss. Working at a grocery store seemed like a natural path for me. After five years of owning his own store, my grandfather went to work for a friend whose grocery business was expanding. He retired thirty-two years later from the corporate office of that company as one of the buyers. Because of this, my sisters and I were often the first kids in our school to have new products, as a result of samples given to my grandfather. When squeezable lunch box drinks first came out when I was in elementary school, a teacher rushed over to me because she thought I was drinking straight from a ketchup bottle. To this day, my parents still have a beach towel with a large image of a cherry-flavored Capri-Sun on it, and Campbell’s soup bowls from the 1984 Winter Olympics. Perhaps this is the reason that I love soup as much as I do.
When my sisters and I were young, my dad, who is a teacher, worked summers and holidays at a grocery store to help make ends meet. But the family connections to the grocery world do not stop there. My uncle is a manager, and my sisters have also worked in the business at one time or another. In fact, both of my sisters met their husbands while working as baggers. My mom is one of the only people on her side of the family who never worked in a grocery store, something she still holds against my grandfather, because when she wanted a job, girls were not allowed to be “box boys.”
With all of this insight and experience, it seems that writing about ways to save money on food would come naturally to me, but it did not. I know that checking the markdown bins or shelves can be a quick way to save a few dollars, but through our experiments, it was continual trial and error to find out the best ways to eat a healthful and inexpensive diet. Navigating the store for the best prices and the healthiest options is something that took some time, but we now approach shopping with the confidence of professionals.
We had grabbed a basket instead of a cart to help collect our items. Now that we had reevaluated the way we approached grocery shopping, our lists were shorter and better planned out. This was in part due to what we learned during our previous experiments. While we were eating on the Thrifty Food Plan, our second shopping trip to the store that had better prices opened our eyes to the cost difference between two seemingly similar stores. While we loved our natural foods store, we were paying almost $7 for a half-gallon of soymilk, but at a chain store, we could get a gallon for only $5.99. The dollar-diet project confirmed for us that bulk foods are less expensive per ounce, and to this day we are still working our way through massive amounts of beans, flour, and cornmeal. The oatmeal, alas, is still sitting in its corner in the cupboard. Perhaps at some point I’ll regain my taste for it, or at least turn it into cookies for my students.
Christopher recently used some of the oatmeal to make a batch of maple-glazed granola, and this allowed us to use something we were sick of and fashion something new. His preparation of this homemade breakfast cereal required that we pick up some maple syrup at the store, since Christopher needed more than we could reasonably pilfer from McDonald’s. Pricing
out maple syrup for this project was quite surprising. Our natural foods store offers about ten different versions of pure maple syrup, and the cheapest is nine dollars, for eight ounces. We simply couldn’t rationalize the purchase. The chain store across the street boasted over twenty different options, but only one that was actually pure maple syrup; the rest were a blend of other sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup. There we were able to find an organic pure maple syrup for eight dollars, but this bottle contained twelve ounces—30 percent more than the cheapest bottle at the natural foods store. Even so, at prices like these, we’ll be limiting how often we use maple syrup.
While Christopher did try making some new things like granola for breakfast, during this plan, fruit smoothies and a piece of whole grain toast with a spot of pure peanut butter became regular options.
While I may lament that we don’t have a true pantry in our kitchen, in truth we have a decent-sized space for extra food. We are able to stock up on staple foods at low prices because we have the cupboard space to store them. During the dollar project, when Christopher came home with several five-gallon Home Depot buckets and informed me that they were going to sit in our kitchen, I thought he had come unhinged. They are an eyesore, and it can be frustrating to have to stack and restack buckets to find what we are looking for. However, this enabled us to buy large amounts of food at the lowest prices.
At the start of our dollar-diet project, we purchased a fifty-pound bag of flour for $15.99, whereas a typical five-pound bag might cost $2 or $3. In addition to the low price, having that raw ingredient on hand now encourages us to make things at home that we might otherwise have purchased, such as pizza dough or bread. Although it’s a lot of flour to have on hand, the cost per ounce makes it a much better deal. While Christopher and I have the space to line one wall of our kitchen with buckets of flour, beans, rice, and cornmeal, it may not make sense to try it if you don’t have the room; however, finding a way to make a pantry, whether in the kitchen or a closet, is essential to lowering the overall cost of eating.
On a Dollar a Day: One Couple's Unlikely Adventures in Eating in America Page 18
