Queercents

This is the ninth installment in our series on stretching your food dollar. The Christian Science Monitor reports that one of the current trends that has been spawned by rising food prices is the return to backyard gardens.

Gardening organizations, seed wholesalers, and local nurseries are all reporting hikes in the number of people buying vegetable seeds and starter plants.

It’s a trend that started slowly several years ago, spurred by concerns about food safety, food quality, and global warming, say garden mavens. But this year’s gasoline and food price spikes have had what could be called a “Miracle-Gro” effect on the backyard garden movement. This year, 39 percent of people with backyards told the Garden Writers Association they planned to grow vegetables this year. That’s up 5 percent from last year, after remaining relatively stable with only small increases for much of the past decade.

“This is evolving into a perfect storm for vegetable gardening,” says Charlie Nardozzi, senior horticulturist at the National Gardening Association in Burlington, Vt. “A lot of the economic things happening, and concerns are rising about global warming and carbon footprints, and so are worries about the quality of food, its price, and freshness – it’s all come to a head.”

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This is the eighth post in our series about stretching your food dollar. For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about eating produce that’s in season in order to get the best prices. If you’re like me, you probably get a little overzealous when you see a good deal on produce at the supermarket. For example, Trader Joe’s has these jumbo boxes of blueberries on sale right now for $6. I LOVES me some blueberries! But with just two of us in the house, is it very realistic that we’ll be able to eat all that fruit before it goes bad?

One answer would be to buy less food and shop more often. But let’s be real. You’re probably a busy gal-on-the-go like me and you don’t have time to shop more than once a week. If that’s the case, a little thoughtfulness will go a long way towards getting the most out of your produce. Try to plan out your week before you get to the store. Think about your weekly schedule while you’re shopping for food so that you can coordinate your meals in advance. Keep the properties of your produce in mind as you plan your weekly menu. Which veggies will head south faster? Try to use those first. Then when you get your goodies home, write your menu down and post it in the kitchen. It sounds a little OCD to have the weekly menu posted on the fridge. But trust me, it works! There’s less chance of something getting forgotten in the bottom of the vegetable drawer if you have a little reminder of what’s in there. You’re also more likely to buy the appropriate amount of food if you have a good idea of how many meals you’ll actually be cooking throughout the week.

Purchasing the appropriate quantity for your household is not the only challenge of buying fresh produce. What do you do with it once you get it home? Should things be washed as soon as you get home? Does it need to go in the refrigerator, or should it be stored at room temperature? What good is it to get all these great deals at the grocery store if you end up throwing things away when you get home? Read the rest of this entry »

This is the seventh installment in our weekly series about food budgeting. Last week one of our readers made a really good comment about factoring the cost of driving into your food budget. It’s been a long-standing mantra that the best way to save money on food is to check out the weekly food ads to look for the best deals. But if you have to drive to a store that’s out of your way just to save a few bucks on meat or produce, is it really worth it? For me, the answer is yes, but only because fresh produce is the cornerstone of my vegetarian diet. However, I only shop at 2 stores, and I buy my produce from one of them on Wednesdays, when you get the sale prices from both the previous and upcoming weeks. It makes it very worth the three-mile drive to the store.

In addition to watching the sale prices, I’ve already mentioned several times that I’m a big fan of shopping at the farmers’ market and taking advantage of the weekly produce basket from our community supported agriculture collective. It’s always exciting to see what’s iavailable each week. The challenge, though, is that we don’t get to choose what’s in the basket. For the past few weeks, we’ve been up to our ears in okra and eggplant, which I love. But what can you do with these vegetables so that you don’t get tired of eating the same old thing? Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the sixth installment in our series about keeping within your food budget.

This week’s headlines have been dominated by news about the Olympics and the tensions in Georgia. But the financial news has been filled with different analysts’ takes on the latest consumer price index report. Last week I mentioned that the recent government stimulus checks had little impact on forestalling inflation because of the dramatic rise in food prices. This week analysts at the Wall Street Journal are saying that even though oil prices have started to go down, there’s no predicting how long food prices will remain elevated.

One of the easiest things you can do to stretch that food dollar is eat produce that’s in season. You’ll get a better deal at your local grocery store to be sure. But you can also stretch those saving even further by shopping at your local farmer’s market, or buying a share in community supported agriculture. The only challenge is finding new and creative ways of preparing these veggies so that your pallet doesn’t get bored. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the fifth installment in my series about the rising cost of food. This week the Commerce Department released its monthly report on consumer spending. According to the Associated Press:

US consumer spending cooled in June and inflationary pressures accelerated strongly as higher food and energy costs stretched Americans’ wallets, a government survey showed Monday.

The monthly Commerce Department snapshot also showed that Americans’ incomes moderated in June after both spending and income got a hefty boost in May from a vast emergency economic stimulus. . . .

“The treadmill is going faster than the legs, at least when it comes to consumers and their spending. Household consumption surged in June but much of that went to purchase higher-priced food and energy,” said Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economic Advisors. Read the rest of this entry »

This is my fourth post in our series about stretching your food dollar. Perhaps now more than ever, adopting a vegetarian diet (or at least abstaining from meat once or twice a week) is more attractive than ever. In last week’s post I talked about the effect that higher corn prices have had on the beef industry. But the chicken and pork industries are also feeling the crunch, and there will be pricing spillovers in every aisle of the grocery store this fall. Ian Cooper at Wealth Daily explains:

In the Corn Belt, flood waters are high. Crops are destroyed. And corn continues to set record highs, with some calling for $10 a bushel, near-term. Current estimates peg Iowa loss at one million acres of corn and two million acres of soybeans, or about 20% of grain output.

That means supply is tight. And it’s too late in the season to start replanting corn and any opportunity to plant soybeans in time for the fall is quickly disappearing.

For grocery shoppers, the destroyed corn means pricier corn, soda, cereal… even cough syrup, pudding and gravy. It’s also used to feed livestock like pigs and chickens. Soybeans are in everything from flour and milk to oil.

In fact, the US Department of Agriculture is predicting that food prices will continue to rise through 2009: Read the rest of this entry »

This is my third installment in our series about making your food dollar stretch. Today I want to ask you to rethink meat.

For many Americans, meat is the primary source of protein in their diets. Although I’m a long-time vegetarian (and aspiring vegan), I’m not going to inundate you with the host of ethical reasons to give up meat. You’re here because you’re concerned about money. So let’s talk about the dollars and cents of eating meat.

The cost of meat is rising because the cost of corn is rising. In my first post of the series, I discussed that this was due to the rising cost of fuel, the production of corn for fuel, and the recent flooding in the Midwest. Those costs are being passed onto you, the consumer. I normally don’t venture down the meat aisle, but on my last trip to Trader Joe’s I decided to do a little research to find out just how bad it really is. The cost of boneless, skinless chicken breast was a whopping $6.69 per pound! After the sticker shock, I thought it best not to take a look at the beef.
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One of the promising trends in the restaurant industry is the movement towards environmental sustainability. More and more businesses are seeking ways to become more eco-friendly, largely in response to customer demand.

As part of that trend, we are seeing an increase in the number of restaurants that are buying their produce locally. Until recently, it was primarily small restauranteurs who were supporting local agribusiness. But Chipotle is one of the first national chains to support the “buy local” mentality. According to the latest issue of Nation’s Restaurant News:

The 730-unit fast-casual chain, based [in Denver], recently announced plans to buy this summer at least a quarter of its produce from local small and midsized farms, making it one of the largest restaurant chains to undertake such an initiative.

Figuring out the logistics of accomplishing the local-purchasing strategy took more than a year, according to company officials.

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Unless you haven’t gone to the grocery store or to a restaurant in the past six months, you may have noticed that the price of food has continued to rise. In fact, because you’re a savvy Queercents reader, I’ll bet that you already knew that food inflation is twice the rate of inflation overall. A few weeks ago, the Nation’s Restaurant News remarked that we are facing “the perfect economic storm” as far as food prices go.

The cost of fuel is now solidly above the $4 mark, which makes both food production and delivery more expensive. At the same time, more and more farmland has been diverted to the production of corn for ethanol. This has caused the price of corn and other grains, such as wheat and barley, to rise because ethanol production directly trades off with the production of other crops. Furthermore, the switch to ethanol has inflated the price of meat since most factory farmed cattle and chicken are fed a corn-based diet.

The third contributing factor in this economic storm is global climate change. The combination of droughts and floods has also affected the amount of food that America produces. And while we haven’t seen the level of devastation or experienced the food riots that have hit developing countries, Americans are feeling the crunch. Read the rest of this entry »