How to eat well on a budget (updated)

A lot of people express an interest in eating great-tasting, healthy, real food but don’t think they can afford to do so while paying bills, paying off debt, and maybe trying to save to buy a home or start a family. Or living on a fixed pension or even just social security. Here are some recommendations for how to eat well on a budget.

Cook your own food

The first thing to do is cook your own food. Home-cooked food is healthier, cheaper, and unless you have the money to go to fancy restaurants all the time, tastes better. Anyone can cook: get a slow cooker / crock pot. Either it heats up or it doesn’t; you don’t need to spend a lot of money. Put everything in the pot the night before, stick it in the fridge, and remind yourself to take it out and plug it in before you go to work. Come home to a hot, home-cooked meal. When in doubt, add liquid: you really can’t overcook stew. With all the money you save not getting fast food and take-out, treat yourself to a nice local restaurant every once in a while.

If possible, buy a chest freezer

A chest freezer is cheaper than an upright for the size. You can buy something used that has dings and dents in it for much less than the retail price. Tell the seller you want them to plug in the freezer before you come over. If you get there and it’s cold, it works. You’ll need a spot to plug it in and to be sure you don’t overload the circuit, but even in a 1BR apartment there may be a spot you can put a small chest freezer. Keep in mind that if you use the chest freezer for long-term storage you only need to get into it every week or so. The rest of the time, put a nice cloth over it and it’s a side table.

Spend your money on good meat (no really, we mean it)

Your best “bang for your buck” (though that would be another way to get good, healthy meat*) is to spend money on good, healthy meat. There are three major reasons why this is the case.

1. Raising meat animals “naturally” is different from gardening. There are no days off. Forgetting to water your carrots is quite different from forgetting to give a pig water. For most people, paying a farmer to do the work for you is the best choice.

2. Any harmful chemicals in plants are going to get concentrated in the meat of animals that eat those plants. It’s relatively common for CAFO animals to have damaged livers, which means their livers aren’t able to filter out all the toxins they ingest. So if you want to avoid toxins in your food, the most concentrated source of toxins is likely the meat you eat. Spending your money on decent meat is the best way to avoid ingesting those poisons. Buying expensive organic produce but eating cheap, “factory-farmed” meat is more than a little foolish.

3. Plant-based diets are trash food. Vegan diets are far worse for the environment and for your health. (A possible exception would be something like rastafarian “ital” cooking, which is very different from eating mass produced veggie “burgers”. If you are an actual rastafarian reading this, please comment.)

Buy in bulk

Half hog, quarter beef, whole lamb, bulk chicken. You’ll save a lot with a bulk discount when you buy direct from a local farmer.

This is what the chest freezer is for. If you absolutely do not have room for a chest freezer, start your own buying club. Get a group together, pool your funds, and buy in bulk together. Then split the meat among yourselves. When in doubt, ground beef and bulk sausage in one pound packages are easy to split among any number of households.

Another way you save money when buying meat in bulk is by making use of the whole animal. Save the bones and make your own bone broth: all this takes is heat, water, bones, and time. Use the extra bits and pieces to flavor or bulk up soups or vegetable dishes. A handful of chopped ham ends adds a lot of flavor to a pot of beans. Organ meats can be especially healthy, cheap, and versatile. Add some beef heart to your meatballs or meatloaf.

What about fruits and vegetables?

DO NOT BUY “ORGANIC”. Not from a supermarket, anyways. Trust your farmer, not a label.

“Organic” fruits and vegetables are not typically field tested, which means it is extremely easy to cheat the system. There are plenty of news story examples of major fraud in big ag “organic” food. Furthermore, organic farming at scale is normally highly intensive row cropping with multiple tillage passes per year, which is just strip-mining top soil resulting in very low nutrient density produce. You probably don’t even know what the “organic” label actually means. Does anyone, other than the industry lobbyists who write the regulations? You know what billions of advertising dollars are spent to make you think “organic” means. Why pay extra for a marketing scam? If you must buy at a grocery store, just get what looks good for the best price. But the better option is to buy from a local farmer you know, who is farming in a way that adds nutrients to the soil and thus to the produce you buy. (And if they say they are organic farmers, that’s a bit different from something with an “organic” label at a big chain grocery store.)

Shop local — and at the farm.

Farmers markets are fun and that is mostly what they are for. If you want to eat well on a budget, don’t buy a bag full of produce at the market. Instead, ask the farmer what their price is if you bring a vehicle out to the farm and fill up the trunk with food. Tell them you want to freeze or can a year’s supply of whatever is in season.

Buy in season, and ask for "seconds”. Farms have produce that they don’t bother to bring to market simply because it looks a little strange. It’s going to be just as tasty and nutritious as anything else, but most shoppers want to buy produce that looks like it’s “supposed” to, and there’s only so much room in the farm truck. Chances are you can find a local farmer who will gladly sell you their seconds at a nice discount. You could even ask if you can harvest from beds they’re going to turn under at the end of the season.

Once you have your gigantic box full of gnarly-looking-but-tasty apples or whatever, preserve them! Try out water-bath canning (don’t get botulism, use an approved recipe.) Or just cut them up, blanch them, and freeze them in your chest freezer.

Grow your own

Even if you live in a tiny 1BR apartment, you can grow pretty much all the salad mix you could ever want. Get two of those large plastic storage containers — the kind for storing clothes or tools. Put a few rocks inside one. Poke or drill holes in the bottom of the other. Stack. Fill the top container (the one with holes) with potting soil. Put it next to a window. (If you don’t have a convenient window, use grow lights.) Plant seeds, fertilize, and water appropriately. You can grow a lot of lettuce mix this way. If you cut the greens a couple inches off the soil, so the stems and parts of the leaves remain, they will grow back and you can keep coming back and harvesting over and over.

You can do a lot with container gardening like this. Salad mix of course. Radishes. Tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs of all kinds. Lemon trees. Plant things that benefit greatly from freshness (like salad mix) or that you like but are expensive to buy (like heirloom tomatoes). Don’t worry about experimenting. A single packet of seeds is cheap, and you can re-use the dirt and container if those seeds don’t grow. Try out companion planting to get more use out of your containers. And don’t stretch your pennies to buy the most expensive “organic” fertilizer when you’re just starting out. Sure, good organic compost is better than the NPK chemical junk on sale at your local garden center. But you’re already so far ahead of store-bought stuff by growing your own fresh, home-grown food, that buying cheap chemical fertilizer isn’t going to ruin it. Try out composting and making your own organic fertilizer — later on, once you’ve had some gardening success.

Save money on staples and don’t feel guilty

Basic, conventional rice. Dry beans. Oats. Staples that you can use to round out any meal. You may want to buy organic wheat flour (yes, this is an exception) because conventional wheat (along with other storage crops) is often sprayed with dessicant herbicides to facilitate an easy and uniform harvest. Your “organic” wheat may or may not be all that “organic”, but at least you won’t be eating something that was sprayed with an herbicide right before harvest time. (Could this widespread use of herbicides be contributing to the historically unprecedented explosion in “gluten” allergies? Not according to the corporate foundations that fund medical science!)

True…if you care about resource depletion and poisons going into the environment you probably don’t really want to think too much about how this stuff is grown and made. You know what? When you’ve saved up some money and you’re not living paycheck-to-paycheck, it would be awesome if you would help do something about that. Until then, we need you healthy and not broke. So buy the absurdly cheap corporate mass-produced flour and don’t feel guilty about it. Heck, buy the absurdly cheap sack of conventional oranges from a thousand miles away. You’re already getting great nutrition from a lot of local, naturally-farmed meat and vegetables and fruits. You’re not a bad person for buying a banana. (Bananas used to fund a lot of drugs and human trafficking, but that’s largely ended. Just don’t buy avocados unless they’re grown in the USA.)

* It’s a venison joke.