Food Part I: Background

As I said before we tend to control our spending in most areas of our life, but we spend plenty on food. We take a list to the grocery store, and buy what is on our list, and then twenty other tasty things that we don't really need, but again, are tasty. If we are tired after a long day at work we eat out. Someone's birthday, we eat out. Picnic in the park? Let's get coffee and a treat. The third largest expense for us after our mortgage and childcare is food.

My family thinks a lot about food. We like what we like. We rotate the same recipes through our diet. We eat at the same restaurants every week or two. We shop at the same grocery store every week. We tend to eat healthily at home (in some part to counterbalance the eating out).

When we first decided to experiment with budgetary poverty, we realized of course that eating out would not be possible (since we only have $11 and change over the three weeks to spend on ready-to-eat and non-food items). We marked numerous more expensive items off our shopping list. But we decided to continue to eat in our usual way shopping at our usual store.

There is one detail about our spending over the next three weeks that I feel is important to point out. We are not going to go out and buy every item that we will be using, but will account for them as we go along and remove them from our final total. For instance, we will not buy a new jar of cinnamon if it is needed but will subtract the amounts we use as we use them. Most people in long- or short-term poverty are not starting from scratch. They have items that they replenish as needed.

One approach to living on a restricted food budget would be to purchase things in bulk at a wholesale club. Anyone who has $35 could afford a membership, but this would mean that a family on a restricted income would have to prioritize this expense over many other needed items. Using a store such as Costco also requires large amounts of money upfront, so while the food may last a long time, money would have to be saved up to pay for it. A Costco membership is just one of the many things that our family takes for granted.

Tomorrow I'll talk about what $1.52 per meal buys us.

Thanks,
Shawn