I was reading an interesting piece today about how there is a positive correlation between waist circumference (an indicator of obesity) and “price sensitivity.” That is, when money is tight and we try to cut back on our food budget, we run the risk of weight gain. A long period of price sensitivity, therefore, can be detrimental to our health. How much of the price difference is actual and how much is perceived is a subject for great debate. I was formulating some thoughts on that for this blog post when this article about a possible upcoming tax on soda caught my eye. The diabetic man in New York City featured in Food, Inc. who lost so much weight from doing nothing but skipping soda leaped to mind, as did the family shopping for food on a very limited budget.
When hubby and I were first married, we were a two-income family. Money was no problem, there was plenty for private school, three square meals cooked at home and weekend mini-vacations. After we had been married nine years, I started staying home with the children and we had to manage on one income. There have been three periods of extreme financial crisis in our marriage: one when hubby and I were both unable to work due to illness and injury and two caused by extended periods of unemployment. The number of years we spent with “enough” money to pay the bills and eat well are far outnumbered by the years we spent with enough to cover the bills with little left over for food or other needs.
One of the ways I stretched our food budget was clipping coupons and shopping at multiple stores weekly (as many as five in one week) to get the most for my dollar. I got pretty good at it: I rarely had a shopping trip that I saved less than $20 after coupons were deducted and my average was closer to $50. But if you’ve browsed coupon slicks and store circulars, you know the savings did not come from meats, vegetables, fruits and dairy. Even the few specials on these items were not for the foods we eat these days, but for the cheapest of the feedlot meats, the most processed of the dairy, and the furthest trucked-in produce. Still, my priority was filling the empty tummies.
I’m not proud of this, but share it with you now because I want you to know there is another way: There were weeks on end that the only appliances turned on in my kitchen were the microwave and coffee pot. Months went by where the only beverage to cross my lips, other than the occasional sip of water, was Coke, and that in great quantity. Shopping days came and went when we had to eat a half gallon of ice cream right away to make room for all the frozen entrees.
What I didn’t understand then was the difference between calorie-dense and nutrient-dense foods. Calorie-dense foods can be nutrient-dense as well, but the worst of the calorie-dense foods are just calories with no nutrition. Soda falls into this category. It is also addictive. The sweetness, the energy boost, these are things our bodies tell us they need frequently. It’s outdated information, programmed in when food was much more scarce. I was choosing the most calorie-dense foods in the market, thinking that those calories were about the same as any other calorie, something to stuff in hungry mouths to stave them off a few more hours.
Would a soda tax cut back on consumption, especially among price-sensitive individuals? Probably, unless Coke and Pepsi really bite the bullet and print lots and lots of high-value coupons. But, will those price-sensitive individuals just shift to other non-nutritive drinks? Probably, and that could be even worse for our health care crisis than calorie dense soda. More efficient than penalizing the consumer might be the removal of artificial government supports that prop up a failed food supply system. Take the subsidized corn out of the foods it doesn’t belong in before you ask the consumer at large to do without, please.
The best of the nutrient-dense foods are not expensive. I know you are rolling your eyes and shaking your head and probably muttering, “Prove it” under your breath. Fellow blogger The Nourishing Gourmet does just that (and beautifully) in her $5 Dishes and $10 Main categories. Kelly the Kitchen Kop also has a great category for ideas on how to eat very well on a budget. Organic and Thrifty is an entire blog devoted to the best food at the least cost.
Some of us eat more organ and less muscle meat, some make homemade kefir “soda pop” instead of buying the industrial version, some garden and keep chickens. The point is that you can eat well on a budget. You do not need to resort to eating the worst the store has to offer because times are tight. I have lived it for a while now, and seen my per person/per day food costs drop considerably by taking advantage of CSA programs, farmer’s markets and home cooking. That’s right: I’m paying less for food now than I did when I bought processed foods at the grocery store. And I know we are healthier because our medical bills also have gone down.
Resources like those I’ve listed above are available online. Tips abound. Start small, find something that works for you and share that tip with others, especially those who insist that eating healthily is too expensive. If you can’t find anywhere to share, tell me! We know what ails us, let’s start working on solutions.
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade.
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September 18, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Mindy
This is such a great post! I’m just a year or so down the road of reformed shopping/cooking/eating, but I’m really falling in love with the idea of nutrient-dense foods, and making my dollar count nutritionally. It bothers me so much when my friends talk about how much they “saved” by using coupons…
September 18, 2009 at 4:52 pm
FoodRenegade
Very true! We’ve actually saved money eating this way, too.
~KristenM
(AKA FoodRenegade)
September 18, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Michelle @ Find Your Balance
Making kefir as we speak! And yes, I save money eating this way too.
September 18, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Elizabeth Quigley
I so agree with you. I am a reformed coupon queen. Processed foods almost killed my husband. We now eat only real foods.
Hugs,
Elizbeth
September 19, 2009 at 4:42 pm
motherhen68
Prior to this past year, I was the coupon queen! Oh goodness, my grocery bill for 4 was less than 70/per week and that included milk & meat! I look back at the foods I fed my family and I cringe. I feel terrible. That’s in the past now.
September 19, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Dana
“The sweetness, the energy boost, these are things our bodies tell us they need frequently. It’s outdated information, programmed in when food was much more scarce.”
I hate to say it, and I don’t mean to pick at you, but I find this very difficult to believe, for a few different reasons.
1. It’s a myth that food was “scarce” before the advent of agriculture. I know the experts bat that idea around all the time and it makes sense because it fits into the Nasty, Brutish, And Short cultural narrative we like to tell ourselves. But what actually happened when agriculture was developed was that our definition of “food” narrowed considerably.
See, there’s a difference between “food” and “edible.” There are literally thousands and thousands of foods that are edible to us, on six of seven continents. But we only consider a handful of them “food,” and our definitions vary widely according to culture and custom. In some cultures cows’ brains are “food”; in others they’re barely considered “edible.”
It took me getting in touch with people who practice modern-day foraging to really understand this. I can walk out my front door and point out at least five edible plants to you, and I don’t even have a garden. There is abundant food all over this city. Most of it is uncultivated–weeds, basically. Even the dandelions you love to hate make an excellent salad before they go into bloom.
It was no different when our pre-agricultural ancestors lived. And even when the plants died out in autumn, there were animals to hunt. Again, we think of a lot fewer animals as “food” these days than we did when we hunted them. We also see fewer *parts* of an animal as food. That narrows down our potential diets considerably–making us more, NOT less, vulnerable to famine.
It doesn’t help that our fates are tied to how the fields fare. When we could travel with the food supply, it was a different matter. We can’t travel with it anymore. No land, no harvest, no meal–and people starve.
2. I have experimented with low-carbing a few times over the past several years. What I find is that if I get my carb intake down enough to drop my insulin level, I stop being so hungry. I have lots of body fat to burn off, so that’s part of it. But, long story short, I don’t go around craving sugar all the time. No need for it. My body’s getting the energy it needs.
Pre-agricultural humanity would have gone through cycles with this. During the summer they may have craved more sweets and starches to build up a fat reserve for the winter. (We have not always had tame fire, so whether or not we hibernated, we did sleep a lot more during the colder months.) As the sweets and starches came exclusively from honey and from plant foods, neither of which was available in winter, we wouldn’t have craved them during that time–what would be the point? And by then we’d be burning fat reserves, not because we were starving, but because we were eating in a different way and causing a different endocrine response. If you eat protein, you get an insulin release, but you also get a corresponding release of glucagon–the hormone that counterbalances insulin. Fat causes no insulin release at all. If you’re not constantly spiking insulin, you’re not constantly craving sugar.
3. It’s worth noting that primates are an insectivore order. Every primate is a bug-eater at bottom. Some of us have chosen to add other foods to our diets; gorillas and orangs eat leaves and fruits, and human beings went on to scavenging and hunting larger animals, then developed grain agriculture (a move Jared Diamond terms the “biggest mistake” we have ever made, metabolically and sociologically speaking). But except for a few insects that produce sweet substances–and the one we would have encountered most often, the bee, was too dangerous to confront on a regular basis with us having no natural defenses against them–most insects do not taste sweet. So I think the desire for sweetness is an acquired or cultural trait, not an innate/genetic one. The existence of individual human beings who do not like overly sweet food seems to bolster my point. They’re not exactly rare.
I think people become overweight because we eat wrong, not because we eat too much. Eating the proper food for our species is rather self-correcting; when we’ve had enough, we feel full. Being hungry when we’re obese, and being obese in the first place, is a sign of inadequate nourishment, not over-adequate.
Gary Taubes is a fascinating read on this subject if you haven’t already.
September 20, 2009 at 1:06 pm
localnourishment
I don’t feel picked on at all! I enjoy a good dialog and that’s hard to get on blog comments. I know some of what I said was controversial, and I still am researching and learning. I hesitated to put in that line only because it tends toward the evolutionary worldview of man, something I try not to espouse.
I agree, agriculture made food easier to come by, and meals more of a choice than a happenstance.
Although I don’t forage as a way of life, I do forage my yard for chickweed, dandelion and nasturtium that we add to our meals, so I am familiar with the idea of what you’re saying.
Precisely my point. Many of us who eat whole foods but don’t shop there (Whole Foods, capitalized) practice foraging and eating offal. I love putting chicken feet in my bone broth and making delectable delights from liver, kidney and sweetbreads. These organ meats are nutrient-dense and very inexpensive because most American consumers think they are inedible.
Again we are in agreement. You are able to eat a low-carb diet, however, in spite of industrial food, not because of it. Carbs are artificially injected into foods into which they simply don’t belong either to encourage us to eat more of them or because they are cheap fillers, making the more costly ingredients stretch further. When you work hard to avoid carbs, your body is able to break the cycle of “Ooh! Carbs! More, please!” and you aren’t hungry as often. It’s also a dandy way to cure sugar cravings.
While I see your point, I also disagree to a certain degree. Breastmilk, the first food of nearly all humans until the twentieth century is very sweet. If our brains were not designed to enjoy sweet, many more babies would suffer a failure to thrive.
Again, exactly the point I was trying to make in my post. I can eat a lot more (in quantity) of a calorie-dense, nutrient-sparse food than a calorie-dense, nutrient-dense one. My body tells me I’ve had enough and I stop. It isn’t a matter of quantity, it’s a matter of quality. We eat less on our nutrient-dense diet than we did on our Standard American Diet, not because we were overeating, but because we were undernourished.
The very best example I can give you from recent meals is our Rib Eye Steak meal. We’ve had a few of these: a couple times when rib eyes went on sale at the store and a couple more when rib eyes were in our grassfed CSA box. Two rib eye steaks in the CSA box, split among the 7 of us fill us up to the point we are done eating. The grocery store steaks are not any smaller, but I would buy and cook 4 to feed us all.
Our Standard American Diet required me to feed a snack to the children every afternoon. They were looking for nutrition, I was shoveling the cheapest food possible at them. After they broke the habit of asking me for a snack because nutrient-dense snacks (liver pate, kombucha, etc.) were available for them to eat whenever they wanted it, they started snacking much less. So yes, quality made a huge difference.
I have heard him speak and read a little of his work. He’s on my “continuing projects” list!
I think we agree more than we disagree, Dana!
September 20, 2009 at 11:16 am
christie, honoring health
Great post! I just found your blog today through suggestions in my google reader and am so glad to have found this one. I really look forward to reading more of your posts!
September 20, 2009 at 1:07 pm
localnourishment
I’m so glad you found me, too! I hope you will be a frequent reader and share what you know about honoring health with us here!
September 21, 2009 at 7:39 am
Alicia Ghio
Great post.Things have been tight especially this year, but I’ve found with just a little more investment in my time, I can still eat real food on a budget. I can’t wait to check out those other resources you mention.
September 21, 2009 at 10:34 am
Anna Salvesen
Great post! Great comment by Dana and great follow-up. The post also describes quite well how I used to shop and feed myself and later my family (& waste countless hours trying to do the coupon clip/organization thing).
Then about 5 years ago I saw how it was destroying our health and I transitioned back to real food that never has coupons. While I’m not foraging to the point that Dana describes (yet!), my paradigm has shifted to the point that my food view is much more like hers now, and we eat with a decidedly primal, evolutionary emphasis. Much of our food has higher price points than the processed coupon options, but our savings from the stuff I no longer buy more than makes up for buying nutrient dense food that I prepare at home.
I’m breaking the supermarket habit, bit by bit, by sourcing our produce about 90% via a local Community Supported Agriculture subscription program (I pay a farm quarterly in advance for a weekly “farm share” box of veggies & some fruit). I don’t keep a large vegetable garden anymore, but I do have some fruit trees/shrubs and herbs that we consume. I buy grass-fed meat (usually bison, but also lamb and pork) in bulk from farmers and ranchers, custom-butchered, frozen, and wrapped to stock my separate freezer. We eat no wheat anymore and the garden’s hummingbirds I feed go through more sugar than my family does. Our eggs come from a neighbor’s coworker who keeps some chickens on her horse ranch. I buy things like olive oil from local farmer’s markets (living in So Cal does mean I am near some great food producers) and I make my own condiments and dressings. My weekly trip a small, locally owned grocery store or Trader Joe’s rarely is large enough to fill two grocery bags anymore. I don’t think I go into a conventional supermarket more than 3-4 times a year anymore and it feels really “foreign” when I do (especially the cereal aisle).
September 22, 2009 at 9:37 am
localnourishment
Thanks. I just read an article that talks about “reward pathways” better than I did. I hope anyone interested will go check it out. And thanks, ZAC at Farm To Table, for bringing it to my attention!
September 24, 2009 at 5:58 pm
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September 25, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Jessie
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to debunk the “I’d love to eat organic/local/healthy but it’s too expensive” myth. Maybe if you’re living on $9 “gourmet” frozen pizzas, but not if you’re eating REAL food.