More on Finding the Sweet Spot

If you've ever lived on a very tight budget, you know that everything comes down to managing trade-offs. Should you buy a badly-needed jacket or a badly-needed new pair of shoes? Is the occasional splurge worth the extreme penny-pinching you're going to have to do to make up for it? Operating on a tight budget means there's very little room for making poor money decisions, and you have to get as much utility as possible out of every dollar you spend. It requires you to sort out which of numerous sets of mutually exclusive options are smartest and which bring you the most satisfaction - and it also requires you to sort out how to reconcile these objectives when they're in conflict.

It's precisely the same with food. There is an astoundingly wide range of ways to meet your basic nutritional needs, representing all manner of foods and meals from cheap to expensive, easy to practically impossible, yummy to totally unpalatable. And eating well on a budget is all about finding your sweet spot. Of the foods that give you the most bang for your buck, which do you find appealing? Which of the more expensive types of foods are worth the price, in your mind? Is the cost savings of something like baking bread from scratch worth the time and hassle?

In general, I feel that it is unwise to attempt to do anything 100% as cheaply as possible, unless you absolutely have to. If you have any room whatsoever in your budget for small splurges, I recommend thinking about what items would make your life significantly simpler, healthier, more satisfying, etc., and letting yourself splurge on those things, assuming they're small - you will be much more likely to stick to your budget this way. For example, I splurge on good coffee, fancy grass-fed milk that costs $9/gallon but is soooo much tastier (and healthier) than conventional milk, and the occasional mid-range cheese. These are things I get to look forward to on a regular basis, which prevents me from feeling like I am sacrificing enjoyment for the sake of my budget.

HOWEVER, the real secret to eating well on a budget is to find ways to put food on your table that make you feel like you're eating exactly what you want to eat in spite of your budget - this is what I mean when I refer to the "sweet spot". Depending on your food and cooking habits, this may involve branching out and trying some new ingredients, cuisines, or cooking methods. This process can be intimidating at first, but over time you should find that you have accumulated a repertoire of recipes and ways of working with foods that bring you satisfaction as well as save you money.

To begin this process of experimentation, it helps to put some thought into your priorities as far as food and cooking are concerned. This might sound like an overly serious and rigid approach to something like food, but when you're trying to save money, it pays to plan carefully, and understanding what you want is part of this planning process. There are four main qualities that I look for when choosing recipes:

1. Taste/Satisfaction Factor: Obviously, everyone wants to eat food that tastes good and is satisfying. The more satisfying you find the food you cook, the easier it will be to stick to the budget you've set.
2. Health Factor: I am a bit obsessed with healthy eating, but I actually didn't become this way until I started cooking all of this cheap but extremely healthy food from scratch and realized that cheap and healthy food can actually be incredibly satisfying as well. However, not all ingredients are created equal. Organic veggies, free-range meats, and certain types of fats are all known to be healthier than their alternatives, but whether they're worth the extra cost is up to you and your budget.
3. Ease: Like I've mentioned, certain cost-saving strategies are far more complicated and/or time-consuming than their more expensive alternatives (dried vs. canned beans and homemade vs. store-bought bread are the two most obvious examples that come to mind). Actual cooking is never going to be as easy as popping a TV dinner in the microwave (but seriously, ick). However, some foods and dishes are easier to prepare than others, and some prescribed steps in the creation of a meal are either wholly unnecessary (like seeding tomatoes) or best reserved for the most finicky special occasion types of meals (I would put dishes involving complicated sauces and such into this category).
4. Cost-effectiveness: It's impossible to cook on a tight budget if you buy mostly expensive ingredients; therefore, dishes that call for mostly cheaper ingredients, such as dried legumes and grains, are a better bet than those that feature extremely pricey ingredients. Obviously.

Depending on your own personal situation, there might be a few other qualities that you need to add to this list. For example, if you lack certain common kitchen equipment, you may need to look for recipes that don't require equipment that you don't have. Or, if you live in an area where it's hard to get your hands on certain "exotic" ingredients, you may have to avoid recipes that call for these sorts of things. But you get my point here.

Your priorities will obviously depend on your own personal preferences as well as your situation. For example, when I was making even less money than I do now and on food stamps, cost-effectiveness was my number one priority. Now that I make a bit more money (and have done a LOT more reading about food), I've begun to value the health factor more than I do cost-effectiveness, which means that I am willing to splurge on some healthier items, like olive and coconut oils instead of vegetable oil. Over the years, I've come to really enjoy cooking, which means that ease isn't always high on my list of priorities. There are certain superfluous steps in many recipes that I absolutely refuse to do because they are done merely for show, but steps that add significantly to the flavor of a dish are steps I'm more than willing to take the time to do, even if they significantly complicate a recipe, because I value taste above ease of preparation. Working out your own priorities in this regard is a helpful thought exercise.

Then comes the question of trade-offs. As with all activities in life, it's impossible to cook in a way that maximizes all of these qualities, and choices must inevitably be made between dishes that are cheap and dishes that are easy, or dishes that are easy and dishes that maximize flavor. Every ingredient has a different cost and health factor, and every recipe has a different level of ease and tastiness.

Over time, you will get a sense of what ingredients and what types of dishes satisfy your particular set of priorities, but if you are new to cooking or cooking on a tight budget, it helps to think about how ingredients and dishes measure up in terms of your priorities.

For example, ingredients that are sources of protein represent a wide range of costs, and dishes that feature these ingredients represent a wide range of levels of ease:

So if ease of preparation is your top priority, your protein dishes should feature the ingredients in the top half of this chart. But if cost savings is your top priority, your protein dishes should feature ingredients on the left half of the chart, and you should probably swap canned beans for dried. (Fortunately, dried beans and peas come in many more varieties than canned, which can help bring some much needed variation to your diet.) This doesn't mean that you shouldn't ever cook with cheese, meat, or meat substitutes - it just means that the majority of your dishes should feature the foods on the left half of the chart, and use foods like meat and cheese as accents.

However, observe, if you will, the quadrant containing protein sources that are both easy/quick AND cheap. This is the golden quadrant, the zone in which there are basically no trade-offs - that is, assuming you like the ingredients in this zone (and I recommend trying some new ways of cooking things like lentils if you haven't been fond of them in the past). There are a number of foods and types of dishes in other categories outside of sources of protein that fall into this golden quadrant - grains like rice, oats, barley, bulghur, and quinoa, and recipes featuring cheaper vegetables like cabbage, root vegetables, and squashes. These types of foods comprise the bulk of my meals, and I will discuss methods and recipes for cooking with these foods later in this blog.

Stay tuned for the next post on basic strategies for making low-cost meals!

In Search of the Sweet Spot

I realize that the world does not need another food blog. The world needs another food blog about as much as I need another reason to spend time online. But humor me for the time being by pretending that this is at least somewhat of an original idea.

This blog has come about because I decided to run my mouth off on Facebook about people's food budgets. I had read an article on CNN that reported that $30/week is the average that recipients of food stamps are allotted in the US. I bragged that I manage to spend only $40-50/week, shopping exclusively at a food co-op (which are big in Minnesota, where I live), which has a mostly organic, and therefore pricey, selection. In response to this, several of my friends made some very good points about how it would be nearly impossible to eat on such a small amount of money if you a) didn't know how to cook, worked two jobs and didn't have time to cook, couldn't afford to invest in decent cooking equipment, etc., or, more importantly, b) lived in a "food desert" where the ingredients one needs to cook healthy, cheap meals were largely unavailable. Both of these are legitimate issues, and for these reasons and others, I think it's fair to say that $30/week isn't sufficient, particularly for people who lack time, equipment, and access to ingredients.

But this article raised my hackles. While attempting not to disregard the very real issues many Americans face in finding cheap, healthy food, I'll say that this article does make it seem unrealistically difficult to eat well on a budget. The author attempts to demonstrate that $30/week is insufficient by taking $30 to the grocery store and trying to buy a week's worth of food. Unsurprisingly, she fails miserably - but this is as much due to the totally ludicrous way she goes about this as it is to her meager budget. She seems not to have bothered to make any sort of meal plan, and chooses food at random. She splurges on expensive items like chicken breasts and packaged fresh tomatoes, and doesn't seem to have any concept of which foods are cheap and which are expensive. When all is said and done, she has only managed to purchase a few items that could conceivably be assembled into an actual meal.

My point is not that people on food stamps should be forced to plan carefully in a way that the rest of us don't have to (though they would certainly benefit from doing so), or that they aren't entitled to eat expensive, "nice" foods like chicken breasts and fresh tomatoes. My point is that, as with all things in life, eating well on a budget works a lot better if you think about it and plan a bit. If the challenge would have been to find adequate housing on a budget, would the author have just run out and rented the first apartment she found? Of course not - she'd have done extensive research first. So why should food be any different? But because we have access to so much food, so many types of food, and so many instant, packaged, and pre-made types of food, a lot of Americans become paralyzed at the prospect of having to assemble a nutritious, filling, and inexpensive meal from scratch.

Recently, a friend messaged me, telling me that she was trying to cut back on her spending and asking about my cooking habits. She remembered me running my mouth off about my food budget on Facebook, and wanted to know what strategies I used for eating well on a relatively small budget. As I thought about how to answer this question, I realized that I have actually learned a ton about this since graduating from college seven okay, going-on-eight years ago, due to a combination of obsessive thriftiness and very low-paying (but interesting and rewarding!) work. At the most extreme end of the spectrum representing my years of penury were the two years I worked for non-profits through AmeriCorps, living on a salary of under $11,000 a year plus $40/week in food stamps. During this time, I learned to be thrifty as heck with just about everything, including food, and many of those habits have stuck. Now that I'm a graduate student and half-time research assistant, I earn a bit more, but hardly enough to live it up, and I still can and do keep my food budget to around $40-50/week (including a couple of very pricey staples that I'm unwilling to give up) when I am watching my spending.

So I've decided to start a blog about how to "do" food better. Cooking from scratch or mostly from scratch doesn't have to be difficult, it doesn't have to be excessively time-consuming or finicky, and it absolutely doesn't have to be expensive.

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I really like the related concepts of trade-offs and optimization, and I think they're helpful to keep in mind when trying to figure out how to eat cheaply in a way that is healthy, tasty, and works with your schedule. While there's no perfect approach that maximizes all of these things, it's helpful to put some thought into which are the most important to you. Are you willing to spend some extra time, say, cooking beans from scratch, or is the convenience of canned beans worth the extra cost? Are the health benefits of organic veggies worth the premium you pay for them? There are a number of trade-offs involved in eating cheaply, and figuring out which are your highest priorities is the first step to feeding yourself in a way that doesn't break the bank. But this doesn't mean that you always have to choose between easy and cheap, or quality and cheap, or nutritious and cheap. There are a number of strategies I've developed over the years for optimizing health and convenience while still keeping my food budget low - strategies for finding the "sweet spot". This blog will cover all of those strategies and more.

Stay tuned. :)