The new family food budget

I haven’t written lately because I came down with a terrible summer cold which then turned into a sinus infection.

I have been reading, thinking, and trying to plan food for a year or until it comes back into season. It is currently strawberry season and I have been attempting to approximate how many quarts of strawberries I will need to put up until next year.

My small garden won’t yield enough strawberries to tide my family over until next year. Dehydrated strawberries are an easy snack to slip into my daughter’s backpack during the school year. I also like to use strawberries in jams, ice cream, rhubarb pies and in smoothies. I would have to guess that I probably buy a quart of strawberries almost every week of the year.

My buying behavior to date has been to buy strawberries in the store when the price comes down and then stock up. Herein lays my dilemma. I am a bargain hunter. I shop for the deal. I have to make my family’s dollar stretch as far as I can especially since I have less buying power than I did three or four years ago.

The decision to buy local has a substantial financial impact on the budget. Local strawberries are $6 a quart. In the grocery store, berries from California are selling for $3. Buying a few quarts is not a huge impact on the budget but I’m estimating I will need 40 to 50 quarts, that means an extra $120 to $150 and all of this money needs to come out of the budget over the next few weeks as opposed to spread out over an entire year. This knowledge sent me into a monetary funk. I need to be able to balance my checkbook at the end of the month. How can I justify buying local when it means I have less?

My main argument for local and organic has always been one about food quality and sustaining nature. We need a food system that does not deteriorate and erode the soil. We need a food system that does not lace its produce with toxic chemicals which stay on our foods no matter how much we wash them.

This argument alone didn’t float the boat entirely for me or my husband to spend $3 more per quart. We had to expand our thinking and look at our entire food production system. As we did this exercise we realized that buying local puts money into the pockets of local farmers which in turn supports their family and preserves the land as farmland. Buying the cheap fruit from California isn’t helping anyone long term except large agribusiness. The savings in money advocates a system that is doomed to fail where water is becoming less common and keeps the poor workers in the fields impoverished, usually immigrants.

When we looked at the system as a whole my husband and I agreed that we will buy as much local as we can afford. We decided that we needed to keep in mind that our own garden was producing free, or almost free, food for us and we needed to consider this as helping to offset the costs

This does not completely alleviate the cost of paying more for local food. I will still be hunting bargains, perhaps different ones (I see more consignment shops and thrift stores in my future). I will try to seek out owners to see if they will cut me a break on the cost if I buy in bulk. For example, yesterday I purchased a flat of strawberries instead of buying by the quart. This was equal to paying for 5 quarts and getting a 6th one for free.

I’ve done the math so far. I’ve purchased 9 quarts locally, harvested 1 from my garden and have spent a total of $48. Translation, the average cost of a quart of local strawberries is $4.80. Not too bad and not as devastating as the original $6 a quart I was looking at when I originally started pondering the situation. This still leaves me with another 30 – 40 quarts before I reach my goal. I’ll keep you updated on the cost of this part of my initiative.