teh food stamp diet (AKA eating cheap)
Nicole and Tino decide to imitate a few congress-critters showboating the “food stamp diet”. I’m assuming our representative are doing this to demonstrate how awful it is to live on the USDA entitlement program, and why it ought to be kicked up a notch. Tino cuts through the crap of the whole thing in the first post here (at least I assume that was Tino, as Nicole seems to be guest blogging too.) If you’re in it just for the food pr0n, that starts here. They have also lumped everything into a category, so if you want to read the whole thingy chronologically backwards, just go here.
Update: Most everything seems to also be crossposted at Nicole’s site too.
I’m sorely tempted to imitate. Not only do I think it would be good blogging grist (intended), but I assume I could add an interesting perspective. The key to eating cheap, however, is planning ahead, and I’m kinda busy right now. If I do it, perhaps I’ll start next week.
I’ve no doubt at all that Nicole and Tino can accomplish this, and I did something similar a decade ago for months at a time. It’s true that a dollar went a little further but I was feeding myself, my now ex-fiancee, and her (in the mist of a growth spurt) teenage son for ~$25/week. I could have even done it for less but they were pretty picky eaters. Planning the whole thing out took gobs of my free time. That $25 per week figure also did not include $20 worth of pizza or some other luxury we blew on payday every two weeks.
Here’s how I did it:
1. 90% of everything we bought was on sale and I had a coupon.
2. I hit three grocery chains per week to buy the deals. This was not as bad as it sounds because all three were on the way home from work.
3. The stores Safeway and Giant doubled coupons up to fifty cents. That meant, of course, that a 50¢ was better than a 75¢ one.
4. A defunct chain called “Food Plus” doubled coupons up to a dollar, but they didn’t have nearly the loss leaders that the other two had. Overall though, prices were cheaper so I bought most of the non-coupon purchases there.
5. I dumpster-dove coupons. A newspaper guy would always dump a bunch of Sunday sections in a nearby recycle bin. This worked so well that I ended up calling the county to dump the bin when it got full. I didn’t want that newspaper guy to start dumping the Sunday sections elsewhere.
6. Rainchecks. Invariably teh soccer moms of the world would swoop in on Sunday and buy all the deals. I’d go in Monday when the shelfs were bare and get management to stamp the ad circular, saying that the store was out of stock. That would give me two more weeks that I was able to buy at the advertised price. Not only was I not forced to blow the budget to stock up at home, but that also gave me extra time to scare up some coupons. If the store was out of stock on Monday, they would almost always be restocked by Wednesday, so I could buy the deals that week too, without battling with the soccer moms.
7. Because I could get 12¢, 2 L bottles of soda, and I always had about twenty five coupons, the kid would have his surgery high-fructose goodness available out of the strategic soda reserve. No choice over Pepsi or Coke, however.
8. I also have to note that if you are using a doubled coupon, it’s almost always a better deal to buy the smallest allowed size as possible (the exception being when the larger size is on sale). If you need more, just use another coupon.
One other thing to note is that occasionally I would dumpster dive food. This only happened once or twice, I never depended on it for making the budget. I’ve learned that many people are pretty funny about what they stick in their mouth, and it’s next to pointless to try to change their mind.
One of the scores was a bunch of food and utensils. I dove right in and salvaged a few backpack loads worth of canned goods and a few nice pots and pans. The cache seemed to be from a nearby apartment that was being cleaned out by management. I found it funny that my ex didn’t have a problem with the nice copper bottom stainless-steel cooking-wear I salvaged (we boiled water in it first), but said she couldn’t possibly eat the canned goods. I drew a large X on each of the salvaged cans and ate them myself.
I left quite a few groceries like spice containers, bags of pasta, and the like because they were opened already or not in durable containers. There was a lot of unopened ramen, stowed in clean cardboard boxes inside the dumpster, but I left all of those behind. I couldn’t come to terms with that myself.
