The way we’ve decided to do the Eating Local challenge is to try to buy and cook things that are:
1) fairly realistic for other people to buy/cook too,
2) low carbon emissions – our current best attempt at this* is to buy a) mainly organic, b) local veg, c) fruit in season (although a lot of it has been shipped from Spain), d) not much frozen, e) few tins/glass jars, f) very little processed, g) limited meat/fish/dairy,
3) under £42 per week for both of us.
We decided in the first week to mainly monitor what we were buying, not spend more than £42 in the shops, and at the end of the week try to estimate how much all the food we’d eaten had cost.
I was keen to do this challenge because the issue of money is something that has nagged at me over the past few years as we’ve tried to make changes to reduce our energy use. I knew that we were able to do it in large part because we were stable financially, which many people don’t have the luxury of. So I was curious how’s now how much it was costing us to fund our organic habits.
One of the first things we realised is how fiendishly difficult it is to actually calculate how much your week’s food is costing! So much of what we use is already in the cupboards, and there’s things you use in small quantities like spices. Plus September is a bumper month for home grown produce, and we’ve benefitted from our own (mainly sweetcorn, runner beans, potatoes) and friends’ (cooking apples). Another ‘problem’ is people’s generosity 🙂 we had several meals that were shared, or where people brought contributions, so that was also helping us keep within budget somewhat artificially.
The food industry often encourages us to buy and share food which has been produced with the aim of being as cheap, and more-ish, as possible. Situations where this kind of food is on offer also pose a bit of a dilemma for me, as another aspect that I feel strongly about is food waste, and if there is a danger the food will go in the bin, I find it very difficult to refuse. But I suspect sometimes I rather use this as an excuse to eat more! In fact, the aspect of eating which would probably reduce my impact most would be to try to only eat what I need, rather than all the extra ‘treats’. But of course that’s a lot easier said than done…
So anyway, how did we do in our first week?
We spent:
£17.90 on a large local COFCO veg box, with 12 eggs (6 of which we bought for next week)
£9.58 on bananas, yoghurt, tinned tomatoes, from Arjuna whole foods
£3 on fruit from local greengrocers Hilary’s
£2.45 on milk and lemons from local supershop, Al-Amin
£2 on fish from Marks and Spencer’s at the Olympic Park!
TOTAL: £36.63
(plus £28 for our annual allotment rent, so that blew our budget!)
A lot of the other food we used was dried goods (rice, nuts etc.) which we buy in bulk every couple of months.
So, adding up the costs of all the ingredients we used in our meals, and using some complicated correction factors to try to account for meals we cooked for others or they cooked for us, we came to a figure of ……. £42.24! Wow, it was almost as though we’d fixed it. We were pretty pleased with that.
Each week we hope to upload a recipe for a meal we’ve eaten in a separate blog post. This week, we’ll upload a lovely leek souffle. Happy eating!
Posted by Rosie and Tim
*it’s very hard to calculate the energy it takes to produce what you eat precisely. Maybe one week I’ll talk in a bit more detail about our current food choices.