Is It Really More Expensive to Eat Healthy?
I’m basically a city girl who has spent most of her adult life living in rural parts of Georgia. I’ve often wished to have grown up on a farm and am quite drawn to traditional ways of living off the land and being self-sustainable. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older or perhaps Covid made me want to unplug from modern conveniences and focus on the simple pleasures of enjoying family and a home-cooked meal. Whatever inspired me to learn old-fashioned practices for preparing healthy meals, I’ve been on this journey for about four years and am happy to be doing it at a snail’s pace.
One of the first things I began doing consistently after enrolling in a Holistic Nutrition program with the Energetic Health Institute in 2021 was buy organic foods. I was just as skeptical as my husband about the whole organic food program. I thought it was a scam, and I didn’t trust the federal regulatory agencies responsible for giving food producers the USDA Organic stamp of approval. Eventually I changed my perspective and told my husband, “I can’t be 100% sure that the organic food I’m buying hasn’t been tainted with toxic chemicals, but I can be 100% sure that the non-organic food I buy has been.” It’s the best option we have if we desire to eat clean nutritious food, and I’m content to simply do the best I can with the information I currently have. It’s kind of like parenting, right?!
With Thanksgiving approaching, I began to look through my Nourishing Traditions cookbook for ideas of traditional dishes to prepare for our family. I began to think about the new ways I now prepare foods and wondered how much more expensive it is to prepare meals using traditional practices and organic foods. I sat down and made a list of all the new ways I now purchase and prepare foods and compared the cost to what I used to purchase when I was focused more on convenience and quite frankly was ignorant to proper food preparations. I’m a former math teacher, so excuse me while I geek out on some numbers!
A typical convenient meal for us is a steak with a sweet potato and broccoli. We recently processed our first cow raised on our small 10-acre farm and my husband estimates that it cost us about $9.00 a pound to feed and process him. Therefore, an 8-ounce filet shared between us costs about $4.50. If I shop at our local organic grocery store, I can get a grass-fed filet for $29.03 a pound which comes out to $14.52 for 8 ounces. A shared organic sweet potato between us would cost $1.23 ($.89 per pound) and a shared bag of organic broccoli florets would cost $5.79 for a total meal cost of $11.52 if we eat our own cow or $21.54 if we buy our meat from the grocery store. I decided to compare this to a similar meal at a local restaurant we like to eat at. An 8-ounce filet, sweet potato (full potato) and broccoli side is $28.00. We could split the meal and only spend $14.00, but it’s more likely we would each order our own plate and possibly have some filet left over to take home with us while finishing the vegetables. Although I prefer the idea of the homecooked version where we know the origin of our food, I recognize that going out to a nice restaurant is a pleasurable indulgence that we will continue to enjoy periodically. However, based on cost and portion size, my analysis of the restaurant meal has convinced me that my husband and I should be sharing entrees rather than ordering our own!
We love eating sour dough bread with our meals so I decided to look at the cost of making it at home as compared to purchasing it from the grocery store or our local bakery. Before I can make sour dough, I have to make a starter by mixing flour and water and adding more flour and water each day for 7 days. It does take some time, but not more than 15 minutes each day leading up to preparing the bread. Since I have a grain mill, I can freshly mill the rye grain I need for my starter (8 cups) and spend $2.32 at $.29 per cup. I’ll only use half of the starter for a batch of bread and spend $10.23 on the first batch and $9.07 on the second batch with the leftover starter. The nice thing is one batch makes either 3 large loaves or 6 smaller loaves. A loaf of organic sour dough from the grocery store is $4.79 and from the local bakery (not organic) is $4.75. If I assume the grocery and bakery loaves are the equivalent of my large loaf, mine is costing me $3.41 per loaf. Of course, I do understand that I’m not factoring in the $300 I spent on the grain mill or the time it takes me to make sour dough bread, but I consider it to be time and money spent doing something I enjoy doing in my free time.
Another hobby I’ve adopted that involves some front-end expenditure and preparation time is making kombucha. My 2-gallon continuous brewing vessel with heating strip cost about $425.00. However, time spent is minimal consisting of decanting 8 16-ounce bottles of kombucha when it’s ready and preparing a gallon of tea to add back to the vessel when I’m ready for more. The tea bags ($1.04 per gallon) and rapadura sweetener ($7.78 per gallon) I use to make tea costs me $1.10 per bottle whereas a bottle of Health Aid kombucha costs $4.69 per 16 oz bottle.
One of the first things I learned to make was yogurt. I was excited to discover a local dairy down the road from our house that sells raw milk for $8.00 a gallon. I wanted to be able to make raw yogurt because I couldn’t buy it in stores. I spent $55.00 on a yogurt maker and can now spend $2.00 for 4 cups of milk and $.79 on ¼ cup of store-bought yogurt (or spend nothing to use ¼ cup of my own yogurt from a previous batch) which comes to $.70 per cup of yogurt as compared to $3.16 per cup of store-bought yogurt. If I add blueberries, it will cost me $3.03 for a cup, $5.49 at the grocery store and $5.99 at a local eatery.
One of the first healthy recommendations I implemented was to start making my own dressings and sauces. It’s so much healthier and fresher to make them as needed. I love making my own balsamic dressing that makes about ¾ of a cup and either serves four for one meal or two for several meals. When looking up the four ingredients (Dijon mustard, balsamic vinegar, extra virgin olive oil and expeller-expressed flax oil) and their prices, I found I can make my dressing for $5.20 each time. If I purchased a Balsamic dressing from the store, I would spend $5.58 on ¾ of a cup of Organicville Balsamic Vinaigrette or $9.25 for ¾ of a cup of Primal Kitchen Balsamic Vinaigrette.
Granted, when I compare the healthy recipes I’m preparing at home with foods in a grocery store or restaurant, I am choosing comparable foods that are higher quality than those that are nonorganic or contain undesirable ingredients. In other words, it would be pretty easy to find less expensive foods at a grocery store or restaurant to compare to my homemade recipes, but they wouldn’t be comparable in quality, and I’ve already decided that whether I’m preparing our food using traditional methods, making them using pre-prepared ingredients or eating out at a restaurant, I’m going to purchase a healthier and higher quality food. My main goal in this price comparison analysis was to determine if I could save money using more traditional preparations at home which ultimately are the healthiest recipes because I know where each individual ingredient came from and cooked and prepared them myself. I feel good knowing that ultimately I can save money using these approaches and that the appliances I have invested in are not only worthwhile because they can help me prepare healthier food, but they will eventually pay for themselves in the monetary savings I can accrue.