The Cost of a Nourishing Diet: A Follow Up to Going Grain-Free
Last week when I wrote about why grains are not necessary for a nourishing diet I really thought I would receive some negative responses. After all, as (one of my favorite bloggers) Elana said:
“I don’t even try to explain to people what I eat, a look of bewilderment crosses their face the moment I go beyond the words ‘gluten-free.'”
Surprisingly, I have been overwhelmed with comments from those who either are grain-free themselves, or who know that it would be best for their health if they were. In either case your thoughts have echoed my own:
“How do you go grain-free, feed growing children and still maintain a budget?”
I wish I had a clear cut answer for y’all, but I’m afraid I don’t.
We are working towards eating more local, organic foods. Right now that means that we try to buy from local farmers. We are hopeful that someday that means growing our own and raising our own. We want to eat as locally as it gets – from our own backyard. The more money we spend on food now, the longer it will take to save enough to pay for our land, mortgage-free. So I am not free from grocery-budget angst.
We have two options:
- We eat cheap now so that we can hurry along to our dream of being self-sufficient.
- We eat well while we have a consistent income, knowing that someday we probably won’t.
We have chosen the latter. After almost 4 years of marriage, two children and discovering the importance of real, local foods we have nearly doubled our grocery budget. Neither my husband nor myself would say that we regret this move. We currently spend around 20% of our income on food, supplements and consumables. That seems reasonable to me, especially when looking at it in the context of history:
Notice the correlation between the decreased spending on food and the increased spending on medical care.
My Thoughts on Food Budgeting
- I believe the first thing we need to do is to realize that spending less than 15% of our income on our food budget is a relatively new thing. Food is cheap in our country for a reason. The money we may save now we will later pay for in medical costs and even worse – make our children pay for depleted resources.
- Secondly, we need to set priorities. How we spend our money and our time is an outward communication of what is important to us. If it is truly important to support local farmers, eat a nourishing diet, go grain-free, etc. we will find a way to do it. For some people it means letting go of television, eating out, expensive cell phones, a second vehicle or even downsizing their home. Figure out where you can cut out wants in order to fund your family’s need for good nutrition. For example, nutrition is not a higher priority in our family than me caring for our children. Therefore, if there is a choice, I would not opt to work outside of the home in order to pay for a higher grocery budget.
- Finally, when it comes to finances and nutrition I love the phrase do what you can with what you have. If you can’t afford to cut out grains entirely then don’t. You can still serve your family properly prepared grains without feeding them truly destructive things like high fructose corn syrup or rancid vegetable oils.
This past week I picked up Mark Bittman’s Food Matters from the library. After reading through most of it I was feeling torn once again. I told my husband that I agree with much of his philosophy about being responsible about what you eat and while I don’t think that (grass-fed and pastured) meat can be detrimental to your health, I do agree that we don’t need to make it the center of our diet.
So I told him that ethically, perhaps eating grain free (and in my case low-carb) is not such a great idea. He reminded me that we feel better eating this way and that it is the only thing that I have found effective for weight loss. We have the means right now to heal our bodies from years of abuse and we would be foolish to pass it by. We hope that someday, if needed, we can eat properly prepared grains without too much trouble.
For now, though, we eat lots of vegetables in the place of grains and thank God for the healing and vitality that we are experiencing.
I’ve been toying with the idea of going grain free just to see how it works for us, because I feel like crap a lot of the time and notice it gets especially bad after I have a sandwich or pasta. My thing is, our family is working towards having a year supply of food stored up just in case something happens or DH loses his job. We have something like 50 lbs of beans, 50 lbs of wheat, a ton of pasta and 30 lbs of rice. What would we even start to store besides grain? I’ve been slowly stocking up on freeze-dried veggies but if anything ever did happen I can’t imagine eating freeze dried broccoli by itself, you know?
Kris’s last blog post..The rest of my life
This is a really good post. More people are dying these days due to conditions associated with obesity than other other disease or condition. On top of that, the current generation of kids may not out live their parents. I’d rather spend money on healthy organic food now than on anything else. Like the old saying goes…we are what we eat.
Denise’s last blog post..INTRODUCING…Faith, Hope, Joy, Carly, Hawk and Bolt
This is a great post. I agree that we must prioritize. Where we spend our money shows what we value.
And I am really trying to make the most of our CSA produce right now…cabbage coming out of our ears! lol
And even though our milk is more costly now, we don’t use nearly as much now that we don’t eat cold cereals. It works out, I think.
Noelle’s last blog post..Real Food Wednesday
Great post!
I love that graph. Gonna have to steal that for another post.
I always quote Michael Pollan saying that we used to spend 30% of our income on food, and now we spend 15% — but we spend the other 15% on health care (or more aptly, sick care).
CHEESESLAVE’s last blog post..Alice Waters on 60 Minutes
I admire Mark Bittman on many points, but on this one he is wrong (or at least misleading). If we’re talking ethics (particularly in regards to environmental effects), try cutting down on the grass-fed beef and ramping up consumption of other grass-fed animals like sheep or goats, pastured poultry, foraged hogs, etc. Start hunting wild game or catching wild fish. You’ll get all the nutritional benefits of a meat and animal fat based diet, AND have less environmental guilt.
FoodRenegade’s last blog post..Real Food Goes Mainstream
I’ve always found it somewhat frustrating when these kinds of “budget” conversations come up because more often than not it becomes a “well, if you just give up your cup of coffee a day/imagine all your health care savings” or “farmer’s need to be paid more” kind of thing. For the first one – it’s a bit silly to assume that most folks can afford that one or are spending all that much on health care.
For the second one – it’s absolutely right, but there are a vast number of other people out there who could stand to be paid more as well (this is a far more systemic issue that encompasses a larger portion of our society than just food). To assume that there are these legions of folks out there who have all sorts of “extras” that can be cut from their budgets means that we’ve already made this an elitist issue. Lets face it, there are folks out there who have little left to cut and they’re the ones who most desperately need real, honest to goodness, nourishing food.
I think the third item in your list – “do what you can with what you have” – needs to be a lot more than an after thought added in there. We need to find a way to uphold the important things while also extending grace to others. After all, there are a lot of simple, cheap, and easy things one can do to maximize nutrition and make even “cheap” foods more nourishing (soaking, sprouting, fermenting, etc).
I hate to be the one commenter that posts something other than “it was just so lovely”, but after having been lambasted locally for choosing something less than ideal (I should just shop at Wal-Mart instead if that’s what I’m going to do) I suspect that this is far more of an issue than we (the collective we here) have acknowledged in the past.
Pampered Mom’s last blog post..Getting Outside
I can see Pampered Mom’s point. I’ve adopted a grain-free diet because of two reasons: one, it makes me feel better in the short-term and two, I *believe* it will keep me healthier in the long-term. However, it’s not a guarantee. There are plenty of environmental toxins, genetic predispositions and other mostly uncontrollabe factors that might kill me or sicken me even if my diet is extremely nourishing (in the NT sense).
I want to make that long-term investment in my health; buying more expensive, but better, foods now is much more fun than paying for pharmeceuticals and medical treatments in the future, BUT…. How much of my current income and available effort should I be putting toward such a goal? I could die in a car crash tomorrow. As a religious person, this is where I get hung up. How do I balance my own goals for personal health as well as environmental-local foods type concerns with the idea that I need to provide for other worthy family needs (I have four children) as well as those poorer than me in my community?
If I spend all my money on cod liver oil and have “radiant” health, yet have not love….
I agree that the Standard American food budget is abnormally low because the quality of the food is abnormally poor; better food should demand a better price. But it’s hard for me to know where to draw the line. At what point do I stop treating myself to the best foods and think of those outside my immediate family?
Along the same lines, considering the poor economy and the potential reality of being laid off, is it the wisest thing in the short term to be buying raw milk instead of regular pasteurized? Can I really justify the expense?
I feel much better on a grain-fre diet, but it is a huge adjustment that I haven’t fully absorbed yet; either financially or practically.
I’m glad your blog is addressing it though because it gives me hope that it’s possible to continue eating this way without too many compromises.
LeeAnn’s last blog post..Welcome to my dream home…
For those of you thinking about going grain-free: it’s really not very hard after a little while. Seven years ago, when I was diagnosed gluten-intolerant and was also going low carb to lose a little weight, I went grain-free. I thought it would just last until I lost 20 lbs, but soon I discovered how much better I felt. Now it seems perfectly natural and simple. My husband and I have a very large garden (several acres, but broken into 3 plots for rotations), so we grow most of our own fruits, herbs, and vegetables. Our eggs come from our hens; our meat comes from our neighbor’s grass-fed beef and pork. We buy from Trader Joe’s olive oil, nuts, Alaskan salmon, unsweetened coconut, coffee, wine, and a little dark chocolate. From a local grocery, we buy local, pastured but not organic dairy products: yogurt, cheese, butter, heavy cream. From a local fisherman, we buy fish from our local lake: Lake Superior. We make hard cider from the apples in the orchard. I put up a lot of canned goods in the fall. My husband still eats carbs–the corn and peas and potatoes he grows, and the honey from our bees. It all sounds very earthy-crunchy, but it’s not hard, and it’s not expensive. We just don’t buy very much.