Realization: Healthy Eating is Expensive

One of our budget items that always seems out of whack compared to what I see the frugalistas out there in the personal finance blog realm is our food budget. I’ve seen a claims of grocery expense for a family of three in the less-than-$150 range. Three meals a day for three people (even if one of them is really 1/4 of the other two… ) for around $5 a day just doesn’t seem feasible to me. Irregardless, that amount is substantially less than what ours ends up being.

Part of the difference is likely because we don’t get as granular as some with our budget categories. I’ll lump in our cleaning supplies and toilet paper and diapers and etc. into the Groceries category rather than breaking them out into, say, Household or Cleaning Supplies or Childcare or Whatever. I used to break it down much more for awhile, but it was just too much effort for too little return. The information just wasn’t actionable enough – I wasn’t going to be washing less if I realized I was spending more on soap this month than I did last month, or stretching out the time between the son’s diaper changes to save a few bucks on the Childcare category.

But even when those line items were tracked in different categories, we were still spending quite a bit more than $5 (or, for that matter, $10) a day on groceries. We’re doing slightly better now than we did back then because we’ve gotten into preplanning our meals (makes shopping a ton more efficient), but I’d still be surprised if we spent much less than $300 a month solely on what we eat. But why so much? I think MyMoneyBlog may have just given me my answer.

WiseGeek recently put up an interesting post showing what 200 calories worth of a vast array of food look like. And MyMoneyBlog went a step further and put up a great followup post on the cost of those different 200 calories. And what conclusion can I reach from the info?

Healthy foods cost more to get the same calorie benefit. Specifically, fresh fruits and vegetables are very expensive, especially compared to cheap carbs and processed foods (on a $/calorie basis anyway). The wife and I realized 5 or 6 years ago that we were, well, flat out getting fat. A few scary vacation pictures convinced us that maybe, just maybe, a little more attention to our health was necessary. And we’ve slowly but surely jacked up our amount of exercise (myself from a level of zero) along with eating much healthier. These days, it’s really a rarity that we eat a meal that has all that much processed food or huge amounts of carbs in it at all anymore, and there are always fresh fruit and veggies around. And we’ve each dropped a bunch of weight and feel infinitely better.

So, is it time to cut back until we get into better financial shape? Nah, not necessarily. We may pay a little more attention to what’s on sale, continue to improve our meal planning, maybe even sign up with a local CSA if we can find one nearby to save on that veggie bill. But the overall improvement in our life that being conscious of our physical health provides is much more important to us. And if that slows us down from getting out of debt by a little while, so be it…

[tags]groceries,budget,healthy eating,CSA,community supported agriculture,meal planning,diet,200 calories[/tags]