Through the Looking Glass: Culture Shock

I had occasion to travel a bit out of my corner of the state the week before Thanksgiving. It was a great time with friends, but also some culture shock (seeing how the other half lives) when we went for a drive on the Parkway.

Château Morrisette Winery

Château Morrisette Restaurant, photos from their website

We stopped to check out Château Morrisette, and while I was sitting on a bench outside the winery on that gorgeous sunny day, I had the chance to watch folks drive up in their status-symbol imports, town cars, Hummers and fancy SUV's... and leave with multiple cases of wines. Not too many years ago, I might could have been part of that crowd, complete with designer jeans and a fresh manicure (and in the Mercedes I drove).

The exposure and the culture shock of seeing my life "then vs now" really got me to some hard thinking over the last 3 weeks, and to some honest reflections in my mirror. I'm still somewhat of the consumer 'mindset' (minus any credit cards), albeit now more for tools, equipment and other things geared towards survival. AND... I still love good wines and gourmet foods. It's hard to believe I used to think nothing of buying anything I fancied. I freely admit to champagne tastes, only now with a Near-Beer pocketbook. (Do they still make Near-Beer? It was all we could get, or even afford, in college.)

It took me a few days to realize and admit that I still had have some residual internal pique at not having that kind of discretionary income anymore. (Actually I thought only the rich still had much discretionary income in this economic downturn. I guess I don't get out of Dodge enough.)

The reason I am in an economic pit despite having made good money is due to naively believing that economic growth would always continue, that corporations were honest, and that Life was fair. Add in the governments' manipulation of the social security fund and the rules that changed during the few years before I retired, and it reduced my "estimated [by the government] SS income" by 75%... which necessitated bridging the gap for living expenses with my assets until they ran out. The government did not single me out; there were many tossed in the same boat. Factor in the economic crisis of the past few years and you have enough added weight to sink many lifeboats.

I have had to really take a hard look at what I have been doing with my life over the last few years: my goals, and what things give me satisfaction in order to balance out the pique I felt. Would I go back to that lifestyle if I could? I doubt it. Of course, a little extra cash now and then would be nice. :)

I suspect I'll never get over my taste for international and gourmet foods, since I spent most of my whole life traveling, and tasting new foods... but I've worked out how to still have them. As for the wines, designer jeans and fancy cars... pfffffttt. My 20 year old, high-mileage pickup truck gets me where I'm going (most of the time!) and if someone is going to judge me based on what I wear or drive, that's their problem. (Besides that, 2 Buck Chuck can taste pretty good.)

I'm learning that many of the things I love and can no longer afford are things I can make myself; the list is much too long to list here other than a couple of examples below. BTW, I did make some decent champagne this year from wild elderberry flowers; it cost me some sugar, water, yeast... and my time. Not Dom Perignon, but drinkable.

Buying $30-$50/pound cheese is not in my food budget, but I AM learning to make cheese. I may never make cheese anywhere near that good, but I can sure keep trying. Meanwhile, I make lots of tasty, real cheese for the price of some milk, a few small expenditures for cultures, and my labor. I make butter (from 100% Jersey cream) as good as, and much cheaper, than imported butter costing $7.95 for half a pound. Actually mine is cheaper than even American store-brand butter, too.

I buy whole pork belly and season then cure/smoke it myself, and wind up with a tastier product than store-bought organic smoked bacon for a fraction of the price. The pastured, free-range meat I buy isn't cheaper, but it's much healthier and tastier. And I discovered the cheap "odd bits" that most folks never buy (or even see) anymore make some outstanding dishes, equal to or better than imported patés, terrines and rillettes, and much cheaper than buying them.

I plan to try to make pancetta and proscuitto which are not in my budget either; after all someone makes them... how hard can it be to do what average people have done in France, Italy, Spain, and many other countries for centuries?

I find a great taste satisfaction in snapping a tomato right off the vine and eating it while standing in my garden, the juices dribbling down my fingers and chin. You cannot buy that "yummy fresh taste" in a store.

My home-grown herbs, fruits and vegetables are free of pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, chemical washes and irradiation. Anything I cannot eat fresh does not go to waste. I have a pantry full of home-canned, lacto-fermented, dehydrated, and frozen goods. Plus I always grow some vegetables that will keep over winter in my root cellar.

However many things I can make, there are still some things I either must buy, or do without... because of my location and gardening zone. Wild Alaskan Salmon is high on the list, as is good olive oil... and spices that won't grow here, like vanilla (a tropical orchid), cardamom and cinnamon. However, I can grow the most expensive spice (herb) in the world, saffron, for the cost of a few fall saffron crocus bulbs (Crocus sativus), which will multiply and give me more fresh saffron every year. Paella, YUM!

In the final analysis, the trade-off is that for every tasty morsel I can make myself, it frees up money in the budget to occasionally buy some goodies I cannot make. Nothing is so wonderful as something sinfully delicious straight from the stove or pantry, even if NOT ALL the ingredients are homegrown.

Who said "back to basics" aka being poor, has to be dull, boring and tasteless?

Minimize your Food Price Rollercoaster

I am finding it very difficult to believe the published numbers for the rise in US food prices which are stated as much less than the rest of the world. The world average is 39% in the last year, and the US says it has increases of only 1.5%*. I disagree... sure wish my grocery bill had only increased 1.5%!!!

The published FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) Food Price Index on the graph shown above is a lot closer to what I personally experience in my geographic area, with the increase in grain prices affecting everything from meat, cereal grains and soft drinks to ethanol added at the gas pumps.

"Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories — wheat, rice, corn and soybeans — has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost."  Source

Some of what's interesting in these charts is the price of various food groups, shown above. Look at the spike in sugar, known to be in most of the addictive junk food, sodas, etc. It's amazing to me that meat is relatively flat in comparison, even though most US meat is raised in CAFO's and fed grains. (Meat prices are expected to go down briefly then surge as US cattle ranchers sell of herds due to drought - lack of hay with the smallest hay crop in more than 100 years.)

Global wheat prices more than doubled in the second half of last year, according to a new report from the World Bank. The price of corn, sugar and cooking oil also soared.

Why are global food prices skyrocketing? Who is hungry as a result? And what does it mean for the U.S.?

Skyrocketing Prices  attribute the price rise to several factors — some familiar to me (and probably to you), some less familiar.

1. The rise of biofuels, like ethanol made from corn. This market, driven largely by government subsidies, has created demand that is what economists call "price inelastic" - that means demand stays strong even as prices rise. (Note: The US says for the first time ever, more corn will go for ethanol than animal feed.)

2. More demand from the developing world, particularly for meat. Livestock are now fed grain and confined rather than being pastured on grass, so increasing demand for meat means increasing demand for grain. This source of demand has also been price inelastic.

3. Disappearing stockpiles Because of WTO (World Trade Organization) rules, the U.S. and Europe have been moving away from subsidies that led to vast reserves of wheat and corn.

Of course, subsidies still exist in the U.S. and Europe, but they've taken a different form. Governments used to buy and stockpile surplus food from farmers. Now it's more common for governments to give farmers subsidy payments without actually buying any of the food they produce.

4. Stock Market Speculation The volatility created by declining stocks is in turn compounded by speculation — traders betting on the rise or fall of prices.

So, what's the Bottom Line for most of us?

It is unlikely any of us can grow enough food (including grains) for sustainability on a city or suburban lot, nor is it likely we can avoid GMO grains in our foods (think corn meal and soy / canola oils added to almost everything) unless we are both wealthy and knowledgeable.

What we CAN do is grow our own fruits, greens and vegetables, even if some are just grown in buckets on a balcony, or in straw bales on a driveway. Buy enough OP (open pollinated) or heirloom seeds this fall for next year, but please... be careful to only buy seeds for things you and your family will actually eat. (Some seeds have a relatively short shelf life; our world seed supply is in danger; many varieties are already extinct, and seed prices are going up.) Plant the seeds next spring and learn how to save seeds for the following year. If you are a beginning gardener, even just a handful of tomatoes will produce enough seeds for another year!

If you don't have any space at all to garden, buy bulk vegetables at a farmer's market and learn how to freeze, can or dehydrate what you don't eat fresh. Starchy carbs are filling, often with empty calories, so start experimenting with carbs that are more nutritious.

If you hate Brussels sprouts, try some new cooking methods that leave them yummy rather than over-cooked and strong tasting/smelling. Try cauliflower and broccoli with fresh lemon and a hint of garlic instead of tasty but fattening fake-cheese sauce in a package. Make your own flavored real butter sauce for fresh vegetables, or those you have frozen.

Try some herbs and spices you don't usually keep on hand. There's a whole world of flavor available!

Learn how to make ghee (clarified butter) which stores on the shelf a long time (in a dark, cool spot like the bottom of a closet), and then watch for butter on sale to make ghee. Ghee makes a tasty butter sauce, and it's great to use in a sauté. (I mix mine with EVOO for a sauté.)

Learn how to render fat or schmaltz from beef, chickens and hogs at home; scrap fat is available at the butcher's, and home-rendered is far better and cheaper than the processed, hydrogenated fats in the stores. Use it to cook instead of processed PUFA oils. It's healthier, if for no other reason than the better balance of Omega 6 to Omega 3 EFA's. Our brains are almost entirely comprised of fats, and we need the nutrients found in animal fats such as fat-soluble vitamins such as Vitamins A, D, and K.

Learn how to buy and cook the less common and less expensive cuts of meat, including the very nutritious organ meats. (BTW, I won't eat organ meats from supermarket CAFO meats as most of the organs store toxins; I will only eat them from grass-fed, hormone-free animals.)

Start weaning yourself and family from highly addictive (and expensive) things like sodas and chips... and also wean yourselves from nutritionally-poor fast food. Learn to grow greens like Swiss chard and kale; you can dehydrate them into chips (with a tasty topping) instead of buying potato chips or corn chips. 

Find a nearby family who has chickens and buy or barter for eggs. There is a lot nutrition in eggs from free-range chickens!

There are many things we each can do to help offset food price increases; we just have to start somewhere. Even with all my efforts to produce more of my own food over the past 4-5 years I still buy a lot, but just not as much as if I were still totally dependent on the system. I also now make better choices with my food dollars, read all the ingredient labels carefully, and double-check unit prices because sometimes bigger boxes are not cheaper.

* "Despite the fact that the world price of staples like wheat, corn and sugar have risen by more than 50 percent in recent months, the price of food in the U.S. has barely budged — food prices here rose only 1.5 percent over the past year. That's because the price of food in the U.S. is driven largely by labor costs and other factors, rather than by the price of the ingredients." Source

Increasingly Costly Items

Of course we all know the cost of goods is increasing, and the amounts in the packaging is decreasing. (Actually, I do not believe the cost of goods is increasing, but rather the US Dollar is worth less and less all the time.) Some things are already (or soon will be) taking a bigger hit than others... here are some of my notes:

Expect the price of cane sugar to increase now that some manufacturers are (finally) switching from High Fructose Corn Syrup back to real sugar. Plus, most of our cane sugar is imported, and so far Monsanto hasn't broadcast GMO sugar cane although they are trying. They have already succeeded with sugar beets. Unless a package of sugar specifies cane sugar, it probably IS GMO beet sugar. Food products must be labeled as to contents, and sweet things may just say "sugar" although I have seen some that do specify "cane sugar". Thus far, labels saying "Non-GMO" are not allowed.

Most fruit and fruit juices are imported, either whole... or as concentrates. Expect prices to increase more than many other items due to transportation across an ocean, and cold-storage costs. Transportation costs are similar for coffee, although overall costs for coffee are worse now because world-wide weather problems have affected the coffee production yields.

Chocolate: same problems with chocolate as with coffee... weather, and transportation around the world. I'm not a big fan of chocolate but occasionally I like a bite. I buy the high percentage (84%) cocoa bars made by Lindt, since they are mostly chocolate rather than sugar, and less expensive so far than other brands. One bar can last a month or more for me, and they work well in baked goods or shaved on top of a dessert.

Stock up on whatever fruits and veggies are in season by dehydrating or canning them so there are no worries about power outages and a freezer full of food. Where you can, store winter veggies in a cool basement, in a crawl space, or in a root cellar if you are lucky enough to have one. Even the bottom of a cool, dark closet can extend the shelf life of winter produce much longer than a kitchen cabinet.

All building materials are increasing in price... particularly items like the wood used for framing because large-enough trees to mill are getting more scarce and thus more expensive to harvest (which makes paper goods made from wood pulp more expensive, too); also items like plastic plumbing parts and roofing shingles because they are petroleum-based products. 

Any household goods made from plastic, and most cleaning goods, will increase more than other items... again because of being petroleum-based. Take an hour a day away from the TV and learn to make your own laundry detergent and soap. Use vinegar for cleaning; it's antibacterial! Learn to ignore the seductive ads for products. Ask yourself how much an item will increase your quality of life, not your ego or taste buds. (That doesn't mean give up tasty foods!)

The insurance industry in the USA is taking a big hit from tornadoes and floods. Expect them to make it up by big jumps in policy costs for home and auto. Don't even think about health-care costs or health-care insurance!

Don't buy disposable batteries. Buy a solar multi-battery charger and good rechargeable batteries instead. My niece who lives here goes through 4-8 batteries a month for her iPod. In less than 1 year, she'll break even with a solar charger and rechargeable batteries. I know, I just helped her mother buy some.

Now, to offset what I said about buying frivolous items, let me encourage you to buy some fun things... one a month should not hurt the budget too much. Buy a set of Pick-Up Sticks and Tiddlywinks, a Chess-Checkers-Backgammon Set, a Scrabble Game Set (and be sure you have a real dictionary), a couple of decks of Playing Cards, and Hoyle's Book of Card Games. Maybe get a set of Jacks (remember them?) and a couple of yo-yo's and a Slinky if you have kids around. You'll be surprised how entertaining they can be when the power goes out!

Fighting Food Prices 2011

Photo from The Comsumerist's Photostream

I had planned to cut back on my vegetable garden this year and concentrate my time and energies on making cheese and curing meats. Guess what? With the increasing food prices, it ain't gonna happen!

In 2010 alone, the cost of food increased 25%, with an additional 9.9% in the first 2 months of this year. That's a 35% increase just for food in 14 months, and the EIU is projecting an additional 19% rise this year. Can your food budget withstand a 54% increase? Mine can't!

So yesterday I put off a personal loan payment and ordered vegetable seeds instead. Much of what I ordered is OP (Open Pollinated) Heirloom seed so that I can save seeds for next year. That assumes we have a decent gardening year, which a lot of the world is not expected to have (and that will drive prices even higher).

For a long time, I have encouraged people to Eat Local, to buy from their Farmer's Markets and roadside stands, and to grow a few vegetables in their yards or pots on the balcony. I've encouraged the idea of converting the front lawn into a garden patch studded with fruiting bushes and trees alongside the rows or patches of veggies. This year I think those ideas are becoming imperative for more and more people, except those with their heads in the sand. (I think I've had my own head a little bit in the sand because I had NOT added up the actual food price increases until now. Shame on me!)

As an aside... Our minds do strange things with the thought of nuclear disaster, from denial to running scared... and one of the places my mind went was to row covers for foods growing in my garden. IF airborne nuclear radioactivity falls to earth contaminating our water and soil, what is the possibility that garden rows covered with long hoop housing could mitigate the soil accumulation and allow plants to grow untainted? Frankly, I have no idea... it was just a thought. (I don't have the money to do such a project anyway.)

Photo from The Consumerist's Photostream

In much the same way governments worldwide are trying to hide realities to calm fears arising from Japan's nuclear disaster, so are food companies trying to mask the incredible price increases by subterfuge in their packaging. You will find these look-alike packages on the shelves in the stores... they will be from the same manufacturer and look the same, perhaps have a price increase, but the contents will be reduced by the following amounts:

Kellogg Cereal: roughly 15%
Snickers Bars:11%
PepsiCo’s Tropicana OJ: 8%
PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay Chips: 12.5% - 20%
Haagen-Dazs: 12.5%
Chicken of the Sea Tuna: 17%
Kraft Foods’ Saltines and Graham Crackers: 15%
Reese's: 37%
Bounty: 7.2%,
Heinz Ketchup: 11%

Photo from The Consumerist's Photostream

American farmers are said to be switching some food acreage into cotton this year because the price of cotton has increased nearly 60% in the last year.

Be assured my tiny vegetable plot will remain planted in vegetables, as long as I feed the soil and the soil will support growth. I'll be posting more on seed starting plus how to make your own seed starting mix in the next few days.

Can You Live on the USDA Food Budget?

On one of the blogs I read, the husband and wife are attempting to stay within the USDA food budget amount allotted to food stamp recipients for one whole month. That works out to be about $5-$6 per day, per person. I had no clue what amount food stamps provide, but I thought I'd look into the USDA budget.

Starting with December 1st, I started to track what I really spend for food, so I can compare that to what the USDA has to say about budget amounts. I know I have to be very frugal or I wouldn't eat the entire month, but I have no real clue what monies I actually need on average per month to feed myself. There are things I buy where the use or life of the goods may span several months... things like apples and winter squash by the bushel, or spices, condiments, bulk meats, and that makes a budget complicated. 

It will probably take a whole year of tracking for me to get a reasonably close figure of my true average cost. I do know that I don't believe it is possible to eat a healthy diet on the budget allowance the USDA suggests. Their budget suggestions are based on the Standard American Diet, or S.A.D., which is indeed sad. The SAD is very high in empty carbs (like white flour in cakes and pastries, bread, sugar, sodas), and very low in things like essential amino acids found only in saturated fats. However, that diet discussion is best left for another post...

The USDA food figures fall into four categories, and each category is further segmented by gender and then by age or family size: a single male; a single female; a family of 2, and a family of four. These are the category budgets and from what I can see, food stamps provide the lowest category, Thrifty.

Thrifty

Low-Cost

Moderate-Cost

Liberal

and this USDA website has all the breakdown figures beginning with 1994.

I am in the category for a single female, age 51-70, and the monthly cost of food figures (June 2009-May 2010 averages) are these:

Thrifty: $147.60/month

Low-Cost: $183.10/month

Moderate-Cost: $ 227.50/month

Liberal: $ 235.60/month

To add insult, the USDA says my food cost average goes down when I turn from 70 to 71. HUH???

Out of curiosity, I downloaded the PDF's for 2000, 2005, and 2010, and made the chart above showing only my age category in the various spending ranges, just to see how the USDA thinks my costs have increased in just 10 years. In the "Thrifty" column, costs have increased almost 50%, and even in the "Liberal" column, costs have increased around 33%. 

For 8 of those 10 years, Social Security has been my only income, and Social Security income certainly has not had a COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) that reflects the kind of increases shown in the food costs. In fact, there has been no COLA since January 2008 and none expected for next year, 2011... or perhaps ever again.

At any rate, I eat... and plan to continue to eat, so it will be interesting to chart my extreme frugality against what the USDA says is is the norm. (I don't even want to think about charting other expenses like utilities, auto and homeowner's insurance, or gasoline.)

How do you stack up against the USDA figures?