Money Crashers: How to Shop for Cruelty-Free Products

A topic I've occasionally touched on here, but never discussed in depth, is animal welfare. I don't put myself in the animal-rights camp, which holds that animals have exactly the same rights as humans, but I do believe it's wrong for humans to cause needless suffering to other creatures. The rub, of course, is that word "needless." Some people, for instance, argue that any use of animals for food or research is valid if it benefits humans, because human needs trump those of "lower" animals. Others go to the opposite extreme and argue that using any animal product for food, cleaning, or any other purpose is wrong if there's any alternative whatsoever.

But there's one use of animals that I think just about everyone can agree is both unnecessary and inhumane: animal testing for cosmetics and other personal care products. It's clearly unnecessary because, first of all, cosmetics aren't life-saving medical treatments; second, it's possible to make cosmetics without using any new chemicals that need to be tested; and third, even if you do need to test new chemicals, it's possible to test them without using animals, using new methods that are often more accurate, faster, and cheaper than the old-fashioned animal tests. And anyone who claims the tests aren't inhumane clearly doesn't know the facts about how much harm these tests do, and for how little benefit.

That's why, for about 25 years now, I've been a "cruelty-free" shopper. I won't buy any personal care products that I know have been tested on animals, and I prefer whenever possible to buy from brands that I know don't use any animal testing at all. This can be challenging, though, because it isn't always easy to find cruelty-free brands in stores, or to identify them when I'm shopping online.

So in my latest Money Crashers article, I talk about the whys and hows of cruelty-free shopping. I lead off with some facts about animal testing: how it works, how effective it is (or, more often, isn't), what alternatives exist, and what the laws are about it. But if you're already opposed to animal testing and don't need convincing, you can skip all that and go straight to the last two sections, which identify companies that do and don't test on animals and offer some pointers for finding cruelty-free products in stores and online.

How to Shop for Cruelty-Free Products – Companies That Test on Animals

Savings Challenge, Week 27: Joining a Meat CSA

Once again, I've allowed myself to fall behind on the Bankrate Weekly Savings Challenges. In fact, after making it through about half of the one-year series, I was thinking of packing it in completely, for three reasons:

1. I'm now working more or less full-time, which gives me less time to update the blog. If I'm only going to post once or twice a week, I'd like to spend those posts talking about my own ecofrugal discoveries rather than responding to Bankrate's challenges, which are often irrelevant to my life.
2. For several weeks, the main challenge page on Bankrate was not working properly in either Google Chrome or Firefox. You could view the list of weekly challenges, but there was no way to click on them and pull up the page for each individual challenge. However, after several complaints in the comment section and a note to Bankrate tech support, that seems to be fixed now.
3. Most problematically, the last couple of challenges have provided me with no new material to write about. Week 25 was about saving money on razors and shaving supplies, a topic I already covered pretty thoroughly back in Week 7; Week 26 was about saving money by doing your own pool maintenance, a subject that never has had, and I'm pretty sure never will have, any relevance to my life whatsoever. 

However, this week's challenge actually sounded new and potentially useful. It's about joining a "meat CSA"—that is, buying your meat directly from the farmer through a yearly subscription plan. And since I only buy free-range meats, which are a lot pricier than the factory-farmed kind, this seems like an idea that might actually offer some real savings for me. So now, instead of dropping the Savings Challenge posts completely, my plan is to keep writing about the challenges that are actually relevant for me and skip over the rest.

And this challenge certainly does sound relevant. Bankrate reporter Laura Dunn, who says she'd never actually heard of a CSA before she began working on this story, says they're a good idea if you "value knowing the original source of your meat" or "like supporting local agriculture and small farms"—both descriptions that definitely apply to me, and to some extent to Brian as well.

The farmer she interviews in the article, Jessica Jens of Windswept Farmstead in Cedar Grove, Wisconsin, says it's "quite honestly, impossible for small farms to ever compete with the 99-cents-a-pound Thanksgiving turkey" available at major supermarkets. (Actually, based on my research on the price of a Thanksgiving dinner four years ago, most stores offer sale prices even lower than that.) However, by selling directly to consumers through a CSA, they can offer a better price than than the supermarkets charge for meat that's humanely raised.

But how much better is it, exactly? Well, Bankrate employee Maria Mancini says she and her husband spent $410 a month, or about $95 a week, for an "omnivore CSA" that provides them with meat, produce, seafood, and eggs. Compared to the $100 a week they used to spend on groceries, they're saving around $5 a week (though Dunn says this is only a savings of $60 a year, suggesting that the CSA only runs for a period of 12 weeks every year). This is a small savings for the Mancinis, but it would be no savings at all for us, as we currently spend only $264 per month on groceries (and that's for everything, not just the fresh produce).

Another problem: with a CSA, you don't get to choose what food you receive every week. A blogger quoted in the article says that her Iowa CSA provides meat at $1 to $2 less per pound than meat that's "hormone-free and grass fed" at the grocery store, but she also says that throughout the year, they get an assortment of cuts of beef, pork, chicken, and lamb. Now, I've never much cared for beef, and I positively dislike lamb—so $1 to $2 less per pound is no bargain for something I wouldn't really want to buy in the first place. Prices for this kind of meat in the store, at least in our area, start at around $7 a pound—so with the CSA, I'd be paying $5 to $6 per pound for meat I wouldn't actually enjoy eating.

A final problem is that CSAs that provide meat aren't exactly easy to find. Dunn says she was unable to locate one in her area, though she did find a "buying club" with meat shares that can be purchased at lower-than-retail prices (though actually, the prices looked pretty comparable to what you pay in stores around here, and you have to buy anywhere from 8 to 40 pounds at a time to get them). When I checked the Jersey Fresh website for CSAs in my area, I found none that include meats or eggs in either Middlesex County or adjacent Mercer and Monmouth Counties. I found one farm in Somerset County, Dogwood Farms, that offers meat shares; it charges $250 for a "regular share" of 5-7 pounds of meat each month from November through March, which can include chicken, pork, beef, and lamb. But for us, this would be impractical for several reasons:

1. The whole share includes roughly 30 pounds of meat, which means the price works out to roughly $8.33 per pound. That's more than we currently spend on any of the meats we currently buy. 
2. Some of the 30 pounds would be beef and lamb, which, as I've said, I don't like and wouldn't usually buy.
3. If we had to pick up a whole month's supply of meat at a time, most of it would have to go in the freezer. Right now, we have only a small fridge freezer that's pretty well stuffed; to take advantage of the CSA, we'd have to buy a chest freezer. That would add an additional $200 or so to the cost of our first share, not counting the cost of electricity to power it—and we'd also have to find a place to keep it, which is easier said than done in our house.
4. Five to seven pounds is significantly more meat than we'd normally eat in a month—and eating it more often probably wouldn't be a good idea, since eating meat more than one or two days in a row tends to disagree with me. Of course, if we bought a freezer, we could spread that five months' supply over as long as a year, maybe, but since it costs more per pound than we'd normally pay, it still wouldn't be a good value. 
5. Last but not least, we'd have to drive out once a month to Hillsborough to pick up our share. That's about an hour round-trip, and it's in a direction we don't normally go, so we wouldn't be able to combine it with any other errands.

So all in all, it looks like a meat CSA just wouldn't be a good value for us—which is pretty much the same conclusion we've already reached about regular produce CSAs. We're better off sticking to places we shop now for for good deals on free-range meats: Trader Joe's for chicken legs ($2 a pound) and the Amish market for smoked meats, such as bacon, hot dogs, and kielbasa sausage, ranging from $5 to $6 a pound. And we can continue to keep an eye out at our local supermarkets to see if any new free-range offerings show up there at a good price.

The "Skip It" list

A few weeks ago, the bloggers at Young House Love put up a post called "Skip It" (complete with a video of the '80s toy by the same name). Basically, it's a list of all the things they save money on by just forgetting about them entirely. Their list included food and drink (bottled water, alcohol), cleaning supplies (dusting spray, fabric softener) and some grooming items (most hair products, manicures, lipstick, perfume). Then, at the end, they named a few things that they can choose not to skip thanks to the money they save this way: "project materials, organic produce, cable TV, and ceramic animals."

Reading through their list, my response was more or less, "Check...check...check" as I passed by item after item that we had chosen to skip as well. However, there were a few differences, so I thought I'd write up my own Skip It list here and note how it compares to theirs.

• Food and drink: The Petersiks say they skip meat "three or four nights a week," which presumably means that they eat it on the other three or four nights. In our case, we eat meat more like three or four nights a month, but when we do, we eat only the free-range stuff. So for us, meat is both a skip and a splurge: we skip it most nights so that we can splurge on the humanely raised meats when we do indulge. Shari Petersik also skips Starbucks by making her chai at home from a mix, saving the Starbucks for "special occasions." I, however, prefer the Frappuccino to the chai, and I've never been able to make a reasonable facsimile of it at home, so I allow myself one per month as a special treat. (At 300 calories a pop, it's probably just as well that I don't indulge more often anyway.) Like the Petersiks, however, we skip bottled water in favor of a filter pitcher and reusable bottles, and we skip alcohol because neither of us cares for it much.
• Home care: The Petersiks' list includes both fabric softener and dusting spray. I don't think we've ever used either of these, although I will confess that we tend to skip dusting altogether more often than we should. As for fabric softener, I've never understood what it's really for; isn't fabric soft enough already? We also skip most store-bought cleaning supplies in favor of a few staples (dish soap, vinegar, and baking soda), and we've skipped paper towels in favor of rags and dishcloths. And one item we've never bought or even owned is an "air freshener," which I consider a total misnomer. (Yech.) We also join the Petersiks in skipping incandescent light bulbs, but frankly, I consider that a substitution rather than a skip. I mean, it's not as if we're choosing to go without electric lighting altogether.
• Media: Unlike the Petersiks, we skip anything beyond the most basic cable TV package (and the only reason we even have that is because the package deal was cheaper than phone and high-speed Internet alone). However, we join them in skipping the newspaper and getting most of our news online and from the radio. I don't currently pay for an online newspaper subscription, although I've thought about signing up for one just to support the struggling papers. But with the New York Times currently charging $5 a week and the Washington Post $2.50 a week, I'm not really convinced it's worth the money. I'd sooner go with a print subscription to the weekly Christian Science Monitor, which works out to only 83 cents a week. 
• Grooming products: Like the Petersiks, we skip gel, hairspray, mousse, serum, and other hair products beyond simple shampoo and conditioner. I also join Shari in skipping perfume and all "creams and self tanners." However, while she skips lipstick (but does use bronzer, mascara, concealer, and eye shadow), I use lipstick (a $4 tube from Burt's Bees) for special occasions, concealer (a $1 tube from Wet 'n' Wild) as needed, and nothing else. And, unlike Shari, I skip contact lenses: I used to wear them, but they always got dry and uncomfortable by late afternoon, and Brian actually likes the way I look in my glasses. So now I kick it old school.
• Services: We join the Petersiks in skipping dry cleaning by choosing clothes that are machine or hand washable (with the exception of one winter coat and Brian's good suit). I skip haircuts too, especially since I've never in my life gotten one I really liked—but unlike Shari, I've never gotten the hang of cutting my husband's hair, so he still goes to the barber a few times a year at $17 a pop. (And then I invariably complain that he made it too short.) I do join Shari in skipping manicures and pedicures, but unlike her, I don't bother polishing my nails at home, either. Just clean them, clip them, and call it good. The Petersiks do have one gym membership for John, but we skip them altogether; Brian gets his exercise by riding to work, and I take an hour-long walk every day, weather allowing. One other thing we skip that the Petersiks have is a cell phone plan. We do have one basic prepaid phone, but it's strictly for emergencies: we do not give out the number, period.
• Transportation: Like the Petersiks, we've skipped the second car; with me working from home and Brian biking to work as often as possible, there really is no need for it (and fitting two cars into our driveway would be a tight squeeze, too). The Petersiks skip bag-checking fees when flying by only packing carry-ons; we tend to go all the way and skip flying altogether.
• Kids: This is the biggest difference between our Skip It list and theirs. While the Petersiks skipped some baby-related expenses, like a diaper bag and disposable diapers, we have chosen to skip kids altogether—which means we skip a whole array of other expenses as well. This choice isn't for everyone, obviously, but for us it was the right one. And with nine (count 'em, nine) nieces and nephews, we'll never lack for a connection to the younger generation. We're comfortable with our roles of crazy aunt and uncle; Mom and Dad just wouldn't fit us.

So that's our Skip It list, or at least all of it that I can think of at the moment. How about yours? Do you skip some things that we keep, or keep things that we skip? And what kind of splurges do your skips allow you to enjoy?

Oh, rats

After all the trouble we went to building a groundhog-proof fence for our garden so that we could peacefully coexist with our resident groundhog, it appears that we now have a new and even more cunning garden pest: Rattus norwegicus, the common brown rat. Or at least, a common brown rat.

The first sign of it came on Friday, when Brian brought in a zucchini from the garden that had clearly been gnawed on by something. We were puzzled, because we were pretty sure we'd finally managed to build a fence the groundhog couldn't penetrate, and in any case, if he'd eaten it he'd probably have eaten the whole thing. But what else could possibly have gotten in? A squirrel? Surely they wouldn't be interested in zucchini, would they? Baffled, we cut off the bitten parts and set aside the rest, figuring the only thing we could really do was keep an eye on the garden and see if we could spot the culprit.

The answer to the puzzle became clear yesterday, as we were sitting in the back yard taking a break from the task of transferring the big pile of concrete chunks to a less obtrusive spot in the back corner of the yard. (Side note: The pieces that were pebble-sized, or not too much larger, got spread along the gap between our rhubarb bed and the main garden area, on top of a layer of weed barrier. We also threw in the remainder of the gravel left over from the patio project and the assorted rocks we'd pulled out of the ground when we planted our plum trees way back in March. We're hoping that this lot will, if not keep the weeds out entirely, at least deter them enough that we don't have to do more than an occasional weeding back there.)

Anyway, as we sat on the grassy bank, trying to work up the energy to get back to our task, Brian suddenly pointed and said, "Look at that." And there, perched right next to the groundhog hole, as bold as you please, was an unmistakeable furry grey critter. It ducked out of sight as soon as we moved, but it didn't take long for it to prove that it was, in fact, the culprit in the zucchini-gnawing incident: next time we looked, we saw one of the zucchini plants moving back and forth, even though there was no wind. And when we headed for it, a furry grey shape bolted straight out of the garden, squeezing right past the gate, and whisked down the groundhog hole.

Our reaction to this new intruder was kind of interesting. Naturally, we were somewhat concerned about having it on the premises at all, since rats, unlike groundhogs, can carry diseases that affect humans. And naturally, we were also annoyed about the loss of our veggies (including the other half of the chewed-on zucchini, which we threw away just to be on the safe side). But we also both found ourselves feeling rather offended to see this upstart intruding on the territory of the groundhog, which we had come to see as an authorized, accepted resident of our property. I actually felt kind of ticked off on the groundhog's behalf: "Who does this rat think he is, anyway, trying to use the groundhog's hole as if it were his own?" Brian, by contrast, felt annoyed at the groundhog: "Hey, what are you doing letting this rat use your burrow? We allow you to stay on our property, but we never said you could have house guests!"

So I had a look around on the Internet for information on rats as garden pests and what to do about them. I found one article on the About.com Organic Gardening site that mentioned that rats supposedly dislike the smell of mint, so I decided as a first step to spray the plants with a solution of Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Oil Soap and see if that deterred the little rodent. Brian also shimmed out the garden gate, which had become a little loose-fitting near the bottom—still plenty tight enough to keep out a groundhog, but easily wide enough for a rat to squeeze through. However, within half an hour after applying both of these remedies, we took another look out the window and saw the zucchini plant wiggling again. Then, as we watched, the rat took off and squeezed straight through the fence, chicken wire and all, not even bothering to go near the gate. So far, the score was Rat 2, Amy and Brian 0.

So we decided it was time to bring out the big guns. Two separate articles I found on rat control (one from the University of Illinois and one from UC Davis) confirmed that no repellant, whether smell-based or sound-based, will deter rats for very long, so if we wanted this thing out of our yard, pretty much our only option was to kill it outright. Based on the article, a trap seemed to be the best choice; unlike poison, it would pose no hazard to humans and most other critters, and it would also ensure that the rat died in a spot where we could find it and dispose of it, rather than leaving a rotting (and, eventually, stinking) carcass in some hard-to-reach spot. The article advised against using the humane type of trap that catches the animal alive, since you really don't want to release a disease-carrying critter into the wild, so we figured we'd have to go for the traditional snap trap, which would (we hoped) kill the rat as quickly and painlessly as possible.

At Lowe's, we found two types of rat traps: the old-fashioned wooden type, with a metal pin on a spring, for two dollars, and a fancier plastic one called a Tomcat trap for five dollars. We opted for the latter, as it looked like it would be much easier to bait and set without injuring ourselves, and also less likely to inadvertently trap some harmless animal just passing by, such as a bird or a stray cat. The trap was in two pieces: a hinged set of plastic jaws, and a removable cup for the bait. Setting it was indeed quite easy: Brian filled the little cup with peanut butter, snapped it into place, carried the whole trap out to the garden, placed it against the side of one of the beds, and stepped on it to pop it open. Unfortunately, I can't give the trap equally high marks for effectiveness. When Brian went out to check on it this morning, he found the trap had been sprung, turned upside down, and dragged to another part of the garden, and the cup that had held the peanut butter was not only empty but completely gone. Rat 3, Amy and Brian 0.

However, Brian is not one to give up that easily. Since the main part of the trap was still intact, he went down into the shop and made a couple of modifications to it. First, he rigged up a board with a short length of dowel to stick up through the hole where the cup used to go. Since we're using peanut butter, we don't really need a cup for it; we can just smear it on the dowel. Then he screwed the body of the trap itself onto the board, which should make harder for the rat to flip over. The trap is a little more difficult to set now—you have to hold it open with one hand while using the other to spread peanut butter on the dowel—but it is definitely heavier and more stable, and it no longer flips over when you set it off. (Brian actually managed to close it on himself at one point, but fortunately it wasn't fully open to start with, so it didn't cause any real damage. I just hope that from a fully cocked and loaded position, it's powerful enough to kill the rat right away.)

We're waiting until nightfall to deploy the modified trap, since rats are more active at night, while birds and other critters we'd rather not harm are less so. If the rat manages to get the bait out of this one without setting it off, I'm not calling an exterminator; I'm calling a science lab, because this rat is obviously some sort of rodent genius who needs to be captured and studied.

Necessities versus luxuries

About a week ago, the Live Like a Mensch blog ran a post arguing that the secret to living below your means is to lower your standards. The basic argument was that it's much easier to meet all your needs if you simply redefine certain necessities as luxuries. One example she gave from her own life was the 20-year-old Volvo that her husband drives despite the merciless teasing of friends and coworkers. For them, having a safe and reliable car is a necessity; having a car that looks good, or one that was built in this century, would be a luxury. She then invited her readers to name some things that they'd determined to be wants rather than needs, regardless of what others may think.

Interestingly, a similar question had been posed that same week in my Tip Hero newsletter: "What 'Necessity' Do You Think Is a Waste of Money?" Readers' responses included new clothes, coffeehouse brews, makeup, bottled water, paper towels, and high-end cell phones. It particularly interested me to see how the definition of a necessity differed from person to person. Some, for instance, declared a cell phone to be a luxury rather than a necessity, while others said that a landline phone was a luxury because they can use their cell (or VOIP) for everything. One reader declared central air conditioning a luxury, while readers who lived in South Carolina and Texas insisted that air conditioning was a necessity for them.

All this got me thinking, as I often have before, about where the line between luxuries and necessities lies in my own life. I suspect that many of the things I consider luxuries would be necessities for many of my peers, yet some of the things that are necessities for me might be luxuries for others. For example:

• High-speed Internet is a necessity; I've tried working from home without it, and it literally wasn't feasible. Cable TV, by contrast, is a luxury—especially since we already have high-speed Internet, which gives us access to nearly as rich a field of entertainment choices.
• A landline phone is a necessity; a cell phone is a luxury. This, again, is because of my job. It's essential to me to have a reliable connection in my home, which is also my workplace, but it's not important—or even desirable—to be reachable everywhere I go. For someone with a different job, one that required them to be on the road a lot, the cell phone might be a necessity and the landline a luxury.
• Central heating in my home is a necessity; air conditioning is a luxury. (An air conditioner in my car, by contrast, I consider a necessity—not so much for cooling as for defogging the windows. Around here, heat is unpleasant but not usually dangerous, while windows you can't see through can be deadly.)
• Hot and cold running water is a necessity. Separate sinks in the bathroom are a luxury.
• A dishwasher is a luxury. A microwave oven is a necessity.
• Having all the meats we purchase be free-range/humanely raised is a necessity, though it isn't a necessity to eat very much of them. Convenience foods of all kinds are luxuries. (Well, maybe not breakfast cereal.)

None of this is meant as an argument that the only things worth spending money on are necessities. On the contrary, for me the main point of frugality is that it frees up money to spend on things that are important to you, and that category is bound to include some luxuries along with the necessities. As Rose Schneiderman observed back in 1911, "The worker must have bread, but she must also have roses." We all need to feed our souls, as well as our bodies. The meaning of frugality is not, and never should be, to do without roses; it's to provide both bread and roses in as inexpensive and sustainable a way as possible. Homemade Golden Egg Bread, for instance, at about 85 cents a loaf, and roses cut from our very own backyard rosebush for free.

Thrift Week Day Two: Eat Sustainably Day

Today's blog entry poses a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, it's day two of Thrift Week, but on the other hand, this is also the day when sites all over the Web are going dark as a protest against two pending pieces of legislation, SOPA and PIPA, that could be used to censor pretty much anything on the Internet. As best I can tell, these are well-intentioned bills meant to stop Internet piracy and copyright violation, which are legitimate problems—but they've been crafted by people who don't really understand how the Internet works. I don't really understand it either, but I've been reading what the folks who do have to say on the subject, and they claim that these bills won't succeed in stopping piracy but will impose massive, costly restrictions on content providers everywhere. So I'd like to show solidarity with the folks opposing the bill...but this is still Thrift Week, and that isn't an event that can just be postponed. So I'm compromising by writing this entry today, but scheduling it to post at midnight, on the 19th instead of the 18th. The seven days of Thrift Week will still be covered, but two of them will be lumped together on one day.

So with that out of the way, let's talk about today's event, which I'm calling Eat Sustainably Day. Sustainable eating, as I see it, takes several forms, most of which I've discussed on this blog before. Sustainable food can be any of the following:

• Seasonal, because food that's in season doesn't have to be shipped long distances, or grown in hothouses, or kept in cold storage, all of which require energy.
• Locally grown, because fewer "miles to market" means less fuel burned, less CO2 emitted, and fresher food, to boot.
• Organic, because using fewer chemical inputs (fertilizers and pesticides) means less pollution and healthier soil.
• Fair-Trade, because a truly sustainable food system has to protect the interests of those who grow the food.
• Low on the food chain, because plants produce less waste and greenhouse gases than animals, and small animals produce less than big ones.
• Humane, because the animals we eat (or eat the products of) are part of our food system too.

I tried to come up with a nifty mnemonic for all that, but I couldn't seem to spell anything with the letters SLOFLH.

I'm observing Eat Sustainably Day in several ways. The main course of tonight's dinner will be a free-range chicken from Whole Foods (given to me by my best friend as what was, I must say, the single most practical birthday present I've ever received). It receives a score of 2 on the 5-point Animal Welfare Rating scale used by Whole Foods, which means that the animals can be kept indoors as long as they are "provided with enrichments that encourage behavior that's natural to them." (This isn't quite up there with living on pasture year-round, but it's a darn sight better than what your typical supermarket chicken has been subjected to.) This will be accompanied by a salad of organic greens, which, remarkably enough, were priced exactly the same at the supermarket as the conventional ones—and when Brian got to the checkout with them, actually rang up for less than the price marked, making them even cheaper. (Is it possible that organic farming is actually turning out to be more cost-effective for some products than the "traditional" methods that came into fashion in the last century?)

But the real pièce de résistance of tonight's frugal menu will be my after-dinner activity: planning my vegetable garden for next year. After all, you can't get more local than your own back yard, and now is the time to choose my crops and get my seed order in if I want to be able to start my seedlings in February. I know I'll definitely want some sugar snap peas, lots of tomatoes, and two—but no more than two—zucchini plants, but beyond that I'm uncertain. I'd love to grow some winter squash, but all my previous attempts to plant it in the actual garden (as opposed to letting it run wild in the side yard next to the compost bin) have been abysmal failures. I've had good luck with arugula, mixed results with lettuce, and no success at all with spinach; my green beans produced only a small crop, even when I managed to keep the groundhog from getting at them; and my cucumbers did great the first year and were anemic the next. So I'm at a bit of a loss. Maybe I need to try new varieties...or maybe I should consider other crops I haven't grown before. Any suggestions?

Eco Thanksgiving vs. frugal Thanksgiving

The latest batch of supermarket fliers to arrive at my door included one from A&P that prominently advertised frozen whole turkey at an amazing 49 cents a pound. I remember my dad describing 59 cents a pound as a good price for turkey when I was a kid, back in the 80s, so 49 cents a pound today seemed like a truly incredible deal, and it got me thinking: with all the talk about how much food prices have risen lately, just how cheaply is it possible to put together a Thanksgiving dinner if you buy everything on sale? Three years ago, in a post on the Dollar Stretcher forums, I calculated the cost of my family's traditional Thanksgiving meal—turkey, stuffing, gravy made from the drippings, potatoes, veggies, cranberry sauce, and apple and pumpkin pies, for about 10 people—at about $34. Would it still be possible to get the meal for that price?

After examining all the store fliers, I concluded that the deal I'd spotted at the A&P was the best available price for turkey. ShopRite store was offering a free turkey, but you had to spend $300 at the store in a single month to get it, while the A&P deal had no strings attached (except that you could only buy one bird at this price). Using the estimate of 1.5 pounds per person (before cooking), I concluded that a 15-pound bird would be enough to feed 10 people. Thus, at this price, the turkey would cost only $7.35, and that would include the cost of gravy made from the drippings.

However, Shop Rite appeared to have the best deals on all the other components of the meal. I figured that with a little planning, it should be possible to hit both stores—if not in one trip, then at some point during the week—so as to combine the cheap turkey with these other deals:

• Stove Top stuffing is 99 cents for a 6-ounce package. This is possibly not as cheap, and certainly not as tasty or healthful, as homemade stuffing—but it makes the math a lot easier if I just assume that the stuffing will come from a box. Two boxes, which should feed 10 people, will cost $1.98.
• Cranberry sauce, on the other hand, appears actually to be cheaper if you buy it in a can. Store-brand cranberry sauce costs only 77 cents a can, or $1.54 for two cans, while whole cranberries cost $1.99 a bag, not even counting the cost of the sugar.
• You can get either sweet potatoes or white potatoes for $2.50 for 5 pounds (which would work out to 8 ounces of potato per person). Ironically, this makes the potatoes marginally more expensive per pound than the turkey.
• For veggies, you can get fresh broccoli crowns at 99 cents a pound. Figure on 2 pounds for 10 people, making $1.98.
• Lastly, we have the pies. I tried to calculate the cost of making the pies from scratch, as we always do, but I couldn't find sale prices in the flier for some of the ingredients, such as canned pumpkin. (Perhaps the pumpkin shortage has driven up the price to a level the stores don't care to advertise.) So I took a shortcut here and just used the price for Mrs. Smith's Pies: $2.24 each. One each of apple and pumpkin would come to $4.48, quite possibly less than it would cost to make them from scratch.

So, the total cost of the meal—not counting extras, such as drinks and ice cream or whipped cream for the pies—comes to $19.83. This is pretty impressive, especially considering the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) today estimated the cost of Thanksgiving dinner for 10 at $49.20—nearly 2.5 times as much.

However, there's one snag. The ultra-cheap Thanksgiving meal I've described here is one that I wouldn't actually eat, because I only eat meats that are humanely farmed. I also prefer to buy organic produce when possible (though I don't do so exclusively), and I have a preference for homemade dishes (stuffing, cranberries, pies) that don't contain a bunch of unpronounceable chemicals. So this raised a new question: what's the lowest amount it's possible to spend for a virtuous, organic, free-range Thanksgiving meal that even hard-core liberals like Lou and Peter Berryman's Uncle Dave wouldn't turn up their noses at?

This question is, of course, trickier to answer than the first one. My grocery store fliers didn't include organic versions of most items, so I had to do a little research. I found that prices on humanely farmed turkeys, at least in our area, vary considerably. A 15-pound turkey from Griggstown Quail Farm costs a jaw-dropping $149.85 ($7.99 per pound plus a flat $30 per bird), yet Stolzfus' Poultry at the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers' Market offers "fresh-killed farm-raised turkeys" for only $2.69 a pound, or $40.35 for a 15-pound turkey. Although this is less than a third as much as the Griggstown Farm turkey, it's still more than 5 times as much as the cheap one from the A&P. So for an organic and humane Thanksgiving dinner, it looks like the bird alone will cost more than twice as much as the entire meal for the ultra-frugal Thanksgiving.

Fortunately, the markup for the other ingredients isn't as high. I checked prices for these at our local Stop&Shop, Trader Joe's, and at the Whole Earth Center in Princeton. Here's what I found:

• Organic sweet potatoes are $3.69 for 3 pounds at Trader Joe's. We'll say we can make do with one bag, since there will be stuffing as well.
• For veggies, we can get organic frozen peas for $1.99 a pound at Trader Joe's. Assume we'll need two pounds to feed everyone, so that's another $3.98.
• My dad makes a stuffing based around brown rice. A two-pound bag of organic brown rice is $2.99 at Stop&Shop, and we'll probably use about half of it, for $1.50. I'm going to cheat and not do the calculations to figure out the exact prices of the other ingredients (apples, onions, celery, chestnuts, and mushrooms); I'll just guess that it's another $2 or so.
• I didn't find organic cranberries anywhere, so I had to go with the price for canned organic cranberry sauce at the Whole Earth Center: $2.79 a can. That comes to $5.58 for two cans.
• Although I did find canned organic pumpkin at Whole Earth, I couldn't find organic versions of the other ingredients (specifically, evaporated milk). So I decided to change the menu to include two apple pies. Organic Granny Smith apples at Trader Joe's are $2.49 for 2 pounds; for two pies, we'll probably need two bags for $4.98.
• We also need flour, sugar, and butter for the pies. Organic white flour is $1.50 a pound at Stop&Shop, and organic sugar is $1.65 a pound. I'm guessing we need a pound of each. Organic butter (for the pie crust) is $4.79 at the Stop&Shop; we'll use probably half a pound in the two pies, for $2.40.

That brings the total for all the other ingredients to $27.28, and the grand total for the meal to $67.63. This is more than 3 times as costly as our rock-bottom budget Thanksgiving meal, but interestingly, it's not even 50 percent more expensive than the AFBF's estimate. So while frugal folks who are used to buying everything on sale may experience major sticker shock when they try to go free-range and organic, those who normally pay full price may be pleasantly surprised to find that an organic version of the same meal needn't be that much more expensive.

The other takeaway from this exercise, I think, is that the organic markup is much higher for meat than for most other products. With our eco-Thanksgiving meal, the turkey accounts for nearly three-fifths of the total cost; for the budget Thanksgiving meal, it's less than two-fifths. In fact, a vegetarian version of the organic meal—all the "trimmings" without the turkey—would cost barely more than the ultra-cheap meal complete with the bird. Of course, Thanksgiving comes but once a year, and maybe for this one occasion it's worth paying extra to have the traditional meal in all its glory. But certainly on a day-to-day basis, eating vegetarian is the most obvious way to go organic without taking a big hit to the wallet.

What a crock!

I thought of something else that should go on the list of Stuff Ecofrugal People Like: slow cookers. We used ours a few nights back to prepare a mushroom-barley soup that we've made many times before, a delicious and hearty soup with only one real drawback: it takes about an hour and a half to cook. As a result, it's always been a weekends-only recipe. But last Friday we decided to just throw all the ingredients in the Crock-Pot and see how it came out, and behold, it was good. Brian actually thought the long slow cooking made it better, because the flavors had more time to blend.

Okay, that's all very nice, but what's so ecofrugal about it? Simple: by making it easier for us to cook at home on nights when we're busy, our slow cooker helps us avoid falling prey to the temptation of restaurant meals or convenience foods. And that's only one way that a slow cooker can contribute to the ecofrugal lifestyle. It can also:

• make it easier to use dry beans instead of the pricier, more packaging-intensive canned beans. The biggest barrier to cooking with dry beans is the prep time involved: they have to be soaked overnight, then drained, rinsed and cooked for at least two hours before you can use them in your recipe. A slow cooker doesn't eliminate the need for advance preparation, but it does eliminate most of the active work involved. You can just throw the beans in the crock the night before, cover them with water, drain and add fresh water in the morning, and set the pot on low. By the time you get home in the evening, the beans will be ready to use in whatever you're cooking. And if you cook up extra beans, which takes no extra work, you can freeze the rest and have beans in your freezer, ready to use (after just a few minutes in the microwave) on those occasions when you can't soak and cook them ahead of time.
• help you make your own veggie stock. This is a trick we learned from The Clueless Vegetarian (my favorite vegetarian cookbook and one I highly recommend for newcomers to vegetarian cooking). Basically, you keep a bag in your freezer in which you store all the vegetable scraps that you would normally discard: potato and carrot peelings, cut-off ends of onions, the innards of green peppers, mushroom stems (very flavorful), celery leaves, etc. When the bag gets full, you just dump it all into a pot of boiling water and cook it down. Normally, this would keep you tied to the house for two hours while the pot boils away on the stove, but with a slow cooker, you can just throw the veggies and water in first thing in the morning, set it on low, and strain it in the evening. (Or, if you prefer, you can throw everything in before bedtime, let it cook overnight, and strain it in the morning.) This is an ecofrugal three-fer: you get something for free that you'd ordinarily have to pay for, you avoid the packaging waste involved with canned stock, and you get additional use out of scraps that would normally be discarded. And the boiled-down mush that's left after you've strained off the stock can still go into the compost bin—you've just given it a head start on decomposition.
• make a small amount of meat go farther. We're not exclusively vegetarians, but we eat only meats that are humanely farmed, and those tend to be expensive. Roasting a whole chicken would run into money, but a single package of chicken legs makes several meals when cooked up with chick peas, onions, almonds and cinnamon in a Moroccan chicken stew. (Note: no tomatoes. Most recipes seem to call for tomatoes, but mine doesn't, and I like it without.) Stretching the meat out with other ingredients makes the meal much cheaper, and (since meat is more resource-intensive than veggies) greener as well. And, another bonus for meat-eaters: slow cooking is an ideal way to tenderize tougher, and thus cheaper, cuts of meat.

And those are just the ways I've tried personally. I've heard of other, less conventional uses as well, like setting up a batch of steel-cut oats overnight so you can have a hot breakfast in the morning. Cold cereal is one of the priciest items in our grocery cart, so eating oatmeal more often would certainly be a money-saver—and because it's less processed, it's greener too, not to mention chock-full of healthful whole grains. And the slow cooker could replace other convenience-type foods, too, like dessert. I've even heard of people baking cakes in it, though I've never quite understood how that works. Clearly, this ecofrugal tool has benefits far beyond my current knowledge—a rich field for further exploration.