As I observed last week, I've been trying over the past couple of months to make my diet lighter on the earth. After reading a study back in October arguing that eating less meat and dairy was the single best way to shrink your total ecological footprint, I've eliminated milk from my everyday eating, and I'm now working on finding alternatives to cheese. And Brian has started habitually making more of our everyday meals vegan when he can, using substitutes like flaxseeds and water in place of eggs.
So you might think that, while I'm at it, I should also be making a point of eating more organic food, right?
Well—maybe not.
My doubts about organic food began last summer. That's when I listened to an episode of "Science Versus," a podcast that explores the science behind controversial issues of the day, called "Science Versus Organic Food." At the outset, chipper host Wendy Zukerman announced that she would be addressing three specific questions about organic food: does it taste better, is it better for you, and is it better for the planet?
I figured I wouldn't learn much of anything new from this podcast, since I was already pretty confident that the answers were no, mostly no, and yes. I listened impatiently through the first half of the podcast, as Zukerman revealed that people can't tell organic tomatoes from conventional ones in blind taste tests, that there's no evidence organic food contains more nutrients, and that there's no difference in cancer rates between people who eat organic food regularly and those who don't (although there is evidence that the workers who pick the conventionally grown food suffer higher rates of cancer). All this was old news to me, and also, I felt, beside the point. I was waiting to hear the evidence explaining why organic food was better for the environment—lower water use, lower carbon emissions, less damage to wildlife, etc., etc.
At first, it looked like the second half of the podcast was going to confirm these views, as Zukerman cited a study showing that organic farms have better soil health than their conventional counterparts. But then things took a turn for the worse as she started exploring the question of pollution. She pointed to studies showing that one of the main types of pollution associated with farming, nitrogen runoff from the soil, was actually worse on organic farms, which rely on slow-release organic fertilizers like manure rather than chemical fertilizers that can be carefully timed and measured to release nitrogen just when it's needed. And then she followed this up with the real kicker: since organic farms have lower overall yields than conventional ones, making more of our food supply organic will divert more land from other uses, while also producing still more of this harmful runoff. (She did concede that if the shift toward organic were accompanied by a shift toward vegetarianism, we could feed the world organically without using more land. But just buying organic won't necessarily help make that happen.)
Hearing this threw me for a bit of a loop, but I quickly rallied. After all, there was no reason to take this one half-hour podcast, which necessarily can't cover any topic in all that much detail, as the final word on the subject. I knew it had left out one of the main reasons I'd always had for choosing organic over conventional food, a lower carbon footprint. And while it had discussed pollution from nitrogen runoff, it hadn't mentioned the environmental impacts of all those nasty pesticides and herbicides used on conventional farms. Clearly it was worth taking little time to look into these issues on my own before just deciding to drop organic food altogether.
So I did a little Googling, making sure to focus on the most reliable sources I could find. But to my shock and dismay, these sources generally seemed to come down on Zukerman's side of the argument. For instance, a highly detailed analysis of organic versus conventional farming in Environmental Research Letters concluded that "per unit of food, organic systems require more land, cause more
eutrophication, use less energy, but emit similar greenhouse gas
emissions (GHGs) as conventional systems." Even the environmental site Treehugger was forced to admit the validity of this study, though the author argues that "surely there are other reasons why Earth-friendly food production is a good idea" aside from carbon footprint.
That might be true, if organic farms really were more "Earth-friendly" in other ways. But the studies I found just don't seem to back up that conclusion. A piece from the Genetic Literacy Project noted that the rules for organic labeling often prevent organic farmers from following the most sustainable practices—for instance, blocking them from "using state-of-the-art soil building practices" and forcing them to rely on "older, ‘natural’ less targeted chemical pesticides" that can cause more collateral damage to beneficial insects. And an article in the Guardian pointed out that "for every acre increase in certified organic farmland there was an
increase in greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production in the
United States." (The author argued that organic farms could have a lower carbon footprint than conventional ones, but the current standards give them no real incentive to do so.)
So what does this all mean? If I really want my diet to be as low-impact as possible, does it make sense to drop organic foods from my shopping list entirely?
Well, again—maybe not.
You see, as I've explained before, I don't always buy organic. I insist on it for only a few products—the ones that are most damaging to the environment when grown conventionally, including coffee, sugar, and bananas. The studies that conclude conventional farming is less damaging than organic farming are looking at agriculture as a whole, not at these specific crops. So until I see evidence to the contrary, it seems reasonable to continue to assume organic versions of these are less harmful, and shop accordingly.
As for the rest of the food I buy, I go by cost. I will buy the organic version of a product if its price is no more than 50 percent higher than the conventional versions. (I used to allow a markup of 60 percent, based on a study I'd seen that said this was the average price premium for organic foods. Hence, I concluded that if the markup was under 60 percent, it was a good deal. However, in 2015, Consumer Reports looked at over 100 foods and found that the organic ones, on average, cost only 47 percent more than their conventional equivalents. So I switched my "Rule of 1.6" down to a "Rule of 1.5," which also has the advantage of making the math easier.)
Now here's the thing—the biggest problem with organic food, and the biggest reason its carbon footprint can be higher than conventional foods, is that it requires more land to grow the same amount of food. This is also why the price difference for some organic foods, like grass-fed beef, is often so ridiculously high. But as Consumer Reports found, there are other organic foods for which the price difference is much lower, or even nonexistent. And it stands to reason that these cheaper organics must also be cheaper to grow—which means they probably also use less land. And if that's true, then the cheaper an organic product is compared to the conventional version, the more eco-friendly it's likely to be.
I admit I can't really prove this theory, since most studies comparing the environmental impact of organic versus conventional foods don't break it down by specific crops. However, I found one piece at the Genetic Literacy Project that shows the "yield gaps" between organic and conventional versions of specific crops, and there seems to be some correlation between those figures and the price differences between the corresponding foods shown in this Business Insider article. For instance, tomatoes, which have a yield gap of 61 percent, have a price gap of 50 percent; avocados, with a yield gap of only 12 percent, have a price gap of about 12 percent as well; almonds have a yield gap of 43 percent, and almond butter has a price gap of 35 percent. It's not perfect, but there's at least a hint of a pattern there.
So all in all, it looks like what I always thought was the organic dilemma—that doing the right thing for the earth was more costly—is exactly backward. Instead, if you let price be your guide about when to buy organic, you'll end up making the right choices for both the planet and your wallet. In other words, buying organic, which I thought of as one of the few exceptions to the rule that ecology and economy go together, actually turns out to be a perfect example of it.
Showing posts with label organic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organic. Show all posts
Sunday, January 13, 2019
Monday, September 4, 2017
A look at Brandless shopping
A week or so ago, I came across an interesting article in Advertising Age about how Millennials shop. Apparently, they're far less brand-loyal than previous generations. They care about the quality of the product, certainly, but not about the name on the label; they'll happily switch from one brand to another to get better quality, or the same quality at a better price.
The article went on to cite Brandless, a new online store that started up just last July, as a retailer that targets this new shopping trend. The goal of the site is to sell high-quality products at low prices by eliminating what the owners call "BrandTax": the advertising costs that get wrapped into the price of most national brands. The owners estimate that BrandTax jacks up the price of the average product by 40 percent, and for beauty products, it can be over 350 percent. So the site is approaching retail from the opposite direction: focusing strictly on the quality of the product, not the brand name. And to emphasize just how much this helps them keep costs down, they've priced every single item on the site at a flat $3. This simplifies shopping on the site and encourages people to try new products, since even if you don't like it, you're only out three bucks.
Since I'm a Gen X-er who shops like a Millennial, this site naturally intrigued me. I always look for the best prices on worthy products—nontoxic, organic, Fair Trade, and so on—and one of the best ways I know to find them is by embracing high-quality store brands at Trader Joe's, Aldi, and now Costco. Would Brandless, I wondered, be a worthwhile addition to my list of places to shop cheap but good?
So I browsed the entire selection of products at Brandless, looking for ones that (1) I would actually use and (2) I couldn't get cheaper somewhere else. Unfortunately, after running through every single product on the site, I came to the conclusion that there weren't any that met these two simple criteria. It wasn't that the Brandless products weren't good; it was just that, on the whole, they weren't any better or cheaper than the ones I'm buying now.
Here are a few examples:
So is there anyone out there who would benefit from shopping at Brandless? Yes, possibly. One thing Brandless carries is a selection of gluten-free products, such as macaroni and cheese ($1.50 per box), baking mixes, corn-based and quinoa-based snacks, and things you wouldn't normally suspect of containing gluten, like pasta sauce and mayonnaise. So if you're a gluten-intolerant person with a need for this kind of product, Brandless could be a good place to get it—although if you live near an Aldi, I'd recommend checking out their extensive LiveGFree line first. Brandless could also be a good place for people who live in an area without any Aldi or Trader Joe's stores to find organic and natural products at a reasonable price—though it's important to factor in the shipping cost and make sure they're really a better deal than your local store.
For most ecofrugal folks, though, I'd say the most useful thing Brandless can provide is ideas. The site offers a variety of "bundles" that look like they might make useful gifts for the person who's hard to buy for, such as the $24 "beauty basics" bundle for eco-conscious fashionistas (cruelty-free and natural versions of eight products, including hand cream, lip balm, toothpaste, and cotton balls), the $30 "dorm essentials" bundle for college students (various dorm-friendly snacks, herbal tea, a mug, lip balm, mouthwash, and all-purpose cleaner), and the $114 "new home starter kit" for a wedding or housewarming gift (a little of everything, including foodstuffs, cleaning supplies, kitchen tools, and tableware). The thing about these bundles is, you could probably put together your own version more cheaply at a local store, such as TJ's, Aldi, or one of the new Lidl stores that have opened this year from Virginia to South Carolina. So you can check out Brandless for an example of what to put in a gift basket, then assemble it on your own and avoid the shipping fees. Brandless products can also provide ideas for inexpensive stocking stuffers, such as fancy lotion, lip balm, and snacks.
Of course, Brandless is just getting started. If the site is a success, it will no doubt expand its product offerings, and eventually it may even have some bargains to rival those at Aldi and Costco (and IKEA, for home products). So it's worth keeping an eye on the site in the future. But for the present, I think it's more interesting as a concept than as a useful shopping destination.
The article went on to cite Brandless, a new online store that started up just last July, as a retailer that targets this new shopping trend. The goal of the site is to sell high-quality products at low prices by eliminating what the owners call "BrandTax": the advertising costs that get wrapped into the price of most national brands. The owners estimate that BrandTax jacks up the price of the average product by 40 percent, and for beauty products, it can be over 350 percent. So the site is approaching retail from the opposite direction: focusing strictly on the quality of the product, not the brand name. And to emphasize just how much this helps them keep costs down, they've priced every single item on the site at a flat $3. This simplifies shopping on the site and encourages people to try new products, since even if you don't like it, you're only out three bucks.
Since I'm a Gen X-er who shops like a Millennial, this site naturally intrigued me. I always look for the best prices on worthy products—nontoxic, organic, Fair Trade, and so on—and one of the best ways I know to find them is by embracing high-quality store brands at Trader Joe's, Aldi, and now Costco. Would Brandless, I wondered, be a worthwhile addition to my list of places to shop cheap but good?
So I browsed the entire selection of products at Brandless, looking for ones that (1) I would actually use and (2) I couldn't get cheaper somewhere else. Unfortunately, after running through every single product on the site, I came to the conclusion that there weren't any that met these two simple criteria. It wasn't that the Brandless products weren't good; it was just that, on the whole, they weren't any better or cheaper than the ones I'm buying now.
Here are a few examples:
- Organic Peanut Butter. Both creamy and crunchy varieties are available at $3 for 12 ounces, or $4 a pound. However, a one-pound jar at Aldi is only $3.39.
- Coffee. The organic, Fair Trade medium roast is $3 for 6 ounces, or $8 a pound. Unfortunately, like the new PATAR line at IKEA—which has supplanted my beloved MELLANROST—it doesn't come in a decaffeinated variety, so it's not much use to me. (Millennials, I guess, don't drink decaf.) But even if you want the hard stuff, PATAR is a much better value if you can get it, at under $5.50 a pound.
- Organic Raisins. They're $3 for 10 ounces, or $4.80 a pound—much more than the $3 a pound we used to pay at Trader Joe's, and more than twice the $2.37 a pound we're now paying at Costco.
- Organic Sugar. A 24-ounce bag is $3, which is $2.00 a pound. That's not as good as the $1.45 a pound Aldi charges for a 2-pound bag, and nowhere near as good as the 80 cents a pound we just paid for a 10-pound bag at Costco.
- Toilet Paper. The "tree free" TP at Brandless is made from bamboo and sugarcane bagasse, and costs $3 for 6 rolls, or 50 cents a roll. The 100% recycled TP we buy at Trader Joe's costs $5 per dozen, or 41.7 cents a roll.
- Toothpaste. The toothpaste Brandless sells proudly touts itself as "fluoride free," which is baffling to me, given that fluoride is the one ingredient that actually keeps your teeth healthier. (Even all-natural health guru Andrew Weil says you're definitely better off with a fluoride toothpaste.) So I certainly see no reason to pay 75 cents per ounce for this, instead of 33 cents per ounce for SLS-free, cruelty-free toothpaste from Trader Joe's.
So is there anyone out there who would benefit from shopping at Brandless? Yes, possibly. One thing Brandless carries is a selection of gluten-free products, such as macaroni and cheese ($1.50 per box), baking mixes, corn-based and quinoa-based snacks, and things you wouldn't normally suspect of containing gluten, like pasta sauce and mayonnaise. So if you're a gluten-intolerant person with a need for this kind of product, Brandless could be a good place to get it—although if you live near an Aldi, I'd recommend checking out their extensive LiveGFree line first. Brandless could also be a good place for people who live in an area without any Aldi or Trader Joe's stores to find organic and natural products at a reasonable price—though it's important to factor in the shipping cost and make sure they're really a better deal than your local store.
For most ecofrugal folks, though, I'd say the most useful thing Brandless can provide is ideas. The site offers a variety of "bundles" that look like they might make useful gifts for the person who's hard to buy for, such as the $24 "beauty basics" bundle for eco-conscious fashionistas (cruelty-free and natural versions of eight products, including hand cream, lip balm, toothpaste, and cotton balls), the $30 "dorm essentials" bundle for college students (various dorm-friendly snacks, herbal tea, a mug, lip balm, mouthwash, and all-purpose cleaner), and the $114 "new home starter kit" for a wedding or housewarming gift (a little of everything, including foodstuffs, cleaning supplies, kitchen tools, and tableware). The thing about these bundles is, you could probably put together your own version more cheaply at a local store, such as TJ's, Aldi, or one of the new Lidl stores that have opened this year from Virginia to South Carolina. So you can check out Brandless for an example of what to put in a gift basket, then assemble it on your own and avoid the shipping fees. Brandless products can also provide ideas for inexpensive stocking stuffers, such as fancy lotion, lip balm, and snacks.
Of course, Brandless is just getting started. If the site is a success, it will no doubt expand its product offerings, and eventually it may even have some bargains to rival those at Aldi and Costco (and IKEA, for home products). So it's worth keeping an eye on the site in the future. But for the present, I think it's more interesting as a concept than as a useful shopping destination.
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Savings Challenge, Weeks 11-16
Since I started working for Money Crashers, I haven't had much time during the week to update this blog, and as a result, I've fallen seriously behind with the Bankrate Savings Challenges. The last one I posted was over a month ago, and since then, six new weekly challenges have popped up on the challenge's main page. I don't really have time to post six separate entries to get caught up, and anyway, I doubt I could get a full blog post out of each challenge, since most of them (as usual) aren't really relevant for us. So instead, here's a catchup post, in which I'll run through the six new challenges and what I have to say about them—whether that's taking the challenge in full or just explaining why it doesn't work for us.
Week 11: Bid on hotel rooms to save big
This challenge is all about using Priceline, along with a few other travel sites, to name your own price for a hotel room. Doug Whiteman, the reporter covering this challenge, leads off with the remark, "The idea that some people would spend hundreds of dollars per night on a hotel room has always seemed crazy to me." I'm certainly in agreement with him there, but I'd take it even further: for me, in most cases, it's crazy to stay in hotels at all.
That's because Brian and I don't really like to travel for its own sake. As a rule, we travel for only two reasons: to visit family and friends (in which case we stay with them), or for the occasional work-related trip (in which case it goes on the expense account). The last time we stayed in a hotel, as far as I can recall, was when we went with my parents to visit my sister for Hanukkah in 2012—and on that occasion, they picked up the tab in exchange for having us do the driving. The last time we actually paid to stay at a hotel, as far as I can recall, was on our honeymoon nearly eleven years ago.
Obviously, if you're a person who does like to travel, this strategy won't work for you, and you're better off with Mr. Whiteman's. (My favorite financial writer, Andrew Tobias, also loves it, saying "Many is the time I've stayed in a $300 hotel room for $89.") But skipping hotels completely works fine for us.
Week 12: Conserve gas by carpooling to work
This tip is obviously useless for me, since I work entirely from home (you know, cranking out those articles for Money Crashers) and I don't use a drop of gas walking from my bedroom to the office. Brian doesn't really do it either, because his workplace is only four miles away, and most of his coworkers live farther away than that. Instead, he saves gas in the warmer months (and very occasionally in the wintertime) by riding his bike to work. He finds this method of commuting much more enjoyable than driving, and it helps him maintain his boyish figure (or rather, acquire one, since he's in much better shape now than he was as a boy).
Occasionally, Brian will get a ride home with a coworker (for instance, if he rode his bike to work and then it started raining), or give a ride to one whose car has broken down. But since he doesn't regularly drive to work, forming a regular carpool isn't really an option.
Week 13: Find the best diaper deals
This obviously isn't a useful tip for a couple with no kids, in diapers or out of them. The only time I've bought diapers in the past couple of years was as a Hanukkah present for my sister, and those were not the disposable kind, but eco-friendly cloth diapers from Charlie Banana. These ain't cheap: a pack of 6 costs at least $114, which means enough diapers to get your kid through to potty training will run you upwards of $450. But that's still significantly less than the $1,912 that frugal-living blogger Squawkfox estimates you'd pay for disposable diapers over the same period. Even if you tack on another $375, as Squawkfox does, for the extra laundry costs, you still save more than a grand by using cloth. And that's just with the first kid; those cloth diapers won't wear out in 30 months, so you can go on to use them again with any future kids. And after that, you can sell the cloth diapers on eBay and recover about half of what you spent on them initially. So unless you can get the price of disposable diapers down to about 8 cents apiece, cloth is bound to be cheaper.
Week 14: Eat local, seasonal produce
Ah, now here at last is a challenge that's right up my alley. Indeed, my whole series of Gardeners' Holidays theme is basically a celebration of local, seasonal produce. However, one thing I learned recently makes me hesitate to take on this challenge: food that's locally grown—say, within a 100-mile radius of your home—doesn't always have the lowest carbon footprint. According to this article from the Worldwatch Institute, the transportation of food from farm to table accounts for only 4 percent of its total carbon emissions. So veggies grown in the fertile soil of California, where they need less fertilizer to flourish, may actually have a lower carbon footprint than veggies grown right here in New Jersey.
The article argues that "production practices"—that is, how food is grown—matters a whole lot more than where it's grown. Organic produce, for instance, has a lower carbon footprint because you can cut out all the emissions associated with producing, transporting, and applying chemicals to fields—and it has other environmental benefits too, like reducing water use and preserving biodiversity. But on the other hand, local produce also has some benefits that can't be measured in terms of carbon equivalents. Buying local makes it possible to know the farmers personally, so you actually know a lot more about how their food is produced than you do when you buy at the supermarket. However, this only works if you're actually shopping at the farmers' market and interacting with the growers directly; if you just pick the apples marked "Jersey Fresh" off the supermarket shelf, it doesn't tell you anything except where they come from.
So if I take on this challenge, I think I'll want to take it one step further. Instead of just choosing food that's local and seasonal, I'll want to make sure it's as sustainable as possible. That means all the food I buy during the weeklong challenge should be either
Week 15: Shop around for the best insurance rate
Here's another challenge that I've already done. I posted on the results of my insurance checkup two years ago, when I tried to find better rates on my auto and home insurance but ended up deciding it wasn't worth switching both policies to save $140 a year. This past February, however, I tried it again, and this time I found that we could save $227 a year by switching to a new auto insurer. The higher savings, and the fact that we'd only have to transfer one policy, sold Brian on the deal, and we made the switch—with a promise to our old insurer that we'd check back with them next year and see whether they could convince us to switch back. So it'll be at least another 6 months before I'm ready to check insurance rates again.
Week 16: Set up credit card alerts
This week's story really isn't a challenge at all. Instead, it's a little educational article about four ways to use credit card alerts to save money:
Week 11: Bid on hotel rooms to save big
This challenge is all about using Priceline, along with a few other travel sites, to name your own price for a hotel room. Doug Whiteman, the reporter covering this challenge, leads off with the remark, "The idea that some people would spend hundreds of dollars per night on a hotel room has always seemed crazy to me." I'm certainly in agreement with him there, but I'd take it even further: for me, in most cases, it's crazy to stay in hotels at all.
That's because Brian and I don't really like to travel for its own sake. As a rule, we travel for only two reasons: to visit family and friends (in which case we stay with them), or for the occasional work-related trip (in which case it goes on the expense account). The last time we stayed in a hotel, as far as I can recall, was when we went with my parents to visit my sister for Hanukkah in 2012—and on that occasion, they picked up the tab in exchange for having us do the driving. The last time we actually paid to stay at a hotel, as far as I can recall, was on our honeymoon nearly eleven years ago.
Obviously, if you're a person who does like to travel, this strategy won't work for you, and you're better off with Mr. Whiteman's. (My favorite financial writer, Andrew Tobias, also loves it, saying "Many is the time I've stayed in a $300 hotel room for $89.") But skipping hotels completely works fine for us.
Week 12: Conserve gas by carpooling to work
This tip is obviously useless for me, since I work entirely from home (you know, cranking out those articles for Money Crashers) and I don't use a drop of gas walking from my bedroom to the office. Brian doesn't really do it either, because his workplace is only four miles away, and most of his coworkers live farther away than that. Instead, he saves gas in the warmer months (and very occasionally in the wintertime) by riding his bike to work. He finds this method of commuting much more enjoyable than driving, and it helps him maintain his boyish figure (or rather, acquire one, since he's in much better shape now than he was as a boy).
Occasionally, Brian will get a ride home with a coworker (for instance, if he rode his bike to work and then it started raining), or give a ride to one whose car has broken down. But since he doesn't regularly drive to work, forming a regular carpool isn't really an option.
Week 13: Find the best diaper deals
This obviously isn't a useful tip for a couple with no kids, in diapers or out of them. The only time I've bought diapers in the past couple of years was as a Hanukkah present for my sister, and those were not the disposable kind, but eco-friendly cloth diapers from Charlie Banana. These ain't cheap: a pack of 6 costs at least $114, which means enough diapers to get your kid through to potty training will run you upwards of $450. But that's still significantly less than the $1,912 that frugal-living blogger Squawkfox estimates you'd pay for disposable diapers over the same period. Even if you tack on another $375, as Squawkfox does, for the extra laundry costs, you still save more than a grand by using cloth. And that's just with the first kid; those cloth diapers won't wear out in 30 months, so you can go on to use them again with any future kids. And after that, you can sell the cloth diapers on eBay and recover about half of what you spent on them initially. So unless you can get the price of disposable diapers down to about 8 cents apiece, cloth is bound to be cheaper.
Week 14: Eat local, seasonal produce
Ah, now here at last is a challenge that's right up my alley. Indeed, my whole series of Gardeners' Holidays theme is basically a celebration of local, seasonal produce. However, one thing I learned recently makes me hesitate to take on this challenge: food that's locally grown—say, within a 100-mile radius of your home—doesn't always have the lowest carbon footprint. According to this article from the Worldwatch Institute, the transportation of food from farm to table accounts for only 4 percent of its total carbon emissions. So veggies grown in the fertile soil of California, where they need less fertilizer to flourish, may actually have a lower carbon footprint than veggies grown right here in New Jersey.
The article argues that "production practices"—that is, how food is grown—matters a whole lot more than where it's grown. Organic produce, for instance, has a lower carbon footprint because you can cut out all the emissions associated with producing, transporting, and applying chemicals to fields—and it has other environmental benefits too, like reducing water use and preserving biodiversity. But on the other hand, local produce also has some benefits that can't be measured in terms of carbon equivalents. Buying local makes it possible to know the farmers personally, so you actually know a lot more about how their food is produced than you do when you buy at the supermarket. However, this only works if you're actually shopping at the farmers' market and interacting with the growers directly; if you just pick the apples marked "Jersey Fresh" off the supermarket shelf, it doesn't tell you anything except where they come from.
So if I take on this challenge, I think I'll want to take it one step further. Instead of just choosing food that's local and seasonal, I'll want to make sure it's as sustainable as possible. That means all the food I buy during the weeklong challenge should be either
- from our own garden,
- Certified Organic, and/or
- from a farm I know to be sustainable.
Week 15: Shop around for the best insurance rate
Here's another challenge that I've already done. I posted on the results of my insurance checkup two years ago, when I tried to find better rates on my auto and home insurance but ended up deciding it wasn't worth switching both policies to save $140 a year. This past February, however, I tried it again, and this time I found that we could save $227 a year by switching to a new auto insurer. The higher savings, and the fact that we'd only have to transfer one policy, sold Brian on the deal, and we made the switch—with a promise to our old insurer that we'd check back with them next year and see whether they could convince us to switch back. So it'll be at least another 6 months before I'm ready to check insurance rates again.
Week 16: Set up credit card alerts
This week's story really isn't a challenge at all. Instead, it's a little educational article about four ways to use credit card alerts to save money:
- Set up payment alerts to let you know when a payment is due, so you never miss a payment and end up owing a late fee. I already receive my bill electronically, so I don't need any additional alerts to remind me to pay it.
- Use balance alerts and spending alerts to keep track of how much you're charging, so you don't let your bill get out of hand. I keep track of my spending using a much simpler system: a pencil and a sheet of paper tacked to my bulletin board. So when my monthly credit card bill comes, I already know exactly what's going to be on it—and if there's any transaction I don't remember, I can always double-check it against the sheet.
- Use transaction alerts to warn you about any transaction that looks suspicious, so you'll know if someone else is using your card fraudulently. This, I admit, would be a lot more convenient than the system Citibank uses with one of my cards, which is to cut it off with no warning at all if it's used outside of our home territory—as they did once while we were visiting my in-laws in Indianapolis. Apparently the fact that we'd used that same card to buy gas several times on the way to Indianapolis didn't tip them off that we might actually be there. So after that, we had to call up the company and tell them whenever we were going to be traveling. (Now, we just use a different card.) But if had simply alerted us to the fact that someone was using our card in another state, that wouldn't have been so bad. (Unfortunately, I checked and this isn't actually an available alert with any card we use.)
- Use alerts to keep track of your rewards, so you know when to cash them in or when to sign up for a new set of spending categories. I already get the alerts to tell me about new spending categories, and I just check the rewards balance whenever I pay the bill, so I don't need to be alerted about it.
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Money Crashers: 8 Ways to Buy Natural Organic Food on a Budget
My second Money Crashers article has just gone live, and it's on a topic I've written about quite a lot here: organic food. Specifically, how to buy it without going broke. Regular readers will recognize some of the topics it covers, such as how to prioritize organic purchases and the great value offered by Aldi's organic brand.
Check out the article here:
8 Ways to Buy Natural Organic Food on a Budget
Check out the article here:
8 Ways to Buy Natural Organic Food on a Budget
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
My frugal Valentine
Valentine's Day is the most problematic of all holidays. If you're single, obviously, it feels like a slap in the face to be surrounded everywhere you go by red hearts and roses and teddy bears, a massive consumer binge in celebration of romantic love that you have no part in. But at least you know how to react to it. You can just grumble at how stupid it all is, and then do your best to dismiss it from your mind. That may mean going out and partying with your single friends, or staying in and vegging in front of the TV, but either way, you get to stay above the V-day fray.
Being part of a couple, however, doesn't necessarily mean that you hate all the rigamarole surrounding Valentine's Day any less. It just means that it's harder for you to ignore it. What do you do if you're happily partnered, but you consider red hearts and roses and teddy bears to be corny, trite, or just plain sickening? If you decide to skip the whole thing, your partner may feel ignored and hurt, but it's almost worse to give a mass-market present that you just grabbed off the shelf; unless your partner actually likes red hearts and roses and teddy bears, giving any of these things makes it seem like you were just trying to meet an obligation, rather than actually looking for a way to please your sweetheart. So, as this XKCD cartoon shows, you end up trying desperately to come up with something clever and original, in order to avoid being either "a consumer tool or an inconsiderate jerk."
This is the main reason that, in the 14 years we've been together—marriage, engagement, and long-distance courtship—Brian and I have never really come up with a satisfying way to celebrate Valentine's Day. Sure, we always go to the special Valentine's Day show at the Minstrel concert series, in which individual Folk Project members take turns doing songs or other pieces about love, but that's more a way of supporting the Folk Project than celebrating each other—and since it's always on a Friday night, it usually doesn't fall on Valentine's Day anyway. Over the years, I've offered Brian various little things for Valentine's Day, from poems to baked goods, but he's never seemed very enthusiastic about any of them, or had any ideas about how to reciprocate. So after yet another uneventful Valentine's Day last year, I finally got fed up and said that this year, I wanted to do something to celebrate.
Being an ecofrugal couple, however, we couldn't very well celebrate with any of the conventional gifts that the stores have been pushing since early January. Roses in February, in addition to being ludicrously expensive, are sure to have been either grown in an extravagantly heated greenhouse or shipped up from the southern hemisphere, either of which requires loads of carbon-emitting fossil fuel; according to Scientific American, the 100 million roses given for Valentine's Day each year in the United States are responsible for over 9,000 metric tons of CO2. The heart-shaped boxes of chocolates lining store shelves, though tasty, are mostly neither organic nor Fair Trade—and, as we learned recently, may well be contaminated with dangerous levels of cadmium or lead. And the priciest Valentine goodie of all, jewelry, comes with a host of environmental problems, from the catastrophic pollution caused by gold mining to the habitat destruction of gemstone mines.
Fortunately for me, I had a good idea for a gift fall more or less into my lap. Brian and I had just finished reading the paperback of Gunmetal Magic, an adventure in the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews, and it seemed to me that there must have been some piece of the storyline that we'd missed at some point. So I checked the website and found not one but two novellas in the series, both of them love stories, and both of them available as Kindle books for only three bucks. (Kindle books aren't included in my current boycott of Amazon.com, because they aren't shipped through Amazon's prison-camp warehouses—though if they don't clean up their act soon, I might decide to cut off this source of revenue to Amazon as well.) So I ordered one of them for him as a gift, which means that an e-mail gets sent to him with a claim code to download the book. Then, to make it more interesting, I set up a little treasure hunt to lead him to his gift. The first clue was waiting for him on the breakfast table in the morning:
That planted the idea of a book, which led him to our bookshelves. Fortunately, he didn't have to hunt through our whole collection to figure out which was was "the book of love," because my little Shakespeare doll was sitting between two bookends holding clue #2:
This clue directed him to the office, where he eventually figured out that the book he was looking for was his homemade book tablet case. Inside that, he found his third clue:
That told him to check his e-mail, where he found his Kindle book waiting for him with the message, "Come on baby, light my fire! Happy Valentine's Day!" (I think the main reason I went ahead and bought the book for Kindle rather than trying the Nook app was to have a chance to use that line.) Of course, the whole process of downloading the book turned out to be another puzzle in itself (they really could make it simpler), but we eventually got our book, and I read the whole thing to him over the course of that day. So that was our romantic Valentine's Day activity.
Brian, for his part, got me two small presents. The first was a photo he'd taken a few years back of our cat, who has been sick lately, so a picture of her in good health was a nice memento. He just printed it out on plain paper and put it in a little frame he had tucked away in a box, so the whole gift was repurposed and cost nothing except the ink.
Then, knowing that I wouldn't be interested in traditional, environmentally destructive jewelry, he instead picked up a whimsical little pair of earrings from our local Ten Thousand Villages store. Aren't they cute? The tag calls them "a whimsical tribute to eco-friendly transport around the world," made from recycled materials by artisans in Kenya. And even though they were paid a living wage for their work, the cost to us was still under $10 on account of the store's February jewelry sale. What could be more ecofrugal than that?
And finally, to top off our romantic day, he made me chocolate pudding (with organic cocoa and sugar, of course), and we ate it on the couch while watching Mythbusters. The perfect geek date.
So if I had to give a single tip for avoiding the Valentine dilemma, here's what I'd suggest: pay no attention to what the stores are selling. Instead, think about what your sweetie really enjoys, and choose a present that you know they'll appreciate. Because a $3 gift that really shows how well you know and care about each other is way, way more romantic than a $50 gift that you could have given to anyone. Better yet, make your gift an activity that you can do together, and show your love with quality time instead of cash.
And, for all you singles out there who still think the whole thing is annoying: there's no rule that says you can't treat yourself to something special on the 14th of February, or any other day that strikes your fancy.
Being part of a couple, however, doesn't necessarily mean that you hate all the rigamarole surrounding Valentine's Day any less. It just means that it's harder for you to ignore it. What do you do if you're happily partnered, but you consider red hearts and roses and teddy bears to be corny, trite, or just plain sickening? If you decide to skip the whole thing, your partner may feel ignored and hurt, but it's almost worse to give a mass-market present that you just grabbed off the shelf; unless your partner actually likes red hearts and roses and teddy bears, giving any of these things makes it seem like you were just trying to meet an obligation, rather than actually looking for a way to please your sweetheart. So, as this XKCD cartoon shows, you end up trying desperately to come up with something clever and original, in order to avoid being either "a consumer tool or an inconsiderate jerk."
This is the main reason that, in the 14 years we've been together—marriage, engagement, and long-distance courtship—Brian and I have never really come up with a satisfying way to celebrate Valentine's Day. Sure, we always go to the special Valentine's Day show at the Minstrel concert series, in which individual Folk Project members take turns doing songs or other pieces about love, but that's more a way of supporting the Folk Project than celebrating each other—and since it's always on a Friday night, it usually doesn't fall on Valentine's Day anyway. Over the years, I've offered Brian various little things for Valentine's Day, from poems to baked goods, but he's never seemed very enthusiastic about any of them, or had any ideas about how to reciprocate. So after yet another uneventful Valentine's Day last year, I finally got fed up and said that this year, I wanted to do something to celebrate.
Being an ecofrugal couple, however, we couldn't very well celebrate with any of the conventional gifts that the stores have been pushing since early January. Roses in February, in addition to being ludicrously expensive, are sure to have been either grown in an extravagantly heated greenhouse or shipped up from the southern hemisphere, either of which requires loads of carbon-emitting fossil fuel; according to Scientific American, the 100 million roses given for Valentine's Day each year in the United States are responsible for over 9,000 metric tons of CO2. The heart-shaped boxes of chocolates lining store shelves, though tasty, are mostly neither organic nor Fair Trade—and, as we learned recently, may well be contaminated with dangerous levels of cadmium or lead. And the priciest Valentine goodie of all, jewelry, comes with a host of environmental problems, from the catastrophic pollution caused by gold mining to the habitat destruction of gemstone mines.
Fortunately for me, I had a good idea for a gift fall more or less into my lap. Brian and I had just finished reading the paperback of Gunmetal Magic, an adventure in the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews, and it seemed to me that there must have been some piece of the storyline that we'd missed at some point. So I checked the website and found not one but two novellas in the series, both of them love stories, and both of them available as Kindle books for only three bucks. (Kindle books aren't included in my current boycott of Amazon.com, because they aren't shipped through Amazon's prison-camp warehouses—though if they don't clean up their act soon, I might decide to cut off this source of revenue to Amazon as well.) So I ordered one of them for him as a gift, which means that an e-mail gets sent to him with a claim code to download the book. Then, to make it more interesting, I set up a little treasure hunt to lead him to his gift. The first clue was waiting for him on the breakfast table in the morning:
 |
| Oh, I wonder, wonder who, who wrote the book of love? |
 |
| He's working late 'most every night, he doesn't phone, he doesn't write |
 |
| My baby, she wrote me a letter |
Brian, for his part, got me two small presents. The first was a photo he'd taken a few years back of our cat, who has been sick lately, so a picture of her in good health was a nice memento. He just printed it out on plain paper and put it in a little frame he had tucked away in a box, so the whole gift was repurposed and cost nothing except the ink.
Then, knowing that I wouldn't be interested in traditional, environmentally destructive jewelry, he instead picked up a whimsical little pair of earrings from our local Ten Thousand Villages store. Aren't they cute? The tag calls them "a whimsical tribute to eco-friendly transport around the world," made from recycled materials by artisans in Kenya. And even though they were paid a living wage for their work, the cost to us was still under $10 on account of the store's February jewelry sale. What could be more ecofrugal than that?
And finally, to top off our romantic day, he made me chocolate pudding (with organic cocoa and sugar, of course), and we ate it on the couch while watching Mythbusters. The perfect geek date.
So if I had to give a single tip for avoiding the Valentine dilemma, here's what I'd suggest: pay no attention to what the stores are selling. Instead, think about what your sweetie really enjoys, and choose a present that you know they'll appreciate. Because a $3 gift that really shows how well you know and care about each other is way, way more romantic than a $50 gift that you could have given to anyone. Better yet, make your gift an activity that you can do together, and show your love with quality time instead of cash.
And, for all you singles out there who still think the whole thing is annoying: there's no rule that says you can't treat yourself to something special on the 14th of February, or any other day that strikes your fancy.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Stuff Green People Like, Part 3
It's been several years now since I first posted on the topic of "stuff green people like" (my attempt at a more positive version of Christian Lander's popular site, and subsequent book, called Stuff White People Like). That original list had 7 items on it, and last year I wrote a second post expanding it to 14, based partly on comments I received from others and partly on new ideas I came up with later. Now, another year has passed, and I thought I might have enough new ideas for a third installment. So here are my next six suggestions for Stuff Ecofrugal People Like:
15. Young House Love (2007-2014). This DIY site was once the best of its kind. Hundreds, if not thousands, of fans like me dropped by regularly to see what new, clever ideas John and Sherry Petersik had come up with for updating their home in a creative and frugal way. We stayed with them through three houses, two kids, two book deals, a house show, and more than 50 makeovers of individual spaces. I named it as one of my seven favorite websites for the ecofrugal in my 2013 Thrift Week celebration. And then, in 2014, as the Petersiks were busily juggling a new house, new book, and new baby, they announced that they would be dialing back their blog entries from five per week to four (one of which was only a raffle to enter, with no actual house-related content). Then they followed that with the news that they would be taking a hiatus from blogging...and when they returned, it was only to say goodbye for good. The site remains live for now, preserved as a kind of time capsule, but the last new entry was four months ago. I still come back there once in a while and prowl around, kind of like visiting an old neighborhood, but the neighbors have all moved away. And so far, no other site I've found—about DIY or anything else—can come close to taking its place.
16. Rehab Addict. This show has replaced the late, lamented Wasted Spaces as my favorite DIY-themed TV show, and its host, Nicole Curtis, has joined Karl Champley in my pantheon of household gods. This five-foot powerhouse knocks out walls, refinishes bathtubs, replaces damaged panes in old leaded glass windows, scavenges Dumpsters for antiques, and keeps a huge pile of scrap wood in her garage—all in the name of keeping old houses true to their original style. Nikki is in the business of buying, restoring, and selling houses, but unlike most flippers, she doesn't just rip everything out and replace it with the newest and latest. She doesn't want to make an old house look new; she wants it to look like a beautifully maintained old house, so she takes an ecofrugal approach in her renovations, saving the original materials whenever possible and, failing that, bringing in vintage materials from elsewhere. (I'm totally envious of her access to Bauer Brothers Salvage in Minneapolis, a store where you can find everything from old windows to light fixtures in every style and period, at bargain-basement prices. The Habitat ReStore in Morris County used to be a bit like that, but on our last trip there we found the selection so disappointing that it no longer seems worth the two-hour round trip.) Sadly, this show isn't to be found on Hulu or anywhere online. There are 17 episodes available on the HGTV website, but they're a few years old and I've already watched them all. New episodes of this show appear regularly only on the DIY Network, which isn't part of our extremely basic cable package. We do get HGTV, but it usually shows Rehab Addict on Thursday nights, when we have dance practice. Occasionally, though, HGTV will run a whole bunch of episodes back-to-back during the day, and I'll make an exception to my usual no-TV-before-dinner rule and binge-watch for two or three hours.
17. Vegetarianism. From an ecofrugal standpoint, a meatless (or meat-light) diet has everything going for it. Eating organic is better for the environment, but it's also costly; a diet of ramen noodles at 25 cents a packet is cheap, but not very healthful. But a plant-based diet reduces your grocery bill and your carbon footprint at the same time—while also offering an assortment of health benefits and, for many people, a clearer conscience. And for those who are used to a more traditional, meat-heavy American diet and aren't sure whether they'd be comfortable giving it up, it's fairly easy to try out vegetarianism on a part-time basis before taking the plunge. Even cutting meat out of just one or two meals a week can make a pretty nice dent in your grocery bill. And adding a couple of meatless meals to your diet can be as simple as having Spaghetti Night on Wednesday and Stir-Fry Night on Friday. Or, if you're looking for a little more variety, just one basic vegetarian cookbook, such as The Clueless Vegetarian, is all you need to get started.
18. Rain barrels. Using a rain barrel has the same appeal as drying clothes on a clothesline: it feels like getting something for nothing. Sure, our municipal water is pretty cheap, but why use it at all when water falls from the sky for free? Admittedly, according to my calculations, using our new rain barrel only saved us around 15 bucks on our water bill last summer, but it also kept an extra 1,000 gallons of water in the municipal reservoir, making our town that much better equipped to withstand an unexpected drought. And in the event of a water main break, which is a much more common disaster in our area, our garden won't have to go thirsty.
19. Aldi. I've noted many times that this no-frills chain consistently has the best prices on foodstuffs in our area. Admittedly, its selection is a bit limited; for most foods, they only carry their house brand, and you shouldn't expect to find obscure or trendy ingredients like arborio rice or Sriracha there. But for the foods that they sell, Aldi's prices are the lowest anywhere. It's the only place we can find breakfast cereal at a reasonable price without stacking sales and coupons, and it's also our go-to store for staples like oats, cheese, chocolate chips, and peanuts. It used to be that Aldi represented the "frugal" half of the ecofrugal equation, while stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's (which I named as a Thing Ecofrugal People Like in my original list) focused on the "eco" part. But lately, Aldi has started muscling in on TJ's turf. In addition to carrying the basics, its shelves are now stocked with upscale goodies like balsamic vinegar, bottled lattes, and a line of cheap organic foods that can often beat the price of non-organic versions sold at other stores. So far, Aldi hasn't actually pulled any of our shopping dollars away from Trader Joe, because the items we usually buy at TJ's (organic chicken legs, organic raisins, recycled-fiber toilet paper, cruelty-free toothpaste and bar soap) are still a better deal there. But if the gentrification of Aldi's product line continues, who knows? Our nearest Aldi store is a lot closer than the nearest Trader Joe's, so shopping there is definitely more convenient; we'd be just as happy to go to Aldi regularly and make our visits to Trader Joe's a special once- or twice-a-year outing.
20. Shopping local. Actually, I think what ecofrugal people really love is the idea of shopping local. You don't have to drive around and burn fossil fuels, and you help keep your community strong by supporting its local businesses. It seems like such a complete win-win. But sadly, the reality isn't always as satisfying. Local businesses typically can't offer the same selection as the big chains, and because they can't achieve the same economies of scale, their prices are usually higher. So while local businesses cater to our eco sensibilities, they often go against our frugal instincts. But fortunately, there are exceptions—like my local mechanic, who not only does a better job with our car than the dealership and is much easier to get to, but also charges far more reasonable rates. So in cases like these, shopping local really is a win-win-win. If only our town had just a couple more thrift shops and a good used bookstore, I'd indulge a lot more often.
15. Young House Love (2007-2014). This DIY site was once the best of its kind. Hundreds, if not thousands, of fans like me dropped by regularly to see what new, clever ideas John and Sherry Petersik had come up with for updating their home in a creative and frugal way. We stayed with them through three houses, two kids, two book deals, a house show, and more than 50 makeovers of individual spaces. I named it as one of my seven favorite websites for the ecofrugal in my 2013 Thrift Week celebration. And then, in 2014, as the Petersiks were busily juggling a new house, new book, and new baby, they announced that they would be dialing back their blog entries from five per week to four (one of which was only a raffle to enter, with no actual house-related content). Then they followed that with the news that they would be taking a hiatus from blogging...and when they returned, it was only to say goodbye for good. The site remains live for now, preserved as a kind of time capsule, but the last new entry was four months ago. I still come back there once in a while and prowl around, kind of like visiting an old neighborhood, but the neighbors have all moved away. And so far, no other site I've found—about DIY or anything else—can come close to taking its place.
16. Rehab Addict. This show has replaced the late, lamented Wasted Spaces as my favorite DIY-themed TV show, and its host, Nicole Curtis, has joined Karl Champley in my pantheon of household gods. This five-foot powerhouse knocks out walls, refinishes bathtubs, replaces damaged panes in old leaded glass windows, scavenges Dumpsters for antiques, and keeps a huge pile of scrap wood in her garage—all in the name of keeping old houses true to their original style. Nikki is in the business of buying, restoring, and selling houses, but unlike most flippers, she doesn't just rip everything out and replace it with the newest and latest. She doesn't want to make an old house look new; she wants it to look like a beautifully maintained old house, so she takes an ecofrugal approach in her renovations, saving the original materials whenever possible and, failing that, bringing in vintage materials from elsewhere. (I'm totally envious of her access to Bauer Brothers Salvage in Minneapolis, a store where you can find everything from old windows to light fixtures in every style and period, at bargain-basement prices. The Habitat ReStore in Morris County used to be a bit like that, but on our last trip there we found the selection so disappointing that it no longer seems worth the two-hour round trip.) Sadly, this show isn't to be found on Hulu or anywhere online. There are 17 episodes available on the HGTV website, but they're a few years old and I've already watched them all. New episodes of this show appear regularly only on the DIY Network, which isn't part of our extremely basic cable package. We do get HGTV, but it usually shows Rehab Addict on Thursday nights, when we have dance practice. Occasionally, though, HGTV will run a whole bunch of episodes back-to-back during the day, and I'll make an exception to my usual no-TV-before-dinner rule and binge-watch for two or three hours.
17. Vegetarianism. From an ecofrugal standpoint, a meatless (or meat-light) diet has everything going for it. Eating organic is better for the environment, but it's also costly; a diet of ramen noodles at 25 cents a packet is cheap, but not very healthful. But a plant-based diet reduces your grocery bill and your carbon footprint at the same time—while also offering an assortment of health benefits and, for many people, a clearer conscience. And for those who are used to a more traditional, meat-heavy American diet and aren't sure whether they'd be comfortable giving it up, it's fairly easy to try out vegetarianism on a part-time basis before taking the plunge. Even cutting meat out of just one or two meals a week can make a pretty nice dent in your grocery bill. And adding a couple of meatless meals to your diet can be as simple as having Spaghetti Night on Wednesday and Stir-Fry Night on Friday. Or, if you're looking for a little more variety, just one basic vegetarian cookbook, such as The Clueless Vegetarian, is all you need to get started.
18. Rain barrels. Using a rain barrel has the same appeal as drying clothes on a clothesline: it feels like getting something for nothing. Sure, our municipal water is pretty cheap, but why use it at all when water falls from the sky for free? Admittedly, according to my calculations, using our new rain barrel only saved us around 15 bucks on our water bill last summer, but it also kept an extra 1,000 gallons of water in the municipal reservoir, making our town that much better equipped to withstand an unexpected drought. And in the event of a water main break, which is a much more common disaster in our area, our garden won't have to go thirsty.
19. Aldi. I've noted many times that this no-frills chain consistently has the best prices on foodstuffs in our area. Admittedly, its selection is a bit limited; for most foods, they only carry their house brand, and you shouldn't expect to find obscure or trendy ingredients like arborio rice or Sriracha there. But for the foods that they sell, Aldi's prices are the lowest anywhere. It's the only place we can find breakfast cereal at a reasonable price without stacking sales and coupons, and it's also our go-to store for staples like oats, cheese, chocolate chips, and peanuts. It used to be that Aldi represented the "frugal" half of the ecofrugal equation, while stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's (which I named as a Thing Ecofrugal People Like in my original list) focused on the "eco" part. But lately, Aldi has started muscling in on TJ's turf. In addition to carrying the basics, its shelves are now stocked with upscale goodies like balsamic vinegar, bottled lattes, and a line of cheap organic foods that can often beat the price of non-organic versions sold at other stores. So far, Aldi hasn't actually pulled any of our shopping dollars away from Trader Joe, because the items we usually buy at TJ's (organic chicken legs, organic raisins, recycled-fiber toilet paper, cruelty-free toothpaste and bar soap) are still a better deal there. But if the gentrification of Aldi's product line continues, who knows? Our nearest Aldi store is a lot closer than the nearest Trader Joe's, so shopping there is definitely more convenient; we'd be just as happy to go to Aldi regularly and make our visits to Trader Joe's a special once- or twice-a-year outing.
20. Shopping local. Actually, I think what ecofrugal people really love is the idea of shopping local. You don't have to drive around and burn fossil fuels, and you help keep your community strong by supporting its local businesses. It seems like such a complete win-win. But sadly, the reality isn't always as satisfying. Local businesses typically can't offer the same selection as the big chains, and because they can't achieve the same economies of scale, their prices are usually higher. So while local businesses cater to our eco sensibilities, they often go against our frugal instincts. But fortunately, there are exceptions—like my local mechanic, who not only does a better job with our car than the dealership and is much easier to get to, but also charges far more reasonable rates. So in cases like these, shopping local really is a win-win-win. If only our town had just a couple more thrift shops and a good used bookstore, I'd indulge a lot more often.
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Price Check: Organic savings? Not so much
Early this year, the Dollar Stretcher site ran a story called, "Using the Web to Reduce the Cost of Organics." Naturally, this headline grabbed my attention right away, because eating organic, using the Internet, and saving money are a few of my favorite things (cue The Sound of Music score). So I perused the article and then checked out the three sites it recommended for eating organic on a budget. Sadly, though, I didn't find any of them particularly helpful—and at least one looked actually counterproductive.
The first site was called Organic Deals. It's basically a coupon site like CouponMom.com or The Krazy Coupon Lady, but it specializes in coupons for major organic brands and retailers. The biggest problem with it is the same one I have with such sites in general: most of the available coupons are for highly processed and packaged foods, such as cereals, baking mixes, and frozen meals and sides. Unfortunately, these are exactly the types of organic food that, at least based on my observations, tend to cost a lot more than their conventional equivalents. A bag of Alexia sweet potato fries may cost only $3.24 with a coupon as opposed to $4.49 without it, but a pound of whole sweet potatoes for $1.16 is still a much better deal. Not to mention that it doesn't leave you with all that packaging waste to dispose of.
(Now, to be fair, Organic Deals also lists a few deals on whole, fresh produce, but these are mostly at a store called Sprouts Farmers' Market, which is based in Phoenix and doesn't extend into the Northeast or most of the Midwest. If you're lucky enough to have a Sprouts store in your area, it's probably worth checking out, as there seem to be some really nice deals there. But in most cases, they're just sale prices, so you don't need Organic Deals to help you find them.)
The second site, Abe's Market, is an online grocery store that deals in natural and organic products. According to the Dollar Stretcher article, the site has a loyalty program that lets you earn points for shopping and cash them in for savings on future purchases. However, when I checked the site, I could find no information about this program. The site did offer a "Best Price Pledge," promising to refund the difference if you could find the same price for less anywhere else—but unfortunately, the types of products sold here are bound to be expensive anywhere. Like the ones advertised on Organic Deals, they're mostly processed foods rather than whole foods: crackers, fruit leathers, baking mixes, chocolate. Also, they appear to be mostly obscure, high-end brands—so while Abe's may guarantee you that its price of $20 for three is the best you'll find for New Tree Pleasure Dark Chocolate Bars, that's still a lot more than the $2 a bar you'll pay for the Organic Truffle Bar at Trader Joe's.
The third site was the most dubious of the lot. Called Find A Spring, it helps you locate sources of fresh spring water in your area. The article said this was a great deal because "many of us pay for drinking water," which is true—but no one in this country actually needs to pay for drinking water. We can get perfectly drinkable water right out of the tap for free, or virtually free. Municipal drinking water, in fact, is subject to far more rigorous safety standards than bottled water. Moreover, blind taste tests of bottled water in New York City, Boston, and Cleveland show that to most people, it also tastes as good or better.
The Dollar Stretcher article claims that spring water is better than tap water because, first of all, it "contains many natural minerals that are mechanically or chemically removed by your city's municipal water supply," and second, it "has high levels of hydrogen, which is the main antioxidant in water." The first claim is clearly inaccurate: according to this page on water quality from Duke University, "few brands of bottled water offer a significant amount of minerals." The second one is trickier, partly because it's confusing. If the author is suggesting that spring water has "high levels of hydrogen" because it contains more than two hydrogen atoms per oxygen atom, that's ridiculous; if it did, it wouldn't be water. More likely, she's talking about hydrogen gas that's dissolved in water. I did a little searching and managed to locate one or two papers (here and here) that suggest hydrogen-infused water may indeed be linked to better health outcomes in mice and rats. It's a big jump from there, however, to saying that drinking it will reverse health problems in humans. Moreover, when I tried to find out whether spring water was a good source of dissolved hydrogen, the only info I could find was about sulfur springs, which contain hydrogen sulfide—which the Water Research Center describes as poisonous and foul-smelling. It's definitely not something you want to drink more of.
What scientists do agree on about water and health is that the most important thing is to drink enough of it. I'd say it stands to reason that you're likelier to do this when you can simply turn on the faucet to get some than when you have to haul it home in jugs from some remote area. Moreover, most of the sources listed on Find a Spring aren't really free; you have to pay for access to the land, in addition to hauling home the water yourself. This doesn't seem like a money-saving strategy to me.
So this article was pretty much 0 for 3 in terms of useful advice. Instead, I'll be sticking with my tried-and-tested strategies for saving money on organics:
The first site was called Organic Deals. It's basically a coupon site like CouponMom.com or The Krazy Coupon Lady, but it specializes in coupons for major organic brands and retailers. The biggest problem with it is the same one I have with such sites in general: most of the available coupons are for highly processed and packaged foods, such as cereals, baking mixes, and frozen meals and sides. Unfortunately, these are exactly the types of organic food that, at least based on my observations, tend to cost a lot more than their conventional equivalents. A bag of Alexia sweet potato fries may cost only $3.24 with a coupon as opposed to $4.49 without it, but a pound of whole sweet potatoes for $1.16 is still a much better deal. Not to mention that it doesn't leave you with all that packaging waste to dispose of.
(Now, to be fair, Organic Deals also lists a few deals on whole, fresh produce, but these are mostly at a store called Sprouts Farmers' Market, which is based in Phoenix and doesn't extend into the Northeast or most of the Midwest. If you're lucky enough to have a Sprouts store in your area, it's probably worth checking out, as there seem to be some really nice deals there. But in most cases, they're just sale prices, so you don't need Organic Deals to help you find them.)
The third site was the most dubious of the lot. Called Find A Spring, it helps you locate sources of fresh spring water in your area. The article said this was a great deal because "many of us pay for drinking water," which is true—but no one in this country actually needs to pay for drinking water. We can get perfectly drinkable water right out of the tap for free, or virtually free. Municipal drinking water, in fact, is subject to far more rigorous safety standards than bottled water. Moreover, blind taste tests of bottled water in New York City, Boston, and Cleveland show that to most people, it also tastes as good or better.
The Dollar Stretcher article claims that spring water is better than tap water because, first of all, it "contains many natural minerals that are mechanically or chemically removed by your city's municipal water supply," and second, it "has high levels of hydrogen, which is the main antioxidant in water." The first claim is clearly inaccurate: according to this page on water quality from Duke University, "few brands of bottled water offer a significant amount of minerals." The second one is trickier, partly because it's confusing. If the author is suggesting that spring water has "high levels of hydrogen" because it contains more than two hydrogen atoms per oxygen atom, that's ridiculous; if it did, it wouldn't be water. More likely, she's talking about hydrogen gas that's dissolved in water. I did a little searching and managed to locate one or two papers (here and here) that suggest hydrogen-infused water may indeed be linked to better health outcomes in mice and rats. It's a big jump from there, however, to saying that drinking it will reverse health problems in humans. Moreover, when I tried to find out whether spring water was a good source of dissolved hydrogen, the only info I could find was about sulfur springs, which contain hydrogen sulfide—which the Water Research Center describes as poisonous and foul-smelling. It's definitely not something you want to drink more of.
What scientists do agree on about water and health is that the most important thing is to drink enough of it. I'd say it stands to reason that you're likelier to do this when you can simply turn on the faucet to get some than when you have to haul it home in jugs from some remote area. Moreover, most of the sources listed on Find a Spring aren't really free; you have to pay for access to the land, in addition to hauling home the water yourself. This doesn't seem like a money-saving strategy to me.
So this article was pretty much 0 for 3 in terms of useful advice. Instead, I'll be sticking with my tried-and-tested strategies for saving money on organics:
- Prioritizing my organic purchases. My biggest concerns are animal welfare and the impact of factory farming on the environment, so I make a point of buying all my meats organic, as well as rainforest products like coffee and cocoa. Other products, like grains, I'm more willing to let slide if it'll save me a buck. If your reasons for eating organic have more to do with health than ethics, you might prefer to choose your organic purchases based on the Environmental Working Group's latest report on pesticide residues in produce.
- Cooking from scratch as much as possible. With a few exceptions, like breakfast cereal, Brian and I tend to eschew processed foods and buy mostly whole foods that we can turn into meals and snacks in our own kitchen. This saves us money on the foods we buy organic, and it also saves us money on the ones we don't—leaving us more leeway in the grocery budget to splurge on the organic foods we really care about.
- Comparison shopping. I keep a price book that shows what all the stores in our area charge for foods we buy regularly, from apples to yeast. I track the price for whichever version of the product we buy most often, organic or conventional. This means that (a) I know which store to go to when we run low on something, and (b) if something goes on sale, I know whether it's a good enough price to make it worth stocking up.
- Buying in bulk. The best example I can think of is baking cocoa, which we buy five pounds at a time from Dean's Beans. A five-pound bag costs $45, or nearly $55 with shipping, which is about $11 a pound—but buying Fair Trade, organic cocoa in a store would cost us closer to $18 a pound.
- Buying store brands. Lots of stores now have their own lines of organic products, which rival the cost of name-brand conventional versions. Indeed, as I showed back in June, many of the organic goods sold at Aldi can whip the prices of their conventional competitors hollow.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Discretionary spending
Just this morning, I read an article in Redbook called "What your spending says about you." (If you're wondering, by the by, how I came to have a subscription to Redbook in the first place, it was a freebie I got for taking some survey or other.) In this article, three successful businesswomen in their 30s share their "discretionary spending" over the course of a week, showing pictures of their purchases and the price of each item. At the bottom of the page, accountant Clare Levison—the author of Frugal Isn't Cheap: Spend Less, Save More, and Live Better—analyzes their expenses and suggests strategies each of them could adopt to save.
What struck me about the article wasn't Levison's money-saving tips, most of which I'd heard before, but the sheer amount of money these women went through in a week. Two of them spent around $220, and the third splashed out with a whopping $492. Their highest spending categories were:
Then I wondered if maybe I was being too judgmental. Maybe my own discretionary spending was actually higher than I realized. So I decided I was going to put my own budget to the same test. I went back over all my purchases for the past week and pulled out all the items that I thought would be considered unnecessary according to the editors' criteria. I counted only my own purchases, not Brian's, since that appeared to be what the women in the article had done. I didn't treat the money I spent on fresh produce as an unnecessary purchase, since I don't live in Alaska and I'm not paying inflated prices for it, but I counted all the foodstuffs that could be considered treats rather than basic nutrition. I also, after some hesitation, included the bottle of body wash I bought, since I could, in theory, bathe with ordinary bar soap instead (though I don't think it would actually save me any money). So here's my week's discretionary spending. All prices include tax, where applicable.
So what, in the words of the Redbook article, does my spending say about me? Well, first of all, obviously, it says I'm not a big spender. It also appears to say that my favorite luxury items are foodstuffs, particularly foodstuffs that are Fair Trade and organic. It says that I'm concerned about animal welfare, what with the kosher marshmallows and the cruelty-free body wash. And it says that I'm a pretty avid bargain hunter, since nearly all the luxury items I bought (plus quite a few non-luxury items, not shown in the picture) were on sale or purchased in bulk to save money. In other words, it says that I'm ecofrugal, which is just what you'd expect it to say.
And, if Clare Levison wants to tell me how to trim the fat in my budget, she'd better bring her A game.
Anybody else want to play this game? Just post your list in the comments, or link to a blog entry covering the same topic.
What struck me about the article wasn't Levison's money-saving tips, most of which I'd heard before, but the sheer amount of money these women went through in a week. Two of them spent around $220, and the third splashed out with a whopping $492. Their highest spending categories were:
- Clothing. One woman went shopping with a friend from out of town and ended up spending $67 on a new dress, a T-shirt, and a swimsuit for herself, plus another $11 on a onesie for her soon-to-be-born baby. Another, a subscriber to a clothing subscription club called Stitch Fix, received a $185 box of clothing from them (five items, including a pair of jeans, a blouse, and a huge costume-jewelry necklace) and spent an additional $62 on a pair of ankle-strap heels and $40 on frilly underwear. Levison's advice to her was not, for some reason, to give up the clothing subscription; instead she said to promptly return any items she didn't love, and also to use coupons when shopping elsewhere.
- Personal care. The lady with the clothing subscription also subscribes to a similar service called Wantable for "makeup, jewelry, and intimates," which she describes as "so good for the working mom." That may be true if the working mom has lots of cash to spare; the box she got from them contained five cosmetic items costing a total of $36, and she spent another $18 elsewhere. The second subject bought only three items—a pot of foundation and two bottles of what might be shampoo—but they cost a total of $64. The third didn't buy any cosmetics, but she spent $84 on a haircut.
- Food and booze. The editors said their definition of discretionary spending left out "the things on the must-buy list, like gas and milk," but they apparently included food items that they decided should count as luxuries. These included all meals eaten out, all alcoholic beverages, all beverages purchased on the go, and certain grocery items that were deemed luxuries, including fresh fruit for the woman who lived in Juneau and ice cream for the pregnant lady. Even whole foods bought for use in recipes (fresh coconut, fresh herbs, lemons and limes) were dinged as unnecessary purchases. For one woman, a food blogger and cookbook author, luxury foodstuffs accounted for $83 of her $225 total.
Then I wondered if maybe I was being too judgmental. Maybe my own discretionary spending was actually higher than I realized. So I decided I was going to put my own budget to the same test. I went back over all my purchases for the past week and pulled out all the items that I thought would be considered unnecessary according to the editors' criteria. I counted only my own purchases, not Brian's, since that appeared to be what the women in the article had done. I didn't treat the money I spent on fresh produce as an unnecessary purchase, since I don't live in Alaska and I'm not paying inflated prices for it, but I counted all the foodstuffs that could be considered treats rather than basic nutrition. I also, after some hesitation, included the bottle of body wash I bought, since I could, in theory, bathe with ordinary bar soap instead (though I don't think it would actually save me any money). So here's my week's discretionary spending. All prices include tax, where applicable.
- Bath Basics coconut shower gel (to replace an existing bottle that was nearly empty): $5.34 at Rite Aid. This is actually a 3-in-1 bubble bath, shower gel, and shampoo, but I use it only for bathing, so a quart bottle lasts me several months.
- Five pounds of organic, Fair Trade baking cocoa: $53.27 (including shipping) from Dean's Beans. I've stopped buying my coffee from them since I found a better deal at IKEA, but they're still the cheapest source I've found for Fair Trade cocoa, even with the shipping costs. The new bag actually hasn't arrived yet, so I photographed the old one, which we bought in January and have nearly used up.
- A bottle of diet cream soda: 82 cents (on sale) at Stop & Shop. The limes you see in the picture were actually bought just over a week ago; there was a big bag of them on the reduced-price rack for $1.63, and Brian had the idea that we could use them to make our favorite non-alcoholic cocktail, a Knightsbridge. (Actually, it's only virtually non-alcoholic, because it contains a dash of Angostura bitters, together with cream soda, ice, and the juice of half a lime.) We bought one bottle of cream soda at the same time as the limes, then went back for a second bottle so we could share some with friends.
- Two bags of kosher marshmallows: $4.28 (on sale) at Stop & Shop. As a semi-vegetarian (or "conscientious omnivore," if you prefer), I don't eat regular marshmallows, which are made with gelatin, a slaughterhouse by-product. However, I enjoy making s'mores over the coals from our barbecue grill, so I like to pick up a bag or two of kosher marshmallows (made with fish gelatin) when they happen to go on sale. These were reduced from their regular price of $3.29 a bag to $2.
- One can of whipped cream: $3.19 (on sale) at ShopRite. I go through a lot of this stuff, but as luxuries go, it's not that indulgent: only 15 calories for a 2-tablespoon spritz. We go through about a can a month.
So what, in the words of the Redbook article, does my spending say about me? Well, first of all, obviously, it says I'm not a big spender. It also appears to say that my favorite luxury items are foodstuffs, particularly foodstuffs that are Fair Trade and organic. It says that I'm concerned about animal welfare, what with the kosher marshmallows and the cruelty-free body wash. And it says that I'm a pretty avid bargain hunter, since nearly all the luxury items I bought (plus quite a few non-luxury items, not shown in the picture) were on sale or purchased in bulk to save money. In other words, it says that I'm ecofrugal, which is just what you'd expect it to say.
And, if Clare Levison wants to tell me how to trim the fat in my budget, she'd better bring her A game.
Anybody else want to play this game? Just post your list in the comments, or link to a blog entry covering the same topic.
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Price Check: The Aldi Organic Face-Off
Aldi sells organics now, doo-dah, doo-dah...
Early this year, Aldi rolled out its Simply Nature brand, which includes both natural and organic products. The term "natural," according to the FDA, has no legal meaning, but "organic" foods have to meet to meet specific standards laid out by the USDA, and eco-conscious consumers like me are often willing to pay a premium for them. In my case, as I've noted before, that premium is set somewhat arbitrarily at 60 percent—though we'll go higher than that for certain foods that are particularly destructive to grow conventionally. In general, that means we focus our organic purchases on fresh produce, which usually falls within the "rule of 1.6," and pass over the organic pasta, milk, and breakfast cereal, which typically cost two to three times as much as their conventional counterparts. Or at least, they used to.
Yesterday, however, on a trip to Aldi to pick up a few staples, I happened to notice that their Simply Nature Organic Toasted Oats (an equivalent to Cheerios, available in both regular and Honey Toasted versions) were priced at $1.99 for a 9-ounce box, or $3.54 a pound. Sitting right next to them on the shelf was a much larger box of Honey Nut Cheerios, one of the rare products Aldi carries that isn't its own house brand, priced at $3.67 a pound. On sale. The sale price of the conventional breakfast cereal was more than the regular price of the store-brand organic cereal.
Well, needless to say, that set my little mental cogs a-turning. I wondered: if the cereal is cheaper, how do the prices of other Simply Nature products compare to conventional versions of the same products? Could it be that buying organic at Aldi actually costs less than buying conventional name brands?
This wasn't a question I could answer right there in the store, since Aldi carries so few non-self-branded products. So instead, I went to the webpage for the Simply Nature line and jotted down the prices of about a dozen products (including only those labeled as organic rather than merely "natural"). Then I went to the local Stop & Shop and jotted down the lowest price I could find for a similar name-brand product that wasn't organic. For the sake of comparison, I wrote down the prices of the Stop & Shop store brand as well, if there was one.
So without further ado, here are the results. Each product is listed separately, and the one with the lowest price is in boldface. However, if the Simply Nature product falls within the "rule of 1.6"—that is, it's less than 1.6 times the price of the cheapest competitor—it's in italics.
Toasted oat breakfast cereal
Simply Nature toasted oats: $1.99 for 9 ounces / $3.54 per pound
Cheerios: $3.99 for 12 ounces (largest box they had) / $5.32 per pound
Stop & Shop Oats & O's: $2.99 for 14 ounces / $3.41 per pound
Price premium for organic: 13 cents per pound (4 percent)
Pasta (spaghetti or linguine, same price)
Simply Nature pasta: $1.19 for 1 pound
Barilla pasta: $1.39 for 1 pound
Stop & Shop pasta: $0.99 for 1 pound
Price premium for organic: 20 cents per pound (20 percent)
Pasta sauce (marinara)
Simply Nature: $1.99 for 25 ounces / $2.55 per quart
Francesco Rinaldi: $1.69 for 24 ounces / $2.25 per quart
Stop & Shop: $1.49 for 24 ounces / $1.99 per quart
Price premium for organic: 56 cents per quart (28 percent)
Salad dressing (ranch or vinaigrette, same price)
Simply Nature: $1.69 for 8 ounces / $6.76 per quart
Wish Bone: $3.39 for 16 ounces / $6.78 per quart
Stop & Shop: $2.39 for 16 ounces / $4.78 per quart
Price premium for organic: $1.98 per quart (41 percent)
Chicken broth
Simply Nature: $1.79 for 1 quart
College Inn: $2.79 for 1 quart
Stop & Shop: $1.99 for 1 quart
Price premium for organic: none
Soup (lentil or chicken noodle, same price)
Simply Nature: $1.99 for 17 ounces / $1.87 per pint
Progresso: $2.49 for 19 ounces / $2.09 per pint
Stop & Shop: $1.29 for 19 ounces / $1.08 per pint
Price premium for organic: 79 cents per pint (73 percent)
Milk (reduced fat)
Simply Nature: $3.39 for 32 ounces / $6.78 per gallon
No name brands of conventional milk were available
Stop & Shop: $3.89 for 1 gallon
Price premium for organic: $2.89 per gallon (74 percent)
Soy Milk
Simply Nature: $2.49 for 1/2 gallon
8th Continent: $3.69 for 1/2 gallon
No store brand of conventional soy milk was available
Price premium for organic: none
Bagged greens (baby spinach or spring mix, same price)
Simply Nature: $2.49 for 5 ounces / $7.97 per pound
Dole: $3.69 for 8 ounces / $7.38 per pound
Stop & Shop: $3.69 for 5 ounces / $11.81 per pound
Price premium for organic: 59 cents per pound (8 percent)
Frozen strawberries
Simply Nature: $2.69 for 12 ounces / $3.59 per pound
Welch's: $4.79 for 1 pound
Stop & Shop: $3.99 for 18 ounces / $3.54 per pound
Price premium for organic: 5 cents per pound (1 percent)
Frozen blueberries
Simply Nature: $2.69 for 10 ounces / $4.30 per pound
Wyman's: $10.49 for 3 pounds / $3.49 per pound
No store brand of conventional frozen blueberries was available
Early this year, Aldi rolled out its Simply Nature brand, which includes both natural and organic products. The term "natural," according to the FDA, has no legal meaning, but "organic" foods have to meet to meet specific standards laid out by the USDA, and eco-conscious consumers like me are often willing to pay a premium for them. In my case, as I've noted before, that premium is set somewhat arbitrarily at 60 percent—though we'll go higher than that for certain foods that are particularly destructive to grow conventionally. In general, that means we focus our organic purchases on fresh produce, which usually falls within the "rule of 1.6," and pass over the organic pasta, milk, and breakfast cereal, which typically cost two to three times as much as their conventional counterparts. Or at least, they used to.
Yesterday, however, on a trip to Aldi to pick up a few staples, I happened to notice that their Simply Nature Organic Toasted Oats (an equivalent to Cheerios, available in both regular and Honey Toasted versions) were priced at $1.99 for a 9-ounce box, or $3.54 a pound. Sitting right next to them on the shelf was a much larger box of Honey Nut Cheerios, one of the rare products Aldi carries that isn't its own house brand, priced at $3.67 a pound. On sale. The sale price of the conventional breakfast cereal was more than the regular price of the store-brand organic cereal.
Well, needless to say, that set my little mental cogs a-turning. I wondered: if the cereal is cheaper, how do the prices of other Simply Nature products compare to conventional versions of the same products? Could it be that buying organic at Aldi actually costs less than buying conventional name brands?
This wasn't a question I could answer right there in the store, since Aldi carries so few non-self-branded products. So instead, I went to the webpage for the Simply Nature line and jotted down the prices of about a dozen products (including only those labeled as organic rather than merely "natural"). Then I went to the local Stop & Shop and jotted down the lowest price I could find for a similar name-brand product that wasn't organic. For the sake of comparison, I wrote down the prices of the Stop & Shop store brand as well, if there was one.
So without further ado, here are the results. Each product is listed separately, and the one with the lowest price is in boldface. However, if the Simply Nature product falls within the "rule of 1.6"—that is, it's less than 1.6 times the price of the cheapest competitor—it's in italics.
Toasted oat breakfast cereal
Simply Nature toasted oats: $1.99 for 9 ounces / $3.54 per pound
Cheerios: $3.99 for 12 ounces (largest box they had) / $5.32 per pound
Stop & Shop Oats & O's: $2.99 for 14 ounces / $3.41 per pound
Price premium for organic: 13 cents per pound (4 percent)
Pasta (spaghetti or linguine, same price)
Simply Nature pasta: $1.19 for 1 pound
Barilla pasta: $1.39 for 1 pound
Stop & Shop pasta: $0.99 for 1 pound
Price premium for organic: 20 cents per pound (20 percent)
Pasta sauce (marinara)
Simply Nature: $1.99 for 25 ounces / $2.55 per quart
Francesco Rinaldi: $1.69 for 24 ounces / $2.25 per quart
Stop & Shop: $1.49 for 24 ounces / $1.99 per quart
Price premium for organic: 56 cents per quart (28 percent)
Salad dressing (ranch or vinaigrette, same price)
Simply Nature: $1.69 for 8 ounces / $6.76 per quart
Wish Bone: $3.39 for 16 ounces / $6.78 per quart
Stop & Shop: $2.39 for 16 ounces / $4.78 per quart
Price premium for organic: $1.98 per quart (41 percent)
Chicken broth
Simply Nature: $1.79 for 1 quart
College Inn: $2.79 for 1 quart
Stop & Shop: $1.99 for 1 quart
Price premium for organic: none
Soup (lentil or chicken noodle, same price)
Simply Nature: $1.99 for 17 ounces / $1.87 per pint
Progresso: $2.49 for 19 ounces / $2.09 per pint
Stop & Shop: $1.29 for 19 ounces / $1.08 per pint
Price premium for organic: 79 cents per pint (73 percent)
Milk (reduced fat)
Simply Nature: $3.39 for 32 ounces / $6.78 per gallon
No name brands of conventional milk were available
Stop & Shop: $3.89 for 1 gallon
Price premium for organic: $2.89 per gallon (74 percent)
Soy Milk
Simply Nature: $2.49 for 1/2 gallon
8th Continent: $3.69 for 1/2 gallon
No store brand of conventional soy milk was available
Price premium for organic: none
Bagged greens (baby spinach or spring mix, same price)
Simply Nature: $2.49 for 5 ounces / $7.97 per pound
Dole: $3.69 for 8 ounces / $7.38 per pound
Stop & Shop: $3.69 for 5 ounces / $11.81 per pound
Price premium for organic: 59 cents per pound (8 percent)
Frozen strawberries
Simply Nature: $2.69 for 12 ounces / $3.59 per pound
Welch's: $4.79 for 1 pound
Stop & Shop: $3.99 for 18 ounces / $3.54 per pound
Price premium for organic: 5 cents per pound (1 percent)
Frozen blueberries
Simply Nature: $2.69 for 10 ounces / $4.30 per pound
Wyman's: $10.49 for 3 pounds / $3.49 per pound
No store brand of conventional frozen blueberries was available
Price premium for organic: 83 cents per pound (24 percent)
As you can see, the Stop & Shop store brand usually—though not always—came out on top. However, in every case except two (bagged greens and frozen blueberries), Simply Nature beat its name-brand competitor—and in both those cases, the competing product was sold in a bigger package, so its lower price may simply be the result of buying in bulk. Moreover, in every case except two (soup and milk), Simply Nature was within the rule of 1.6 compared to its conventionally grown competitors, sometimes costing only pennies more. And in two cases (soy milk and chicken broth), Simply Nature was the cheapest of all, beating even the Stop & Shop brand.
The category in which the Simply Nature brand was most thoroughly trounced was milk. The contest may not have been a completely fair one, since the Stop & Shop didn't have any name brands of milk to compare with it, but the store-brand, conventional milk in a gallon jug had Simply Nature beat by about 75 percent on price. However, this too may be the result of a different package size: conventional milk sold by the half-gallon cost $2.69, bringing the $3.39 half-gallon of Simply Nature well within the rule of 1.6. Still, since most consumers will probably buy by the gallon if given the option, it's fair to say that milk is still much more expensive to buy organic than other products. You may also note that no other animal products appear on my list; the Simply Nature line doesn't include eggs, and the only meats it includes are "natural" rather than organic. So animal products remain an expensive choice for organic eaters (a disappointing discovery for us conscientious omnivores). For all other products, though, it looks like Aldi is bringing the cost premium for buying organic lower than it's ever been before.
So what's the takeaway? Well, if your goal is simply to keep your grocery bill as low as possible, then generally speaking, you're still best off sticking with conventional store brands (though Aldi is probably still the cheapest place to find them). But if you'd like to buy more organic foods and have been put off by the price, you may be able to add more organic edibles to your cart and barely ding your budget at all (particularly if you've previously been buying name brands). And if you're already buying organic as much as possible, but you're cursing the prices every time you load up the cart, then looking for an Aldi store in your area could lighten up your grocery bill significantly.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Veggienomics
Thanksgiving may be late this year, but winter isn't waiting patiently to arrive. Right now, at around noon, it's 29 degrees outside, with a 30-mile-per-hour wind on top of that. From my perspective this means two things: 1) from this point forward, I'm not going to be annoyed with stores that have their Christmas decorations up already, and 2) I can pretty much declare the gardening season over at this point. Which means that this is a good time to do something I've been planning all year: tallying up the total of all our garden produce for the year and seeing how much money this hobby has actually saved us.
I've been doing my best to keep track, throughout the year, of how much we actually harvested of each crop that we grew. Granted, that wasn't always easy with items like cherry tomatoes, which tend to be priced by the pound: if you're going out and picking Sun Golds by the handful every day, it's a bit of a nuisance to have to weigh each day's pickings on the kitchen scale as soon as you get them inside (especially if there are too many of them to fit in the little measuring cup that came with, the scale, so you'd have to do them in multiple batches). So in many cases, I ended up just eyeballing the day's pickings and making an educated guess. Also, it was often Brian who did the picking, and he didn't always notify me immediately about what he'd just brought in, so I sometimes ended up having to make an educated guess about how much had been harvested over the course of the week. So the numbers below are really just rough estimates, but as the Brits say, they'll do to be going on with.
Once I'd counted up the harvest for each crop in pounds, I had to estimate the regular cost per pound of each crop in the store. For some of them, I just checked the price at the Whole Earth Center, where all the produce is organic and much of it is locally grown; since all our garden produce is organic and as local as you can get, I figured this was a fair approximation of its market value. In some cases, however, I forgot to check on the price of a particular crop while it was in season, so for those I used this price list for produce from a food co-op in Brooklyn. That's reasonably close to us—within 50 miles, anyway—so I figured their prices should a reasonable approximation of what we'd pay in our area.
There was one crop in our garden this year that I wasn't quite sure how to count: the marigolds that we bought at the Rutgers plant sale and tucked in amongst our tomatoes. We did pick a lot of the flowers, so in theory, I could have reckoned up the cost of an equivalent volume of store-bought blooms and added that to the total. In reality, though, we never buy flowers at the store (we just pick whatever's blooming in the garden, even if it's technically a weed), so I decided that counting the store value of the marigolds would be cheating. I'm not saying the money we spent on them was wasted—they did provide a lot of nice flowers for the table, even if it's not clear that they actually did anything to repel pests on the tomato plants—but it can't be counted as a savings on our grocery bill.
So, based solely on the crops we planted and ate this year, our output was:
TOTAL SPENT on seeds, plants, and compost: $42.95
PROFIT from our gardening venture: $191.04
Looked at in the light of an investment, that's an amazing annual return. We put in $42.95 starting with our seed order back in January, and by the end of November—less than 10 months later—we had more than quintupled our money. I punched the numbers into this little online calculator I found, and it claims that our annualized return on this investment was 617.5 percent. Just for comparison, the About.com "Investing for Beginners" site reports that stocks usually earn about a 10 percent rate of return (before inflation), and bonds get maybe half of that. An ROI of over 600 percent isn't just good; it's literally incredible, in the sense that if someone promises you that kind of return, you shouldn't believe him.
Realistically, though, these figures are misleading, because the money we spent on seeds and compost isn't all we put into this garden. We also invested hours of labor into planting, watering, weeding, pest control, and picking—and the value of that time is much harder to calculate. Although I kept at least an approximate record of everything we put into and got out of the garden, I kept no records at all of how much time we spent cultivating it, so any estimate of the amount of time we put into the garden this year would be more or less a wild guess. But, for the sake of argument, let's go ahead and make a wild guess: let's say that, from April through November, we spent an average of an hour a week on gardening tasks. (That's just for the vegetable garden itself; add in the amount of time we spent on yard work altogether, and it's probably at least twice as much.) That's about 34 weeks, or 34 hours of labor. So if we look at this garden as a job, rather than an investment, then we earned a salary of $191.04 for 34 hours of work, or about $5.62 an hour—much less than minimum wage.
However, that figure doesn't really tell the whole story either. After all, we don't garden simply as a way to save money on our grocery bill; we also do it for the healthy outdoor exercise, and for the flavor of veggies that were picked literally minutes before they landed on our plates, and for the satisfaction of seeing something that we've planted and tended literally bear fruit. All of these factors are virtually impossible to put a price on. So frankly, calculating the value of our garden crops doesn't tell me whether gardening is a worthwhile activity, because we already knew that, for us, it is; we wouldn't do it otherwise. (Even if the savings on groceries are fairly impressive, if that were the only consideration, it would probably be easier to find some way to work a few more hours each year and spend the proceeds on food.)
So, in the grand scheme of things, calculating the dollar value of our garden crops doesn't actually tell us much about the value we get from gardening. However, it's much more useful for seeing, not the big picture, but the fine details—that is, figuring out which particular crops give us the best return on the money and time we invest in them. And based on the numbers above, I think it's reasonable to say that we get great value from our basil, zucchini, and butternut squash—all of which not only gave us huge yields, but also required very little work to grow. (Okay, we did need to invest a bit of effort into protecting our zucchini from squash vine borers and processing all the basil that we harvested, but in general, these crops gave us a pretty massive bang for our buck.) Our eggplant, by contrast, gave us pathetic yields even after all the effort Brian put into protecting it from squirrels. Our peppers barely broke even, since we had to purchase plants after the seedlings we started failed to germinate, and then those plants, despite their head start, barely produced anything. And our Sun Gold tomatoes, though they certainly gave us a huge dollar value for the amount we spent on the seeds, were so much work to maintain that I don't think we can possibly afford to devote this much space to them next year.
So on the whole, I think my calculations give us some useful information that we can apply when planning next year's garden. For example:
I've been doing my best to keep track, throughout the year, of how much we actually harvested of each crop that we grew. Granted, that wasn't always easy with items like cherry tomatoes, which tend to be priced by the pound: if you're going out and picking Sun Golds by the handful every day, it's a bit of a nuisance to have to weigh each day's pickings on the kitchen scale as soon as you get them inside (especially if there are too many of them to fit in the little measuring cup that came with, the scale, so you'd have to do them in multiple batches). So in many cases, I ended up just eyeballing the day's pickings and making an educated guess. Also, it was often Brian who did the picking, and he didn't always notify me immediately about what he'd just brought in, so I sometimes ended up having to make an educated guess about how much had been harvested over the course of the week. So the numbers below are really just rough estimates, but as the Brits say, they'll do to be going on with.
Once I'd counted up the harvest for each crop in pounds, I had to estimate the regular cost per pound of each crop in the store. For some of them, I just checked the price at the Whole Earth Center, where all the produce is organic and much of it is locally grown; since all our garden produce is organic and as local as you can get, I figured this was a fair approximation of its market value. In some cases, however, I forgot to check on the price of a particular crop while it was in season, so for those I used this price list for produce from a food co-op in Brooklyn. That's reasonably close to us—within 50 miles, anyway—so I figured their prices should a reasonable approximation of what we'd pay in our area.
There was one crop in our garden this year that I wasn't quite sure how to count: the marigolds that we bought at the Rutgers plant sale and tucked in amongst our tomatoes. We did pick a lot of the flowers, so in theory, I could have reckoned up the cost of an equivalent volume of store-bought blooms and added that to the total. In reality, though, we never buy flowers at the store (we just pick whatever's blooming in the garden, even if it's technically a weed), so I decided that counting the store value of the marigolds would be cheating. I'm not saying the money we spent on them was wasted—they did provide a lot of nice flowers for the table, even if it's not clear that they actually did anything to repel pests on the tomato plants—but it can't be counted as a savings on our grocery bill.
So, based solely on the crops we planted and ate this year, our output was:
- Arugula, 3 bunches (not nearly as good as last year) at $2.99 per bunch: $8.97
- Basil, 20 bunches (I think this is actually a conservative estimate) at $1.78 per bunch: $35.60
- Celery, 2 bunches (not a very successful experiment) at $1 a bunch: $2.00
- Cucumbers, about 4 pounds (2 small, 2 medium, and 6 large) at $2.49 a pound: $9.96
- Dill, 4 bunches at $2.17 a bunch: $8.68
- Eggplant, about 10 ounces (four pathetically tiny eggplants) at $2.27 a pound: $1.42
- Green beans, about 4 ounces (truly pitiful for 3 squares of garden space) at $2.38 a pound: $.60
- Leeks, about 1 pound (3 small leeks, including one still out there now) at $2.18 a pound: $2.18
- Lettuce, Boston, 9 small heads at $1.29 a head: $11.61
- Lettuce, leaf, 6 bunches at $1.29 a bunch: $7.74
- Parsley, 3 bunches at $1.28 a bunch: $3.84
- Bell peppers (ripe, various colors), about 1 pound (6 smallish peppers): $5.43
- Scallions, about 3 bunches (very rough estimate, since we tended to harvest them one or two at a time) at 87 cents a bunch: $2.61
- Snow peas, about 2 pounds at $5.99 a pound: $11.98
- Spinach, about 6 ounces (basically just a few stray leaves from our fall planting) at $2.17 a pound: $.81
- Squash, butternut: 18 pounds at $1.29 a pound: $23.22
- Tomatoes, cherry: 20 pints at $2.83 a pint: $56.60
- Tomatoes, heirloom (a couple of Boxcar Willies and 1 large Brandywine), about 1/2 pound at $3.16 per pound: $1.58
- Tomatoes, other (Moreton and Ramopo), about 2 pounds at $2.99 a pound: $5.98
- Zucchini, about 14 pounds (6 medium squash, 7 large, and 3 HUGE) at $2.37 a pound: $33.18
TOTAL SPENT on seeds, plants, and compost: $42.95
PROFIT from our gardening venture: $191.04
Looked at in the light of an investment, that's an amazing annual return. We put in $42.95 starting with our seed order back in January, and by the end of November—less than 10 months later—we had more than quintupled our money. I punched the numbers into this little online calculator I found, and it claims that our annualized return on this investment was 617.5 percent. Just for comparison, the About.com "Investing for Beginners" site reports that stocks usually earn about a 10 percent rate of return (before inflation), and bonds get maybe half of that. An ROI of over 600 percent isn't just good; it's literally incredible, in the sense that if someone promises you that kind of return, you shouldn't believe him.
Realistically, though, these figures are misleading, because the money we spent on seeds and compost isn't all we put into this garden. We also invested hours of labor into planting, watering, weeding, pest control, and picking—and the value of that time is much harder to calculate. Although I kept at least an approximate record of everything we put into and got out of the garden, I kept no records at all of how much time we spent cultivating it, so any estimate of the amount of time we put into the garden this year would be more or less a wild guess. But, for the sake of argument, let's go ahead and make a wild guess: let's say that, from April through November, we spent an average of an hour a week on gardening tasks. (That's just for the vegetable garden itself; add in the amount of time we spent on yard work altogether, and it's probably at least twice as much.) That's about 34 weeks, or 34 hours of labor. So if we look at this garden as a job, rather than an investment, then we earned a salary of $191.04 for 34 hours of work, or about $5.62 an hour—much less than minimum wage.
However, that figure doesn't really tell the whole story either. After all, we don't garden simply as a way to save money on our grocery bill; we also do it for the healthy outdoor exercise, and for the flavor of veggies that were picked literally minutes before they landed on our plates, and for the satisfaction of seeing something that we've planted and tended literally bear fruit. All of these factors are virtually impossible to put a price on. So frankly, calculating the value of our garden crops doesn't tell me whether gardening is a worthwhile activity, because we already knew that, for us, it is; we wouldn't do it otherwise. (Even if the savings on groceries are fairly impressive, if that were the only consideration, it would probably be easier to find some way to work a few more hours each year and spend the proceeds on food.)
So, in the grand scheme of things, calculating the dollar value of our garden crops doesn't actually tell us much about the value we get from gardening. However, it's much more useful for seeing, not the big picture, but the fine details—that is, figuring out which particular crops give us the best return on the money and time we invest in them. And based on the numbers above, I think it's reasonable to say that we get great value from our basil, zucchini, and butternut squash—all of which not only gave us huge yields, but also required very little work to grow. (Okay, we did need to invest a bit of effort into protecting our zucchini from squash vine borers and processing all the basil that we harvested, but in general, these crops gave us a pretty massive bang for our buck.) Our eggplant, by contrast, gave us pathetic yields even after all the effort Brian put into protecting it from squirrels. Our peppers barely broke even, since we had to purchase plants after the seedlings we started failed to germinate, and then those plants, despite their head start, barely produced anything. And our Sun Gold tomatoes, though they certainly gave us a huge dollar value for the amount we spent on the seeds, were so much work to maintain that I don't think we can possibly afford to devote this much space to them next year.
So on the whole, I think my calculations give us some useful information that we can apply when planning next year's garden. For example:
- DO plant lots of butternut squash—maybe even more than three plants, since you can't really have too many of a squash that will keep all winter long.
- DO continue to plant two, but only two, zucchini plants (fewer and you risk having your only plant succumb to squash borers; more and you risk having more zucchini than any sane person could eat).
- DO continue to use the "carpet bomb" method for sowing basil, which provides massive yields with very little effort. (No room for weeds in a patch completely full of basil!) DO try using the same technique with leeks and scallions, and possibly even lettuce, in hopes of boosting our yields next year.
- DO get the snow peas into the ground earlier, so they'll have as long a growing season as possible.
- DON'T bother growing eggplant next year.
- DON'T attempt again to grow the varieties of peppers, green beans, or celery that we planted this year. Look for others that offer better yields.
- DON'T, under any circumstances, plant more than two Sun Gold tomato plants—and keep those plants isolated at the end of a row, so they can't take over the whole bed. That way we might actually manage to get some tomatoes off our other plants.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
The Rule of 1.6
Today, I came across an article in the Huffington Post called "Why You Shouldn't Buy Organic." The author, an agricultural economist from Oklahoma State, attacks organic food on the following grounds:
But to me, the real problem with the arguments on this list is that most of them—like most of the articles I see arguing either for or against eating organic—seem to miss the point. To me, pointing out that organic food is no tastier or healthier than conventional is a bit like saying that it's throwing away money to give to charity. After all, if you give money to, say, an organization that helps the homeless, yet you're not homeless yourself and it's highly unlikely you ever will be, then there's virtually no chance that you'll ever recoup your investment, right? Um, well, right, but so what? I don't give to charity because I expect to benefit from it personally (in any tangible way, that is)—and that's not why I eat organic, either. I'm not worried about how much pesticide might end up in my food; I'm worried about how much pesticide might end up in the soil, and the water, and the bodies of the birds that eat the pests, and the bodies of the workers who pick the crops. I don't buy free-range meats and eggs because I think they're going to reduce my chances of getting heart disease; I buy them because I'm not willing to be a party to the way animals are treated on factory farms. (I'm not the first to be struck by this, by the way; articles from The Atlantic and the Christian Science Monitor make essentially the same points.)
However, there is one argument on the list that carries some weight with me, and that's the first one. While I do believe firmly in the benefits of organic farming, there's a limit to how much I'm willing to pay for them. So one thing I do is prioritize my organic purchases—not on the basis of how much pesticide residue the foods contain, as the Environmental Working Group recommends with its "dirty dozen" list, but on the basis of how much damage they cause to the environment when grown conventionally. Thus, there are some foods that I will only buy organic, such as coffee, sugar, and bananas. The price markup on these, as I've noted before, is pretty high, but that's okay, because I can keep my cost down by cutting back on how much I use. Drinking less coffee or eating less sugar certainly won't do me any harm.
For other products, I follow a simple rule of thumb. I call it the Rule of 1.6. Years ago (in fact, probably decades ago now), I read that organic food cost, on average, 60 percent more than conventional food. But since this was an average, some organic foods cost way more than that—up to 4 times as much as their conventional equivalents—while for others, the price difference was almost nil. So I decided then and there that I would be willing to pay up to 60 percent more for organic foods, and that was my limit. Any more than that, and I wouldn't be getting my money's worth. Organic apples at $1.99 a pound, as opposed to $1.29 a pound, yes; organic breakfast cereal at 50 cents an ounce, as opposed to 20 cents, no.
This rule is, of course, a bit arbitrary, but in general, it's worked out pretty well for me. It's helped steer me toward whole foods, which have a lower cost differential, and away from highly processed foodstuffs—which is just what folks like Michael Pollan say we should all aim to do anyway. Of course my original benchmark of 60 percent may no longer be an accurate average of the cost difference (if it ever was); the most recent figure I was able to find comes from a 10-year-old USDA study, which puts the organic price markup at anywhere from 10 percent to 100 percent, which is a pretty broad range. Still, 60 percent is close enough to the midpoint that I think it still works as a reasonable guideline. Lowering my cutoff to 50 percent would make the math a bit easier, but I'm willing to do a little more work to give the organic farmers as good a chance as possible.
- It's "much more expensive."
- Organic farmers sometimes use "natural" pesticides that are "just as toxic and carcinogenic" as synthetic ones.
- Pesticides in foods don't really hurt you anyway.
- It's healthier to spend the same amount of money on a larger amount of conventional produce.
- Organic food doesn't taste any better.
- And it's not more nutritious.
- Organic farming is "not necessarily more sustainable," because crop yields are lower (so it takes more land to grow the same amount of food).
- Organic food isn't lower in calories.
But to me, the real problem with the arguments on this list is that most of them—like most of the articles I see arguing either for or against eating organic—seem to miss the point. To me, pointing out that organic food is no tastier or healthier than conventional is a bit like saying that it's throwing away money to give to charity. After all, if you give money to, say, an organization that helps the homeless, yet you're not homeless yourself and it's highly unlikely you ever will be, then there's virtually no chance that you'll ever recoup your investment, right? Um, well, right, but so what? I don't give to charity because I expect to benefit from it personally (in any tangible way, that is)—and that's not why I eat organic, either. I'm not worried about how much pesticide might end up in my food; I'm worried about how much pesticide might end up in the soil, and the water, and the bodies of the birds that eat the pests, and the bodies of the workers who pick the crops. I don't buy free-range meats and eggs because I think they're going to reduce my chances of getting heart disease; I buy them because I'm not willing to be a party to the way animals are treated on factory farms. (I'm not the first to be struck by this, by the way; articles from The Atlantic and the Christian Science Monitor make essentially the same points.)
However, there is one argument on the list that carries some weight with me, and that's the first one. While I do believe firmly in the benefits of organic farming, there's a limit to how much I'm willing to pay for them. So one thing I do is prioritize my organic purchases—not on the basis of how much pesticide residue the foods contain, as the Environmental Working Group recommends with its "dirty dozen" list, but on the basis of how much damage they cause to the environment when grown conventionally. Thus, there are some foods that I will only buy organic, such as coffee, sugar, and bananas. The price markup on these, as I've noted before, is pretty high, but that's okay, because I can keep my cost down by cutting back on how much I use. Drinking less coffee or eating less sugar certainly won't do me any harm.
For other products, I follow a simple rule of thumb. I call it the Rule of 1.6. Years ago (in fact, probably decades ago now), I read that organic food cost, on average, 60 percent more than conventional food. But since this was an average, some organic foods cost way more than that—up to 4 times as much as their conventional equivalents—while for others, the price difference was almost nil. So I decided then and there that I would be willing to pay up to 60 percent more for organic foods, and that was my limit. Any more than that, and I wouldn't be getting my money's worth. Organic apples at $1.99 a pound, as opposed to $1.29 a pound, yes; organic breakfast cereal at 50 cents an ounce, as opposed to 20 cents, no.
This rule is, of course, a bit arbitrary, but in general, it's worked out pretty well for me. It's helped steer me toward whole foods, which have a lower cost differential, and away from highly processed foodstuffs—which is just what folks like Michael Pollan say we should all aim to do anyway. Of course my original benchmark of 60 percent may no longer be an accurate average of the cost difference (if it ever was); the most recent figure I was able to find comes from a 10-year-old USDA study, which puts the organic price markup at anywhere from 10 percent to 100 percent, which is a pretty broad range. Still, 60 percent is close enough to the midpoint that I think it still works as a reasonable guideline. Lowering my cutoff to 50 percent would make the math a bit easier, but I'm willing to do a little more work to give the organic farmers as good a chance as possible.
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