20 Ways to Incorporate Whole Food into your Kitchen Buy local. Ideally, you never need to set foot in a grocery store. Change your shopping habits and buy from local farmers, either directly from their farm or from a farmer’s market. You will get your produce at the optimum time, right after it was picked. As well, you can directly ask the farmer about his practices. Sometimes farmers grow organically and they just haven’t gone through the expensive and highly regulated certification programs that exist to make increase the monopoly of factory farms. (Enter you Zip Code in the search box above to find Farmers Markets) Join a food co-op or CSA. This is win-win, because it helps out the farmers and it helps out your family.With both of these options, you can register ahead of time (in some cases you pre-pay for the season) and then receive a box brimming with abundance from your own area. You will get to try lots of new things (this is how we tried one of our family favorites, rutabaga, for the first time) and you will get to do this at a fraction of the price. Buy produce that is in-season. Purchasing food that is in-season is not just cheaper, it is nutritionally beneficial too. Buying strawberries in January and asparagus in October requires that the produce be picked before it is fully ripe, and the produce begins to decompose and lose nutrients the second it is separated from the plant. Avoid the high cost of transporting your “fresh” Christmas berries and melons and stick to the items that nature is currently providing in your area. Grow as much as you can in the space you have. Plant a sunny windowsill with salad veggies and herbs, grow a container garden on a balcony, or turn your yard into a mini-farm. Every bite of food you grow yourself is a revolutionary act. Plan your menu AFTER shopping, not before. This allows you to stay on budget because you aren’t shopping for special ingredients to make pre-planned meals. You can take advantage of the best deals and plan your meals around those. This can also help by keeping those unplanned budget purchases from going to waste in your crisper drawer while you carry on with your planned menu. Drink water. We generally stick to drinking water. Not fluoridated tap water – we purchase 5 gallon jugs or fill them in a spring when that option is available. Water is cheaper and healthier. Beverages that you make yourself like coffee and tea are far less expensive than the soda pop and energy drinks that fill most modern refrigerators, not to mention, relatively free of the toxic chemicals that overflow in the store-bought drinks. Buy staples in bulk. Organic grains like brown rice, wheat berries, cornmeal, barley and oatmeal can be purchased in bulk quantities. This reduces the price to lower than or equivalent to the smaller conventional packages that are offered in your local grocery store. Buy some meats frozen instead of fresh. Some butcher shops freeze meat that isn’t sold immediately and sell if for a lower price. Look for deals on frozen chicken breasts, frozen fish, and frozen turkey breast. Fish is nearly ALWAYS cheaper frozen. Just read your ingredients carefully and make sure you are just getting fish, and that the fish is from a safe source (not the radiation-laden Pacific Ocean, for example, or a tilapia farm where they feed fish their own recycled feces). Buy meat in bulk. Look into buying beef in quantity. Check out the prices at local farms for a quarter of a cow. You will pay slightly more for the lesser cuts but much less for the better quality cuts. It balances out to a much lower price for meat farmed in the healthiest way possible. Add some lower priced protein options. While lots of us would love to have grass-fed beef and free range chicken breasts twice a day, the cost is prohibitive. Add value-priced wholesome protein with beans, farm fresh eggs, homemade yogurt and cheese, nuts, and milk.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 07:22:21 +0000
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