They should just lead with people don't have any money to buy things because wages aren't increasing to match living expenses.
It cuts back some of the fig leaves
It cuts back some of the fig leaves
I used to eat high quality fish every week, now it’s beans and cheaper cuts of chicken. And we make good money, but our wages have gone down since 2022 when adjusted for inflation.
i'm rounding up on eggs and bread since you might be buying a more expensive variety, and guesstimating parsley because i haven't bought it from trader joe's before. everything else is pulled from my last few shopping trips.
if you're spending $50 on this, i would highly recommend finding a new grocery store.
>> Complains that groceries are expensive
Where I am in the US, you can get a dozen eggs for ~$2 at Walmart. A loaf of bread with 22 slices is like $2 to $6 depending on store brand vs name brand. The canned refried beans I buy are still $1.30 to $1.50 for 4-5 servings.
Some stuff is way too expensive (beef) but other food items seem at normal prices to me.
Saying 'everything is fine, you just have to shop down market, you can no longer afford your normal store, you need to go to the poorest store now because you are poor now' is just rephrasing what is being said.
The article points to shopping around and buying cheaper brands to make it work. But that’s the point, you didn’t have to do it, but now you do because things are too expensive.
Some people prefer to shop at less conglomerate and evil stores.
A dozen of eggs at Aldi's in FL was $0.79 in 2020. Now around $3.00.
Farmed salmon was commonly $8.99 at Costco, now it's $12.99 (sometimes on sale for $9.99).
At least where I live if I went to Kroger I’d spend $6 on bread, two tubs of Fage would be $14, eggs are like $3, the parsley would be like $1.50 and the rest of the veggies comes out to about $5.
The comment was meant as a comparison to the same store prices in 2022. If your argument is that “Walmart is cheaper, shop there”, how much more expensive is Walmart as compared to 2022? If your argument is that “don’t buy everything at the same store or buy cheaper brands”, is that something you had to do before or is that your response to raised prices. If your argument is “well you live in an expensive, I don’t”, has your grocery bill remained the same as compared to your income from a few years ago (you could’ve gotten a promotion or a new job, but that’s not the point).
Also keep in mind, shop at XYZ is not really a great way to think about this because not everyone has access to the same stores.
The current situation will be the new normal for at least the next several years. Chicken hasn't risen nearly as much, just moderately more than inflation, perhaps because of a shift of demand away from beef.
There also seems to be greater price discrimination going on with beef than previously, with larger spreads between, e.g., bulk ground vs vacuum packed ground vs whole cuts.
I completely forgot about needing a chest freezer and space for a chest freezer..that's also not nothing.
???
Maybe if you're buying organic grass fed steaks every day, but chicken/pork is still available for less than $5, especially on sale. Kroger's weekly ad for Dallas, TX shows:
1. beef for $6.97/lb
2. pork for $1.99/lb
3. chicken breasts for $3.99/lb, or organic for $6.99/lb
You'll want to specify what type of beef. The price per pound varies immensely based upon what cut you're getting.
$6.97/lb is a price I can only assume refers to ground beef. Once you start talking about steaks, though, the price climbs rather quickly. Near me, sirloin regularly clocks between $14-16/lb, and NY strip/ribeye at the best of times may go on sale for close to $20/lb, but they also regularly exceed $30/lb.
Rent is the only part of our economy in which money is forcibly taken at gunpoint by someone who never did any work to earn it.
The groceries at the grocery store are expensive because of the grocery store's rent, too.
Your dramatic post makes it seem like the cops can kick down your door to get rent. That's simply not true.
You're either homeless or you have a domicile somehow. So, many people enter into leases or rental agreements. Then they pay rent to maintain that home.
If you don't pay rent, you don't get arrested, but the constable is actually a law enforcement officer, and the constable is the #1 official who is involved in evictions, so yes, they will "kick down your door" to dislodge you from a place where you haven't paid rent.
And then what do you do, when you're homeless and on the streets? In most urban centers, it's illegal to sleep outdoors or trespass ("urban camping" laws), and so the homeless are often subject to arrest or sanctions because of the nature of their plight.
So the only logical response here is to get housed, pay rent, and keep paying, just to stay on the legal side of things. Ask me how I know.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/237141/us-obesity-by-ann...
https://www.usda.gov/about-food/food-safety/food-loss-and-wa...
> food waste is estimated at ... 133 billion pounds ... in 2010.
USA population in 2010 was 311M. 133B / 311M = 427 pounds per person.
I sincerely doubt the average consumer throws away 427 pounds of fresh food in a year.
I'd believe 0.5lbs/day/person in my household - cook enough for everyone to have seconds, but most of the time it's tossed (sometimes after some time spent in the fridge/freezer hoping for a reheat); stuff bought but inedible (chicken bones, etc)..
I'd believe similar in the distribution pipeline (just look at how much stuff are in the discounted aisle just about to fall off sell-by date + obviously moldy goods), and I'd believe similar in the production pipeline.
Now the notion of "cook fresh every day" is a thing (rather than reheats), we try to do keep leftovers but eventually we run out of space for them.
Lack of market and spoilage makes it unavoidable. When I lived in farming communities there were massive piles where people dumped excess crops.
The kid might have ate 2 lbs of blueberries a week for six months, but surprise, they hate them now!
I can't count the number of half-full glasses of milk I've found in the last month, probably averaging 1 per day. Kids are extremely inefficient eaters unless it is covered in sugar or chocolate.
This one specifically has a good solution:
As an aside, a quickbread like banana bread happens to be one of the simplest to make with some of the cheapest shelf-stable ingredients, and almost every home has an oven and access to the ingredients. For those who like it, I highly recommend this recipe (Mark Bittmans):
===
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, plus some for greasing the pan
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
¾ cup sugar
2 eggs
3 very ripe bananas, mashed with a fork until smooth
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans
½ cup grated dried unsweetened coconut
===
Step 1
Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9- by 5-inch loaf pan.
Step 2
Mix together the dry ingredients. With a hand mixer, a whisk, or in the food processor, cream the butter and beat in the eggs and bananas. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients; stir just enough to combine (it’s okay if there are lumps). Gently stir in the vanilla, nuts, and coconut.
Step 3
Pour the batter into the loaf pan and bake for 45 to 60 minutes, until nicely browned. A toothpick inserted into the center of the bread will come out fairly clean when it is done, but because of the bananas this bread will remain moister than most. Do not overcook. Cool on a rack for 15 minutes before removing from the pan.
I'm one of those on a much-reduced budget without access to a home oven (kitchenettes and single-top induction burners are wonderful things), without central AC at home (I do miss it but AI replaced my former industry), and live in a food tundra (slightly higher food density than a desert but more from luck than urban planning), so if it's all the same to you, I'm just going to ignore the recipe and move on.
That definitely helps, I'm pretty bad at eating leftovers unless I put them in a new meal so we end up with more food waste than necessary.
Kids completely changing what they'll eat on a weekly basis also has a pretty large impact.
I see nightmare kids via friends/neighbors, and all I can think is “stop treating your kids like they’re your coworkers, they’re your kids and they actually yearn for structure and ‘discipline’ in the sense that you are their whole worldview structure”
Kids want structure, rules, boundaries. They will test them, which is good.
Oh yeah, totally. That being said, our eldest was super picky and changeable (and often didn't eat enough so it was a little concerning) so we often ended up with lots of staples that she one day decided she didn't like :shrug:
Mostly fixed now that she's older, but I can see how food waste happens. And more generally, if the kids get excited or distracted, there will often be waste.
Source: grew up poor, there was no food waste, none
I have a solution that we have instituted here at home if you would like to cut waste on bananas and other perishable fruits and vegetables. We bought a food dehydrator. I was initially skeptical about the utility of the device but after several years of ownership I find it is one of the most useful tools for anyone who cooks at home.
Bananas, even those that are well past the point where I won't eat them, are ridiculously delicious when sliced and dried. The flavor concentrates so that a single banana chip can be like the old Lays Potato Chip slogan - no one can eat just one.
This also works great for berries like blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, goji berries, kiwi fruit, apples, plums, peaches, nectarines, cherries, etc.
We buy them fresh or grow them here and before they reach the toss stage, we dry them for future use. Some of the things are also great frozen. I have several pounds of berries from this year's crop in the freezer now and quite a few available for adding to granolas that we make here at home.
We have made fruit leathers in the past using strawberries and the flavor is better than the store-bought products.
I grow and dry vegetables too. Some of them are also freezer items.
Good luck with the grocery bill.