Lightweight Eats

Our biggest recurring expense at the moment is groceries. Sure, we’re vegan, but it’s also really easy to get carried away spending lots of money on vegan food. Beans and rice are cheap, but chipotles in adobo sauce and organic miso paste and buckets of vegetables get expensive. And I really do eat quite a lot of food.

Fortunately, there’s an Aldi here in town. Aldi is the kind of grocery store where you have to put a quarter deposit down for your cart so they don’t have to pay somebody to retrieve them from the parking lot.

It’s bare bones, sure, but they skimp on looks more than quality, which is nice. And while we can’t find all of our weird vegan food there, it’s a great place to buy the bulk of our food, especially when we’re not looking to buy organics. (They do have organics, but the selection is somewhat limited.)

Our most recent trip included:

That $69 included most of our needs for the next 9 days of food, plus some extras (spinach, edamame, corn, pumpkin, paper goods, and more). We’ll also be using some pantry items, and last week’s leftovers. 

We have left to buy: tofu, bread, scallions, soba noodles, tahini, brown lentils, Tofurky, frozen green beans, pitas, more roasting veggies, black peppercorns, notch, brussels sprouts, sticky rice

Still, even with those additions and two extra days, I expect we’ll stay below our $120/week food and toiletries budget. Sure that’s a far cry from our $1.50/day challenge in Oakland, but we’re also eating a lot of fresh (and frozen) produce, which we couldn’t afford on that kind of budget.

I’m still proud of being able to feed us healthy, wholesome, home-cooked, tasty meals for about $6/person a day (really, that’s about $7 for me and $5 for Dan). That’s less than some people spend on their morning coffee.

Sure, maybe it’s not the $50/week that some families of two aim for. But I can’t see that kind of budget bringing us the kind of joy an extra $50 or so per week can bring. $3.50/day just means too many onions and plain beans for my liking. If that was what it came down to, it would be time to reconsider my choices in life.