Food for People Not for Profit
I had a tshirt that said that once.
I am crunching numbers. There are financial changes afoot for my family this fall and Bill and I are trying to stay ahead of the changes. One of the things that we were looking at is our food bill. I mean, we feed eight people, so yeah, the food bill is big. Well, huge really. And it's hard for me to judge how much is too much. So I did some research.
I found this site from the USDA which I love. (Click on the hyperlink to bring up the chart.)
$134 to feed a family of four for a week?! For real?!
And then I found a link to a sample menu plan that is based on the USDA food guidelines and can bring my weekly food bill to $134. (I figured $112, but that doesn't account for our family of 5 and the meals that kids eat at school, etc. I am going to figure this out next week though.) Now, the USDA food guidelines is not a group of nurtitionists, it is a group of food producers. There are a LOT of bread products and dairy products and orange juice in this menu plan. I am NOT serving white bread and white rice, as suggested by the menu plan I found. But for the rest of it, I figure, what the heck, I mean, one week of orange juice every morning and milk a couple times a day will not hurt us. And a $134 weekly grocery bill would not hurt us at all!
So, next week - the blogging of a thrifty USDA mother in a household of five.
I am crunching numbers. There are financial changes afoot for my family this fall and Bill and I are trying to stay ahead of the changes. One of the things that we were looking at is our food bill. I mean, we feed eight people, so yeah, the food bill is big. Well, huge really. And it's hard for me to judge how much is too much. So I did some research.
I found this site from the USDA which I love. (Click on the hyperlink to bring up the chart.)
$134 to feed a family of four for a week?! For real?!
And then I found a link to a sample menu plan that is based on the USDA food guidelines and can bring my weekly food bill to $134. (I figured $112, but that doesn't account for our family of 5 and the meals that kids eat at school, etc. I am going to figure this out next week though.) Now, the USDA food guidelines is not a group of nurtitionists, it is a group of food producers. There are a LOT of bread products and dairy products and orange juice in this menu plan. I am NOT serving white bread and white rice, as suggested by the menu plan I found. But for the rest of it, I figure, what the heck, I mean, one week of orange juice every morning and milk a couple times a day will not hurt us. And a $134 weekly grocery bill would not hurt us at all!
So, next week - the blogging of a thrifty USDA mother in a household of five.
posted by Lea at 11:48 AM
1 Comments:
We feed two and a cat for a month on about $200...I'll bet the USDA would say we could strip it down to $100 at least...
We also eat out way too much.
It's a hard habit to break, especially when some days it's all you can do to grab a cup of yogurt, let alone cook.
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