Sustainable Food

If one were to choose a single method of saving money, reducing environmental impact, and creating a more equitable world, food would be a wise focus.

You could spend your entire life dabbling in the garden alone. The same goes for the kitchen. The same even goes for the grocery store. There is so much more to food than buying and eating it. You can make the world of better place by growing tomatoes, baking bread, or reducing your dependency on over-packaged goods. Combine all three and you win at life.

This page will include links describing my own exploits, recipes, and strategies. I will provide my favorite resources and inspiration as well.

First, A moment on my soapbox.

The best part about concentrating on making your food choices more sustainable (subversively so) is that you probably spend a great deal of time and brain space on this topic already. Instead of counting calories and beating yourself up over that last cheeseburger, why not expend than energy learning a new recipe or finding ways to get a week's worth of groceries to your house without driving?

Many people take a great deal of pleasure in clipping coupons, shopping sales, and visiting many grocery stores to update and utilize price books. I'm sure that all of these methods are an excellent use of time, but my greatest saving methods at the grocery store have been Buying Whole Foods In Bulk and Shopping En Masse. I've further refined this technique to the point of creating A Formulaic Approach To Saving In Bulk.

In terms of social equality, buying food can't always be about saving a buck. Buying your veggies from a local farmer will often be more expensive than buying the same product imported from another climate. It's not because local farmers are jerks, it's because much more time and money has gone to empowering the national infrastructure and corporate supply systems that make this possible. Unfortunately, those same infrastructures and supply systems are quite efficient at shipping your money straight out of your community while undermining small-scale food operations. So supporting a farmer may reduce your personal choices today, but is one way to participate in a national shift in priorities from big business to community well-being. The same goes for local grocery cooperatives and other locally-owned businesses.

The reason I say that shopping itself can be as encompassing as gardening or cooking is that there is much more to groceries than the weekly hour-long stroll down the aisles. There are many, many ways to get food to your house. Darling and I used to shop once a week by bus. When we discovered an organic grocery delivery service specializing in local farm produce, we were happy to pay the extra for the convenience of not having to go to the store! Today we share the shopping responsibilities with our seven housemates, three of whom have done the weekly shopping (for NINE PEOPLE) by bicycle! We also use the mail order source Azure Standard for our bulk soap and laundry detergents.

We also put a lot of thought into what we buy. After some debate, Darling and I agreed that local products trump organic. Later, we perfected A Packaging-Free Shopping Trip. That way we were avoiding not only the environmental impact of driving to pick up groceries and buying products that had already been shipped hundreds of miles, but we didn't have to worry about contributing to landfills.

Not all food need come from the grocery store, of course. There are many ways to procure Free Food. My best piece of advice in this area is that you will get slightly more back from the land - be it a container garden or an acre lot - than you give to it. Plant something every day and learn to save seeds. I'll write more on these topics and provide links on this page.

Learning to cook and bake was my first, and greatest, accomplishment. Don't worry if you don't know how to boil water, I was in the same exact boat seven years ago. I taught myself How To Save In The Kitchen using blogs and library resources. Eventually I learned enough to prepare holiday feasts for my friends and family ever Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

Once I mastered A Very Basic Bread Recipe, I had the confidence to experiment with noodles,  Home-Made Seitan, yogurt, and eventually cheese. I don't make any of these product religiously (anymore), but I do cook every single day.

Web Resources:
Hillbilly Housewife
The Family Homestead

Books!!!
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
The Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyzyn