The $100-A-Week Farmers Market Challenge
Categories: At the Farmer's Market
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| Dave Lieberman |
Shopping at the farmers market is the prerogative of the wealthy, right? It's a place for well-heeled yuppies with environmental guilt to pretend they're in oh-so-enlightened France or Italy. Eating local food is a nice buzzword but out of the reach of the average Californian, right?
Wrong, and after my snarky post about how the University of Washington proved that junk food is cheaper than healthy food, I set out to prove it. While there's no definitive source on what an average family spends on food (it's not, for example, a Census question), a jaunt around the Internet shows that the average Californian family spends between $85 and $110 on food in a week, nearly half of which is for meals out.
As it happened, the day I sat down to write this, the TV at the gym was tuned to the Food Network, which was showing "Sandra's Money Saving Meals"--the queen of "semi-homemade" cooking, famous for using expensive, processed convenience foods, is now talking about cooking from scratch to save money. The irony is there--it's not delicious, because I saw what she cooked, but it's there. The worst part, though, is that she still managed to spend nearly $20 for four people for a single meal, without planning for much in the way of leftovers. I'm not sure how she managed to turn a plate of white macaroni, red beans and a few vegetables into a $20 meal.
I set out to prove that my family of three could eat local food, including sustainably raised meat, for $100. I went to the largest--and most expensive--farmers market in Orange County, on Saturdays in Irvine, built a menu around vegetables, added protein, and then supplemented with food from other stores.
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