A Year Without Groceries Update

I know some of our readers might not be following our other blog or even know about our big project so I figured I’d give an update about it here.

We just passed our half way point through our Year Without Groceries. For those not familiar with it, we decided to go a year without buying food from grocery stores, box stores, convenience stores or restaurants. We’ve been getting our food from our garden, an organic CSA, the farmers’ market, and specialty shops such as real butchers, fish mongers and spice merchants. We’ve been really focusing on eating humanely raised pastured meat and sustainable fish.We recently bought a whole hog that was raised on organic milk and grain. Tasty goodness.

Our final 3 months we’ve decided to not buy any food. We’ll have to survive off of what we can grow and what we have stored. I’m hoping we can do it considering how far behind we are in the garden.

Passing the 6 month mark has made us think about what we’re going to do when our year is up. We’ve decided to continue doing the no grocery thing (but not the extreme of not buying any food) but give ourselves a small amount of leeway. That leeway is we’ll allow ourselves to go out to eat once a month at restaurants. We’ll still stay out of grocery stores.

One of the things that helped us decide to continue doing this was that we save so much money doing this. We used to spend $120-$180 a week on food. We’ve now spent about $150/week on average but we’re buying much higher quality food. The average does include the whole hog that we purchased last month. I’m expecting our average to do down substantially over time though because of that bulk purchase and not needing to buy meat for quite awhile.

I’m really enjoying learning about food. I’m learning to appreciate food more. I’m also learning a lot about most of the food you find at grocery stores. Especially the processed food. Bread doesn’t need to have 20 ingredients in it. Real blueberries taste better than the fake ones in store bought bagels and muffins.

After learning what I have about industrial there is no way I could go back to doing it so it makes sense for us to stay out of the grocery store.