Living frugally

Elser fed two people for a week on $50, the amount she would normally spend on a "couple of nights' take-away food"....
...How did it go?
I bought cheaper brands of everything, used leftovers, wasted nothing, plundered the cupboards and garden, and spent more time than I have shopping around. We didn't starve, in fact we ate reasonably well, but it was very tight. If I replaced the stores we would be over budget.
New-season apples and end-of-season plums are about $1 each; why is in-season fruit so expensive? Why are snack foods high in salt and sugar cheaper than carrots?
Household expenditure for a couple with two dependent children averages $218.30 a week. There is not a lot leeway in that for meat, milk or cheese, let alone chickpeas and rice. Hopefully, the two children like water, bruised fruit and homegrown silverbeet.
Read the whole article here.

Now this household is no stranger to living frugally and does a better job than the writer of this column. Basically because we have had more practice at it.

Still it does raise some interesting questions:

Why are snack foods, of the salt and fat kind cheaper than carrots?
Why is in season produce not necessarily cheaper than stored, imported or, horror of horrors, processed?
Why have the cheaper 'house' brands been vanishing off the shelves? -not because they are out of stock either.
Why is flour suddenly more expensive, weight for weight, than sugar? You can substitute sugar but not flour.
Where has all the cheap meat gone? There are whole cuts like belly flap and tongue that just are not in the butchers, even lamb's fry and pig's heads are hard to find. It can't all be going into cat food. Have you seen the price of soup bones lately? or neck chops, or bacon bones?

I do feel sorry for vegetable growers, every man and his dog round here now has a veggie patch of some description. Some have gone to the extent of filling what were formally flower beds with veggies as well.

There could well be whole families turning vegan this year and not for any querky idologal reasons either.