The Cheap Food Trap

I recently learned about all the horrible things that are in store bought almond milk.  I mean, it's bad.  I definitely don't want to feed that to my kids, especially with how much of the stuff they drink.  It would be really harmful in those levels, especially to Chai since he's so little.  The only solution is to make almond milk at home, and so I did.

The thing is, it takes raw almonds, and those can be pretty expensive.  Bought locally, it would cost about $7 a day for enough to make all the almond milk my boys drink. That is TOO expensive, but an astute friend turned me onto nutsinbulk.com, where I can get all the raw almonds I need to make my boys' enough almond milk for as little as $3.75 a day. That's the same price as the store bought stuff. Score one for the good guys.  Granted, it is a lesser quantity of milk that we get from that amount of almonds, but it is still enough for the boys.  They just won't get their cups FULL full 3x a day.  It's still enough, and it lacks the additives that would harm their health, so it's a good trade-off.

I had mentioned that I am now making my boys' almond milk, and a friend who is a military wife approached me about it.  She asked how I make almond milk, because her boys drink it, too, and she thought making it would definitely save money.  I explained that I don't do this for cost-effectiveness, although I have found a way to get the cost down to the same as buying the store bought variety, that I am doing this because of the harmful additives in store bought almond milk, and that I don't want to expose my boys to that stuff.  I also explained that if you look at the actual cost of raw almonds, store bought almond milk is actually unrealistically cheap.  It's like store bought meat in that way.  When you factor in what it actually costs to correctly produce this product, you should have questions about why the stuff in the store is priced as low as it is, because something isn't right if it costs that little.  Obviously, for the meat, factory farming is to blame, and for the almond milk, it's full of harmful chemicals that nobody should ever ingest.  That's why it's so cheap.  Cheap food is something to be skeptical of.

Now, I've been in a position of having to eat cheap food.  I'm not one for canned garbage, so we never did that, but my family spent about half of last year living on beans and rice, plus whatever vegetables we could grow in the hard desert climate we lived in, mostly peppers and squash.  I know that the beans and rice we ate were not organic, but I also know that it doesn't cost that much to grow beans, so it makes sense to me that they're cheap.  I don't know much about rice farming (insert joke about being Asian by marriage, and how I should know that, here), but from what I can tell, the price of rice is pretty believable, too.  As far as cheap food to eat as an alternative to starving to death, beans and rice are about as good as it gets.  They may not be the most appetizing things after you've lived on them for a month or so, but I still stand by my choice to eat beans and rice as opposed to things like Spaghettios or Chef Boyardee, which is the other style of cheap foods.  That stuff comes in cans sealed with BPA, is full of preservatives, artificial colors, artificial flavors, and stuff I can't pronounce.  Give me the beans and rice over that stuff any day.

Now, here's my thing about food.  I think that those who can afford to eat well have somewhat of a social responsibility to do that.  We, as a society, have to vote with our dollars against Monsanto, factory farming, and irresponsible food production practices that put us all at risk.  Not everyone is in a position to do that.  The $16 that I spent on local, organic, pasture raised, pork chops last week, would have had to feed my entire family a week's worth of food this time last year.  Then, when we were living on beans, rice, and whatever we could grow in the dirt, we were not in a position to vote with our dollars in any meaningful way.  (Although, in a small way, choosing beans and rice instead of certain other cheap foods is still voting against Monsanto.) Now that we have actual money to spend on food, it's important that we spend conscientiously.  No, we don't spend an inordinate amount of money on food.  To be honest, we spend less than a lot of people.  Our grocery budget is about $100 every two weeks at the grocery store, and then $80 a week at the farmers' market.  That adds up to $520 a month, which isn't much when you consider that there are 5 people in our family.  Even so, that's $6240 a year that we get to decide who to support with.  We try to make sure that as much as possible of that goes to local farmers, ranchers, and fishermen who are doing it right, and that as little as possible goes to big corporations with questionable methods, and of course, we shoot for not giving a single penny to Monsanto (although that's easier said than done since they have their hands in everything).

Don't give me that line about how if you're military, you're poor and can't afford to eat well.  Military culture has a huge emphasis on being a major cheapskate when it comes to grocery shopping (I've never seen so many extreme couponers in my life as I did on Ft. Bliss), but don't fool yourself.  You can afford to do better if you make it a priority.  On the enlisted side, there's this thing called BAS that every soldier who doesn't hold a meal card, gets as part of their pay each month.  Look on your LES, it's there.  It's about $300 a month, and it's for food.  Assuming you spend about what we spend on food in a month, that means you're only really spending $220 out of pocket.  That's not bad, and the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

You'll be making yourself and your family healthier.  Sure, in the military community, nobody has medical bills, but who actually wants to require medical attention beyond the simple and routine when they're in their 20's, 30's, or 40's?  I would hope, nobody. Even if you don't pay for your medical care, an investment in your health pays off nicely in many ways. The fact is, we don't HAVE to be sickly and in need of medication while we're young.  If we live in a healthy and sustainable way, and feed ourselves foods that we actually evolved to eat (read: NOT a bunch of ingredients we can't pronounce, NOT feedlot meats, NOT hormone loaded dairy products) most of us will find that our bodies work pretty well. 

What's more, it's socially responsible, because when you vote with your dollars for good foods, local farmers, and sustainable production methods, then you're sending a clear message that that's what the people want.  If you're in a position to be able to send this message loudly, then you need to do that, because not everybody has the means to cast as substantial a vote. Trust me, the loss of profit from the person who chooses beans and rice as opposed to Spaghettios is a tiny fraction of the loss of profit from the person who buys a side of beef from a local farmer instead of the store shelves. All our voices must be heard, but some speak undeniably louder than others.

Food is an issue, and these days, there really are only two ways to be. You're either part of the solution, or you're part of the problem.  Be part of the solution.