My mom loves cooking. I love eating. It is no surprise that I am not a skinny man today. My employees asked me what my favorite kind of food was a couple of months ago. "Anything that I do not have to make myself," was my response. I love Italian food, Chinese food, sandwiches, pizza, Thai food, Hamburgers, Mexican food, anything with cheese on it. I am a big fan of eating.
Eating always carries a few challenges with it. Almost everything is available any time you want it so there are very few restrictions that are externally placed upon us. All the restrictions usually come from within. The restrictions could be time available, budget allotment, nutritional value, forbidden ingredients, calorie count, or just living in a family of picky eaters.
The most common struggle that my wife and I have over food has to do with quality. Her perspective is that whatever we consume most should be of the highest quality in order to give the kids the best nutritional benefit. I lean towards cheap products for staples with higher quality/cost going towards items that we do not use as much of. We never sit down and fight out what kind of groceries we need to get. It is just that whoever is shopping looks at the aisles through their own lens...which could be very different than the other person. I do have to say that I have come to a point, after 17 years of marriage, where I do carry my wife's voice in my head when I go to the store. I never used to wonder, "Does my cart have enough leafy greens in it," before. Now I do.
Simple living has forces...I mean encouraged us to sit down and work out what we need to buy each week and an estimate of what that will cost. In doing that we are cutting our grocery bill by nearly 60%, which is outstanding. There are a lot of people who take their simple living approach to food much more seriously than we do. They will meal plan and prepare for the month, grow their own food, make their own condiments, raise livestock in order to eat in a more organic and focused way. We are not so zealous.
Again Simple Living is not about living a spartan existence. It is about intentionally focusing your resources in order to craft the lifestyle that you wish to pursue. A garden with chickens and goats and compost and root cellars is not the lifestyle that we want to pursue at the moment. Spending less on groceries so that we can bridge this period between jobs? Yes. Having more time to bake and cook with the kids? Yes. It is not glamorous. I will probably never write a book entitled, "Feeding your family on $12 per day...with minimal dishes!" But this is how we want to invest in food during this season.
No comments:
Post a Comment