<p>Not all apples come from USA. Some comes from New Zealand. Fresh from New Zealand.</p>
<p>I read about this community project in this month’s Sunset magazine.
This is the kind of thing I am talking about.
[Birch</a> Community Services, Inc. : Gardens : BCSI Teaching Garden Year 1](<a href=“http://www.birchcommunityservices.org/Garden_BCSI_Year1.asp]Birch”>http://www.birchcommunityservices.org/Garden_BCSI_Year1.asp)</p>
<p>This made me think of the Michigan woman who’s being prosecuted by the City of Oak Park for planting a vegetable garden in her front yard. </p>
<p>[Vegetable</a> Garden Brings Criminal Charges in Oak Park, Michigan - ABC News](<a href=“Woman Faces Jail Time For Growing Vegetable Garden in Her Own Front Lawn - ABC News”>Woman Faces Jail Time For Growing Vegetable Garden in Her Own Front Lawn - ABC News)</p>
<p>Mom60, my own dear old mother vociferously complains about the cost of certain types of produce which traditionally are in abundance in the local area. For example, Washington is the largest single source of fresh apples on earth. Yet apples in Seattle area supermarkets fetch a premium price and have been expensive for years! Mother swears the best apples are exported, leaving the locals with costly sloppy seconds. LOL. To get back to a point I made earlier, I’ve found that imported Galas from Chile and Braeburns from New Zealand are downright tasty, and typically priced less than domestic Gala and Red Delicious apples (with the exception of the usually bland New York Red Delicious, which are always discounted, in my experience).</p>
<p>LW: Regarding those apples: remember that different apple trees fruit at different times. You can’t eat Fujis year round because the trees most fruit for a few weeks in late September. Gravensteins are earlier, August-ish. If you look around the grocery store, you’ll notice that one variety of apple is on sale–and the others aren’t. The one variety is the one to buy. But if you want to buy what’s in season, you have to be flexible. And out of season apples (ones from WA right now were picked last fall and stored under nitrogen for 10 months) are not going to be tasty.</p>
<p>(I had a spat with DH about this a few days ago. He likes chicken salad with apples in it, and I put in nectarines–nectarines are in season and local, apples are from New Zealand and I won’t buy them. And I won’t buy ten-month-old apples at $2/pound when I can buy nectarines at $1/pound and cherries for $2 and they’re fresh.)</p>
<p>Dmd77, I vividly remember the elementary school educational documentaries about Washington State apples and how they are essentially put in suspended animation for months at a time in huge warehouse coolers. They fed we kid a lot of that type of fluffy promotion, sort of like the ‘duck and cover’ videos, back in the day. LOL.</p>
<p>dmd77, I too like to eat with the seasons. Asparagus in the early spring, cherries in the late spring, nectarines & corn later, then tomatoes (in our area, not ripe yet!), tangerines at Christmas, avocados in January. In-season produce tastes way better, and it gives a rhythm to the year. </p>
<p>But in my area, in-season produce, like everything else, is expensive. To find cheaper produce that is still fresh and tasty, I’d have to move. And I like living here.</p>
<p>My DH is a cardiologist whose patients with heart disease and diabetes will often tell him they can’t afford to eat healthy foods. Perhaps in some cases, it is true. But more often he thinks it is because they have eaten sugary/fried/high carb foods for so long, it is an addiction that is hard to break. He will joke with them and say “Gravy is not a food group!” or “Potato chips are not vegetables!” Most everyone on this thread seems to love healthy fruits and vegetables, but there is a segment of the population that rarely eats produce or even lean meats. It is a huge struggle to get people to change. So I can’t help but wonder how much of the problem is cost and how much of it is about a radical change in eating.</p>
<p>I know a few kids that rarely eat fruits/vegetables. They both don’t have a lot of energy, ie get tired easily and have lots of health issues even at a very young age(under 20).</p>
<p>DH started to eat veggies in his early twenties since he would go out with Chinese friends and they would order and eat <em>family</em> style and he wanted to get along. In his mid-fifties, after a quarter of a century of watching me eat fruit, he finally started to eat fruit on his own and not at my initiative. People can change, albeit slowly.</p>
<p>I was thinking about this when I bought (more) peaches today. Two peaches cost $1.50. Two large peaches are 120 calories. </p>
<p>For $1.50 a person could buy a hamburger on the dollar menu and get at least twice the calories. </p>
<p>Peaches have no fat. Peaches taste better. But if you are hungry and have little money, which would you go for.</p>
<p>I’m in the office right now and am almost done with dinner: one turkey meatball, 2 cups of Okra, 2 cups of Broccoli. I’ll pick up a few apples from the supermarket on the way home and have one for dessert.</p>
<p>It’s a pretty cheap dinner but I suspect that most people wouldn’t care for it.</p>
<p>It depends where you live too - at Safeway here the produce is really quite expensive, compared to perhaps those random stores in the SF Mission district (holy cow! SO CHEAP!)</p>
<p>I think in general, healthy food costs more than unhealthy food. Or to put it a different way, if you are trying to feed your family on a very tight budget, you are more likely to opt for unhealthy choices.</p>
<p>A few examples I noticed while grocery shopping last night. Only two types of fruit were under $2/lb – bananas ($0.79/lb) and plums ($1.69/lb). We just ate plums for a week, so I opted for 2 lbs of strawberries ($2/lb), 2 lbs of nectarines ($2/lb), and some bananas for a total cost of $9. For my family of four, this fruit will probably last about five days.<br>
But brownie mix was on sale for $0.99/box. So if I were strapped for grocery money and trying my best to have snacks for a full week, I could buy two brownie mixes and a dozen eggs (I need eggs for the mixes – I’ll assume I have some vegetable oil at home for this exercise). Two times $0.99 + $1.39 for the eggs is just $3.39; way less than the $9 for fruit. Plus my two boxes of brownies will probably last all week and I have some eggs left over.</p>
<p>Last night I bought an 8-lb pork shoulder ($1.49/lb) to make pulled pork. We will probably get three meals from this big hunk of meat, so it’s a good bargain…but what if my budget were so tight this week that I couldn’t spend $12 on one item? Maybe I would have to buy the $3 package of hot dogs.</p>
<p>In the bulk foods section, I bought some almonds for $7/lb. They will be my afternoon pick-me-up for a few days. But the assorted candies (tootsie rolls, caramels, etc) are only $2.39/lb.</p>
<p>There were examples all over the store: 100% whole wheat bread is more expensive than plain white sandwich bread. Vegetable oil for cooking is less expensive than olive oil. At the deli case, bologna is less expensive than low-fat turkey breast. Making the healthy choice in each case will add up to a significantly higher grocery bill.</p>
<p>Of course, besides the economic incentives for buying unhealthy food, there may also be habits in play. Unfortunately, many adults living in poverty were once children living in poverty. So they grew up on the unhealthy food; it’s what is familiar. Brownies taste better to them than nectarines, and it’s a hard habit to break.</p>
<p>I’m curious what some of your grocery bills add up to in the end. With the way things are going for us at the moment I couldn’t dream of spending $10 on fruit even if it doesn’t sound like that much money for a week, but I am an inexperienced grocery shopper and I think we are doing something wrong anyway. While I was in school, my bf and I usually only spent $20-$40 in two weeks for groceries, but we only ate two meals a day, one was usually just a sandwich or a bagel, and we only cooked dinner two or so times a week and ate leftovers the other days. </p>
<p>Right now, we are cooking a different /very/ simple meal every day, mostly just two or three ingredient stir fries with simple salads-- we dont have to buy meat because mom buys that in bulk and freezes it, and we’re spending between $100 and $120 a week and are struggling to have enough left over to get stuff for breakfast, lunch, or snacks or laundry detergent and paper towels. $120 a week is a /lot/ of money for us, I’m not sure that this is sustainable. We’re shopping at the cheapest grocery store in the area and buying what I thought was cheap, I’m not sure why it’s so much, or if I am just naive to how much it costs to buy food.</p>
<p>My mom only cooks dinner once or twice a week and we eat toast and frozen dinner crap for dinner the other nights, I am starting to understand why.</p>
<p>Emaheevul, you’re spending about $8 per person per day. I don’t say that $100-$120 per week isn’t a considerable expense, because it clearly is for you, but $8 a day is by no means extravagant.</p>
<p>Is there a possibility you could either bake your own bread, or use some other, cheaper kind of grain instead of eating bread? Rice or cornmeal?</p>
<p>Rather than making lettuce salads (if you are doing that) could you chop up other fresh vegetables instead? Carrots & cabbage, maybe? In my area, lettuce is not that cheap. (Even though it’s grown here, sigh.)</p>
<p>I use rags instead of paper towels, then throw them in the wash with everything else. Might that work for you?</p>
<p>[CTV</a> British Columbia - Healthy eating is a privilege of the rich: U.S. study - CTV News](<a href=“Healthy eating is a privilege of the rich: U.S. study | CTV News”>Healthy eating is a privilege of the rich: U.S. study | CTV News)</p>
<p>We’ve figured out some good ways to incorporate more beans into my diet (and the rest of the family too). My wife cooks a pound of beans and makes chili (grinds own meat) or mixes soy chorizo with the beans (from Trader Joes). I like beans with something else though I can just eat them plain. Of course the expense is in my wife’s labor and in my trips to Trader Joes. Trader Joes has cheap Chorizo and it’s near where I work so it is convenient but Trader Joes are relatively hard to come by across the country. Similar products at grocery stores cost twice as much. I gather that regular grocery stores consider them a premium product that vegetarians are happy to pay more for while Trader Joes considers them as staples. I find that Tempeh and Tofu are much less at Trader Joes than at discount supermarkets.</p>
<p>Emaheevul; any type of processed food tends to cost more, incl. bread and bagels. Rice and old-fashioned oatmeal are cheaper. I used to cook up brown rice and eat it warm with milk when I had a low paying job. (And congrats on your new job!!!) Unfortunately, fluid milk is pretty expensive. Remember that the most expensive food is stuff you buy and don’t/won’t eat!!! </p>
<p>Watch for sales, eat generic vs. name brands, be mindful esp. of produce prices. Your cheap grocery store may not be the cheapest across the board if another store is running a sale on a few items to bring shoppers in. </p>
<p>My widowed mom shops at Costco and purchases produce she knows is good for her but doesn’t eat. No savings that way. Our family downsized its refrigerator because food was getting lost at the back of our old one, and I hate the waste of throwing away food that has gone bad.</p>
<p>BCEagle91, you would be surprised by the variety in flavor of different types of beans. Discovering a taste that appeals to you will be a sure way to motivate you to get more beans into your diet. Unfortunately, most supermarkets simply carry only a few varieties of beans, at least in the northeast. On vacations to the Carolinas and Georgia I am always impressed by the great number and variety in the dried beans aisle. In addition to finding a specialty market in your area with a good bean inventory is to check online retailers. I can’t remember the name but there’s a New England online retailer whose website has at least two pages of offerings of dried beans. It might be the ‘Vermont Bean Company.’</p>