Food, glorious food

Kent and I have a second strategy we use to control grocery costs. I wrote about shopping the pantry earlier this month; the second approach involves buying mostly first order foods. I learned about first order foods and stacked costs a couple of years ago from a blog I read, Casual Kitchen.

Daniel, the blog owner, wrote an article about stacked costs and second order foods and discussed how food manufacturing layers in additional costs at every processing step. Think of first order foods as those that come directly from the garden with almost no processing. Second order foods are processed, packaged, reduced in size and scale—and the costs associated with that processing gets passed right along to you and me.

I’m not going to outline the entire article; go read it, it’s well written and worth reading. I do think that sticking with mostly first order foods is another reason why Kent and I have been able to cut our grocery bill.

Kent and I have fun rating food orders, and sometimes we’ll add a decimal point. For example, the so-called baby carrots you can buy in the produce department, which aren’t baby carrots but have been peeled and somehow whittled down to size—we rate those a 1.5. But the individual serving size cups of peeled, sliced and diced fruit are clearly a 2. Then the bagged salad mixes are 1.5 while the bagged salad mixes with small packets of dressing, croutons, bacon bits and so on are off the chart. By the way, we don’t buy any of these things. We just point and laugh.

Edited to add: bonus article link today for Casual Kitchen. You should read his blog.