Expensive Eating – Final Reflection

Several months ago I choose to start an experiment to make a change in my life. I wanted to do something that would be fairly easy to accomplish within a short time and have a goal that I could have measurable progress towards. I choose to make a change in my eating habits to reduce the bad habits I have of eating out so much. Not long after I began the project I jotted down the following statement kinda as a goal to give myself some guidance.

Taking a look at my life and personal choices and how they affect my immediate environment I realized I needed a change. My relationship with food was wasteful, inefficient, and ultimately damaging to my health and well being. This is an attempt to study how to have a healthy relationship to the food I consume and take steps in a better direction.

For academic purposes the project is concluded but the goal still remains. In the past 3 months I believe I have made important steps toward this and have had much introspection of what this means to me and my life. I have used many philosophical concepts to assist in gaining a better understanding of why I am doing this and the importance of it. These include concepts of privilege, voluntary simplicity and ecofeminism.

Some measurable goals I have achieved is the reduction of eating out expenses and the increase of eating at home. This has allowed me to be more efficient with my home grocery use and prevent a lot of waste. A measurable savings measured in dollars of around $200 a month. There are a lot of benefits that are unmeasurable as well. Such as better use of time, the increased closeness to family and the lower health risk.

The most important thing is and improved relationship between myself and environment, specifically regarding the food that my family consumes. It has not been perfect but progress has been made. I’ve begun taking baby step with the actions I’ve taken and the knowledge I’ve gained so far. After I’ve gone as far as I can with this I suppose I’ll have new goals and experiments so as to always be moving forward. Perhaps I’ll try reducing my meat consumption, or recycling more. It has been a pleasure to do this and to share with you. Thank you for reading.

Expensive Eating – Update

My lived experience project is going great. I thought I would give another update. First some numbers to show you my progress. Today I am at $358.96 and have hopes of breaking below the important $300 mark soon. We haven’t done very well on eating at home only this past week so I suspect it will be several weeks before we can consistently keep the numbers around $300 or below But I will continue to work on this. I’m glad to say that I will never see the number go above $400 which if nothing else is an accomplishment.

Here is an update graph so you can visualize my progress better.

Also what I have done is used the data from my the tracking of both my eating out expenses and meal expenses to work out how much my eating out cost me when compared to eating at home. I figured out that during the 4 month period that I looked at that we ate out for 41% of our meals. When look at the cost however, the meals eaten out cost much more at 56% of the total cost of food. The final number I came up with is that eating out cost probably at least twice as much as eating at home.

The actual ratio is 1.9 but this is a conservative estimate and if I used different assumptions it could be as high as 4 times. So every time I make the decision to eat at home instead of eat out I save the difference which is less that $4 per person.

Look at statistics and averages that I have been able to find I’ve realized that for the US my numbers are real close to national averages. Even at my current low numbers I am pretty well average as far as the amounts and cost spent on eating out. This is a growing concern is society and something I see in the news often. The ill effects of out fast food culture, the epidemic obesity, and many other negative effects. Just this morning one of the morning shows featured a lady whose child got really sick from food allergies, so she researched and wrote a book with the theme that the food we eat is basically killing us and poisoning us.

I think it’s weird that we have this problem in the US and industrial nations that we eat too much and the stuff we eat is increasingly unhealthy. As opposed to countries in the global south, some of whom have problems getting enough food to feed themselves. I believe this relates very much to ecofeminism. People need to stop and think and consider the connections with nature and others and the effect their actions have on nature. Eating out is a drain on our finances and our health. Our capitalistic society encourages the spending though, it increases the wealth of fast food corporations, creates jobs, and makes us look better with a better GDP. When eating at home the cost of the food is less but the value and knowledge that comes from the preparation(mostly by women) is not included in the economics.

That’s my thoughts for now. Hope you enjoyed.

Expensive Eating

My lived experience project is going well so I wanted to give an update on my progress. My goal is to reduce my the eating expenses for my family to eliminate wasteful spending. The biggest of which is eating out at restaurants.

Here’s my newly updated progress chart. Click it to see the larger version.

Yesterday was a milestone as far as progress because I dropped below $400 for the first time giving me the lowest number so far. I’m at $371 currently assuming I don’t eat out today. Each day after today that I don’t eat out will be a new low. I did horribly during spring break and we ate out every day that week, but I’ve made up for it this week. If I can keep the trend going it may drop below $300 next week.

Also you’ll see my grocery expenses (the pink line). If all goes well, my grocery expenses will exceed my eating out expenses for the first time. I’m still trying to see if my grocery bill will go up as my eating out goes down. That’s difficult to prove and so far I don’t see any indications of that. Maybe it won’t change. Another part of this is that we need to and are working on being more efficient with the groceries we have. Many times we eat out while we have good stuff and home that we should be eating and we end up throwing a lot of stuff from the fridge away.

Reducing expenses is very much a current topic on everyones mind. Seems I see it on TV all the time. I’ve seen a few shows where they take a family and drastically reduce their expenses and then see how it affects them. Oprah has her “What you can live without experiment.” where families experiment with reducing.

Yesterday morning on the Today Show Matt Lauer was interviewing some expert who gave the top best way for reducing expenses.

1. Cancel Cell Phone
2. Get rid of extra car
3. Prepare more meals at home
4. Stop shopping for clothes

Eating out is always on list like these because it can take up a huge part of someones budget. The statistic he gave was that 42% of people’s meal are eaten outside the home which is pretty close to my experience. I can’t easily do the others at this point, but reducing eating out is the easiest. You have to start somewhere.

It’s weird to think that a big problem that we have in this country is that we have so much disposable income that we have problems controlling our unnecessary spending.

Expensive Eating

Time for an update on my lived experience project. I’m working on reducing my eating out expenses which lowers my overall food cost and carbon footprint. Why am I doing this? It’s part of my plan to take baby steps to reduce my consumption and live a simpler life. The ideas behind voluntary simplicity are the goal I hope to achieve someday. I found a document on voluntary simplicity that has been a great guide for this.

http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0304spiritpsych/030409simplicity/SimplicityFrame.html

Specifically the document talks about how everyone should simplify their lives to the point where our minimal needs are met and then perhaps a certain reserve about that. It mentioned that only a third of what we spend is used to meet minimal needs and of the money we spend on food 56% percent is used to satisfy hunger. This was published in 1936 so I bet it’s much higher on average for Americans now.

So this is something I’m working on. It is more difficult than I had hoped. Right now my average is the lowest I’ve seen so far. It was pretty easy to cut out eating at the expensive restaurants. Stop eating and Olive Garden and Red Lobster and places like that and the numbers drop pretty fast. I can see now that I probably won’t achieve an average of 0 but it would be nice to see it cut in half in the next 30 days. Here is my data chart I use to track my progress. It covers from Oct 08 thru today.

I am working on keeping it under $400 for now. That’s the average for my household which makes it harder because I don’t have full control of the expenses. Wish me luck. I am trying really hard to resist going out to have Chinese for lunch.

Expensive Eating

Hey there. For my blog project I am putting together a number of concepts to work on reducing my ecological footprint. I’m reading a great book called Radical Simplicity that gives a lot of great tools and strategies for reduction of my carbon footprint. One of the tools is based on another popular book called Your Money of Your Life (YMOYL) which really goes into detail about an individual’s relationship with money and relates the money you make to life energy which most people waste a lot of.

So, my project will be just to reduce expenses as much as possible and to reclaim wasted resources starting with the one expense that I have the most immediate control over which is my food budget. I know that in my household we way too much on eating out so I first want to dramatically reduce that to work on reducing the total amount spend overall on eating. I have always kept pretty good record of our household expenses so I can easily see results. I know for example that between the 2 adults and our 8 year old kid that we spend about $500 a month on eating out at restaurants and about $400 is spent on groceries. The experiment is to reduce the eating out portion as much as possible which will likely increase the eating at home portion. I’m interested in how the ratio of eating out and eating at home will shift going under that assumption that eating out is way more expensive.

So that’s it for now. Wish me luck. I’ll post more details every week with details of how it’s going and with data if your interested in seeing that.