Is Your Health On A Budget?

Is your health suffering because of your budget?  Most of you know that we live on extremely low income and so budgeting food is always a challenge.  We garden and have a small farm.  We have added chickens to the farm and hope to be getting fresh eggs soon. However, we still buy staples like bread and milk.

Let Them Eat Cake

I slipped into Walmart the other day to buy a loaf of sandwich bread.  We generally stick to whole wheat bread as it the much healthier choice than white, bleached bread.  I guess the price difference hit me because I was just getting bread and not other groceries.  The generic Walmart brand of white bread was just under $1 a loaf and one of the longer loaves. There was no Walmart brand wheat bread and the least expensive loaf of Whole grain bread was $2.98.  Wow… I was a bit shocked.  Prices for whole wheat bread had been running about double the cost of white bread but this is triple the cost.  It reminded me of Marie Antoinette’s instruction when the peasants couldn’t afford bread, “Let them eat cake!”    And by the way, you can buy a small cake for less than a loaf of  healthy bread.

It really made me think about the cost of eating healthy.  Prices have risen for just about everything.  Chicken prices, beef prices, fresh vegetable and fruit prices have all soared.  I know that the prices are driven by the farmer’s cost of production and then shipping all relying on gas and oil but it seems to me that the cost of producing and shipping white bread should be just as high.  I am sure that Walmart loses money on their white bread because it draws people into the store.  It was the one reason why I stopped there that day and not at our closer store.

The Solution?

The bread solution is fairly simple.  I need to start baking bread at home and my challenge is that it is difficult to slice homemade bread into sandwich sized slices.  If anyone has a foolproof way of thin slicing homemade bread, please let me know. Whole wheat flour is also a bit more expensive than white bleached flour but the cost of five pounds of flour is still less than a loaf of bread.

I am going to be checking out our local farmer’s market this week.  Hopefully, I can not only help my neighbors but I can also buy some fresh, healthy vegetables for less.  They have the added benefit of being fresher.  I can some and some go into the freezer.  If you don’t have time to can, freezing is the way to go.  Most vegetables can be frozen after washing and blanching which just kills any germs on the surface of the vegetable.  I freeze whole tomatoes and peppers out of our garden just by washing them and putting them in a bag.  The skins on the tomatoes come off easily when they thaw and I don’t have to spend hours getting all of them done at the same time.

My question to you is whether you are sacrificing health for price?  I find that there are times when I end up buying the cheaper, less healthy option instead of the fresher or healthier variety.

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