Day 68

Noodle soup with onion bread

I've been thinking about the economics of eating raw. Autismom mentioned in regard to my last post how similar my crackers look to the ones she buys for $6 a bag. I've purchased similar crackers before as well, and those bags probably contain as many crackers as 1 dehydrator tray yielded for me. My batch made 6 trays and took 2 cups of flax seeds. I purchased about 4.4 lbs from my local health food store for $10 and I still have over half a gallon of seeds left (judging from the overflow of my mason jar storage). There are other ingredients in there; pumpkin seeds, parsley, cilantro, garlic powder, salt... but as with the flax seeds, the cost is nominal.

One of the things that keeps coming up in the forums I peruse is how expensive it is to eat raw. As far as I can tell, that's pretty subjective. Coming from a junk food vegan diet, I know we're spending more. No more $1 boxes of pasta for two nights of dinner. We don't stock up as much on sales because most of what we purchase now is perishable and our freezer space is limited. We used to get by on $100/month for both of us. But we weren't happy and we felt like crap. That's why we became raw in the first place.

On the other end of the spectrum, when I was living alone about three years ago, it was all Whole Foods all the time. I spent around $70 a week ($280 a month) just for myself. I did cook some (I baked a lot), but I was still buying a ton of packaged food. Healthy and organic, but packaged nonetheless.

To be honest, I'm not sure how much we're spending now. I started to keep track when I first started the blog, but it's time consuming and boring. We go to the produce market every couple of days, so it would be a constant update on the prices of produce in our corner of the world. And I don't want to keep track, either. I don't want to feel guilty about how much we spend on food. We get by from week to week since we're not really in a position to save at the moment, and if we can reasonably afford it, I'm not going to worry about it. We buy in bulk where we can ( I have chia seeds, hemp seeds and hemp protien coming my way from The Raw Food World... I am unreasonably excited). I know that we're definitely spending more than we used to, but we're also definitely spending less than I did on just myself. For the most part, we're happier and healthier, and you can't really put a price on that.

We don't buy many organic products. A lot of our produce comes from a local produce market that carries a large percentage of local fruits and vegetables. Their prices are the best around, as well. I feel good about that. I would like to eat organic, but that probably won't happen until I have a salary. Conventional produce hasn't killed me yet, and spinach trumps potato chips any day, fertilizers aside. My sprouting seeds are organic, as are some of my bulk goods. The amount will probably increase as the farmer's markets open and I grow some veggies on our balcony, but it's not something I'm going to stress about.

Bottom line, I don't think that eating raw needs to be any more expensive than any other healthy diet. We minimize the expensive ingredients (mainly nuts and nut butters) and focus on the produce that we get cheap and in abundance. A lot of the raw recipes I look through I reject out of hand. 1 cup of macadamia nuts, 2 cups pine nuts... that's expensive! I mainly stick to the cheaper nuts (walnuts, cashews, sunflower seeds) and I use them sparingly. We only eat a nut/seed based recipe at most once a day, usually dinner. It's better for our hips and it's better for our wallets. We also buy very few packaged food items. Come to think of it, Egg-less salad is the only thing we seem to have on a regular basis. We used to buy granola, but, if I say so myself, mine is better. Everything else, we eat as is or I make from scratch, and that's a huge savings right there.

The picture up top is last night's dinner. It was a good pairing. The soup (from here) was pretty bland and the onion bread (from here) was almost too flavorful. My modifications (there are always modifications) for the soup were to cut the turmeric way down. I doubled the recipe, so for 8 cups of water, I added 1/2 tsp turmeric. Madeline thought it could have used more, but I find it to have a bitter aftertaste, and I poured the first batch of broth with the full amount down the drain. This was about as much as I could take. I used a 1/2 tsp garlic powder, but it probably could have stood to be increased even more. It's not a recipe that would make my greatest hits list, but as Madeline said, it would be good to eat when you're sick. The dehydrated zucchini-as-noodles were really good, so I may wind up using them in a different broth eventually.

For the onion bread, after looking at some of the comments, I only used 1 small onion, which was plenty. I also only dehydrated for about 24 hours, instead of the full 36, because it seemed perfect to eat with the soup. It was soft, but not "undercooked". It was very salty, so I might cut some of the Nama Shoyu with water next time.

It was really weird to use my stove! I heated the soup up on the stove, per the instructions, and made sure that it didn't go above 115 using my instant read thermometer. It was nice to have a warm meal though. The bread was warm, too, fresh out of the dehydrator. It was a pretty good dinner.

-Eloise