I had to change up the way I buy my groceries this week. I knew this change was coming because the cost of food has increased noticeably for me in just about every category of items I regularly purchase. I was trying to hold off on making this change for as long as I could because I believe very much in my food buying philosophy, but I was going over budget more and more and it needed to stop. So, this week I purchased almost zero organic food for our home. There were several instances where organic was actually cheaper than non-organic and in those cases I gladly purchased the organic item in question, but for the most part 95% of my food purchases were of the non-organic variety.
I know that every family has its own focus. Some families focus on the food they feed their families; others place their focus on activities with and for their families; others place their focus on the clothes they buy, the kind of house they live in, and the cars they drive, etc...None of these focus areas are necessarily wrong or right - they are just where we are most intentional with our monetary resources, and we all have our own reasons for the things we choose to focus on.
For me, this focus has almost always been on the food I feed my family and the cleaning products I bring into my home. I believe, wholeheartedly, that the food we ingest, or more specifically the chemicals on and in the food we ingest, are making us a very sick and unhealthy species. I often wonder if the food we ingest and the drinks we drink aren't somehow related to our rise in autoimmune diseases and other sicknesses that seems to be on the rise. The food and drink industries are so powerful and I believe the people that run those industries know that they are making us sick, and don't care because the dollar is king. Making money for them is more important that keeping people healthy.
Anyway, I 'll get off of my soapbox. My point is just to say buying organic food has long been a priority of mine because I believe that they are healthier for my children's bodies than non-organic. But, as we all know, inflation has taken hold of this country and while the minimum wages almost everywhere have increased (as they should have - every working family member deserves to earn a living wage), so has the cost of everything else - food included. Because our family is middle class, I feel that it is those of us in this economic bracket that are squeezed immensely by these changes. (I don't know of any middle-class family who has gotten a cost-of-living increase from his/her employer. We are just supposed to make do with increased costs at the same rate of pay.)
All of this has led me to where I was at this past weekend with my grocery shopping - a budget that could no longer support the standard of food it had for the last 15-20 years. My values haven't changed though even if my grocery financial situation has, so I am making do with what I can. These are my new guidelines when food shopping:
1. Plant a garden (I purchased seeds to do so in January knowing that the cost of food was getting to be too much for my budget.)
2. Buy non-gmo labeled products for those items that have been approved by the FDA to be grown as genetically modified plants.
3. Make as much as I can from scratch so that I am buying a few chemically laden products as I can.
Even making these changes my food expenses this past weekend to supply our family with food for the upcoming week was $400. This cost is only for 5 of us as Joshua is at school. I will be working diligently over the course of the next few weeks/months to reduce this cost as much as possible while also not trying to stray from my food values.
I never in a million years would have thought that I would be in a place where I could no longer to afford to feed my family the kinds of foods I have been feeding them for years, but here I am. And so, I will do what any person would do whose focus for their family is challenged - I will adjust and set my sails in a different direction, but make no mistake my course may be different, but my end result will still be the same - to feed my family as healthy as possible by avoiding as many chemicals in their food as possible.
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