Healthy Eating on a Budget

Yes, You Can Eat Healthy on a Budget

What a lean season taught me about feeding my family whole, real food when money was tight — and how you can too.

I hear it all the time — sometimes as a question, sometimes as a flat statement: “Eating healthy is so expensive.” And then comes the explanation of why it just isn’t possible, or the honest wondering: how do you afford to eat the way you do?

I’ll be honest with you. When I had my health scare a couple of years ago, I was so grateful that I could empty my kitchen of everything I considered “part of my problem” and restock it — all the seeds, grains, sweeteners, milks, cheeses, fruits, and vegetables I wanted — without once worrying about the cost.

But then life humbled me. When my husband merged his company with his former business, every dollar went toward building it, and we paid ourselves the bare minimum just to get by. Picture this: we still had two homes (one an investment/remodel project) and drove big, expensive, gas-guzzling cars — and yet suddenly I couldn’t even afford the gas to drive to Orem and dance with my friends three times a week. I missed nearly a whole year of rehearsals. And in that lean, humbling stretch, I got to see — no, to live — firsthand that you truly can eat whole foods on a budget.

Here’s what that season taught me.

1. Hunt for free (and nearly free) food

Once you start looking, free real food is everywhere. A few of my favorite finds:

Wanted: Raspberry leaves

I posted an ad on the classifieds asking if anyone had organic raspberry bushes I could pick the leaves from — I wanted to make raspberry leaf tea, a beloved traditional herb. My daughter and I made a whole afternoon of it, laughing our way through the bushes, and came home with what would have cost around $125 in the store. A bag runs about $25!

A gentle note for expecting mamas: red raspberry leaf is traditionally used as a “woman’s herb,” often in the later weeks of pregnancy to support the body — but herbs and pregnancy deserve real care, so please check with your midwife or doctor before adding it in.

Wanted: Fresh fruit

It still amazes me how many people have apple, peach, or cherry trees dropping fruit in their yards and simply need help picking it. Keep your eyes open, offer a helping hand, and I truly believe you’ll be led to folks happy to share their harvest in exchange.

Wanted: Food about to go to waste

During our little “family famine,” I wandered a farmers market and spotted a box of green, yellow, and red peppers right on the edge of going bad. I asked the vendor for a deal on the ones about to be tossed — he gave them to me for practically nothing and threw in a whole box of chili peppers too. With those and some onions, I sliced everything fajita-style and bagged it by meal size. We had fajita nights all winter long, nearly once a week. And I still reach for the chili peppers I dried and ground into a quart jar.

2. Grow a little of your own

Plant herbs. Plant salad greens. They grow fast, replenish themselves quickly, and — bless them — are awfully hard to kill. Even a windowsill or a couple of pots can quietly trim your grocery bill week after week.

3. Learn a little raw-kitchen magic

Thanks to my earlier health scare, I’d built up a freezer full of seeds, nuts, and grains — and during the famine, that stash became gold. Leaning on what I’d learned from raw-food cooks, I was amazed at what a blender and a few humble ingredients could do:

From seeds and nuts alone, I made: creamy nut and seed “milks”; a dreamy whipped-cream-tasting treat from walnuts, water, and maple syrup; homemade tahini from sunflower seeds; and a genuinely delicious “meatloaf” built mostly from nuts and dried tomatoes (a recipe from Juliano’s The Uncook Book).

4. Ferment and sprout

Two of my very favorite recipes come from Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions: her kimchi and her gingered carrots. Store-bought kimchi is outrageous — I’m talking around $20 for a single quart jar. But made at home?

The kimchi math: Napa cabbage, carrots, onions, sea salt, ginger, garlic, and red peppers — about $8 of ingredients makes roughly four quarts. That’s around $80 worth of kimchi for eight dollars, plus a batch of gingered carrots (just shredded carrots, shredded ginger, and sea salt) as a bonus. I fold those gingered carrots into salads, pile them on sandwiches, stir them into rice — I love them so much I don’t even need dressing on my salad.

I also keep sprouts on hand at all times — I’m nearly through my three-pound container of Alfa Plus seed mix. And oh, the sprouts have given us some moments. I had to laugh at Disney World, years prior, when I caught my son piling sprouts on top of his chips; he looked up at me, sprouts poking out all around his little mouth, and said “What?” in that deep little-boy voice.

Another Disney memory I treasure: I was waiting with the three youngest while my husband took our oldest on a ride, and the kids wanted a snack — so I pulled out seaweed sheets I’d cut into little chip-sized squares. A Japanese couple walked by, did a double-take at my children happily munching seaweed, and turned to me with the biggest, proudest smiles and a slow, respectful nod. My heart nearly burst. In one smile and nod, I felt their approval — and such quiet gladness that my kids were eating so well.

5. Buy your meat the smart way

Now, about meat. I don’t consider meat truly healthy unless it’s free of added hormones and the animal was raised humanely — cage-free and pasture-fed, on the kind of diet God intended. The way an animal is raised and fed genuinely matters to the food that ends up on our plates. (If you’ve seen Food, Inc., you already know how hard a look at the industrial meat system can be.)

So here’s the budget trick: seek out a local farmer and buy a “quarter cow” in the fall. You’ll have good meat for your family all winter at a wonderful price per pound. A neighbor of mine just told me she’s buying a calf from her cousin for around $500 and paying to have it pastured — and that calf will provide a lot of meat. The truly savvy move? Go in with other families. I paid nearly $500 for my quarter cow, but if she splits her calf four ways, her cost could drop to around $150 per family. Now that’s a smart shopper.

And if you’re able — raise chickens. Eat the eggs, eat the chickens. I promise you, there’s a whole new reverence for food you’ve raised with your own hands. (Just be sure to feed and care for your animals well, so they can return the health investment you’re hoping for.)

6. Buy in bulk — then portion and freeze

Often the savings live in buying organic produce, and even meat, in bulk — frozen is perfectly wonderful. The key is what you do next: repackage it into smaller, meal-sized portions, and date each freezer bag. When money was tightest and I was rationing, it was such a relief to pull out one family-sized bag of vegetables instead of opening the big bulk bag over and over. Bonus: portioning naturally keeps serving sizes reasonable, too.

And don’t forget the pantry workhorses — amaranth, quinoa, gluten-free oats, buckwheat, flax, chia, corn (to grind), and rice. A friend from my old dance company, whose salesman husband had an up-and-down income, could work absolute magic with whatever she had on hand and a garden out back. Whole grains like these stretch a long, long way into wonderful meals.

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Seek, and you shall find

Here’s the part that still moves me. Again and again, when we truly needed food, it appeared from the most surprising places — neighbors dropping off squash, tomatoes from someone’s garden, all without any idea how tight things were for us. We let go of the unnecessary extras, my husband downgraded my car, and we simply kept eating well. I learned more in that lean year than I ever could have in an easy one.

If you have the room, put in a garden. Plant fruit trees, maybe a walnut tree, a few berry bushes. And if you’ve got the space, why not chickens of your own? It really is fun to eat this way. And nothing fills me up quite like watching how strong and healthy my children are, in body and in mind.

So the next time someone tells you healthy eating is only for people with money to spare, you’ll know better. Seek…and you truly shall find.

Love,

Steffanie