Afford Anything - PSA Thursday: How to Slash Your Food Budget, with Rosemary Fotheringham

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2019, Americans spent just over $8,000 on food. If you're on a tight budget, slashing your grocery bill is one of the easiest ways to spend less. But what if you don't want to compromise on healthy eating? Today's guest, Rosemary Fotheringham, is a Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (FNTP) who's also on the path to financial independence. She and her husband slashed their monthly grocery bill from $1,200 down to $300 - without eating pasta every night. She's here to explain their framework for healthy eating and her best tips for eating well on a tight budget. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/psathursday Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy Thanksgiving and welcome to PSA Thursday. This is a weekly-ish bonus segment of the Afford Anything podcast in which we talk about money, work, and life in the context of 2020. How do you survive all of the weird things that 2020 has thrown at us? Those are the topics of these PSA Thursday episodes. These episodes are typically much shorter than our normal episodes. They are specifically hyper-focused on one topic. oftentimes very actionable topics. Previous PSA Thursday episodes, we've covered student loan

repayment in the context of 2020, how that's changed. We've covered PPP funding for small business owners and alternatives to PPP funding if you are an entrepreneur and you're looking for more sources of revenue due to the revenue hit that you've taken or you may have taken this year. We've talked about donor advised funds and how you can get one set up if this year has inspired you to make more charitable donations. So you can find our archives where we have episodes around all of that at afford anything.com slash PSA Thursday. Today is Thanksgiving. We're releasing this episode on Thanksgiving Day. And so in honor of Thanksgiving, we are going to be discussing food. According to consumer spending data, food is one of the biggest line items on the budget of the

average American household. So according to spending data, the three biggest line items in a household budget are housing, transportation, and food. And so in honor of Thanksgiving Thursday, we're going to talk about food today. How can you design an FI-friendly food budget and how can you cut back your grocery bill without sacrificing on health or nutrition? With me today to answer these questions is Rosemary Fotheringham. And Rosemary, I'll let you introduce yourself. Yeah. I'm a certified functional nutritional therapy practitioner and a certified functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. So FNTP, FDNP, which I always jokes, sounds like my Myers-Briggs types, but there we go. My husband and I found the FI movement while we were getting out of debt. And a big part of what we had to do there was

reduce our grocery bill. We found when we tallied up what we were spending, it was about $1,200 for two of us. And so we thought, well, that's ridiculous. We can at least cut that in half. And we did that and we ate on $600 a month and then we thought maybe we can cut that in half again. So we did. And for a while, we were on $300 a month and we were still eating healthy food without heavily relying on super starchy stuff like beans and rice. I want to invite people to consider nutrient density and not just cost or calories when they're considering what foods to buy. So we're not just looking at the ratios of protein fat and carbohydrates, but also, you know, the density of the micronutrients, the minerals, the B vitamins, and the fat soluble vitamins,

like vitamin A, D, E, and K, the food that we're getting, those micronutrients are just as important as the ratios of the macronutrients that we're getting. One important key is that you want to consider how much effort that you're willing or able to put into food prep. So think about where you are on the sliding scale from hamburger helper to sprouting your own lentils. You know, everybody's lifestyle is going to require somewhere different on that sort of sliding scale. So if you're more on the hamburger helper and there are just a few quick swaps that you can do to make an existing recipe a little bit lower carbs. So for example,

if something calls for pasta, we loved using zucchini noodles or zoodles, as they're called, which you can either make with a spiralizer or get in the frozen section of the grocery store. Same thing with mashed potatoes. You can do mashed cauliflower, which is really easy to do. way lower carb rice. We would sub about cauliflower rice. And then for things that were more like wraps or tacos, we'd use like butter lettuce leaves or maybe sheets of nori to make like a roll or a hand wrap. So those are some sort of simple steps. But what John and I mostly did, if you're somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, we sort of use a template to assemble a variety of different foods. And we just sort of use that template over and over. So you get

variety, it doesn't take that long to put together. So essentially this meal template, you get a fat, you have a protein, maybe one to three vegetables, and then some kind of flavor boosters. So for the protein, we might do like some sort of grass-fed ground beef or have fish or, you know, some pastured pork. Ground meats are a lot cheaper than cuts of meat. So that's what we would use a lot of the time. and then maybe get a couple vegetables, like some Swiss chard that's cut up or some diced carrots. Add a little fat into a saute pan, saute the chard and carrots, add the ground beef that we'd cooked before, and then just add some cumin or salt and pepper or whatever. And there's your dinner, and it takes like 10 minutes.

And there's a vast amount of permutations you can use with that same template. So you don't really have to get bored with that template. But with that, so, you know, you mentioned like grass-fed ground beef. And even earlier when you were talking about cauliflower as a substitute for rice, in the context of a person who's really trying to save money, maybe they've lost their job this year or they've had their hours cut, cauliflower is certainly more expensive than rice. Yeah, it certainly is. And when we were getting out of debt, we did still do like some carbs. We did, so this is the nod to sprouted lentils that I mentioned earlier. We would sprout our own lentils, which makes them more digestible and sort of releases some of the new nutrients. nutrients inside them so that you can actually get the nutrients that are inside the lentils. So we would stretch our ground beef one to one with those sprouted lentils. So it's maybe not exactly, it's not going to be the same like quality of protein as it would be from an animal source in terms of how your body's able to use that protein.

But it worked for us and it helped us to get that cost down. Oh, interesting. So basically you kind of only had to buy half of the amount because you were making it go twice as far with the lentils. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it was still important to us to have the meat in there because beans are cheap, but they are mostly carbohydrate, not protein. That kind of surprises some people. And unfortunately, your body really isn't able to use that protein as well as it is with animal proteins. But they do provide some. So if they're prepared properly, like the sprouting, using them one-to-one is a good option. And the reason we sprout is because plants can't run away. So they've evolved all these chemical compounds or mechanisms that, sort of dissuade animals like us from eating them. So they sort of damage the gut. They decrease your ability to absorb the nutrients in them. But humans are smart. And we have figured out that the processes of soaking, sprouting, or fermenting grains and legumes, it decreases the level of

those chemical compounds and increases their digestibility. So we've been doing this for thousands of years, like a traditional sourdough bread, you know, is fermented. So we're able to use the nutrients in there. So yeah, it totally comes down to each person's ability and their inclination and where their finances are at. But there's really a variety of options to suit everyone. And you don't have to be perfect. This doesn't have to be perfect. Just kind of focus on a 1% better thing. There's just a variety of things that could suit anyone.

So as we talk through some of these options, like as we talk through the substitutions of substituting, we'll say, pasta for zucchini noodles or white rice or brown rice for cauliflower rice, One thing that strikes me is whenever I make those substitutions, I'm still hungry. And so, you know, if I eat a normal traditional bowl of spaghetti the way that I did when I was a kid, I feel full. If I swap that out with zucchini noodles, I still feel hungry. And then I have to either eat a lot more or eat something else on the side in order to feel full. And again, coming at this from a cost perspective, since a lot of the people who are listening to this are paying off debt or their percentage. suing FI or maybe 2020 is a particularly financially tight year for them more so than usual. So coming at this from a cost perspective, it seems that that would increase the food budget.

Right. I think a common thing is that people think they need bulk of food to fill them up. And there is an element of that, that when your stomach stretches, that you feel full. But satiation actually comes at a hormonal level. So it's when we eat fat and protein, that our body sends out a satiation hormone called leptin that tells us, okay, we're full. So that's the hormone that will tell you you're full and will keep you feeling full until you need to eat again. My advice would be, and this is what John and I did, focus your money on high quality fats and proteins first.

So making sure that you're eating enough fat, making sure that you're getting enough high quality animal protein, that's what's going to keep you feeling full longer. and especially the fat. So the difference between fat and carbohydrates is kind of like the difference between a log in the fire versus quick kindling. So fat gives you that long, sustaining, stable energy throughout the day, whereas the kindling, you can get full and feel good, but then it burns up and it's gone. So really focusing your money and your effort on the high quality fats and proteins is where you want to go. So we're talking for fats, you know, like ghee, which is clarified butter or coconut oil or cooking with butter. We would use olive oil or avocado oil, but not at really high

heat because those can get damaged a little bit more easily. We would even use save bacon fat and use that to cook with. And making sure that you're eating enough fat is really key for satiation. If you're feeling hungry an hour or two after you eat, you probably didn't have enough fat in your meal. And fat has been so wrongly maligned. It's actually really important, you know, for all kinds of functions in your body to keep your energy stable, build good hormones. It makes up the outside of every cell, for example. It's a crucial part of brain health. So fat is really important. So I would say people should focus first on high quality fat and then on high quality protein. So for fats, you know, for bacon fat, for example, you'd want to look for something that's pasture raised.

So it just kind of means that the animal is able to live in their natural environment and be outside and eat what it's supposed to be eating. If you're eating healthy animals, then the products that come from those animals are going to be better for you. Same thing with butter or ghee should be grass-fed. So the animals, the cows are eating grass, which is what they're supposed to eat and not corn. Cows aren't designed to eat corn, but it's what we give them in this country. So looking for grass-fed butter. Same thing with coconut oil. If you get a virgin coconut oil rather than a liquid one, those are some of the key things there. What should people do? I'm sure there are many people who are listening to this right now who have family members who just refuse to eat in certain ways. When you have

certain food limitations, whether it's allergies or personal preferences, the path of least resistance is to eat to the common denominator in terms of time and money and storage. So what do you do if that common denominator is in contrast with some of what you're saying. One thing I really like is the sort of build your own meal format to accommodate different preferences without having to make multiple meals. So you can do like taco bar or salad bar, burger bar, that sort of thing. And you lay out little bowls of different ingredients and everyone can build it for themselves. Kind of like the Chipotle model, but in your own house.

And even for the baby, you know, you can grind up the meat and dice the tomato. you know, for the taco bar, give them a little dollop of guacamole or whatever. Another thing is in the same vein, you know, still batch prepping those ingredients, but assembling them later. So you still save time, but you also still get variety. And the key there is really pre-prepping the ingredients. So you get all the benefit of the front-loaded effort. But then at meal time, you assemble those into various combinations.

There's a whole cookbook that's based exactly around this principle. it's called cook once, eat all week. And so you prep a whole bunch of the ingredients, like maybe you'll cook some chicken thighs and dice some carrots and roast some squash. And then, you know, she gives a variety of meals that you can assemble those foods into. And it's easy to make another portion that just doesn't include one of the ingredients, for example. And then that meal template I was telling you about also works well there because it's easy to

assemble a separate version that doesn't have X ingredient. You know, so in your fridge, you might have different storage containers that have, you know, cook ground beef or shredded chicken or grated carrot or diced tomatoes. And you can assemble those at various meals into like a salad or tacos or an omelet or soup or whatever. You mentioned the thing about boundaries with time or money. I love, I love boundaries. I love boundaries. But they can feel tricky for a lot of us because we worry about how the other person's going to react. If when we establish them, especially for switching things up from how they've always been,

obviously for a lot of us, there's going to be a budget reality. But maybe you might have a picky spouse or picky teenagers that want to eat something else. So it depends on how you want to run your household. But one thing that I really love for boundary setting is the phrase, I'm happy to dot, dot, dot, because it shows what you're willing to do and what you're not willing to do, like where the line is. So you could say, if you don't wish to eat what's on the menu this week, I'm happy to supply whatever ingredients you need to cook your own food or even I'm happy to clear a spot in the fridge for you to store the ingredients that you'll be buying for yourself to cook your own food. And they may opt to take you up on that

or they may decide that eating what's on the menu is acceptable, but it allows you to not turn into a short order cook. And the trick with those boundaries is establish that new norm and then just stay consistent with it. In terms of food allergies, this can be a little bit harder because you've got different people with different food allergies and both time and money are constraints in terms of how many meals you can make. But there's a really good way to kind of 80-20 this. And that is that the most common food allergies, you know, 20% of the foods are the most common food allergies for 80% of people. And you wouldn't think that, but like gluten, dairy, eggs, soy, or nuts are really, really common ones. And this is going to sound funny, but there's a way of eating

called the autoimmune protocol that is designed for people who are managing an autoimmune disease. It helps them manage their symptoms. But it necessarily takes away the most commonly allergenic foods. And there are tons of recipes out there and cookbooks. AIP is what it's sort of referred to as. But if you were to find those recipes, you could make those and it will cover most food allergies. So one dish will be able to take care of multiple food allergies. Say you've got one kid who can't do gluten and another who can't do dairy and eggs. One AIP recipe is going to cover all those bases at once. So it's just kind of a way to get a little bit more efficient about making sure that the thing you're making can be fed to everyone. Right, which has a budget tie in as well, because if you're not

cooking a bunch of separate meals, the more that everybody can eat the same thing, the more you can buy in bulk, and the more you can prep in bulk. Exactly. And you can also look up the whole 30, which is similar to AIP, but it still includes some other foods like nuts or eggs, night-shaped vegetables like tomatoes and bell peppers. If those aren't part of your family sensitivities, then the whole 30 approach is probably better because you have more foods available to you. And there are tons of both AIP and Whole 30 cookbooks that you can get at your library or order online. So there's lots of options there. One of the most common objections, and I think about this whenever I read blogs about eating paleo or eating keto, one of the most common things that I hear is,

but it's so expensive. Adding that much meat in or adding grass-fed butter is much more expensive than the regular junk butter. Yes, and it can be, and that's where sourcing is really key. So buying in bulk. So, for example, it's possible to buy meat in bulk. So my husband and I and my sister went in on getting a half cow that we bought directly from our farmer, so it was grass-fed, grass-finished, and we just divvied up the meat

amongst ourselves, and the price per pound was maybe $4.50 per pound. Whereas, of course, if you're buying grass-fed organic meat from whole foods, like, it's going to be a lot more expensive. So buying in bulk is a way that we got those prices down a lot. I mentioned earlier, cutting, stretching, so to speak, the ground beef with the sprouted lentils. We love Costco. We get Kerry Gold butter from Costco, which is grass-fed, and so we get the huge, you know, Mondo-pack that have the four pieces of butter in the big, big box. Like, oh, good, this will last us a couple weeks at least. Carrie gold is my favorite butter, too.

That's the only brand I buy. Yes. I had a roommate who was from Ireland, and she would laugh at me all the time because being from Ireland, Carrie Gold is just for her, normal, who cares butter. And for me, it was kind of a splurge. Like, it was a time where I was always buying the cheapest thing, and Carrie Gold was part of my spending splurge, and my roommate thought it was just the most hilarious thing she'd ever seen. Yes, to us, that would be like, someone being like, oh my gosh, dairy gold. It's like the greatest thing

ever to go, it's just, I mean, it's just normal. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. But yeah, to answer your question, I mean, all the things like ghee and coconut oil and butter and our avocado oil and olive oil, all of that we get from Costco. We're not being super fancy in going to the fancy boutique, know, stores. It was very much Costco for probably 75% of what we were eating. And then, you know, our meat we would get directly from our farmer. Of course, that decreases the cost and support someone that's raising animals in a way that we feel really good about in terms of our ethical beliefs and views on sustainability and that sort of thing. How can a person who's listening to this find a farmer in their area? Ooh, great question. There is a website called eatwild.com.

that you can go to and find farmers in your area for meat and eggs and dairy. It has the contact information for your farmers. I recommend if you find a farmer or farm that looks interesting, get in touch with them. Ask if there's a good time for you to come visit. See how they raise the animals, talk to the farmer, ask questions, and that way you can sort of discern how they do things. And it's a good thing to get to know your farmer. We're so separated.

In our current food system, we're so separated from where our food is. produced. And I think it's a richer experience to know where our food comes from and be connected directly to the food supply. Right. A lot of people who are listening to this live in RVs or tiny homes or they may live in just a small apartment or perhaps they live in a house but they're sharing it with roommates and so their personal portion of the kitchen is kind of small. To the people who are listening to this who have those space limit. And when they hear Costco, their first thought is, I can't shop in bulk. I have nowhere to put stuff. Like, I have no storage space. What advice would you give them?

My husband and I actually did full-time house sitting for six months, and we would travel from place to place in our car. And so we had just a box that we filled with what we considered the absolute essentials to be able to cook with. So I get having just a tiny, tiny amount of space. And the reality, you don't need tons of fancy equipment. You know, that equipment can make things faster and easier, but you don't need them. And the same thing, you don't need a ton of spices or cooking sauces or liquids or whatever. They're nice to have when you're getting fancy, but you can get by just fine with just a few staples.

So I can talk about what we carded around in a second, but just general principles. I would say find what you use every week and use that. So if you have a smoothie every day, then a blender probably makes sense to have as some equipment. But if you're only going to use a blender twice a year, like January 1st and January 2nd, and then that's it. Yeah. Then maybe it's not worth it. So I'd say with anything, this is kind of just one of my life philosophies, but focus on what brings the most utility and then get high quality ones. Right.

Make sure they're good quality so you're not fighting through the cooking process. If you hate it, you're not going to want to cook. So you just need really basic equipment. You know, a good chef's knife, a good cutting board, you're going to need those if you're not using a food processor or a blender, for example. I do recommend spend a bit of money on a chef's knife. You don't need to have a multiple hundreds of dollars one, but, you know, go to the store, feel it in your hand, feel what's comfortable.

Good size is probably going to be like eight to ten inches for a chef's knife. I like to get mine sharpened professionally at least once a year and take good care of them so they're going to last me a lifetime. You can also learn how to sharpen them yourselves if that's something you're so inclined to do. But a good knife is going to make it so much more fun to cook and it's less dangerous. A dull knife is a dangerous knife because it'll slip and chop your finger off. Right. Just like doll razors are more likely to cut you. 100%. So good chef's knife, a good like roasting pan, cast iron pan. And then in terms of ingredients, you can really get away with just a handful of ingredients. that serve different purposes. For example, when we traveled, we did kind of an all-purpose liquid oil fat, like an avocado oil. And then we had an all-purpose sort of solid fat like a ghee, or I think maybe we did coconut

oil. A single vinegar, like an apple cider vinegar for salad dressings. We had an unrefined sea salt. And we brought a bottle of coconut aminos, which is sort of adds that umami flavor. that sort of rich, savory, brothy kind of flavor that adds depth. Right. And so we just traveled with those. And if you're just going to do three spice blends, like if I just narrow it down to three,

one would be an herb blend, kind of like an Italian seasoning. You can use it for everything, like chicken and fish and soups and stews. You can get ones that grind fresh, which will give you more flavor. And then the second would be some sort of warm spices blend, something that has kind of like cumin and coriander, maybe cinnamon, sort of gives you that Middle Eastern or Moroccan type flavor. That's really good on roasted vegetables, especially roasted root vegetables or squash. And then the third one, I love. Trader Joe's has something called umami seasoning, but it's basically like a mushroom powder blend. So you use that for depth that kind of adds a deeper

level layer of flavoring with that umami flavor, the rich, savory. And you could use all those three and cover all your bases. Okay. One Italian herbs type of seasoning, one that's a warm spice blend and one that's umami. Yeah. Okay, yeah, that does sound like a very easy way to pair down, like pair down to RV living. For sure, yeah. Ours was car living. So we just had a box that we stored, you know, those fats and spices, salt and that sort of thing. We just took with us from place to place and it covers all our bases. Right. Oftentimes when I hear people talk about how to cook, I lived with roommates until I was 31. And living with roommates, there's a similar problem where you might have a full-size kitchen in a house, but each of you has your assigned designated cabinet.

Or worse, you're in a roommate situation where you don't have your own space and everyone's stuff just gets jumbled together. And so you personally just need to make sure that you have a few key things. Like you just can't have a lot of stuff when you live through mates. Yeah. And the reality is you don't need a lot of stuff. A lot of people think cooking healthy needs to be complicated or involve a ton of fancy equipment or ingredients. And it really doesn't. You just need a few staples of high quality ingredients and that meal template that I talked about. And you have basically endless permutations of things and flavors and never get bored and it's not exorbitally expensive either. Right, right. And that leads to a similar question that I have where when I look at recipes online, so many times I'll look at a recipe and they're like, then use a food processor or use an immersion blender or put this in a Dutch oven, which I had to Google what that was.

You know, it seems like almost any recipe that I try to Google calls for some additional piece of equipment. Yes. Yeah. Like a food processor, for example, it does make things faster and easier, but it's not necessarily. You can get the same thing with a knife and a cutting board. Get the same result with a knife and a cutting board. An immersion blender is actually a good alternative to a bulky blender with a base because if you just have a soup pot, you can stick the immersion blender in there and turn your soup into a creamy soup that way, smooth soup. You really don't need tons of equipment at all.

You can just get by with a few basics. I do have a Dutch oven. And it's basically just a very heavy, big cast iron, a coated cast iron dish. And the good thing about that is you can use it on the stove top. You can use it in the oven. You can roast meats in it. So it's a good kind of workhorse for a kitchen. But those can be an investment.

A cast iron will get you 90% of the way there. Get a good cast iron and you can use that for the same thing. I will say a meat thermometer seems extraneous. I didn't use a meat thermometer for years because I didn't think it was really necessary. And that was a mistake because they're cheap. They don't take up much space. You're going to get way better quality food if your meat is at its highest potential rather than just making it a guessing game for when it's done or cutting into your meat and letting all the juices run out to see if it's done. And then it's dry and it's not that good. So in terms of kitchen equipment that's actually

worth it, I would say meat thermometer falls under that category. I just ordered one from Amazon yesterday, actually. So it's funny that you bring that up. It was less than 24 hours ago. you're right, it's cheap. I think mine was 12 bucks or something. Exactly. And you can just, you know, I never remember the temperatures for each of the things. So I'll just ask my phone, hey, Siri, what temperature does pork need to be at or whatever? It'll tell me. And I can just use the thermometer. Right. Well, we're coming to the end of our time. To wrap up, many people who are listening to this are on a tight grocery budget, particularly this year. A lot of people have lost their jobs or have had their hours reduced or are getting their base pay but they're not

getting any bonuses or the size of their commissions have shrunk. A lot of people have reduced income this year. And they might have reduced income while also trying to pay off debt or trying to reach some other financial goal. So to the people who are listening who are on tight budgets where every $20 counts, every $10 counts, what are some top tips for how they can eat healthy on a tight budget. I would say remember that satiation comes at that hormonal level rather than from bulk. So focusing those $10 or $20 on getting some high quality fats and high quality proteins and of those two, having the fats be really the priority, getting good quality fat is going to help you feel more energetic, have stable energy throughout the day,

keep you feeling full for hours. And also just progress. perfection. There is no one perfect diet for everybody, but you can take small steps to get kind of one percent better to eating more healthy and feeling better and more energetic. Well, thank you so much, Rosemary. What resources would you direct people to? Yeah, I would say start looking for recipes that fit the whole 30 way of eating or the AIP way of eating if you're dealing with the allergy side of things. For more on, sustainability and ethics of eating meat. I really love the book Sacred Cow that explores that side of things. People can also go to my website, which is flourish fundamentals.com, which sort of gives

you tips for eating healthy on a budget. And it's sort of created for people in the five community who are wanting to eat healthier and reduce their risk of a big healthcare burden later on in life. Thank you so much, Rosemary. Thanks, Paula. It's been so great to be here. That's our show for today. Thank you for tuning into PSA Thursday and happy Thanksgiving. If you would like notes from today's show, you can sign up to get them delivered for free to your inbox at afford anything.com slash show notes. You can also find them online at afford anything.com slash PSA Thursday. That's where all of our PSA Thursday archives are. On Monday, we are launching a course called Your First Rental Property. This course is only open for

enrollment two weeks out of the year, one week in the spring, one week in the fall. So right now you can enroll for one week only. We're opening our doors for enrollment for the fall winter semester. It is a 10-week-long course that walks you A through Z on everything that you need to know about how to buy your first rental property. So if that is something that interests you, head to Afford Anything.com slash enroll for all the details. Afford Anything.com slash enroll. Remember, enrollment is one week only starting Monday, November 30. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant.

This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I will catch you in the next episode.