By Halley Ortiz.
I’d like to be able to tell you that we did it on a bet. Or that I’d taken leave of my senses, but I can’t. Last January, my family (okay, I) decided not to eat out anymore for a year. There were several reasons: financial, health, a commitment to keeping my kids off the street. And although those are all really good things, mostly I just wanted to save some money and lose some weight.
The rules were as follows: NO fast food, restaurants, take out, snacks from the convenience or grocery store, nor any prepackaged food. Also out was basically anything I could make at home. We made exceptions for birthday and anniversary celebrations, a once monthly date with my husband (which we rarely had time to use), meals with out-of-town friends, business lunches, and our own trips out of town (my oldest asked if Austin was out of town – she didn’t take all that well to the project). These exceptions amounted to about one meal out per month on average.
Let me be clear: the project we undertook and the lifestyle it has grown into would be significantly more difficult if I had been working full time. I volunteer quite a bit, am active in my community, and am physically active almost every day, but I still do have the time to grow food, shop for food, prep food, and cook food, all in the same day (except for the growing, of course). But I wasn’t working, so the project began with the intent to decrease our retail food footprint and increase our home food footprint.
Photo by Kim Hilsenbeck |
There’s so much quick, easy food available that the mind almost automatically defaults to running by the Sonic or picking up the phone to order pizza. In the past, I was always turning over new leaves – ordering/buying fresh food/ making meal plans – always with the best of intentions. Mondays usually worked out, Tuesdays were iffy, and by Wednesday, we were calling Domino’s. Week after week. Good intentions on Monday, rotten chard by Friday.
We (okay, I) was determined to break the cycle. It was hard at first. Really hard. My oldest pined for fast food. Often. She told me she daydreamed about it in class. I struggled to find healthy things that everyone wanted to eat. Even more, I struggled against the constant reminder of all of the food that’s available outside the home. In one round trip from my home outside Buda to Mopac and 290, I passed no fewer than 35 restaurants. It’s hard to sell grilled chicken and a salad when you’ve passed four burger joints and three taco shacks on your way home from math tutoring. And we wonder why we have an obesity epidemic.
Somewhere along the way, and I couldn’t tell you where or when, it just got easier. Going out just became something we didn’t think to do. Some nights I had microwave nachos. Okay, many nights I had microwave nachos. But I had control over the quality of the cheese, the amount of salt in the chips, and with my own homemade salsa and an apple, it made a pretty satisfying meal for one. I also realized that eating at home isn’t necessarily about presenting three-course, five-star meals every night. Sandwiches, pick-ups, and leftovers featured heavily in the rotation. What eventually began to matter more was creating an intentionality to our eating. We had achieved a fundamental change in how we eat. We knew where it came from and what was in it. Period. If that’s where you start, it’s pretty easy.
All in all, we spent 329 days on the project with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success. It’s difficult to calculate our food savings accurately given the multiple variables, such as spending much less on restaurant food but more on groceries, increasing the quality of the groceries because I was cooking everything from scratch which added value to each meal but cost more. Our estimate is that we saved a little more than one-third of our total food bill.
We were gone over Christmas, but when the kids started back to school in January, we shifted without discussion or discomfort right back into our pattern – meal planning, shopping, dinner at home. We weren’t on the project anymore, but maybe the true test wasn’t if we could be successful while we were on the project. Maybe the test is can we sustain these habits over time.
I think we survived the first test well. Last Tuesday’s planned meal was roast chicken, which I pulled out of the freezer Sunday thinking it would thaw. That sucker was FROZEN SOLID Tuesday afternoon. In the past, that would have been the most satisfying excuse to grab some take-out or head to Jason’s Deli. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I realized we hadn’t even thought to go out. I just grabbed some of chili from the freezer, thawed it, boiled some hotdogs and roasted the cauliflower like I had planned. It was weird - chili dogs and roasted cauliflower - but I knew where it came from and what was in it. I call that progress.
