Here's the tally of what I spent on food in my first Really High Raw month: about $477.
Gaaaaaah, I spent almost $500 on food -- just for me!!
This is hard to believe. However, those $8 smoothies do add up. I ate out a few times, which is of course not efficient use of money:food ratio, but the fun factor made up for it.
I guess the depressing thing, besides the unsustainability of that tally, is that it felt to me as if I skipped a significant portion of eating-to-satiety altogether. How does one spend so much money on food yet still not get enough to eat?!
Now, a part of the equation that I did not tweak out is what proportion of groceries purchased went for bulk items that did not actually get consumed that month. These are sale items that I stock up on, like frozen berries and coconut water. So maybe that would account for, say, $35 or so, if memory serves me correctly.
But STILL! I also ate a certain amount of greens frozen from my own garden last year, and nut butters that I already had, and bulk nuts I freeze when they are on sale. Not to mention all the green food-powder that I habitually add to my morning fruits, occasional supplements. This seems outrageous ...
... unless one imagines that this food is also my medical insurance premium! Eating this way, with the exception of the rotten vertigo day that came out of nowhere, has kept me free from most common "viruses", flu's, etc., that plague the normal population. I stay this way free from drugs and their insidious side effects, which must include an assessment of the pollutions created in their manufacture and wanton disposals (seriously, all that Prozac has to come from some chemical source, and it all gets peed out into everyone's drinking water!!). Add another $100 or so to make homemade food for three small cats -- who, being all-raw, almost never have to go to the vet's -- and these benefits put this investment into perspective. Yeah, it's a lot of moola, but here's the rub: even when I was only earning the equivalent of about $8, I still managed to eat a lot of organically grown food. I had a lot more of the cheaper, processed stuff like pasta, instant soups, canned beans and all, but I also had enough fresh produce to stay alive and pretty healthy this long!
How'd that happen?