I don’t have to tell you that the economy sucks right now. Everybody knows that already. You can’t watch TV without hearing it, you can’t open a paper or a magazine without reading it and we talk constantly about who is going out of business or who has lost a job. And I don’t have to tell you that people have been cutting back and saving their money to prepare for the worst. It’s all a little extremely depressing and scary.

But, for me, there has been a bright side to all of this gloom and doom. In an effort to scale back our budgets and pad our savings accounts a little, I have put a limit of $75 a week on our grocery spending. According to the IRS, the national standard for food expenses in a two-person household is $528 a month. That’s about $132 a week. In contrast, some people claim that $62 a week is the poverty level for two people (I’m still not sure how that figure was determined and it seems a little high). In any case I’ve decided that $75 a week is a realistic amount for us and we are now two weeks into our $75 a week experiment. 

Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking. Cutting back your food budget? That’s not good news. Hang in there while I explain. Cutting back would be difficult (and possibly detrimental to our health) if we had to sacrifice quality. So instead, I decided that I can continue to buy the quality ingredients I love if I swear off most prepared foods. The key here is to buy ingredients. And with that in mind, I began making cuts with some guidance from this list.

The good news in all of this mess is this changes how we eat for the better. Here’s why:

1. Foods made from scratch are generally healthier than prepared ones. They only include what you choose to put in them, and all of those things will have names you can pronounce.

2. Cooking from scratch does require some extra effort, but most of the prepared foods you can buy are far inferior to what can be made at home from scratch, so to me, they are well worth the extra effort (think homemade mayonnaise, homemade yogurt and fresh-baked bread).

3. Buying food with a limited budget also limits the amount of meat you can buy. You’ll get more food for your money when you spend the bulk of your budget on things that come from plants: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans. We should all be eating more of these anyway:

This means fewer meals will be centered on meat and as a result you’ll likely consume more fiber and plant derived nutrients and fewer saturated fats. Doesn’t that sound great? Sure does! Sign me up!

So what does this mean for the blog?

Well, as I begin to learn how to make some of the prepared foods I normally buy at the grocery store, I’ll write about it so you can learn right along with me. I’ll also be working on a list of tips that will help you eat well on a limited budget. It will soon be located to the right under “Pages on De Nacho.” Stay tuned folks—good things are coming up!