Six Tips to Managing Costs on a Special Diet

Cooking everything from scratch is time consuming. We dealt with that in another article.  It can also be expensive if you have to be low carb and high protein or looking for organic foods. In this article I want to share some of the time saving tips I have learned over the past few years as we have gone gluten free, had a daughter go through the GAPS diet,  and now my husband is low carb/high fat. Our food bill is clearly higher than it used to be, but there are things that help to bring it down some.

1. Buy in bulk whenever you can.

 This works very well for families since the bigger the family the more we tend to eat. I buy 25 lbs of almond flour at a time from Honeyville. I buy 1/4 of a beef from my dad who raises grass fed bed. I buy half of a pig from him as well. I buy 5 gallons of coconut oil at a time (and usually sell 2 gallons to friends). When you buy in bulk you can get a better price and you have plenty on hand. There is a storage problem that comes with this. But it is well worth it to save your money and buy a freezer if you don’t have one. For grains and non perishables, you can often get free 5 gallon buckets from grocery store bakeries, that need to be cleaned but then are great for storage.

If you are single or a couple, you often don’t need the quantity of food that a family needs and you may not want to buy so much at a time. In that case you can often still participate in the bulk savings by working with friends of like mind. So you could buy 5 gallons of coconut oil and if you can find 4 friends who also want some you all could save considerably.

2)  Buy from the producer as much as possible.

This is harder to do if you live in a big city where meat and vegetables and fruits are not grown too much (although there are urban farms which break those rules). But wherever you live you can find folks who live around you and raise and sell good food to eat. In the city it might mean finding a farmer’s market for those who come in to you, or it might mean going out to an area where much food is produced monthly or biweekly. As you build a relationship with those who produce their own food you build community and often you will get some great bargains when they have abundance.

We have a local farmer that we get most of our seasonal produce from and when he has extra he calls me and gives me a great deal. He knows I can and freeze and will call me to let me know he has a good deal for me. It gets me great quality organic produce at a better price and he knows it is not going to waste. He even called me when food froze in his cooler and I was able to move some of it to my freezer and see it not be wasted. (I got that for free.)   That only happens because we are friends.

3)  Eat Seasonally.  

This applies to produce more than anything. In spring eat strawberries and asparagus and lots of greens. In summer eat berries and squash and tomatoes and peppers. In fall eat more peppers, onions, potatoes, winter squash, apples, pears, and lots more. In winter eat what you canned and froze from the summer and fall abundance.

Of course there are lots of exceptions to the above examples. But if you do eat seasonally you will find it much easier to get bargains if you are buying from a grower. And if you grow it yourself you will save even more money.

4)  Make your food from scratch.

Yes I know you are already doing this but it is easy to try and find items to cheat on. You can do that if you are trying to save time and not cost (and they are allowed on your particular diet). If you are more driven by cost savings than time savings, then you will want to make most everything from scratch.

5)  Make your own bone broth.

This is one of the biggest ways I have saved money in our food bill in the past 2 years. It costs pennies to cook down the bones after we eat a whole chicken or have a beef roast or steak. And the homemade broth is so much better for you and better in flavor. I can’t believe I used to buy packaged broth.

6)  Shop with a grocery list and stick to that list.

Impulse buying, especially when you are hungry can increase your food bill significantly. Hopefully there is money for some treats but plan those out well and your dollars will stretch further.