True Cost Of Eating
I have been conducting some very interesting first hand research about the cost of the food we consume. I encourage you to try it yourself, but I reckon you will have similar results.
As an avid gardener for twenty years, I know as most people, that I am able to save a lot of money by growing much of my own food. Between 1991 and 1999 as a family living on twenty acres in Montana, we were able to produce 90%+ of all our own food, enabling a family of five of us to live on about $3,000 per year. However, these days we only produce about 30% of our own food. We raise chickens, rabbits and vegetables from our heritage garden using heirloom seeds from http://www.survivalistseeds.com.
We rarely eat out but for this experiment we did for about a month. By the way, during this research I gained 12 pounds. When we ate at restaurants I took in a scale to weigh our meals. Now I know this sounds a little embarrassing but we live in a small community and we personally know all 5 owners, so they just grinned and served us. Of course when we reluctantly ate at fast food franchises I weighed the meal at home. Then we harvested much of our garden and weighed our meals of vegetables from seed, rabbit and chickens, in addition to eggs.
The results were more alarming than expected:
13 – Fast food meals, average cost was $6.89 cents per pound.
11 – Restaurant meals, average cost was $12.55 per pound.
14 – Home grown & cooked meals, average cost of $0.61 per pound.
We did not include the cost of travel or tips for eating out and did include the estimated cost of all ingredients for home meals such as gravy, ketchup and cooking oil.
As you can see, we spent 10 and 20 times less money eating at home rather than outside of our self sufficient homestead. What are the benefits of doing this long term? For us, they are substantial. We have had absolutely no debt for two full decades, we have never needed health insurance and have spent less than $500 in medical expenses over twenty years. We are proud to raise our own food rather than relying upon people or corporations we will never know or meet to feed us. And it is probably the single greatest reason why we are living a more sovereign life than 99% of Americans. We encourage you to break free of the molded lifestyle and try gardening and homesteading.
