seeing_octarine
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18th century cookbook said:If you have a garden, make the most of it. A bit of leek or an onion makes all dishes savory at little expense.
If the money spent on fresh butter were spent on meat, poor families would be much better fed than they are.
Those two, at least, are not particularly good advice these days.
The best way to use a garden is to grow high calorie or high micronutrient crops that are preferably also space efficient and that you can't easily buy cheaply. Leeks aren't completely terrible for micronutrients and growing them would likely save you money, but onions? Not worth it at all. Focus on growing leafy herbs instead, like parsley and basil, and maybe some fava beans.
I don't know how it was back in the 1700s, but these days meat is far far more expensive than butter. You need protein from somewhere, sure, but just buying more meat is generally the opposite of what poor families should do. Better advice would be for them to get more legumes and cheaper varieties of offal into their diet.
Only cheap compared to restaurants. Not even slightly cheap overall.
The thing to realise is that your average daily/weekly calorie intake is more or less constant. So if you really want to cut down the grocery bill you need to minimize the cost per energy, not the cost per weight or cost per meal or whatever. There are other important considerations to eat well like protein, micronutrients, and flavor (generally in that order) but cost per energy is where to start.
As a side benefit cutting your food bill this way almost automatically means you're counting calories, which means you can easily adjust to slowly lose or gain weight if you're overweight or underweight respectively.