On January 1st of last year, I began meticulously tracking my food purchases, both for groceries and for dining out, to see how much of my money was going toward locally-produced & sustainably-grown food. It was a daunting task. I logged every receipt, made notes of my cash use at farmers markets and on nights out, and even calculated the market value of the produce grown in my garden plots. Though I originally planned a monthly post documenting my progress, life did what it does and I ended up grouping together the months in roughly seasonal quarters. Now, having tracked for a year, I wanted to take a look back at my spending to see how I did.

But first: a brief moment to discuss my September-December expenses (since, you know, that just ended).

I’d really like to say that the last four months showed great progress. But that would be a big fat lie. Look at that! Almost half of my spending, for groceries and dining out, was from the large, corporate sources I’m trying to wean myself off of. I’m most disappointed in the grocery spending, as during the previous eight months I had really reined that purple wedge in.

Some thoughts on why this happened:

1. This fall was a perfect storm of party-throwing, wedding-cake-baking, long-hour-working, and cross-country-traveling. Routine grocery-shopping sort of flew out the window

2. I couldn’t shop at my local farmers market or co-op for the vast majority of the wedding cake ingredients as it would have been nearly impossible (and wildly un-local) to haul them across the continent for the Colorado nuptials, so I had to use the grocery stores available to me on my first evening in town.

3. In fact, most of the locations I traveled to this fall don’t have co-ops or year-round farmers markets, so holiday grocery shopping was limited primarily to the big box stores.

4. I know it was hungry too, but a wily groundhog made quick work in my garden of the produce I planted in late August. As fall revved up, I barely had time to hurriedly plant a few dozen cloves of garlic, let alone start from scratch on my fall crop. Ugh.

So. Huhrumph. Fall wasn’t so good for this aspiring locavore.

When looking at the entire year, however, I felt better.

Even with my backslide in recent months, I still managed to make 75% of my grocery purchases and more than 50% of my restaurant dollars from local sources.  In a 20-something living in a nation where the big box is king, I’m fairly pleased that I can make that statement.

But I think I can do better. I’m not going to track my spending this year quite so maniacally, but I am going to continue pursuing the goal I originally set out to achieve: to purchase as much of my food from local sources as I possibly can. This summer, I plan to join a CSA, which should help, and I’m hoping also to have an even more productive garden (pending the groundhog).

Is eating local fare important to you What are some of the challenges you face in doing so?

After not only one but two majorly epic failures in the kitchen yesterday, I thought I’d start off today with an easy, food budget update. I started the year off posting monthly, but as winter slid into spring, spring into summer, things got busy, and I’d suddenly find myself half-way through the month and still didn’t have time to post about my edible expenses from the previous month. In fact even this month, I’m clearly not posting until halfway through, but since this too is an accumulation of three months, I tossed up my hands and decided to post anyway.

And, as I discovered when looking at my graphs this morning, I’m glad I did. June, July, and August have, for the last two years, been a very unusual time for me. Brad has been away on internships both summers, which leaves me living a life of full of single lady meals at home and, frankly, a lot of take-out. I also traveled rather a lot, grew a lot of food in the garden, and canned copious amounts of summer produce that I otherwise would not have purchased. In some ways, my graphs reflect a bit of back-sliding from the previous installment of the rather fortuitous months of March, April, and May. Here’s how things shook out:

On the grocery front, things stayed pretty steady. I was somewhat surprised by this particular chart since I collected quite a lot of food from my garden and thus was expecting the blue segment to grow. However, I also spent a fair amount of cash on canning supplies, produce for canning, flours, sugars, and butter for wedding cake practice cakes, and so on. Evidence also seems to suggest that I made a lot of oh-poofles-I-forgot trips to the Harris Teeter by my apartment (it falls in the purple pie, large-scale corporate). Seems I was kind of a scatterbrain. Still, the vast majority of my groceries were either grown by me, grown locally, or purchased at the local co-op, so at least there’s that.

Here, however is the true backslide. During the spring months, I had cut my corporate restaurant budget down to 20% of this graph, but look! Back up to nearly half, something was terribly amiss. The most logical conclusions I have are these: one, when I did eat out this summer, it tended to be quick stops on my way home or lunches on campus when I was too frazzled to pack my own. Two, it’s REALLY obvious when I traveled. After a week with 1-2 restaurant trips, suddenly there are six airport purchases from long days of travel flying across the continent. Oy. Must do better this fall.

Summer was strange. As I move into fall, I’m curious to see what develops. Brad is back now, I’ve been much better about planning ahead so I am less tempted to stop for takeout or to order lunch on campus, and the farmers market is still chock full of new produce. Here’s to hoping for getting back on the local-eating horse!

I’ve done a really bang-up job of giving a monthly update on my food budget, haven’t I I started in January, updated in February, and then… got busy. And it’s not that I haven’t posted other things. I have! I really wanted to tell you about this. And these. And my progress on this. Firsts of months came, and I thought, I should write a budget post, and then before I knew it, Fifteenths came by and it was no longer relevant.

If you’re new here, to ring in the new year I started meticulously tracking my food expenses, both for groceries and for restaurants, to get a sense of just how much of my money was going to local food sources rather than corporate, distant ones. Despite my lack of updates, I have managed to continue this tracking. You can check out my first post on the subject to see how I distinguish one type of purchase from another.

So without further ado, here’s a three-month update.

On the Grocery Dollars front, I’m making some interesting progress. Interestingly, the purple wedge (the one I’m trying to get rid of) has only reduced a little since January, about 3%. The convenience of a 24-hour store SO close to my apartment is, I confess, challenging to overcome sometimes. And oddly, there are some items I simply cannot find at the co-op. Brad’s preferred pickle relish. Instant tapioca. Our favorite sandwich bread. But look at the blue and red! Up from about a third to over HALF! Not surprisingly, I’ve got a lot more produce out of my garden in the spring months than I did in January, and the variety of food available at the farmer’s market has increased as well. Exciting!

And to the restaurants…

PROGRESS MAJOR. The chain restaurant wedge that currently occupies 20% of my food dollars It was 68% in January. It helps that May, in particular, included two trips to new cities where we focused on exploring local dining options rather than chains we recognized. But in general, since I saw the glaring discrepancy in January between my chain restaurant expenses and my local restaurants, I have been trying very hard to choose the latter when I can. And yes: I realize that the ideal, blue wedge of local restaurants serving primarily local food is still small. It’s something I struggle with. At least here, a huge number of the restaurants that focus on local cuisine are, let’s face it, really pricy. There are only so many nights a month when I can afford to dine at them. And these next three, while I’m spending the summer solo Even more of a challenge.

Now nearly half-way through my year of tracking, I’ve learned a few things about myself and my food-buying habits. The first is that there are some non-local ingredients I’m simply not willing to give up (yet?). Olive oil. Lemons, and more importantly, lemon juice. Sugar. Brummel & Brown. Unless I decide to completely up-end my cooking and baking habits, some of these things will always be in my pantry. On the other hand, I do pretty well with meat and produce, and rarely have them in my cart any more at the store. But I do grab the occasional avocado, a bag of sweet cherries, which most unfortunately, do not seem favored by growers in the Durham area, or a grapefruit.

The second thing I’ve learned, however, is that in most instances, it is even more satisfying to wait until something I want is in season.  The clamor that ensues the first day of asparagus is well deserved. Same for strawberries. My favorite vegetable of all, shelling peas, have a phenomenally short season, but I figure out ways to savor these tiny veggies every day of that time.

The more of my produce I buy locally and in season, the more I find I’m less interested in fruits out of their element and their time. I don’t need to buy apples when berries, melons, and peaches are nearby. I love celebrating the food that I have and arriving at the farmers market with a sense of anticipation about what might be there to surprise me.

Just to re-cap, I started the new year with a goal: I wanted to learn just how I spend my money on food. Do I trade it with local culinary artisans National corporations?

After some debate over which delineations mattered, I made a list of categories into which I would divide my purchases —  both for groceries and for restaurants — and began the semi-tedious task of tracking every single receipt. My first month of tracking gave me some results that were expected, and some that surprised me.

Here are the results for February:

On this front, the numbers are almost identical to January. I did have a few extra runs to the big box grocery store close to my apartment this month, and to be totally honest, I’m not exactly sure why. Other than I must have really planned meals poorly that week. My goal for this month is to only hit the grocery store once a week, which should save food dollars, gas dollars, and time dollars. Yes time dollars.

But look! Grocery dollars may have been the same, but restaurant dollars show major improvement! I had friends in town one weekend and my parents in town for almost a week, which gave me opportunities to go outside my normal restaurant box and show off Durham’s local flavor. We’ll see how it keeps up when I am not entertaining guests…

So on goes the tracking. And finally, as promised, if you want to track as well, I’ve uploaded the spreadsheet I’m using. You can download it at the link below… it’s pretty smart and makes all your numbers turn into graphs. Poof! Time to get excited.

Food Dollar Graphs

Happy tracking!

Fair warning: if you didn’t know I was a moderately obsessive, detail-oriented, and rather analytical, you certainly will be the end of this post.

I love cooking and baking. Taking photos of the process, digging through shots to find the best ones to tell a recipe’s story, and sharing them with you. I get a thrill from planting seeds that, after a few weeks of sunshine and water, will produce food. And my weekly trip to the farmers market is a cornerstone of every weekend.

But part of my intent in starting this blog was to challenge myself toward a lofty goal. I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to buy locally  (or grow myself) as much as I could, but I’d never really tracked how I spent my food dollars exactly.

The new year gave me a great opportunity to step. it. up.

I wanted to see just how much of my money I spent in a local food versus, well, non-local food. Easy enough, right?

Eh. It turns out it’s not quite so simple.

As I actually began smoothing out the wad of receipts in my wallet to enter totals on my fancy-pants spreadsheet, new questions developed: is there a consequential difference between buying groceries at a regional corporate chain and a national corporate chain Is it important to distinguish between a locally-owned franchise offering a corporate product and a regular old chain restaurant How do I value the food I grow myself Should I track the food as I eat it, or as I buy it Should I focus on only the food’s source, or the economic impacts of the food seller on my community?

After much deliberation, I think I found something that works. Is this the system you’d use Maybe not. But for now, for me, this breakdown is specific enough to identify areas of improvement, but general enough that each pie graph isn’t seventeen colors.

Grocery Dollars
Spent on foods that are coming home to my pantry, fridge, or freezer

Self-Grown: Food from my garden plots and container garden, grown by me! I estimate the prices based on what I would pay at the farmers market for the same product.

Direct from Producer: Food purchased primarily at the farmers market, pick-your-own farms, or local food artisans. The more of my food I can swap for cash directly with the person who made that food, the better.

Co-op/Local Independent: I’m fortunate to have access to a grocery store co-op; the store is collaboratively-owned by members of the community, and any surplus profits are divided amongst the many co-owners each year. This co-op places a major emphasis on selling products that are locally, sustainably, or organically produced.

Large-Scale Corporate: Big box grocery chains. All of ’em. We debated the merits of regional chains compared to national chains, sustainable-focused versus conventional, but since my goal is to minimize my shopping at all of them, I lumped them all together.

So how’d I do?

Not too shabby! For my first month of tracking, I spent only 18% of my money at large-scale, corporate grocery stores. With one of these grocery stores (a 24-hour one at that) less than a mile from my apartment, it’s very tempting to just run over there when I need something, ya know, RIGHT NOW. As the seasons change and more produce becomes available, I hope to reduce that purple slice even more.

Restaurant Dollars
Food I buy at restaurants, coffee shops, campus eateries and the like.

Sources Local Food: Restaurants with a strong emphasis on sourcing local ingredients and omitting menu items that are extremely out of season.

One-of-a-Kind Independent: Those hole-in-the-wall local gems unique to your town. These restaurants don’t necessarily source local ingredients, but they provide plenty of local flavor and support restauranteurs willing to take a risk on opening their own place.

Local Owned, Corporate Product: A sort of catch-all category for those eateries that aren’t really independent but do still seem different from corporate chains. Franchises owned by a local businessperson. The little convenience store in the student center (a danger zone – lollipops shouldn’t be available this close to my office).

Large-Scale Corporate: The big national chains. The same menu in Vermont and California, in January and June.

How’d I do on this one?

Ruh-roh. Though I knew this was coming, I’m still stunned by how big that purple pie is. Here’s the thing. Most of the really local restaurants are, let’s face it, EXPENSIVE. Or fancy. Or sit-down-y. Usually, all three. When we eat out, we are rarely looking for any of those attributes. On a brighter note, we have a gaggle of one-of-a-kind, independent restaurants here in Durham, and we are getting better at choosing those places for our meals out than the chains we became accustomed to in college. It’s a work in progress.

What does this mean?

It means it’s a start! Every month, I’ll make a new set of graphs and try to figure out how to improve. Ideally, the blue and red pieces of pie will grow, gradually pushing out the purple. Now I’m no fool: I know there will be challenges. Sometimes, the only place to eat in an airport is a chain. Also I don’t see myself forsaking burrito bowls at Chipotle. Or driving 20 minutes to the co-op instead of Harris Teeter when I’m halfway through cooking a meal and realizing I’m out of some key ingredient.

But the simple act of tracking has already made me think twice about how I spend my food dollars. Do I need to buy cheese today, or can it wait until a farmers market run on Saturday What can I learn to make myself out of ingredients from local growers that can replace something I currently pull off the shelf at the store?

For what it’s worth: I think our individual choices matter. Just as each vote contributes to an election, every dollar spent on local food contributes to an economy that supports a vibrant network of farms, farmers markets, co-ops, and new local restaurants. As more and more people have taken an interest in where their food comes from, new farmers markets are popping up all over the place, local sections are appearing at even the largest of grocery stores, and more restaurants are proudly stating where their food was grown. It’s truly exciting.

Stay tuned! We’ll see how February goes, and I’ll be back with more graphs in a month.

What is important to you when deciding which food to buy?