Eating The Freezer: Experiment Results
In April, regular readers may recall that Mr. Sense and I agreed to eschew all meat and bread purchases, partly to stretch our frugality muscles, but more so because we were getting annoyed with how challenging it was to close our overstuffed freezers. I generally only buy meat on sale, but apparently I have come across a lot of good sales!
This experiment was a piece of cake and we still have plenty of food left in our freezers. At the beginning of last month, I hypothesized how it might turn out, and now we can check these projections against the results.
I guessed that we would spend less than $250 for groceries all month. It turns out that was true… but I really overestimated our necessary spending. We ended the month at $144.43, tax included. We could certainly have come in lower, despite the fact that two out of four of us were actively training for a half marathon and another one is a rapidly growing teenage boy. We did 100% of our shopping at our local Aldi, which kept the costs down before even taking the constraints of the experiment into account.
Our spending stayed low because we were willing and actually excited to get creative with the contents of our freezers and pantry. Mr. Sense discovered some cuts of meat that always get passed over in the freezer, like pulled pork, and turned them into things that we wanted to eat (carnitas nachos!). For the most part, the new recipes turned out well. One batch of beef liver pate wasn’t a big hit with us, but our chickens were thrilled to be included in the feasting.
We also came upon a lucky break partway through the month. Our good friends, who pick up expired produce from a grocery store that gives it away to livestock owners, alerted us that their grocery source was forced to toss large quantities of frozen food after a delivery driver mistakenly put it in a refrigerated, not frozen, area. The store was happy to give this unsaleable, but perfectly edible, food away. Most of it was frozen fruit and vegetables, along with a generous quantity of chicken nuggets. Mr. Sense was able to get several bags of the undamaged but slightly defrosted food. Many bags made their way to the church, where he coordinates a free weekday lunch program, and some more came back to our house! The kids were thrilled to get chicken nuggets, which I never buy. And I’ve been enjoying a few bags of frozen fruit in smoothies, especially with the warmer weather settling in. A win like this doesn’t happen very often, but it added some fun to our month (and we were glad we had already begun emptying our freezer). While we were grateful for the free food, I don’t think it changed our shopping pattern much, since the items weren’t really things we typically buy.
We didn’t crack the $50 mark in the first half of the month, but our spending accelerated in the latter part. Kid Sense and I ran a local half marathon with a couple friends, and some other wonderful folks came to support us. To celebrate the occasion, Mr. Sense created a beautiful bagel board for the whole group– with four different kinds of his famous homemade bagels– that included lots of spreads, fruit, candy, and more. He takes a lot of pride in his culinary creations and did a little extra shopping to make the board special and ensure there was enough food for everyone who came over after the race. He also bought me some fancy non-alcoholic beers as a post-running treat.
My second hypothesis for the month was that 80% of our grocery spending would go towards produce and dairy. I didn’t keep track during the month, but adding up the items on the receipts, it appears this was a decent guess– the actual percentage was 73.1% (based on number of items, not cost). The other stuff ended up being candy (for the amazing bagel board), drinks (NA beer and seltzer water, for me), and a couple household staples (refried beans– I don’t think I can count this as produce). The kid-oriented snacks we already had lasted through the month, though I’ll need to pick up more soon. The snacks/candy and drinks could have been skipped if we were trying to stay on a tight budget, knocking off 17.1% of the items, and an even larger percentage of the cost.
My other guesses were that we would finally be able to close the kitchen freezer drawer without a battle (achieved!) and that Mr. Sense would be very ready to buy more chicken (I’m sure he’ll buy some soon, but we still have enough in the freezer that we’ll wait on a good deal).
While I’m happy to be able to buy bacon again– we ran out a few days before the end of the month– I expect we’ll continue buying less meat in general going forward. I adjusted to eating more eggs with my lunches this month instead of meat, and fortunately our chickens usually provide enough eggs that we don’t need to supplement with store bought. Mr. Sense and I are going to be more intentional about buying things we’re likely to eat right away, rather than stocking up the freezer with roasts and ribs that are delicious but require too much planning to use on a regular weeknight. Mr. Sense has always been wonderful about baking most of the bread items we eat, so I’m not tempted to buy much of those unless the price is ridiculously low (I generally consider $1 too much to pay for grocery store bread). Mr. Sense and I found this experiment to be a complete success, and we plan to repeat it at least once or twice a year, saving hundreds of dollars in the process.
