Foodies shit me, though I am one. The reason I say this though is that I think most people have the wrong idea what a foodie is, and it is this misperception that shits me.
To take an example, we were given a subscription to The Australian Gourmet Traveller magazine, which is about to expire. We are not renewing it, which is unfortunate, becuase parts of the magazine were quite good.
What was annoying, though, is this idea that being a foodie is a rich person’s pursuit, with large credit balances and inflated prices the norm.
Just about everything in the magazine was expensive. Even when chefs from some new restaurant are raving about their slow cooked peasant dishes, and telling us the the cheaper cuts are the better ones (and let’s face it, the best food is indeed peasant food), they’re still charging upwards of $40 a plate – hardly peasant prices.
I understand this idea that the magazine is supposed to be ‘aspirational’, but it still gives me the shits because it doesn’t have to be. It’s not just this one magazine though, it’s most of the things that go with foodie culture – restaurants, cooking classes, wines, kitchen appliances/implements, etc.
I was, in a way, forced into this sort of thinking by our financial situation. This year we dropped from 2 incomes to 1, so we had to really consider where our budget was spent. Seeing as most of our restaurant experiences were mediocre, we quickly cut them out. Why spend a week’s food bill on one plate of food that was cooked in an ordinary way, and served by indifferent teenagers? That’s not to say that we don’t enjoy any restaurants, and there are some real gems out there (Citron at Wilston is superb, as is Thai Chada at the nearby Grange), however we’re not going to spend the money to find them (I will accept recommendations though).
Cooking classes are an absolute rip as well. Don’t even think of attending one in Brisbane for less than $100, and sometimes much, much more. In contrast, the chef at Govindha’s restaurant in the CBD is hosting cooking demos on a nearly weekly basis for $20 – $25 per night (usually Saturdays), and I think for the average punter, they’d get more out of this class than a $100 job from the other places around town.
Now I understand that running a restaurant or food business is a tough job, and I doubt I could do it myself, but sometimes you feel like you’re just getting fleeced because there are just enough baby boomers with too much disposable income around willing to pay these prices, and ruining it for the rest of us.
Wines, too, are heading down this road. Again, another tough industry, and I really doubt I could do it myself, but I don’t buy the fact that $30 is the minimum price for a bottle of decent wine. For mine, $20 is a reasonable upper limit at the moment, and thankfully we found Darren Davis at Purple Palate through our cooking club who regularly hooked us up with small production, exceptional wines from the Barossa Valley, many of which came in under the $20 limit. We’re planning a small invasion of their retail outlet at BarBarossa in the city soon to stock up for summer.
So to ensure this post isn’t just an inane rant, full of sound and fury (and then something about insignificance), I’ll share how we’ve been approaching our foodie-ness (on a budget). Below is how we buy our food, how long it lasts, and how much it costs. This feeds two adults (with large appetites) for a month, with the occasional extras along as well.
Vegetables – $110 per month. We buy two organic boxes from www.homefreshorganics.com.au, each lasting us a fortnight. We get the organic over the conventional. This isn’t quite Community Supported Agriculture, but it does cut out some of the middle-men between the farmer and our plate. The vegetables are very fresh, and very seasonal. To make this work, you do have to change your cooking and base it around what’s available, but then we love doing the challenge that provides, and surely this is the most traditional way of eating anyway.
We also source all our salads, herbs, and supplement our veges from our vegetable garden in the backyard. No more paying $2 for a bunch of basil that lasts 1 day and isn’t all that fresh to begin with.
Meat – $<100 per month Firstly, we’ve cut back drastically the amount of meat we eat – probably every other night we’ll have a meat free meal (it might include stock though, so it’s not totally vegetarian).
We’ve started sourcing humanely treated, hormone free, grass fed beef from www.honestbeef.com.au. The ‘honesty’ comes out of their breakdown of prices, which tells you exactly how much the farmer, the butcher, and they themselves get out of your payment. Comes in 20kg boxes, delivered to your door, and costs $250 per box ($12.50 per kg). You get a representative sample of all the different cuts of the animal, so you get some steaks, some roasts, some sausages (which are phenomenal), some mince, etc. Again, we enjoy the challenge this provides as we find ways of cooking cuts we’re not used to. We went halves in a box with friends back in August some time, and we’re still getting through it.
We’ve also located similar arrangements for lamb (where you can buy a half or a whole lamb – the half lamb is great, becuse you only get one lamb shank, because there is only one hind leg in half a lamb ), and tracked down a butcher that gets organic, free range pork. Occasionally, we’ll pick up a whole free range chook for about $12 from the supermarket, and this will give us at least 3 meals with meat (the first roast, then the shredded meat in something, then use everything else as a soup base), and then stock for weeks. We have done this once with a duck as well. As nearly half of our meals are meat free, a $12 chook will contribute to nearly a week’s worth of meals.
To those who say I’m being a hypocrite by spending extra money on free range, organic meat – we’re actually spending less money this way. Our food bill has dropped dramatically, because we’re eating less meat overall (and we’re both feeling a lot healthier as a result, but I’ll stop now lest you think I’m a health food nutter).
Wines - We haven’t bought many wines of late, but as mentioned above, we’ll be shopping around the $20/bottle amount, and buying what we can afford. If this means we drink less, then that’s probably a good thing.
It shouldn’t cost a lot of money to be into food, and hopefully you’ll see from our example that really being interested in your food and cooking can save you money, and taste better than anything you can buy in a restaurant.
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