Ask Lemmy

I taught myself how to cook and it's been life-changing.

Where I live, the grocery prices aren't up anywhere near the double or triple that other people have mentioned. The basics / necessities have generally seen more modest price increases over the past few years. There have been obvious exceptions like when there's been shortages of specific things or like if I were to compare out of season produce prices to the prices of stuff when its in season, but in those cases I just go without (which also kind of proves they weren't necessities to begin with).

For the most part, any luxury items or luxury brands that have dramatically increased their prices and engaged in shrinkflation, I stop buying that stuff or cut way back. Even if I can afford that stuff, I'm not going to pay the prices. And if I weren't really able to afford to feed myself, I would definitely not be buying anything like that. No organic apples for me. No potato chips. No microwave meals. No soda.

In my adult life, I've twice experienced food insecurity. I can't speak to anybody's situation in specific, but for me what worked was willingness to be flexible and getting creative. I would grow as much of my own food as I could, even in a small shared living space I could grow some lettuce or spring onions in a window. I was also pretty knowledgeable about edible plants, including local/wild stuff, so that helped to supplement my diet as well.

I'm doing a lot more cooking that's for sure

Pancakes can really go with anything, they're basically a large flat biscuit. Not to mention they keep quite nicely if frozen or simply put in the fridge

Fortunately for us we make a lot of money so we don't look at prices.

I was actually contributing a fair bit to savings with the last job I did, but for anybody making 14 or less I can imagine it's a real struggle.

I mostly buy ingredients and cook bulk batches of food. Before, we were splurging on instacart, but they got crazy expensive with their upcharges (MINIMUM 15% increase in item cost, + service charge, +delivery fee (or the annual delivery fee), +tip (it started to feel like 15% was too low, on top of the 15% grocery upcharge).

We stopped that and we actually spend less now even after this inflation.

Buying cheaper stuff. Doing fine I guess

My spreadsheet shows my grocery costs are about 12% higher than last year. A difference of around $10/wk.

Buy in bulk.

Buy lots of dried beans, rice, etc. (living in earthquake land, I like to keep our canned goods fairly stocked and just rotate out old ones only).

Buy from farmers markets when available, frozen veg when not.

Buy whatever the supermarket is trying to get rid of. In Japan, I end up with mystery seafood a fair amount, but just about anything is fine fried or in a stew.

Stay away from things out-of-season and pre-prepared foods.

Use any space you have to grow something. Even in my Tokyo apartment, I was growing herbs and chilis.

The above helps. I think everyone has some thing they don't want to give up and that's fine. When I first got out on my own in the US, I ended up surviving off of whatever I could get at the restaurants I worked at and boxed, instant mashed potatoes from the dollar store.

I've just stopped eating, I'm hoping it will make the survival aspect a moot point after awhile.

I am lucky enough to have a yard, so grow leafy greens in most seasons and some other veg.

Other than that, what I noticed about the food inflation is that prices converged, whole foods were already expensive but their prices came down a little while our regular grocery and the cheaper place increased theirs a lot, regular grocery prices worse than whole foods in quite a lot of the things I actually buy so I just buy stuff at whole foods and local ethnic groceries now, not much from the chain grocery.

Dried beans and canned beans we use for near every meal but have always done, that's not a change.

Housing here has increased way more than food. Rent and purchase prices went crazy and are now dropping so slowly.

I've been shopping at WinCo, it's a further bike ride than Fred Meyer or Trader Joes but the prices are hard to beat. This year I'm looking at buying into a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). The one I'm looking at is $400 for 12 boxes of food spread across 24 weeks. We'll see if it's a good deal. I'll be planting a garden soon too. Hoping to get a 3 sisters plot or two as well as some potatoes in containers