7 Ways to Save Money as Food Prices Rise

According to the UN, global food prices increased by nearly 30 percent this past year. Here in the US, food prices have soared 9.4 percent during this same time period. Demand at food banks has also increased.

The pandemic forced roughly 60 million Americans to seek help for food insecurity, according to Feeding America. At the end of 2021, as hiring boomed, demand for food banks returned to regular levels. But the relief was short-lived.

“High inflation leaves food banks struggling to meet needs.” AP News

How can this be in such a wealthy country?

While the following tips will help reduce food waste, the tips assume that people actually have access to food. Too many people do not. We need political will and policy to fix this rather than stretched-thin non-profits triaging the symptoms of hunger. We must treat the disease itself—inequality, a non-existent social safety net, insatiable greed, corruption. (Register to vote here.)

And now for the tips.

1. Shop the fridge first

When we were taught to cook—if we were taught—we were told to look up a tasty recipe, jot down the list of ingredients, shop for those ingredients, prep the food, then put away the leftover ingredients and any leftovers of the dish. Done a few times a week, this can easily result in all kinds of food going to waste.

Instead, before you choose a recipe, look in the refrigerator and let the contents dictate what you’ll cook next. Have some leftover roasted vegetables? Throw them in a frittata, a galette or add a handful to hummus. Have leftover pesto you made with kale stems you saved? Top pizza dough with it. Build a grain bowl around leftover cooked rice or barley or farro.

Americans throw out about 25 percent of the food and drinks they buy. Cooking with the food you have on hand will slash food waste and save money—and time because you’ll make fewer trips to the grocery store.

2. View everything as a resource

Just as weeds are, in fact, plants, most parts of vegetables are food. Include daikon radish greens when making kimchi. Save your beet greens and sauté them, including the thick ribs you mince up. Or add beet greens to a pot of borscht. Save the stems of kale or chard, chop them up and sauté them along with onions for a sort of heretical mirepoix. No one will know!

The outer leaves of cauliflower taste delicious when roasted. Simply toss them in olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and roast. Some cauliflower leaves have very thick white ribs. You can remove these, cut them up and cook them just like the cauliflower itself. Depending on your farmers’ market, you might be able to get cauliflower leaves for free! At my farmers’ market, some vendors remove the leaves and place them in a bin for customers to help themselves. 

Think of every part of the vegetable as a tasty resource. You’ll have fun finding uses for everything, you’ll eat delicious food, you’ll save money and you’ll reduce food waste.

For more ideas on cooking with scraps, go here, here and here. 

3. Eat more fresh vegetables

In a glass-half-full kind of way, the good-ish news is that vegetable prices, while higher, have risen less than the prices of many other foods. The USDA forecasts the following price increases this year:

• Beef and veal: +16.2 percent
• Pork: +14 percent
• Poultry: +12.5 percent
• Fish and seafood: +10.4 percent
• Eggs: +11.4 percent
• Dairy: +5.2 percent
• Fats and oils: +11.7 percent
• Fresh fruits: +10.6 percent
• Fresh vegetables: +4.3 percent
• Processed fruits and vegetables: +7.6 percent
• Cereals and bakery products: +7.8 percent

Most of us don’t eat enough vegetables. They cost less than beef and pork before inflation and now cost much less than those foods.

4. Buy pantry staples in bulk

Do this if you will eat all of the food. Otherwise, it may go to waste. The 35-pound bag of popcorn below at $24 works out to a little less than 69 cents per pound. The cheapest popcorn I’ve seen at the bulk bins costs 99 cents per pound.

Trying to buy everything package-free? Keep in mind that bulk stores fill their bins with giant bags of food like these. The food doesn’t grow on the store roof. Yes, you’ll have a large bag to deal with but if you bought individual bags of popcorn kernels, you’d bring home much more packaging. And if you buy pre-popped popcorn in plastic bags, this bag of kernels would replace at least 175 bags of it. (I did the math. One bag or popped popcorn would use less than .20 pounds of kernels. 5 x 35 = 175 bags.)

5. Be your own sous chef

If it’s prepped, it’s eaten.

Recently, my daughter Charlotte showed me a great prep trick. She minces up several cloves of garlic, a few inches of ginger and a few jalapeños, mixes that up and stores it in a jar to use all week (or a bit longer). When she cooks an Indian dish, for example, the most tedious prep work is done. As I type this, she’s cooking chana masala with the last few spoonfuls of this mix (it smells amazing!).

To extend the shelf-life of greens—spinach, kale, Swiss chard—the day I bring them home, I cut them, wash them, then put them in a clean cloth produce bag. Outside, I twirl the bag around like a human salad spinner, wicking water away from the produce, and put the entire bag of damp greens in the refrigerator crisper. This is like having convenient bagged greens on hand—without the plastic waste. The greens stay fresh for a long time. 

6. Cook like Grandma

Our grandmothers (or great-grandmothers, depending on your age) ran efficient kitchens. They preserved food. They fermented food. They knew how to cook every morsel of food. Their practical life skills served them well during hard times. And they tried to pass those skills down. Somewhere along the line, society rejected those skills and embraced convenience culture.

You cook like Grandma when you save your vegetable scraps to make broth; or fill pastry with fruit that, while still edible, has seen better days; or make a batch of sauerkraut.

7. Grow food

Start with some easy plants to grow from seeds: herbs, beets, carrots, radishes, zucchini, kale and arugula. Plant a couple of fruit trees if you have space. You’ll plant once and eat for years after the trees begin to bear fruit (you have to be patient). If you don’t have a yard, you may be able to rent a plot at a community garden. (Go here to search for one near you.)

Regrow green onions, basil and other herbs

For green onions, when prepping, reserve about one inch of the white ends with the hairy roots. Plant them immediately in soil or, if you don’t have time to plant right away, place the ends in a jar of water and after the green parts have regrown a bit, plant the onions in a pot of soil outside or indoors. Or plant them directly in the ground.

Basil works similarly. Trim the ends of a few sprigs of very fresh basil and set them aside in a jar of water. Change the water every week or so—and use that water on your other plants! After a few weeks, you should see white hairy roots growing. Replant these ends to grow more basil, either outside or indoors in a pot in a sunny window. This trick will work even if you have stripped the leaves from the basil sprigs! Let at least some of the basil flower and attract bees—they love the stuff. In the fall, harvest your basil seeds to plant in the spring. Go here for more on growing basil from cuttings.

I’ve also had good success regrowing rosemary, which can be a bit tricky to grow from seed. Start with several sprigs as not all of them will develop roots. I started with five in October and now have one actual full-fledged (but small) rosemary plant that I need to transplant soon. Someone on Facebook recommended I put the cuttings in an opaque container rather than a glass jar—the roots grew much quicker when I tried that!

The future of food prices

Food prices likely won’t ease up any time soon. Drought, high shipping costs, bird flu, supply chain problems and a lingering pandemic have all contributed to higher food prices. Russian aggression has worsened an already precarious situation. Russian soldiers have allegedly stolen grain and destroyed grain warehouses in Ukraine. Russia has also blocked the export of 20 million tons of Ukrainian grain, which, if left to rot, will exacerbate a global food crisis.

Even if Russia ended its war on Ukraine today, climate change will result in substantially smaller crop yields by as early as 2030, according to NASA. Less food leads to higher food prices.

Now would be a great time to grow even just a little bit of food. Maybe you’ll start with herbs this year. Next year, who knows? And as for food waste, there is no downside to reducing food waste at home.

Gratitude can also help reduce food waste. The more grateful we are for what we have, the less likely we are to waste it.

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I have enough food-saving tips to write a book! And I did! Go here to learn more.