Februgality!

When I was at the grocery store the other day, I started thinking about my whole food to food-in-a-box ratio. Although most of the groceries I buy are vegetables, fruit, grains/legumes from the bulk food bins, and reasonably unprocessed dairy products like plain yogurt, I think that the majority of what I spend goes to what I call "food-in-a-box." Prepared frozen and/or microwavable meals, snacks in a bag inside a box (double penalty!), energy bars, convenience foods like cut up fruit, olives in a jar, fancy cheese from Whole Foods, ice cream sandwiches...etc. I like to eat healthy, which to me means minimal food-in-a-box, so I think I probably eat less packaged foods than the average consumer...but I still spend quite a bit of money on that sort of thing.

To address this, I decided to challenge myself to NO FOOD IN A BOX for the month of February. To keep myself honest, I am:

1. Starting this blog
2. Making my friend Kelsey do this challenge with me - it's a contest! And it will be a joint blog. Kelsey's an awesome blogger.
3. Telling my friend Erin, who is about to successfully complete a month-long gluten-free food-blogger challenge.

There are a lot of food-blogger challenges along these lines out there, actually...but they all seem to revolve around eating healthier, rather than around frugality. I don't want to eat healthier (I eat plenty healthy without going to extremes, thanks). I just want to know how little money it is possible to spend on groceries by eating only unpackaged foods (which tend to be very cheap).

As I do this challenge, I'm also interested in investigating how issues of privilege and inequality affect the food choices we have available to us, and in highlighting the barriers that exist to eating and shopping this way long-term. Specifically I'm concerned with things like food deserts, access to unprocessed foods, time and transportation issues...even seemingly innocuous but actually privilege-related issues like the fact that I happen to have internet access (which allows me to easily find new cheap easy whole-food recipes) and a whole shelf full of cookbooks (which also cut down on the lentils-and-rice-are-boring factor). Kelsey doesn't have to do this part...though she can probably chime in with barriers one encounters when working a crazy nurse-schedule. 

Next we will follow up with The Rules...once we make The Rules. We also tell of the first Madeline Kelsey Frugality Challenge (which I won).