What I’d Rather Be Doing

Managing My Food Spending & CSAs

Oops.

Every now and again I keep forgetting to use Mint.com to track my expenditures and my accounts, so it’s sometimes shocking to see what I spend on after I stop paying attention. The graph above is my “Food” spending for a month.

While I live with two other people (my boyfriend and my roommate), this total doesn’t include feeding them as well. Restaurant costs is nearly always split between Matt and myself, and we’re pretty good at pitching in our fair share for the groceries at home (Although, I cook the most at home so I may be feeding them more than they feed me, increasing my costs).

So, why does did cost me nearly FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS to feed me last month? Laziness. Restaurants, prepared foods at the super market… it’s rather sickening when I should be saving a lot more than I am.

So I’ve decided to combine my need to save money and my desire to eat better and locally by joining a couple CSAs. And I have to admit, before I looked at my spending for the last month, I thought that CSAs were expensive.

My plan:

1. Join Two Small Farms for vegetables. They offer half shares combined from two small farms (thus the name) near Watsonville. The biggest problem with this is that they take three months off in winter. As it’s late Sept. now, I may have to wait until March to receive my first shipment.
2. Join Marin Sun Farms for meat. I never realized you could get a meat CSA. I also don’t eat meat very often, so I wondered whether this would be a good choice. However, I figured that if I was to eat meat more often, I would rather it be the grass-fed, sustainably-farmed meat that Marin Sun Farms offers, and having the meat around will probably mean I would eat it more often as well (plus, protein!).

Combining the $77 monthly share from Two Small Farms plus the $75 share from Marin Sun Farms should provide me with enough edibles to last me through a month as well as keeping my costs down (since the additional benefit of fresh food at home means less time spent eating out).

I’m rather excited. Has anyone else considered a CSAs? Any thoughts?