Half Changed World

Lisa at Learning the Lessons of Nixon has inspired us to start our own version of her  Family Dinners.   And you’re invited.

The idea is that at least half of the effort of having people over for dinner is the hassle of emailing back and forth, trying to find a date that works for everyone, then hoping that no one gets stuck working late and the kids stay healthy.  This hassle can be largely overcome by just saying "Ok, standing invitation for dinner on Tuesday night.  If you can’t make it this week, come next."  The menus are centered on the sort of low-fuss dishes that can be cooked in large batches as easily as in small (and that freeze well if no one shows up some week).  And it will be good for us to have a precipitating event that forces us to vacuum the cat hair off the living room furniture once a week.

I’m serious about the invitation.  Since we can’t guarantee that we’ll be home every single Tuesday evening, I’m making a list to send everyone whose interested a weekly notice of a) whether we’re on and b) what’s for dinner (this week, it’s homemade pizza).  If you’re in the greater DC area and would like to be added to the list, send me an email.

After a month of almost no rain, it’s been cold and rainy all weekend.  Yesterday we had one of D’s friends over for a sleepover, and went to the Children’s Rain Garden in Arlington and saw the new Wallace and Gromit movie.  Today, we had pancakes for breakfast, and then the boys ran all over the house hunting rabbits.  We ran a few errands after the friend went home, and then T and I were pretty much wiped.

In the interest of distracting D, and maybe getting him to eat an occasional vegetable, I offered him a new computer game — MyPyramid Blast Off, from the fine folks at the US Department of Agriculture.  In order to make the rocket blast off and travel to Planet Power!, you have to pick an assortment of foods that equals the right number of portions from the different food groups, without overloading your "fuel tanks" by eating too many calories.  Sounds thrilling, no?

D was actually quite intrigued by the game, even though it’s about as basic as you can get.  (I suspect kids in the official target age range (6-12) would be bored stiff.)  The only big problem we had was that it really did require one of us to sit with him the whole time and read the choices, so it didn’t give us quite as much of a break as we had hoped.   On the nutritional front, I’d rate it about a B:

• It did help us talk to D about the need to eat a bigger variety of foods, including some vegetables.  We’ve been floundering a bit trying to explain to him why we don’t want him to eat peanut butter on graham crackers for 3 meals a day, even if it is a reasonably healthy food.
• He was willing to try a carrot stick at dinner this evening.  He only ate about 2 bites of it, but he claimed to like it.  So that’s a good thing.

On the negative side:

• They were pushing the low-fat options pretty hard, including praising a choice of non-fat chocolate milk over the 2% fat milk that we serve the boys.  Given the overall mix of his diet, the fat is a better choice than the extra sugar.
• The options listed for the "meat and beans" category were pretty limited.  They didn’t seem to count peanuts and peanut butter toward it, and they rarely provided eggs as an option.  Those are pretty big sources of protein for our kids.
• There was essentially no discussion of portion size.   And at the "official" portion size, almost anything can fit into a balanced diet — even burgers and fries.  But almost no one eats that little of them at a sitting.

A few months ago, when Moxie solicited Bad Mommy/Daddy Confessions, she was looking for one-time horrors, and explicitly ruled out ongoing failings.  But, truth be told, I spend a lot more mental and emotional energy worrying about the fact that D doesn’t eat any vegetables than about the time I turned my back on him in the grocery cart and he fell on his head.  The fall scared the heck out of me at the time, but he survived, and I know that even the best parents have occasional lapses of that sort.  But deep down, I’m convinced that my son’s eating habits are a sign of my failure.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately around the internet about the health consequences of being overweight, the new Food Pyramid, childhood obesity,and Cookie Monster’s new message that "cookies are a sometimes food." I think it’s an important conversation to have as a society, but it drives me slightly insane on a personal level.  One of these days I’m going to stuff a little ziplock bag full of green pepper slices up the nose of a parent who smugly tells me that their child just loves vegetables because they’ve always set a good example. 

Things D will eat these days include all sorts of breads, muffins, pancakes and waffles.  Milk, juice, yogurt smoothies (sometimes).  Raisins.  Cheese.  Fish sticks (sometimes).  Scrambled eggs (sometimes).  Chicken "dinosaurs" and nuggets.  Ice cream, cookies, and cake.  But not icing.  Pizza crusts but not the part with sauce.  Hot dogs, although he prefers the bun with nothing on it.  Grilled cheese sandwiches. Peanut butter, but not jelly.  Apple slices when offered by his friend’s mother, but not when offered by me.  That’s about it.  He used to like blueberries, but won’t eat them now.  He’s the only 4 year old I’ve ever heard of who won’t eat plain spaghetti, no butter or sauce.  Pretty much the only fruit or vegetables he consumes are what we put into the muffins.  So we make a lot of muffins.

I’ve read Ellyn Satter’s terrific How to Get Your Kid To Eat — But Not Too Much and generally try to follow its principles.  We do more "short-order cooking" (e.g. microwaving one of his preferred foods) than she recommends, but the alternative would be his eating just bread for multiple meals, which doesn’t seem like an improvement.  We give him stars for trying new foods; five stars earn him small toys that he covets.  Last weekend, he threw up after we insisted that he take a single bite of mashed potatoes at the seder if he wanted any desert.

Is D overweight?  No.  If anything, he’s on the skinny side.  If one of his preferred foods isn’t available, he’ll generally do without eating.  He’s active and healthy, so we try not to worry too much.

Meanwhile N, at 18 months, will eat pretty much anything he can swallow.  He loves tomatoes, and screams with frustration if I try to eat one in front of him without sharing.  The only food I can think of that he’s rejected outright is avocado.  And — I swear — we haven’t done anything differently with the two boys.  If anything, N’s been exposed to more convenience foods.  Go figure.

Last week, Reuters ran a story under the headline First Week Critical in Childhood Obesity — US Study.  The article began:

"What you feed a newborn baby during the first week of life could be critical in deciding whether that baby grows up to be obese, U.S. researchers said on Monday."

and later explained:

"Writing in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, they said each additional 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of weight gained during the first eight days of life increased a baby’s risk of becoming an overweight adult by about 10 percent."

It sounds like this is a pure correlational study.  If that’s the case, I’m not convinced that this is about anything the parents do or don’t do.  I could make an argument that this might mean, instead, that even in the first week, humans have different thresholds for when they feel "full."

Today marks the end of our one month experiment in restricting our food spending to what we’d be allowed under the USDA Thrifty Food Plan.

As it turns out, we finished well under our $434.40 budget.  Our total spending on food groceries totalled just $340.84, with just under $40 in purchased meals (including one full dinner, one fancy coffee, and a couple of lunches at the very cheap cafeteria down the street from my office).  Even if I accounted at a fair price for the spices and such that we didn’t have to pay for because they’re in my basic pantry, we’d make it in under budget.

Following the suggestions of some of the commenters, I drove out to the Grand Mart supermarket on Little River Turnpike last weekend, which serves a largely Asian clientele.  I was mindboggled by the array of vegetables they offered — four different kinds of eggplant (American, Italian, Thai and Japanese) — and the prices.  If someone can explain to me why Giant or Shoppers can’t have half as good produce for twice the price, I’d be very grateful.  Unfortunately, after I had loaded up my cart and got on line, the manager announced that their computers were down, they couldn’t run the cash registers without them, and the store was closing.  And I didn’t have the time or energy to return later in the week.

We ate pretty close to our typical diet, although a bit heavier on the eggs and homemade pizza than an average month.  Although I didn’t track it, I’m sure we didn’t come anywhere near meeting the food pyramid recommendations for fruit and vegetables.  I’m not sure we do that much better in mid-winter even when we’re not on a budget, as I find the seasonal offerings awfully uninspiring.  (Although worries about the budget did stop me from buying some of my usual mid-winter healthy treats, like frozen cherries.)

The time-money tradeoff was a big factor in the budget, both in the shopping (do I make a separate trip to another store that has a better price on specific items?) and in the preparation (is the two dollars saved buying regular spinach v. the prewashed stuff worth the time involved in preparing it?).  And I truly can’t imagine doing this if I didn’t have access to a car, or had to bring my kids along on every single shopping trip.  (Shopping with kids can be much more expensive, both because you don’t want to spend the extra time studying price labels when they’re getting restless and because they constantly ask for things that aren’t on the shopping list.)

Although I wasn’t tracking our expenditures on non-food items, this experiment made me much more aware of all of our spending.  Friday we took D. to the doctor because his cough was getting worse, and came home with a nebulizer and two kinds of medicine.  Even with our quite good insurance, the copays totalled $60.  For us, that’s not a terribly big deal.  But if every dollar that comes in is already spent, an unexpected expense like that has to come out of somewhere.  And food is almost always the most flexible part of poor families’ budgets.  That, rather than the cost of food, is why so many American families are "food insecure"

I’m amazed at the attention this little experiment has gotten; I’ve gotten more links to it than any other post, including many that I thought were much more interesting.  I guess it’s because there are lots of people pontificating on the internet, and many fewer trying to match what they eat to what they say.  The discussion here was particularly interesting.

So, when I left off, we had spent $163.24 on groceries, $191.49 including purchased meals, $182.62 including cat food and laundry soap.  We spent about $87 on groceries in the past week: $29 at Shoppers Food Warehouse for frozen grape juice concentrate, graham crackers, soda (for the birthday party that wound up being cancelled due to sick kids), milk, spaghetti sauce, mozzarella cheese (for pizza); $37 at Costco for peanut butter, eggs, bread, spaghetti sauce, cheddar cheese, and dino buddies; and $21 at Giant for milk and taco fixings.  Current grocery total: $249.12, or $277.37 with purchased meals.  Including things like cat food, pedialyte, tylenol and cleaning supplies, we’re at $340.09.

I’m fascinated by how defensive I could feel myself getting as I read some of the comments that suggested ways in which we could cut our grocery budget further, even though the goal of this experiment was never to spend the absolute minimum possible.

I’m quite surprised by Amy’s statement that she’s able to buy organic food for $250/month or less — the stores that sell organic food around here are VERY expensive.  Even when I’m not trying to stick to the Thrifty Food Plan, I find it painful to buy wild salmon at $14 a pound when I can get farmed salmon (even if full of PCBs) for $3.99 a pound.  Amy, if you’re still reading, I’d love examples of what things cost where you shop.

Someone else ("PGC-ist") suggested a bunch of different chains that he said were cheaper, but Shoppers Food Warehouse is the only one of them that has a store anywhere near me.  I enjoy cooking, so am willing to spend 20 minutes making muffins or waffles rather than buying them at the store, but I’m not willing to spend an extra hour driving around the Beltway in order to save a few dollars.  And if I didn’t have a car, they’d be totally out of consideration.

One of the goals of the experiment was to see how trying to stick to this budget affected the quality of our diet.  Bean soup is cheap, healthy and filling, but its appeal wears somewhat thin after several days in a row.  Fresh vegetables have been surprisingly expensive — the ground turkey for our tacos was only $2.67, but peppers, lettuce and plum tomatoes were another $5.  I always have a harder time eating the recommended servings of fruit and vegetables during the winter than during the summer, and this project has made that worse, because I think they’re overpriced.

***

2/6/05: Final report on the experiment is posted here.

As previously discussed, we’re tracking our grocery spending this month to see how hard it is for us to stay within the limits of USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan, which allows up to $434.40 per month for a family of our size.

For the record, I don’t think this gives us a real feel for what it’s like to be poor, any more than making teenagers carry around an egg or a sack of flour for a month gives them real insight into what it’s like to be a parent.  I know that it makes a huge difference not to really have to worry that my kids are going to go hungry if I don’t leave enough money for the last week.  But it’s a useful consciousness raising exercise.

When I last updated, we had spent $112.38 on food.  This week we’ve mostly been doing quick grocery runs when we’re running out of food, and haven’t really done meal planning.  Friday I spent $8.90 on milk, bread, eggs and tea at Trader Joe’s.  Monday, I went to Giant, and spent $23.90 on rolls, bread, cheese, milk, eggs, butter, spinach, graham crackers, grape juice, and ice cream.  Today, we spent $22.95 on milk, chicken and veggies for stir fry, flour, cake mix (D’s birthday is next week and the party is Sunday), and chocolate and marshmallows (D talked us into making s’mores).  So, our current total is $163.24, or $182.62 if we include the cat food and laundry detergent (which are pretty much necessities, but are not legitimate uses of food stamps).  Not too bad for halfway.  Except that I also went out to dinner with friends on Sunday, and then we bought part of our lunch on Monday, and I bought lunch at work on Tuesday.  So add another $28.25 to the total, for $210.87, just barely under half the budget.

A few comments about some of the choices that we’ve made this week.

• Mostly, we’re eating the way we normally do, although with slightly less prepared foods.  I’ve made muffins and coffee cake from scratch, but that’s something I do semi-regularly in any case.
• We’re eating more eggs than usual, but some of that is because we’ve just discovered that the 15 month old adores them, and once we’re scrambling them for him, it’s easy to make them for us too. 
• I’ve been stunned at how much variation there is in the price of milk across stores.  The least we’ve paid for a gallon of milk is $2.35 at Shoppers Food Warehouse (cheaper than Costco); the most we’ve paid is $3.99 (at Giant).  I also don’t understand why 2% milk is so much cheaper than whole milk. This is likely to affect our shopping patterns even after the month is over. 
• Monday, I was shopping with D and I let him convince me to buy ice cream, since Breyer’s was on sale for $2.50 for a half gallon.  But when we got through the checkout lane, I saw that I had been charged the full price for it.  I went to the manager, who told me that only some flavors were on sale.  I returned the half gallon I had been charged $5.29 for, and would have left the store, but D was saying "you said we could get ice cream" and was about to burst into tears.  So we got a package of the other flavor, got back on line, and got it.  I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I weren’t watching the budget — at least not with D in tow.

The most basic insight I’ve had is about how much of a privilege it is to be able to shop and not pay attention to the total cost of what’s in your cart.  I’ve never been one to shop for anything without paying attention to the price — I scrutinize unit price labels with the best of them — but if I’m confident that each individual item is a reasonable buy, I generally don’t worry about what the total is going to be.  That’s had to change this month.

Unfortunately, it’s no longer available for free on the New York Times website, but last summer, Adrian Nichole LeBlanc, author of Random Family (reviewed here), had a fascinating article in the magazine section about grocery shopping and attitudes towards money.  She wrote:

"That afternoon, I was trailing my book’s main subject, Lolli, as she bought the month’s groceries. She was a teenager, pregnant, homeless and already the mother of two children. Her young family subsisted on food stamps and vouchers from the federal subsidy program, WIC. The shield of my judgment rose when she passed right by the C-Town weekly discount flier and made her way down the dirty aisles with her shopping cart. She just grabbed things — packs of chicken legs and pork chops, bags of sugar and rice, bottles of vegetable oil; in went cans of beans and tins of Spam. I stood, stunned, as she reached for the individual-portion cartons of juice — with their brightly colored miniature straws — ignoring the larger, economy-size bottles. No calculation of unit price, no can’ts or shoulds or ought-not-to’s, no keen eye to the comparative ounce. By the time her stuffed cart reached the checkout line, my unease was turning into anger. Didn’t she know she was poor?"

LeBlanc notes that one of the emotions fueling her anger was envy — neither she nor her parents had ever shopped that way, as they had scrimped and squeezed the grocery budget in order to save for college.  But she also acknowledges that it’s hard to imagine that any amount of scrimping was going to bring Lolli and her family a noticably better future.

********

Next update here.

(For any new readers, I’m trying to live under the Thrifty Food Plan for a month. See this post for background.)

We were entirely out of milk, so went to Trader Joe’s.  And we never manage to get out of there with just milk.

So, after 5 days, we’ve spent $112.38 (not including the cat food).  I was definitely worrying about blowing the budget, so distracted D. when he asked for Pirate Booty.

Since my husband did a Costco run on Friday, I’m going to retroactively start our month on the Thrifty Food Plan then, as otherwise our spending this week would be artificially low.  (I recognize that most poor people don’t have the extra money for a Costco membership, and many don’t have the car to get them there.  We don’t do that much of our shopping there, as we don’t have much storage space, so I don’t think it should distort the results too much.)

After tax, that brings us to $64.45; $78.14 if you count the cat food.

Ok, we’re up to $80.83 without catfood/$94.52 with it.

Sunday I did a mini-run to Giant for split peas (I was sure we had them in the house, but we didn’t) and onions.  I can’t find the receipt, but it was under $4.  Say $84.83; $98.52 for simplicity.  So we’ve pretty much blown our first week’s budget, but we’ve got lots of food still in the house.  We’ll probably need to buy milk (we go through a ludicrous amount of milk), but otherwise I think we’re in decent shape.

A few thoughts in reaction to the long (and partisan) discussion of hunger, obesity and poverty at Asymmetrical Information (found via 11d).

Food is mindbogglingly cheap in the US today, accounting for a smaller portion of people’s overall budgets than ever before.  In fact, this is one of the big problems with the official definition of poverty.  Mollie Orshansky, who developed the measure in the 1960s, found that the average family spent about 1/3 of its income on food; the poverty measure was thus set at three times the cost of an economy food plan.

So why are some families struggling to buy food?  Because other necessities have gotten more expensive, especially housing.  Many low-income families spend 50 percent or more of their incomes on housing; if they don’t want to be evicted or have their gas shut off, they pay their rent and utility bills first and whatever is left over is available for food.

Is healthy food more expensive than unhealthy food?  Yes and no.  It’s certainly true that you can prepare nutritious and inexpensive meals, especially if you minimize use of meat.  But if you want quick and easy meals — and if you’re a busy parent at any income level, you want quick and easy meals — healthy food is a lot more expensive than fast food or a candy bar from the store on the corner.  And if you’re looking at a vending machine, the soda is usually half the price of the juice.  (And let’s not even get into the cost of organic food.)

It’s also true that food is an easy way for low-income parents to indulge their children (and themselves).  If you’re poor, you spend a lot of time saying No.  No, you can’t have that.  No, we can’t afford that.  No, you can’t go there.  McDonald’s is an affordable treat, something you can say Yes to.

The Thrifty Food Plan for a family of 4 (with 2 young children) is $434.40 and I honestly think that we spend less than that most months.  But we also eat out occasionally, which would blow that budget quickly.  I also know that it’s cheaper to buy food if you have enough money to buy in bulk and to stock up on groceries when they’re on sale, which we do. I’m thinking of tracking our groceries 100% for a month and seeing if we can stay under it.  Anyone want to join me?