The household budget makes up a substantial part of most families’ outlay and of that the largest part of the bill is for food. Meat probably makes up the largest part of that food bill too, so you would be forgiven for thinking that you could save a lot of money by giving up meat. You would suppose that becoming a vegetarian might save you some money.
However, that is not always the case. You can save money by taking up vegetarianism on a budget, but it does not necessarily work out that in that way without some work on behalf of the vegetarian. The fact is that vegetables, on their own, often appear boring to someone who used to enjoy a good steak or barbecued spare ribs, so food manufacturers have come up with all sorts of accoutrements to liven up vegetarian dishes yet these are not usually all that cheap.
Even some of the fairly regular vegetarian staple foodstuffs like nuts are not necessarily cheap, especially if you like variety. After all, you can not just eat salted peanuts, not that all that salt would be good for you anyway but when you start to buy macademia nuts or pistachio nuts for a change, you will find them more expensive than meat.
Eating out at vegetarian restaurants is also pretty expensive, because the market is relatively small. There are not many restaurants that refuse to cook meat and the percentage of the populace that is vegetarian is still fairly small. This all leads to higher charges, yet that is if you can find a vegetarian restaurant outside a large city. A sandwich bar is likely the nearest thing you will get to it in most towns but there will be meat on the premises too.
The cost of vegetarian food is exacerbated if you insist on eating organically grown food. Eating just organically grown food can add 30% to your food bill making vegetarianism on a budget impossible. So what can you do to trim down the price of your food bill if you are a vegetarian?
The first thing to do is decide if you really believe the whole organic story. Some do, some do not. Either way, you could endeavor increasing the costly vegetables in your garden, your greenhouse or in an allotment. If you can not do that, you could offer to purchase these vegetables from friends, if they will grow them for you. Many pensioners take up gardening and numerous pensioners would become happy of the extra earnings.
Another way is to shop at farms or farmers’ markets. I know that time is valuable, but if you can just go to such a place once a week, you could buy enough food for three or four days without it deteriorating. Buying in bulk like that should become cheaper as well. A sack of potatoes will last a month and it is far cheaper than purchasing a few pounds at a time from the supermarket.
Another method of reducing costs is not to purchase your fresh fruit and vegetables from supermarkets at all, because it easy to be enticed to buy the latest fad fruit or vegetable from halfway around the world at an exaggerated cost ‘just for a change’. Stick to locally grown fruit and vegetables that are in season and you might just about manage vegetarianism on a budget.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a number of topics, and is now concerned with low carb vegetarian recipes. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at http://vegetariancasserolerecipes.com