Category Archives: Money

Priced Out of Paradise

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How does a regular person afford a carnivore diet?

Crochet (now Carnivore) Gramma has had wonderful success with the carnivore way of eating. She’s lost a bunch of weight, become more physically active, and is (I believe) generally happier. Carnivore can work a lot of miracles in a person’s life! Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually make a person any richer, and she was wondering in one of her latest “walk with me” videos how she is going to afford to keep eating well. She feels like she’s been “priced out of paradise” and may have to start eating the boxed mac and cheese again. I know that feeling. If I were starving, I’d eat whatever was available! The consequences of that kind of food, though, I will avoid for as long as possible.

I have felt that same sinking feeling she does, as I’ve watched prices go higher and higher.

I have heard a lot of carnivore gurus say that eating good meat doesn’t cost more than the standard American diet, so you don’t really need to worry about the budget. That really seemed to be true for a long while. Perhaps it’s still true. I don’t know what the processed food prices look like, to be honest, so standard American dieters may be in just as dire straits as carnivores! But it sure seems like meat is going up in price a lot faster than the other stuff.

I’ve been grocery shopping on a strict budget my whole life, unlike probably most of the people who’ve popularized the carnivore diet. These are usually people who are not feeding large families, and also likely have more income (or more comfort using credit cards) than most of us do. Not to mention, nobody is sending me free steaks to promote on my YouTube channel. I’m not knocking them for that, and I’m grateful that people like Dr. Berry and Dr. Baker are doing well in life. They work their butts off, they’re brave and honest, and they’re frankly just better at everything than I am–than most of us are, in fact.

Us regular folks still have to find ways around the growing money problem.

People who are more financially comfortable likely don’t notice when the “cheap” box of hamburgers goes up by $5 overnight, or when the 12-count bag of meat sticks that you rely on for kids’ packed lunches is suddenly $2 more. Even worse, you’ll be opening a brand of canned chicken that had always just contained chicken, water, and salt, and a glance at the ingredients says that they’ve now adulterated it with food starch. Your yogurt that had been clean now has fruit pectin and some kind of bean gum in it. So now you have to find something new or quit that food entirely.

And it’s all of the foods, not just one item. Just a couple of dollars more per item. NBD, right?

When everything is increasing in price, and your income isn’t even inflation adjusted, this starts to really hurt. I left Wal-mart without my usual cheap box of hamburgers after seeing the hike in price. I won’t pay that much right now for those sub-par burgers. I will probably get over the sticker shock and do it anyway someday, and find some non-food place to cut corners. I’ve already canceled all of my little subscriptions and extra comforts. We’re running out of places to find another five or ten dollars!

We have an above-average income, but we also have seven kids still in the home. The oldest one doesn’t really eat at home much, so let’s say we’re feeding eight people right now, plus two meat-eating dogs. I am blessed that I could walk away from that box of hamburgers because I have a freezer full of beef that I can make into patties for myself. I only bought the boxed burgers for convenience, as we get a whole beef at a time, about 3 times a year. It looks like that’s going to have to be cut back, as well, as those prices just get higher, too. Still, it’s a sight better in both quality and price than the store beef!

What is happening here?

Dr. Shawn Baker posted this on YT a few days ago, and I think this increased demand has a lot to do with it. People are starting to wake up to the fact that the food pyramid we’ve been indoctrinated to was upside down.

Of course, it is nowhere near that simple. On the supply side, farmers are getting squeezed in ways that I’m not conversant enough to articulate. When I’ve picked up my beef from my farmer the last few times, she has been increasingly concerned about what is being intentionally done to the market to stop people from affording to eat meat. The push to turn everyone vegetarian is real. People who eat like this…

…have decided that you should eat beans and bugs. It’s expensive on purpose.

Every elite class in history has known that slaves need to be only strong enough to do what you want them to, and never strong enough to rise up. They want us to be fewer in number, dumber, and weaker, and then to die before we cost the medical and pension system very much.

Meat is elite food. The powerful are deliberately trying to make us too weak to do anything that would raise us closer to their status and make us harder to control.

This is not going to last forever. Revolutions are just as real as elite oppression. I just can’t say how long it will take, or by what means. Perhaps our elites will decide to loosen their grip to save their own skins as people get angrier.  Maybe the market will sort itself out through clever ideas for getting around the imposed scarcity.  Maybe Jesus will come back and we’ll see final justice in a New Heaven and New Earth.

In the meantime, we have to figure out how to afford to eat like human beings, not cattle. That means eating meat.

I have a few tips for my adopted Gramma, who I hope can find some use in this post. I’ve really gotten attached to this lady as she documents her journey on Youtube. Today I learned that she had social anxiety, too, so that’s another thing that we have in common that meat healed. Subscribe to her channel, or give a few dollars to her buy me a coffee fund. Hopefully, we can buy her some meat!

These are some of my habits that help me spend less on food, and some other ideas I don’t currently implement. I’ve ranked them in order from most to least plausible for regular folks:

Eat more of the less expensive meats. This is the most obvious one, of course. Chicken and pork cost less. This won’t be an option for people who have to avoid all but ruminant animals, but thankfully most people do just fine with other meats. Dr. Berry has said many times that you can be perfectly healthy on just eggs and bacon, and I think that’s largely true. But bacon is going up, too! We can rely on the chicken thighs and picnic shoulders for enough fat. Some of our family do not tolerate pork at all, so I will have other meats available for them when I make pork.

Eat a lot more eggs. Eggs prices have finally gone back down to mere Biden-era prices, after having more than doubled during a “bird flu” scare. It was a scam, of course. And the $13-something box that I buy is still $5 more than it used to be. I can buy the cheap eggs, thankfully. Most people do fine with the cheapest eggs, and the nutrition is still adequate in factory-farmed eggs, though not as good as appropriately raised chickens will give. Even with the volatile prices inherent in the egg market with these ridiculous policies for dealing with infectious diseases (again, the real goal is to drive us to plant-based eating), eggs remain the least expensive source of animal protein.

If you are eating eggs and trying to stay higher on fat content, you’ll want to dispose of most of the whites and eat more yolks. I often do one white to three yolks. Even throwing out the whites, eggs are a very good choice for inexpensive eating.

Shop the markdowns and sales. This is another very obvious one that we’re probably all already doing. I really hesitate to say this one out loud, though, lest someone who shops at my favorite grocery store sees it and decides to compete with me for the meat there.

Find out what days and times your local grocery store puts the marked down meats out. The stores are on a regular schedule, so if you can get to the bargain section at the same time as the manager, you’ll have a lot more to chose from. We have a particular brand of hotdog that we like, and that is acceptably clean, that was marked down to $2.50 a pack. I got a dozen packages that way! It is kind to leave some for other people, so I will often leave some good deals and come back the next day and only buy them out if nobody else wanted them. I’m pretty sure the cashiers at my favorite store know me as “Red Sticker Meat Lady”.

You may even want to find out what stores the wealthier people shop at–the ones you know you can’t afford–and scope out their deals. Every store has things that have to move fast. People with plenty of money don’t care as much about those red stickers, so you might get better deals there. I haven’t tried this, probably because I’m already shopping at a slightly higher-priced store due to our dietary needs.

Look for alternative sources of meat. If you have a freezer or two or an extra fridge, buying a whole, half, or quarter beef directly from the farmer is a much less expensive way to go. I only buy hamburgers at the store because I’m too lazy to make my own patties. Now that they’re so ridiculously expensive, I will probably make my own patties from my freezer beef. Hanging weight for my last one was $4.50/lb, I believe. That is more than dollar higher per pound than it was when I first started doing this several years ago, but it’s still a lot better than grocery store prices, and the meat is incomparably better. Store-bought steaks make me cry. I can’t even eat at steakhouses, I’m so spoiled by this meat.

I did the math with my take-home weight the last time we bought a cow, and because I take the marrow bones, heart, fat, and organs, I think I recall ending at about $6/lb for the whole thing. That is a lot to shell out all at once, of course. I understand how impossible that sounds for a lot of us. But if you can get ahead enough to buy just a quarter of an animal at a time, you’ll be doing much better in the long run.

We’ve got a friend who sells us duck eggs for $5 a dozen, just to get rid of them. You’ll have a hard time finding anything like that, I’m sure, but any local producer will be giving you better quality, and the prices can vary widely, so just look around.

Buy leaner cuts, which tend to be less expensive, and add fats. I’m not a fan of chicken breasts, pork loins, or any other lean cut of meat. But when they are on sale, I will buy them anyway. I can add bacon to pork loin or country ribs. I can add bacon to anything, actually. Chicken breasts can be made into something delicious with a cream sauce or cheese and bacon. I have an air fryer chicken tendies recipe that is delicious, and we use butter and mayonnaise for dipping to increase the fat content.

Canned meats are kinda OK. Dr. Ken Berry says you can get by just fine on canned meats like Vienna (pronounced: vy-ee-nee) sausages, and we do have a fair amount of canned meat in our lives. But I do find that these need to be less often than once a day, especially for the ones with a lot of salt and nitrates. Several times a week, though, can be a good amount to supplement with canned goods. Canned beef with the fat is fine every day, but it’s expensive. I keep that in the basement for emergency situations, and don’t bring it out much for regular meals. Canned fish of most kinds is also good on a daily basis. But the things that are lower in fat and higher in salts, like sausages, just don’t satisfy the same way. You also need to read the ingredients every single time you buy it. Manufacturers are quick to start adulterating the food with starches and sugars rather than raising the prices.

I will post some recipes for salmon or tuna patties that are carnivore or carnivore-ish, along with my chicken tenders.

Fast more. Take this advice only very carefully. I am not a fan of fasting for anyone over the age of about 45, nor for people who are already lean, nor for children, nor for women of childbearing age. I personally only fast for religious purposes. I’m happy to give my lean mass for prayer and supplication, but I’m not giving it up to make the number on the scale look better. You can achieve a lot of ketones and weight loss by fasting, but it’s not worth the detriment to your muscle mass, unless you are in a very strong state to begin with.

All the same, if you have plenty of fat to lose, your body will prioritize burning that up first, sparing your lean mass, and it will be a lot less harm than eating potatoes, I am sure. When money is tight, you could tighten your eating window down and only eat for 6 hours of the day instead of 8, do one meal a day, or you could skip every third or fourth day of eating entirely.

Scale it back to “keto”. For me and many other carnivores, this really is not an option. I have not found very many plant foods at all that don’t trigger either my auto-immune or anxiety/OCD problems. But most people who are on carnivore probably have a few things they can get away with. Low-carb berries, some green things like asparagus or cauliflower, or avocados and olives can fill in some gaps. It is a trope among carnivores that “plants are trying to kill you”, but in fact, some plants are pretty benign. Plants with fruits seem to even want us to eat them, to spread their seeds! But the sweet fruits we find in the stores are so over-bred for sugar content as to be dangerous for regular consumption.

It is mostly the good fruit oils–avocado and olive–that I would add back, to satisfy the need for fat, but  it is my opinion that there are other plant foods that many people will not experience any real detriment from. If you need to make cauliflower “taters” to fill up your stomach a little more, or add some berries to your yogurt, you may find that to be a good, though not perfect, option.

You have to experiment yourself to find out what you tolerate, and (like me) that may end up being nothing. Honestly, I hesitate to add this as an option, because most of these “foods” just waste your body’s energy trying to digest them. But you will feel fuller for a little less money, perhaps, and it may be a short-term solution.

Get creative. Ask for beef for Christmas, or a freezer to keep your bulk and bargain buys cold. Use your tax returns to buy the side of beef you can’t save up for any other way. Finding new ways to bring in money is an option for some of us, I suppose. But most of us are pretty much already doing what we can. Cut corners other places. I’ve canceled all of my little $5 subscriptions, for instance. It’s hard to do that, though, because I know that other creators need my money, too! You could start a YouTube channel or a blog (doesn’t pay if you’re me, but some people might do well). Whatever you’re already good at, see if you can squeeze just a little income out of it.

Raise a few animals of your own. This is another one of limited use. You have to be in a place where you’re allowed and able to raise animals. You have to have time and energy to take care of them. And, really, backyard chickens can be a lot of trouble, let alone any other kind of animal you might try to raise. But many people do find they have a knack for raising their own eggs and meat, and if you are good at it, you will save money. I sadly never saved a dime with my backyard chickens, but I enjoyed them, and the eggs were much better. If you can free-range them, they cost very little indeed! But the predators around here made that impossible, so I was always out more for the feed than I would have been just buying all of my eggs at the store.

Hunting is another way to get fresh meat on the table for a lot less money. Again, this requires a certain skill-set and location, so not as many people can take advantage of it. I will probably be doing this eventually, but haven’t quite decided to yet. There’s a gal down the road here who says she would be happy to teach me to hunt!

I’m sure I have more to say on this subject, but I think this post is too long already. What do you do to keep food prices down? Or to make enough money to cover the increasing costs? Currently, I’m just using a buymeacoffee link. If you want to contribute to my gofundme for my last run, it is also still active. I will give a report on that race very soon, I’m sure!

Leave me a comment or something! I want to hear from you!

 

 

How to Save Not a Dime on Food

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but sleep like a baby.

There are ten people in our family. The volume of consumables that goes through that many alimentary canals on a daily basis can be an intimidating prospect for those who have to procure that much food. Our single-income family grew faster in the beginning than our income did, so I learned to cut as many corners as I could. Couponing, gardening (poorly), eating vegetarian for several meals per week, avoiding restaurants and convenience foods, bargain shopping at big box stores, and buying in bulk were all weapons in my money-saving arsenal. I felt like kind of a genius at saving money, honestly. I even blogged about feeding a large family on a budget back in the day, saying appalling things like “use meat as a condiment, not a main course” or “organic is a rip-off”.

A number of the things I did to save money were both sensible and healthful, though, so it’s not like it’s always a binary choice. A bag of Cheetos costs similar to a bag of apples, and any fool can tell you which one will give you a better bang for your buck. We still avoid restaurants, even more than before, though it’s less about the money now than about the low-quality ingredients they sneak into everything, even in some the high-end establishments.

Alas, most of the strategies I’ve employed to make my husband’s hard-earned money stretch farther have fallen by the wayside as I’ve learned the keys to healthy living. Now, of course, the whole family’s diet is meat-heavy. There are no coupons to be found for the foods we eat now. (Though I did once win a year’s supply of coupons for FREE STEAK back in my sweepstakes days. That was an awesome win.) And I would feel kind of guilty serving vegetarian meals just to save money now, even though I once thought that it was healthy to do so.

Penny wise, pound foolish. Like most penny-pinchers (and I still very much like the sound of loose change in my pocket), I used to think of food as an expense to be kept to an absolute minimum. I’ve come to realize, however belatedly, that food is an investment. It is a very basic fact, and thus one that I’d overlooked in my zeal for perfect budgeting, that every cell in my body is made of what I put into my mouth. Those cells’ proper functioning depends upon being made of the correct components, which come only from real food.

Sadly (for those of us with limited means), real things do cost more than fake things. Real Hot Wheels cost more than the plastic matchbox cars my children spurn; real diamonds cost more than fake ones; and real nutrition costs more than fake food. For years of my children’s growth that I can never recover, I mainly bought food that would give our family some calories and a sense of fullness, but from which our bodies couldn’t extract sufficient nutrition. Almost everything you find in the center aisles of the grocery store, where food is “affordable”, is fake. All of the nutrition has been refined out of it so that it will be shelf-stable. Much of it is made with industrial waste products that we’ve been tricked by underhanded industries into ingesting. You can eat that mac and cheese powder stuff. You may even enjoy the taste. But it’s not food.

I pay about 1/3 more for groceries now than I did three years ago. Some of that may be due to inflation, but most of the increase reflects the higher quality of the food. While I was saving a lot of money back in the day, I was already seeing the ill effects of a poor diet in my children. I just didn’t recognize that fact yet. Focusing on my food-dollars to the exclusion of any other consideration amounted to a storing up of biological debt that my children would certainly have to pay later.

No matter how much I brushed and flossed their teeth, my children were getting cavities, due not to the sugar in their diet, as I’d assumed and stringently restricted, nor to bad genes, but instead because of inadequate fat-soluble vitamins in their diets. Those vitamins come almost exclusively from animal foods. Some of them have needed orthodontic correction because their jaws grew too small in their early years. Their growth was not what it could have been, as I’ve seen in my strapping youngest ones, who have a much more protein- and fat-rich diet than their elders siblings did. One of my children was developing inflammatory bowel symptoms from the overload of grains and fiber. Now that their main source of fuel is fat, their moods are on a much more even keel, and they never crave snacks the way they did when bread was on the menu. Inexpensive industrial seed oils were building up in my children’s tissues, sure to wreak havoc later on in the form of diabetes, cancers, and who-knows-what else.

Y’all, I’m a conscientious mom. I never thought I was harming my kids. I thought I was being a good steward of both our resources, and their bodies. I was doing everything the pediatricians and dentists said I should do, right down to the insanity of six to eleven servings of grains per day. I’m talking about homemade, no-additive, no-preservative, whole grain, lower-sugar food that was made with as much love as a mom can muster. But I was making many of my food decisions based on cost, thinking that it didn’t matter very much, as long as our tummies were full.

Knowing what I know now, I can’t in good conscience make money my priority when feeding my family. Doctors and dentists are expensive. Either I’ll pay for it now, or we’ll all pay more later, in both money and misery.

Love your neighbor by eating well?

Besides the overwhelming financial strain that the burgeoning health-care sick-care industry is putting on every one of us, there is both a spiritual and practical advantage to increasing the quality of your food. The best way to improve quality is to buy fresh, seasonal, local food. Big box stores do offer a better price, and I still use them when local offerings aren’t available. But I’ve come to realize that loving my neighbor means more than treating him nicely and praying for him. It also means frequenting his business and not penny-pinching him to death. I now buy local food, especially my meat, as often as possible, which doesn’t help my budget at all. It does help me in myriad other ways.

You can ask your local rancher how the cows are fed and encourage them to look into better practices. You won’t be getting melamine-enhanced tooth paste from someone who has to look you in the eye the next time she goes out, even if that tooth paste (or powder, in my case) does seem a bit pricey. You also build community allegiances and in-group loyalty that goes far beyond the kind of big-money grants that the corporations use to bribe communities to let them come in and destroy Mom and Pop.

And, perhaps most importantly, you are ensuring that the local food supply will be up and running smoothly, and hopefully ready to scale up when the global system inevitably fails. Local products, especially meat, certainly do “cost more” in fake Federal Reserve notes, but they cost a lot less in real terms than the consequences of continuing to disemploy our neighbors in favor of imported, slave-produced goods.

I won’t even get into the environmental aspects of things. We can go down that rabbit hole some other time. Suffice it to say that I believe we can take care of the world God gave us much more efficiently both by eating more meat, and eating local.

A penny earned is a penny saved.

Let’s not just look at groceries as a spending problem, though. Many people find after switching to a whole-food, or even a ketogenic or carnivore way of eating, that they have a great deal more energy, less pain, and a sharper mind. When you have these benefits, you may find yourself able to produce more and better than you could before. I certainly have. Not long after I started a ketogenic way of eating, I started feeling well enough to do things like building (however amateurishly) my own chicken coop and raised garden beds. I’ve raised meat chickens as well as egg chickens. I can do a better job at nearly everything because I’m more reliably energetic and happy to have honest work to do.

There’s a very good chance that you might find other parts of your budget breathing a sigh of relief as you increase the pressure on the food side of things, just because healthy, community-connected people are more productive.

Of course, I do realize that sometimes the money just isn’t there to go totally local. Like I said, a large portion of our needs are still supplied through freakin’ Walmart. (I have never said the word “Walmart” without “freakin”. I hate it.) But that’s the system we’re in. You can’t break out of it all at once. Our family has been poor. Right now we’re a bit less poor, but we’ve had to make sub-optimal choices aplenty. I’m not trying to make anybody feel badly about what they simply can’t avoid. I wouldn’t feel guilty at all if we ended up subsisting on beans and taters again out of necessity. I can at least grow those without harmful chemicals and get some delicious sunshine while I do it, right?

Poor folks don’t have as many choices, now do they? But when we have choices, we ought to make better ones. If you can scratch together just one locally raised meal a week, or one locally produced tooth powder, you’re making both your body and your community stronger.

Buying More Meat on a Budget

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I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I eat a steak almost every day. That is absolutely an expensive way to go about eating a carnivore diet. I don’t deny it, and sometimes I feel like I’m being a little bit extravagant. At the moment, though, for reasons I won’t get into right now, it’s what I do. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped trying to save as much money as I can. I can eat a lot of meat and still get within shouting distance of a reasonable grocery budget. I would never want to see someone forgo the idea of a carnivore diet because of the cost. Here are some ways I keep things manageable:

Buy in bulk. If you’re buying the packages of one or two ribeyes from the grocery store, it is going to cost a ridiculous amount of money. I do buy my steaks that way when I have to, and resent the heck out of it. Thankfully, there are usually better ways to go about getting steaks. My primary source of beef comes from a local ranch that sells me a whole beef at a time. Our whole family can eat on that for about three months, so I get my steaks and roasts for quite a bit less than you might expect. When my freezer runs low, or I just want to stock up on ribeyes, a local grocery store frequently has either whole boneless rib roasts or boneless strips on sale for $4.99/lb. Those roasts carve up into 12-16 ribeyes or New York strips for around $55.

Buy cheaper cuts. If you want beef steaks, they don’t have to be ribeyes. You can get sirloin or skirt steak and enjoy them just as much if you learn to prepare them properly. Just be aware that the cheaper cuts are typically the leaner cuts, and you’ll need to add fat accordingly. I make sure the butcher knows I want the fat trimmings from my cow. You can often buy suet or rendered fat from local farms or independent butchers, as well. Sometimes they’ll just give you the rib fat trimmings for free, because they’re just going to throw them out, anyway. We really do live in clown world.

It’s ok to get the 10 lb. chub of ground beef from Wal-mart. As important as it is to buy local, and to support a sustainable meat supply in that way, there is no getting around the need to live within your means. There’s very little evidence to support the idea that conventionally raised meat is less nutritious than the grass-finished, and you’ll get along just fine on the cheap stuff. Kelly Hogan, one of the most amusing and adorable carnivores in the online carnivore community, eats a whole lot of inexpensive hamburgers–even McDonald’s hamburgers. It really is good for you, so go ahead!

Eat all the meats, not just beef. You can eat an all-animal sourced diet without ever having a steak at all. A lot of carnivore/zero carb adherents are perfectly happy eating fish, chicken thighs, canned seafood and other meats, pork rinds, and even (gasp!) bologna. I stick to beef and eggs almost exclusively right now, but I’ll eat anything that ever moved if I’m hungry and it’s all I can find at the moment. Eat whatever meat you like. Chances are you can find something you can afford.

Eat the organs. I always get the organs and offal from the whole beef that I buy. Liver, heart, tongue, kidney–you name it, we’ve eaten it. (Except lung. I think I’ll ask for that this time, too.) Some people don’t like organ meat, and I don’t think they’re strictly necessary for everybody. But they are cheap, and, in my view, superfoods. You can have liver ground into your beef to both hide the taste and stretch your meat a little farther.

Do not fear the egg. Whether you buy them or raise your own chickens, nothing beats the nutritional punch of eggs. I know you’ve been told that they’re terrible for you, but…well, I’ll get into why they’re good for you some other time. Right now, just ask yourself: when’s the last time the “experts” told you the truth about anything? One brand of eggs I’ve bought says “Two a day are OK!” on the package. That’s stupid. Twenty a day are ok, if that’s how many you can eat. They are a perfect nose-to-tail diet, easy to cook, easy to digest, and cheap. I raise my own chickens and buy some eggs, too. Dirt-scratching, insect-eating, happy chickens give you better eggs, but you’ll do just fine on the cheap eggs, if you need to. Splurge a little on the free-range ones, if you can afford it. Or just get to building your chicken coop now. Spring is coming! I’ve got 20 more chicks coming in a couple of weeks!

It’s still going to cost more. Even with all these tips, I’m sorry to report that I have not seen any way to wrestle my grocery budget back down to the size it used to be. Meat really does just cost more, and my next post will explain why I think it’s well worth the investment. I hope that some of these tips make it seem less scary to eat a meat-heavy, or even meat-only diet. I’ve found this to be the most satisfying and healthful way to live, and want to see more people discover its benefits for themselves.