Many of us have noticed that groceries and dining out feel more expensive than they used to. But few of us likely know exactly how much we spend year to year.
Jen Sherman, a stay-at-home mom of two in Poway, does. One day, in 2019, she found a Trader Joe’s receipt she hadn’t thrown out yet.
“I said to my husband, can you please build me a spreadsheet so that I can track everything we spend on food for this year?” she said. “And he asked me why, and I said, ‘Because I want to.’”
After every trip to a grocery store or restaurant, Sherman adds to the spreadsheet.
On a recent Saturday, she opened up her laptop and scrolled to the very top. The first entry is for mandarin oranges from Trader Joe’s. On Jan. 2, 2019, they were $2.99.
By the end of the year, she had a lot of data. She decided to share it.
“Instead of sending a holiday card to everybody, we decided to write a newsletter that analyzed our food expenditure,” she said. “That's what we did in 2019, and now it's a thing that we can't stop doing.”
The last six years have given Sherman a thorough look at her family’s eating and spending habits. Some changes happened as the kids got older. In 2019, their monthly average for going out to eat was $418. They had a two-year-old daughter.
“She wasn't even eating from the kids menus at that point,” Sherman said. “She was just nibbling at whatever we had ordered.”
Restaurant food is more expensive these days. And now they have two kids, both old enough to order off the kids menu.
“Our average cost of eating out these days, if it's all four of us, it's usually about $60 to $75 depending on where we're going,” Sherman said.
The data also reflect their family’s preferences. They bought the most bananas in 2021. Last year, they found a cheese vendor at the farmers market, and their spending on cheese went way up.
Sherman can also pinpoint when she started learning more about the American food system. It was 2021. She read about the poor working conditions at many slaughterhouses and the benefits of regenerative agriculture.
“That was when we started to consciously kind of ‘vote with your fork,’ as the saying goes,” she said.
They soon learned that voting with your fork often meant spending more money.
Take meat, for example. In 2019, the Shermans had spent about $800 on meat, mostly from Costco. In 2021, Sherman found a website that sold meat from small farms.
“And we didn't change how much meat we ate,” she said. “So we spent a lot on meat that year.”
At nearly $2,500, it was more than triple what they’d spent the year before.
“I thought, ‘That's quite a lot of money,’” Sherman said. “The following year, we didn't change the type of meat that we bought, but we started eating dried beans instead, and we cut the meat consumption by $1,000.”
Sherman buys beans from a Northern California company called Rancho Gordo. They offer a quarterly bean subscription. She gets a monthly chicken delivery from a company called Pasture Bird.
She still buys flour, olive oil and nuts from Costco. She gets pasta, eggs, potatoes and bananas from Vons. The kids still love Annie’s boxed mac and cheese, but they’ve also grown to love fruit from the farmers market.
Kids have more discerning palates than we might think, Sherman said.
“If you stop feeding them the cheaper, ultra-processed stuff and start feeding them more of the really, really yummy strawberries and the really, really yummy apples, that's what they're going to start preferring,” she said. “And not everyone can afford to do that, I know. But if you can and you want to make the choice, then that's a good way to start.”
For other families looking to start voting with their forks, Sherman suggests trying a CSA box. CSA stands for community supported agriculture. Sherman buys hers from Yasukochi Family Farms. They sometimes have sales on year-long subscriptions.
“It's a cost efficient way of getting a diverse range of good plant foods in your diet,” she said.
Sherman goes to the farmers market once a week and brings cash to avoid credit card fees. She knows vendors by name.
Once she’s bought what she needs, she steps aside, opens up a note on her phone and types how much she spent.
It becomes the latest entry into the spreadsheet, and one more piece of data for this year’s holiday card.
_
