June 4, 2008Writer Jeff Yeager sets a $1-per-pound limit at the store. What does that put on the table?Jeff Yeager does not go through the grocery store the way other people do.
As he pushes his cart up and down the aisles, he doesn't see the things that are designed to catch the eye: the frozen pizza, the New York strip, the imported tangerines.
He is not lured by advertising, by special displays.
He eats the free cubes of ham and cheese, but he doesn't stop to put them in his cart. Only one thing will make him reach for a food item:
Does it cost a dollar a pound or less?
That's what Yeager, the author of "The Ultimate Cheapskate's Road Map to True Riches," (Broadway Books, $12.95) likes to spend on groceries. His price point means almost everything at the regular supermarket is not on his shopping list.
"But this is not about deprivation," he said. "You'll find all kinds of great ways to cook if you shop this way. I say it's healthier and in a way, gives you greater variety because you have to really think and experiment."
In his book, which is a guide to every aspect of cheap living, he describes how he does this, and makes it sound simple, even attractive, but it still seemed impossibly restrictive to me. So when Yeager was in town on a book tour through Ohio, I asked if he'd come shopping with me at the Hyde Park Kroger to put his method to the test.
He was working at a bit of a disadvantage in a strange town and had no chance to check out advertising inserts to decide which store to go to. The best special on the page of Kroger specials was whole chicken at 99 cents per pound. That provided our starting point. Mr. Cheapskate definitely knows what to do with chicken. "I make a compost chicken that's quite nice - you marinate it and stuff it with the odds and ends of your vegetables," he said. He also claims to know 100 ways to fix chicken quarters.
At the meat counter, he got pretty excited at the cache of marked-down packages. "What time of day do you mark these down?" he quizzed a store employee. "And by how much?" He knows the answers to those questions at his home store - at Kroger the answer was "first thing in the morning" and "it's on the computer." There wasn't anything reduced enough to fit our criterion. Some pork came close, and there was ground beef on sale for $1.59.
So it was going to be poultry for dinner, unless I was interested in trying beef heart? I declined, though he says it's very good grilled. Chicken livers were the other meat under $1 per pound. "I make a nice chicken liver mousse, with a little sherry." "Sherry?" I wondered. "Oh, booze doesn't count," said Yeager. "There's no limit on that."
So maybe he's not quite as strict as he says. "Well, I do say you should tend toward, or favor foods that are under $1 per pound. I've never been able to find cheese or nuts in my price range, and I do like beef."
He doesn't eat cheap lunch meats, such as bologna or hot dogs. But one place he does find bargains is breakfast sausage, which is often on sale, though we didn't find any on this trip.
The dairy aisle is another source of protein. "We think of eggs as breakfast, but other cuisines have lots of egg-based main dishes." And milk, though it may have gone up shockingly in the past few years, is still under a dollar a pound.
The grocery aisles turned up the main basis of any cheap-eating scheme: beans, pasta, rice and canned tomatoes. "The USDA says you should eat most of your foods from the bottom of the Food Pyramid. So what's healthy is also what's cheap. See, no deprivation," said Yeager.
Not even all dried beans were under the limit - we couldn't find black beans for less than about $1.50/pound. But we did find them in the Hispanic section for much less. "Ethnic stores are some of my favorite places to find cheap food and new things to eat," he said. "One of my favorite things is canned hard-boiled quail eggs from China. They're 89 cents for a one-pound can, and they really impress people."
Finally, we visited the produce section, where we could not have bought grapefruit or pears or radicchio. But we could be free with carrots, celery, butternut squash, potatoes, onions, zucchini and cabbage. We scoffed at the washed and bagged lettuce, the cut-up fruit that added cost without really saving that much time. I could feel my own inner cheapskate growing by the minute.
"To keep it under a dollar a pound, you'll need to eat in season, which means eating the best, freshest fruits and vegetables," Yeager pointed out to further make his claim that his way was the better way.
At the end of our shopping trip, I could think of lots of things to make with what we'd found: stir-fries, rice and beans, soups, chili, fried chicken and potato salad, any number of omelets, frittatas and quiche.
Still, I don't think I'd like to impose the $1 per pound limit in a strict way. Maybe I could do it if my grocery list averaged $1 per pound. But Yeager's way is a great exercise to begin an effort to cut down on food costs.
Everyone should have a good rice-and-beans recipe, know how to make potato soup and have their own alternative to ramen.
http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080604/LIFE01/806040315/-1/allThe Ultimate Cheapskate official websitehttp://www.ultimatecheapskate.com/index.cgi
