8 Ways to Save Money on Vegetables

Times are tough right now, and Jeff and I haven’t escaped the pinch. In fact, while I’m still freelancing, we’re both currently job hunting. As a result, we’ve had to do some serious belt-tightening. Cable TV? Gone. Eating out? Not so much.

That said, we’re not about to give up on our vegetable habit. Au contraire, we’re still each shooting to eat a pound of raw vegetables and a pound of cooked vegetables every day, à la Joel Furhman’s nutritarian disease prevention plan, Eat to Live.

However, we’ve discovered that consuming 28 pounds of vegetables a week can wreak havoc on a food budget, so I’ve had to do some strategizing. Here are my eight favorite ways to save:

1. Comparison Shop Your Farmers Market

I love the farmers market—supporting local agriculture, getting the very freshest produce, and seeing friends and acquaintances. Yet every Saturday Jeff and I were dropping huge amounts of cash on local produce. So we recently decided to do a little price recon, and what we found shocked us! Pesticide-free tomatoes ranged in price from $2.50 to $5.95 per pound. And for $3.00, we could get either a bunch of kale the size of a waffle cone or one with leaves approximately the size of umbrellas. (You can guess which one we chose.) So next time you’re at the market, make a note of which farms have the best prices. What you find might surprise you.

2. Buy Organics Wisely

We try to buy as much organic and pesticide-free produce as possible, but organics can put a dent in any food budget. So lately we’ve focused on buying organic versions of the “Dirty Dozen,” or the top twelve most contaminated fruits and veggies (plus an additional two) as identified by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), and getting conventional versions of the rest. (Download EWG’s “Dirty Dozen” app for your smartphone, and you’ll always have the list at the ready.)

3. Chill Out

For vegetables you plan on cooking, you can save a lot buying frozen over fresh. For example, at my local Whole Foods, fresh organic baby spinach is $0.33 an ounce. Organic whole-leaf frozen spinach? Just $0.19 an ounce! I know, the taste isn’t quite as good, but we’re on a budget here. Besides, if you’re just going to add it to soup, you won’t notice much of a difference. And since freezing breaks down vegetable cell walls, nutrients within frozen veggies are easier for your body to absorb. Bonus!

4. Shop the Season

Buying seasonally saves a bundle. Think winter squash, kale, cabbage, onions, and root veggies in the winter, and lettuce, chard, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant and zucchini in the summer. Check out the cool seasonal ingredient map at Epicurious for a customized list of what’s in season in your neck of the woods.

5. Buy in Bulk

If you don’t mind doing some preserving at home, you can get a great deal on vegetables by buying in bulk, whether at wholesale clubs like Sam’s or Costco, the farmers market, or a produce auction. Just be sure that you have a plan for all the veggies you buy, or it won’t be a great deal at all.

6. Store Smart

According to a report by Tim Jones, PhD, Americans are huge food wasters, throwing out an estimated 14% of the food that comes into the house. And the estimate for vegetables is even worse—a staggering 25% of the vegetables that people buy are thrown into the trash can. The horrors! No amount of savvy shopping can undo that. To keep your veggies long enough to actually eat them, store them in the fridge. Potatoes are the exception; they’ll keep longer in a dark, cool (but not refrigerated) place. As for onions and tomatoes, for best flavor they should be kept at room temperature, but both will keep longer in the fridge. In fact, refrigerating tomatoes can extend their shelf life for up to a week. Having just had two tomatoes rot on my counter within four days, I’m now inclined to refrigerate any tomatoes I don’t plan to eat immediately. (I can hear the screams from my foodie readers now—sorry, folks.)

7. Plan Your Meals Weekly

I know it seems kind of Home Ec, but meal planning cuts our veggie waste dramatically. We don’t do it every week, but when we do, we’ve found this magnetic “What to Eat” pad to be immensely helpful.

Saving-Money-on-Vegetables-What-to-Eat-Fridge-Pad

We fill it out at the beginning of the week, making a note of any cookbook page numbers we’ll need. Then we make our shopping list, and voila: a week of food with little waste and never having to ask, “What’s for dinner?”

8. When All Else Fails, Make Broth

Spinach goes limp, carrots get rubbery, and parsley falls flat. It happens. So every week or so, typically just before I unload new groceries into the fridge, I do a veggie audit. Any vegetables past their prime but still edible go into a pile on the counter. Then they’re washed, peeled if necessary, and tucked into a gallon bag in the freezer. Scraps leftover from prepping, like onion skins (yes, skins!), leek tops, and herb stems go in there too. Once the bag reaches critical mass, typically after a few weeks, I make a big pot of veggie stock and start over.

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Now I’m turning the floor over to you: How do you stretch your produce budget? What tricks do you have for eating veggies on the cheap?

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Comments

Rugrat Chow! says
September 18, 2012 at 2:46 am
Love this post. Great pointers. I wish I could afford to buy everything on the dirty dozen organic but it doesn't always work out. I do make a lot of broth but mostly with scraps – I don't throw out much … Lol!
- Lee says
  October 8, 2012 at 1:10 pm
  Totally understand not being able to buy everything on the Dirty Dozen organic. We buy some of those veggies at produce auctions, so they're definitely not organic, but they're local and crazy cheap! And I'm with you on homemade veggie broth; frugal and delicious!