What to Eat? Part 1

When you go from having way more money than time to having way more time than money, you find that you have to change some of your habits to reflect the new reality of your life. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the area of how and what you eat.

Paying Others to Cook for You

So many people have become accustomed to eating food prepared for them by others. In the hectic lifestyle of the late 20th/early 21st century era, who had time to cook every day? Working parents picked up family meals on the way home from work. Singles grabbed a bite at local fast food joints or met friends at restaurants. Even those who preferred to eat at home found almost anything they could want available, prepared and ready to heat and eat, at the local supermarket.

For most people, this made sense. You have to eat several times a day, but you don’t have time to make food several times a day. So you pay extra to buy prepared food.

But this only works when you have more money than time. The average working adult with a demanding job (and in these days of ever-increasing productivity, aren’t most jobs demanding?) has a steady stream of income and a limited amount of time.

Cooking for Yourself Pays

But when that steady stream of income shrinks or even disappears, paying someone else to cook for you is a steady stream of outgoing cash that you have to stop. The only way to do that is to cook for yourself.

If you think about all the overhead involved in a meal prepared for you by others, you can make a mental list of how you can eliminate that overhead so that you can eat healthy meals on an extremely limited budget. For instance, let’s think about lasagna. A lovely dish of lasagna at a local Italian restaurant will run you anywhere from $15 to $35. The expense will cover the cost of:

Growing the wheat for the lasagna noodles,
Transporting it,
Making it into pasta,
Packaging it, and sending it to the wholesaler,
Then sending it to the restaurant.

Growing the tomatoes for the sauce,
Transporting them to the factory where they are washed, peeled, pureed, cooked, preserved and shipped to the wholesaler,
Then sending them to the restaurant.

Growing the herbs for the sauce,
Transporting them, packaging them, shipping them to the wholesaler,
Then sending them to the restaurant.

Raising the cattle for the beef and pork, transporting them to the facility where they are butchered, processed, packed and sent to the facility where they are processed into sausage, then sent to the wholesaler who will send it to the restaurant.

Raising the cows, milking them, processing the milk and turn it into cheese….

By now I’m sure you get the picture. Note how many actions were involved in that description above (33, if you’re counting) and realize that each action costs money. Now add to that the costs involved in running the restaurant (the cook who makes the lasagna, the server who serves it to you, the hostess who seats you and the general overhead of the restaurant itself) and you can see why this will cost you $15 to $35 for one meal.

First Step: Warehouse Club

When you look at that description, you can see that if you move just a little ways up from the bottom, you save money. If instead of eating lasagna at a restaurant, you buy your lasagna from a wholesaler or warehouse club, you save money. Of course, that takes a little longer than eating at a restaurant: you have to buy the lasagna, take it home, and wait for it to bake (at least an hour). But the entire lasagna will cost you $10 to $20 instead of $15 to $35, and you will get far more than the one big piece you would have been served at the Italian restaurant. This means more meals in the future, which brings down your cost even further.

So it cost you a little extra time but saved you a fair amount of money. That wouldn’t have worked out that well for you if you had more money than time, but it’s definitely the right way to go when you have more time than money.

Even Better: You Make It

But let’s move further up in the process. Suppose you make your own pan of lasagna. This requires some basic knowledge of cooking and a good recipe. It also requires a trip to the grocery store to buy each of the ingredients in lasagna. Then you have to take it home, assemble it and wait for it to bake. This will take even longer than buying a premade pan of lasagna at the warehouse club, but it may cost less (depending on the prices you pay for the ingredients.)

It’s more likely to cost less if you make a really huge pan of lasagna, most of which you cut up and freeze individually for future use. If you take the time to learn prices and where you can get the best deals, you’ll come out even further ahead.

This is an extremely drawn-out version of a very basic principle: the more things you do for yourself, the more money you can save.

This is so important, it needs to be repeated:

The more things you do for yourself, the more money you can save.

This principle applies in all sorts of areas, but it’s especially applicable when we talk about food, something we cannot do without. You may be accustomed to having your food prepared by others (whether in factories, grocery store deli’s or fine restaurants), but if you now find yourself with way more time than money, this is where you need to make a lot of changes.