The 2014 hoard

Every time I found a coin or a dollar bill (or even a sawbuck) on the sidewalk while I was walking around town in 2014, I brought the money home and tossed it into an old zinc-cap canning jar. Here's the hoard:

Holy cow! It's $17.48!

Here's to further good fortune in 2015!

Do the math: Kitchen sink garbage disposal vs. composting service

I am feeling better about the oncoming home canning season now that I've had the kitchen sink disposal unit replaced. It gave up the ghost a couple of months ago, and I hadn't been looking forward to having to deal with the volume of scraps that a batch of home-canned food can produce.

There are mixed opinions on whether a sink disposal is a good idea, whether economically or environmentally. When the city of Philadelphia partnered with a manufacturer in 2012 to install some at no cost to test how effectively their use diverted solid waste from landfills, an environmentalist blog posted an article, with inflammatory and offensive language, calling the effort "greenwashing." One concern is a claim that a household could use 700 extra gallons of water every year to run the disposal. Another is that the solids don't just disappear, but are trapped at the entrance to the wastewater treatment plant and landfilled anyway. So Philadelphia residents should pay a local composting service to come around weekly to gather their kitchen scraps.

I'll counter all three comments. First, that 700 gallons figure seems really high to me, as well as not actually sourced. It doesn't replicate my experience or practice. Unless I have something truly horrifying going down my sink (say, after a fridge clean-out), I generally run my sink disposal only when I'm finishing up hand-washing dishes. The eggshells from breakfast, vegetable trimmings from lunch, and breadcrumbs from dinner all sit in the drain until I flush them through the disposal with a sinkful of dirty dishwater. So I'm not usually running any extra water down the sink disposal over and above what ended up in the sink from washing up after dinner. But even if I am doing a separate run of the garbage disposal, such as during a canning project or a dish that generates a lot of waste, I'll try to run the disposal minimally, clearing out just enough that the sink remains useable, and leaving the last for flushing with dishwater. With this kind of practice, I don't see how I could possibly be using 700 extra gallons of water every year to run my disposal. The article there links to an eHow item about the environmental impact of disposers, but the eHow figure is unsourced to any actual citation. In our home, I would have to use almost 2 gallons of water daily to match that wild-sounding claim. My kitchen faucet is a pretty standard piece of hardware with a flow of about 2 gallons per minute. So for me to use 700 extra gallons of water per year, I would have to run my disposal for nearly one minute per day, every day, with the faucet going. I make my disposer work like that on an apple butter canning day, maybe, but certainly not every day.

Some more realistic math, then. Most days I use my disposal at the end of the washing up, so in those cases I'm using zero extra gallons of water. I would guess that I run the disposal three more times per week, for about 20 seconds each time. That gives us 52 weeks X 20 seconds X 2 gallons per 60 seconds, or just under 35 gallons. That's less than a tenth of that clearly spurious 700 gallons figure.

The second comment goes to the problem of what to do with the solid waste that even a disposal unit leaves in your household's wastewater. I do know that down the road apiece, the Delaware Solid Waste Authority collects and burns for electricity the methane off-gassing from the Cherry Island landfill. Since I don't think that Philadelphia's solid waste goes to Cherry Island, the Green Philly Blog author may have a fair point. In fact, however, Philadelphia does recycle biosolids from city wastewater and uses biogas to generate electricity for one of its plants. Perhaps these measures weren't in place when the blog author was writing.

As for the last comment, that people should hire a composting service, I find that residential compost service costs $15.00/month. But running my disposal is far, far cheaper: Philadelphia water is about $0.04 per cubic foot; a cubic foot is about 7.5 gallons; so water costs about $0.04 per 7.5 gallons, or about a half-cent per gallon. If I use the disposal three times per week, for about 20 seconds each time, then (as we saw above) I'm using just under 35 gallons per year. That costs me just $0.17 per year -- I can find that kind of change on the sidewalk on the way to the supermarket. At this point, brighter minds than mine can look at my disposal's specifications and the electric company's current rates to add in my electricity costs. But I think I can safely say it doesn't add up to $15.00/month.

I'm a day late and a dollar short, so to speak, in addressing that particular author's views against sink disposals. The issue didn't really come up for me, I guess, until I had to decide whether to replace the one that broke and couldn't be repaired. In the end, the blog article hasn't convinced me to move to composting -- and it's not just because of the cost of a service, but also because I can't do any gardening here at the homestead, for architectural reasons. I'm super happy to have a disposal again, and I'm happy to see that I can pay for its use with my "see a penny, pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck" jar.

The CSA season begins

Our community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscription started delivering last week, so my projects over the next several months will be to post (1) cheap, simple recipes to use up the produce, and (2) notes about canning. The recipes will be mostly about vegetables, and the canning will be mostly about fruit.

My past experience with CSA's: every week, we'd get a handful of strawberries here, a small sack of green beans there, and six pounds of kale. But that was in the Pacific Northwest, where there's an endemic blight that makes it hard to grow tomatoes. (Man, did I miss Jersey tomatoes while I was living in Seattle. Now that I'm back in Philadelphia, though, I miss getting apples for under $1.00/lb. This mid-Atlantic cheapskate can't win.) Word on the street from a friend who did this particular CSA last year was that the quantity of tomatoes can approach overwhelming levels, and fall can become Carrot Time. So if the same bounty occurs this year, maybe I'll try pressure-canning carrot slices for use in quick winter soups.

We've paid $640.00 up-front for a half-share of vegetables plus a full share of fruit. This amount is comparable to what we would pay for produce at the local farmers market from May to October -- but we'll be getting a larger quantity of produce. We'll still hit the market, though, for local cheeses and wines, plus occasional gifts. I'll look at the math again at the end of the season and see how we did. But with careful, complete use of the produce through immediate consumption and home-canning, I'm almost certain we'll be ahead, and into the winter as well.

Here's a recipe to kick off the season: CSA frittata, using what else? Kale.

Ingredients:

1 bunch CSA kale

1 bunch (or less) CSA spring onions, chopped

2-3 tablespoons butter

2 ounces shredded Cheddar cheese

6 eggs, well beaten

Method:

Wash kale and chop into bite-sized pieces. In a large skillet, sautée onions in butter over medium heat until tender. Add kale in batches and wilt. Season with salt and pepper and cook until tender. (Add a little water if necessary. If you do so, let the water cook off before proceeding.) Spread the kale evenly over the skillet, and place shredded cheese in an even layer over the kale. Pour beaten eggs over kale, reduce heat to low or medium-low, and cook until done, 10-15 minutes.

Serves 2 as a main dish, 4 as a side dish.

On Drexel Law's two-year J.D. program

So Drexel University is launching a new two-year J.D. program. Usually, it takes three years to get a law degree in the U.S. Six of the 200-odd American law schools offer a two-year path; Drexel's first two-year grads will start in 2014. It seems like a good deal -- you don't have to get loans for a third year of living expenses, and you can get a job one year more quickly -- but I did the math and found that it's an even better deal for Drexel, where I earned my law degree with the inaugural class in 2009. From e-mail I sent to a fellow alumnus:

I think the premise is that Drexel's two-year J.D. program addresses the assertion that the third year of a J.D. program isn't necessary. That is, a person should get their two years done (some even say only one year), be awarded a J.D., and then get experience through an internship or apprenticeship, and then sit for the bar. But a two-year J.D. doesn't address that problem, because you still need all the credits of a three-year program. That issue won't be fixed until the A.B.A. and/or state supreme courts allow a two-years-plus-apprenticeship path to attorney licensure.

Until then, the law schools with two-year J.D.'s reap the rewards of graduating three classes, instead of just two, every six years. Notice that Drexel's two-year J.D. will still cost almost $112,000 in tuition, because it's the same 85 credits as the three-year J.D. (85 credits x $1,315/credit). Yes, the candidates save a year's living expenses and the opportunity cost of being unemployed that third year. But the real answer to cui bono? is the law school. The Class of 2015 (three-year program) is 140 students. If 140 get past the no-refund point in their third year (minus a few for attrition and transfers out, plus a few for transfers in), then that's over $15 million in tuition and fees, or $5 million/year. If one class of a two-year J.D. program is 1/3 the size of a regular three-year program, then a law school gets $5 million every two years, or about $2.5 million every year. But note that that's not 1/3 the amount they get from one year of a three-year program; it's 1/2. Drexel's bottom line is that they gain half a class's worth of tuition every year by adding this program.

Note: here's where I have to Emily Litella a little bit. Dean Dennis explains that the law school will keep its "current class size of about 130 students, but with a quarter of them enrolled in the new program." However, when I did the math before, I started with the assumption that the two-year students would be in addition to the full classes of three-year students. Rather, they will be a sub-set of the incoming class. To re-do the math, this means that every year once the program is fully implemented, about 33 students will be paying half their $112,000 total tuition, while about 97 students will be paying one third of their $112,000 total. Every year, this means (33 x $112,000 * 1/2) + (97 x $112,000 * 1/3), or ($1.848 million) + ($3.621 million), or $5.469 million/yr. Without a two-year program, all 130 students simply pay one third of their $112,000 total tuition: 130 * $112,000 * 1/3, or $4.853 million/yr. Each year, the school takes in $616,000 more in tuition per class -- it's like growing the class by some 15 students while adding zero bodies to the student body. You can hire at least four law professors with that kind of change.

To [one colleague's] point, I'm a little concerned about the loss of value in Drexel's J.D. brand. It appears to me that the two-year J.D. is not a trend among top-tier schools (except for Northwestern), even though it's probably inevitable in the very long run. I think the lowered prestige in a Drexel J.D. is a big risk for the school, and not a good deal for the graduates. But Drexel must have done the math and decided that there is a sufficient financial advantage for Drexel to be on the vanguard of this type of program.

As I concluded to my fellow alumnus, there's a huge reason why I'm certain this is all about the benjamins for Drexel, and not about the students or the profession, which is super-saturated and unable to employ new graduates. Drexel isn't offering a night or part-time program, which would increase enrollment of "students who are a little bit older," as Dean Dennis says. But since a night program takes longer than a three-year program, it doesn't infuse the school with extra cash up front the way an accelerated program does.

My fellow alumnus wondered if there were any other industry that responds to decreased demand by increasing supply. My answer: one where an invisible hand brings it an extra $616,000 every year.

Follow up: Is bar soap dirty?

In August 2012, I asked:

Why does everyone use liquid soap? [...] Is liquid soap more sanitary? I found one secondary source that says "[g]erms can grow on bar soap." But wouldn't viruses, molds, and bacteria just wash off your hands with the mechanical action of washing and rinsing, and the chemical action of soap micelles forming around them? And what bacteria can grow on bar soap, anyway? I thought one of the basic (ha-ha) things about soap was that it lyses bacteria when the business end of a hydrophobic-hydophilic soap molecule disrupts a bacterium's lipid membrane. There must be more types of bacteria in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

(Internal links omitted. Pretentious reference to Shakespeare retained.)

Well! Following some bouncing links the other day, I found an answer. Some of the links in the article no longer work, but here we go:

According to a series of tests conducted in the early 1980s, bars of soap are often covered with bacteria and carry a higher load than you'd find inside a liquid dispenser. But no one knows for sure whether this dirty soap will actually transfer its germs to your hands during a wash.

In fact, what little clinical evidence there is suggests that dirty soap isn't so bad. A study from 1965 and another from 1988 used similar methodologies: Researchers coated bars of soap in the lab with E. coli and other nasty bacteria, and then gave them to test subjects for a vigorous hand-wash. Both teams found no transfer of contamination from the dirty soap. However, both studies were tainted by potential conflicts of interest: The first was conducted by Procter & Gamble, and the second came from the Dial Corp.

Still, there's no good evidence to contradict these studies, and it's likely that the bacteria on a dirty bar would just wash off when you rinsed your hands. In other words, you'd be cleaning the soap as you cleaned your hands.

I always understood that it doesn't matter what texture of soap you use, because any soap works in two ways, due to its chemical makeup. First, the soap molecule disrupts a bacterium's cell membrane. Two, the friction of rubbing your hands together, plus the slipperiness of the basic (as opposed to acidic) soap solution you create by lathering up, plus the rinsing action of water, all work together to mechanically remove dirt, bacteria, and viruses from your skin. The Mayo Clinic agrees, telling us essentially, just wash yer dang hands, and it doesn't matter if you use liquid, bar or powder soap.

Does anybody else remember using powdered soap? An elementary school of mine, built in 1929 with bathrooms likely dating to the post-Second World War era when I attended, featured powdered soap dispensers. I didn't figure anybody really used it any more, but Google text and image searches show current vendors and new dispensers.

But my take-away from all this is that I'm going to stick with my bar soap. And, now that the continental U.S. is enduring an extreme flu season this year, I'm going to wash my hands super frequently. The math lies squarely in favor of bar soap versus liquid soap. And I don't see a reason to install dispensers ($35.00 each) for powdered soap ($11.25 per 5-lb. box) in my home.

Cheap eats: soup from the pantry

As promised, a cheap wintertime recipe.

The household's teenager is wrapped up in daily rehearsals for the school play, so we don't roll home until 6:00 p.m. or even later on weeknights. She usually has homework to finish, and I often have laundry to move or bread to bake. But we want to end our household activities early enough to start the whole routine over again the next morning. And like everyone else whose kids are busy with after-school activities, we want dinner on the table as soon as possible after we get home. It helps, too, if dinner is nutritious, cheap, and different from whatever it is we scrounged up the night before.

That said, I won't do take-out. Although we have a half-dozen options for food to go within just one block of the Rowhouse Livin' homestead, I avoid them. Why? Take-out is expensive, for one. I might spend $25.00 on a take-out dinner for two; and though it may give me leftovers for lunch the next day, $25.00 is several times the amount I may spend on a dinner (plus lunch leftovers) made from scratch. If I get take-out just once per week, that's $100.00 per month added to my grocery bill. Shudder!

For another, take-out meals aren't terribly healthy. They're very calorie-dense but nutrient-poor, even if you choose an option heavy on the vegetables. A veggie lover's pizza is still pizza. Asian-style tofu and broccoli is still stir-fried and high in sodium. A burger or steak sandwich with fries . . .  sounds really good right now, but I digress. The following recipe is scientifically proven to be healthier for everyone in the world than a take-out cheesesteak and fries:

Ingredients:

One quart jar of cubed winter squash, or 1 to 1 1/2 pounds pre-cooked winter squash

Broth, or water plus 1 bouillon cube or other soup concentrate to taste, to cover

1/2 cup to 1 cup (up to 1/4 pound) very small pasta (e.g., conchigliette, ditalini, orzo, elbow macaroni)

Method:

Empty the jar of squash into a medium saucepan. Add broth or fresh water plus bouillon to cover. Bring to a boil. Add pasta, reduce to simmer, and cook until pasta is done.

Cost And Time:

I don't remember exactly how much I spent on the winter squash that I canned, which I'd bought at the farmers market when it was in season. I think it was $2.50/pound, and I fit a little under 2 pounds in each jar; that makes for a total of $5.00, to include the costs related to home canning. The bouillon cubes I used cost about $0.50 apiece. And I added about $0.25 worth of pasta. Let's add another $0.10 for water and cooking gas. This batch of soup cost $5.85.

Not the end of the story, though! Winter squash is very filling, and adding starchy pasta also helped the soup stick to our ribs. We ate only half of the pot of soup one night; we finished it the next night. So really it was $2.93 per night, or just $1.46 per meal, per person. (We are a household of two.)

As for time, I had this soup on the table within 20 minutes of our walking in the front door. If we had brought home take-out food, we would have eaten right away, of course. But I'll argue that we ate faster by cooking: we did not have to wait at a restaurant while our food was prepared, or wait for delivery after phoning in an order.

And that's how I avoided getting take-out dinners for two weeknights this week. How about you?

Do the math: Does D.I.Y. pantry stocking pay off?

At the risk of boring everyone with blueberries again, I wanted to crunch some more numbers around the topic of D.I.Y. pantry stocking. You'll recall that Rowhouse Livin' went to New Jersey in July and U-Picked 12 pounds of blueberries, then made pie, muffins, jam, syrup, and a few other things with the produce. The cost for the 12 pounds of blueberries, plus gas and tolls, was $26.00. But reader Ray wanted me to "calculate in the cost of [my] time." Here goes.

Round-trip drive to the U-Pick farm: 60 min.
Blueberry picking: 100 min.
Jam: 120 min.
Pie: 5 min.
Cobbler: 10 min.
Muffins: 5 min.
Syrup: 15 min.
Brandied blueberries: 45 min.
Consumed fresh: 1 min.
Frozen: 1 min.
TOTAL: 362 minutes (6.00 hours).

If I had obtained all these finished products from the supermarket, I would have used time thus:

Round-trip walk to store: 30 min.
Shopping: 15 min.
Unpackaging: 2 min.
TOTAL: 47 minutes (0.75 hours).

Recall that the D.I.Y. outlay was $32.76, and the estimated supermarket cost was $100.49. Now, what to do with these numbers? If I multiply my hourly rate by the time used, then I get what someone would pay me for lawyering. That's not completely apt, because a cook at my level of kitchen skills would make less than what I charge my clients. But arguably I should use my rate, because the money that I earn at that rate is the money that I use to pay my household expenses. So I'll use my attorney rate, multiply it by the time, and get a Rowhouse Livin' labor cost. Then if I subtract the actual dollars spent, it looks as though I'll get a "real" comparison of outlay.

Or do I? Let's call my hourly rate $100.00/hr. and see what happens.

D.I.Y.: (6.00 x $100.00) - 32.76 = $567.24
Supermarket: (0.75 x $100.00) - 100.49 = -$25.49

What? If I'd gone to the supermarket I would have made $25.49, but because I made everything myself I spent $567.24? I'm no economist, but something tells me that even though the arithmetic works, I'm not asking the right questions of the math.

What if I put it this way? In The Complete Tightwad Gazette, author Amy Dacyczyn suggests looking at a particular task, figuring out how many times you can do it in an hour, and then multiplying that number by the cost of buying the item or not doing the task yourself. By Dacyczyn's logic, that gives you a truer "hourly wage" yardstick by which to measure whether you should D.I.Y or go shopping. For example, it takes me 15 seconds to wash and rinse a coffee mug. One disposable coffee cup, at $54.00 for 500 paper cups, costs $0.11. So this 15-second task saves me $0.11 every time I do it. Theoretically, I can wash and rinse 3600 coffee mugs per hour; 3600 x $0.11 gives me a Tightwad Gazette hourly wage of $396.00 when it comes to choosing what kind of vessel I use for my morning coffee.

Should I re-think my law office's billing practices?

But how can we bake the Tightwad Gazette math into a blueberry cobbler? Well, it took me 10 minutes to make the biscuit topping and mix the blueberry filling; I won't count the baking time, because that required no work or attention from me. A cobbler from the supermarket would have cost me $8.23 in ingredients; my recipe cost $4.01 in ingredients and cooking gas, for a savings of $4.22. Theoretically, I could prepare six blueberry cobblers per hour. Multiplying my net figure of $4.22 times six cobblers gives me an hourly wage of $25.32.

That's not an awesome wage for a lawyer. But in return I get to use the freshest of ingredients, avoid high-fructose corn syrup, and get some face-to-face time in with my daughter, helping her work on her kitchen skills.

Finally, notice how I get the most bang for my buck on the "littler" thing, the coffee mug vs. disposable paper cup comparison. As Dacyczyn points out elsewhere in The Complete Tightwad Gazette, people tend to deliberate for hours and hours and hours on the big financial decisions -- house, car, elective surgery -- but they tend to not think much at all about the little financial decisions that they make many times per day -- paper cup vs. coffee mug, convenience foods vs. from-scratch cooking, food cart lunch vs. sack lunch. Over time, though, how many houses will you buy compared to how many cups of coffee will you drink? You can pay the down payment with the money you save on your daily coffee, your groceries, and your lunches. And the practice you get from doing this math on all the little decisions, all the time, prime you for the best thinking when it comes to the big financial decisions.

Food budget secret: No coupons, ever

NBC's Today show provides a brief list of food budget tips. The one most surprising to readers who are familiar with the "extreme couponing" idea celebrated on reality TV is the view of the author there urging you not to use coupons at all, ever.

Here at Rowhouse Livin', we almost completely agree. But if I had to put a percentage on it, I'd say we avoid coupons for 98% of what we buy. Though I'm no knee-jerk brand loyalist, about two percent of what I bring into the house is stuff I buy very specifically by brand: sugar, hippie toothpaste(note this is not an invitation to debate fluoride), certain feminine products, and one or two shelf-stable emergency food supply items.

It's really important to remember what coupons truly are: they're ads. Look at the coupons in the Sunday paper. It's page after page of products that are new or improved or more conveniently packaged than previous versions or formulations. And they're all convenience foods, things that are processed with more sodium and preservatives, but less vitamins, than what you'd prefer to consume (or what your body would prefer you'd give it, anyway). Note what never, ever shows up in the Sunday coupons: fresh produce, dairy items, and unprocessed grains and legumes. But those are the very items that should make up the bulk of your diet! And you can make most of the convenience foods you see advertised in the coupon section for even less than if you buy them with a coupon. Example: A 4-oz. package of a noodle side dish with powdered sauce costs $2.59. But getting it with even a $1.00 coupon is not a deal! The package will yield just 1 1/3 cups of finished noodles, and you had to add perhaps $0.20 worth of butter and milk to it anyway. Your $1.00 coupon is now only an $0.80 coupon, so your total is $1.79. You have not actually saved any time, because pasta takes as long as pasta will take to cook.

To replicate this expensive convenience food, prepare 1/4 of a 1-lb. box of pasta and serve with a thin sauce Mornay. Boom, you've spent about $0.25 for the pasta and maybe $0.35 for the milk, flour, cheese, seasoning, and herbs or spices. The sauce prepares while the pasta is cooking, so it takes no more time than the packet noodles. Plus, the result won't carry the stale taste you get from starting a sauce with flavor powder. Next question for the hippies at Rowhouse Livin' is whether Knorr includes any scary-sounding ingredients in its flavor powder. I did not find ingredient information for Knorr's alfredo-flavored noodle side dish on Knorr's own website, but I did find similar info elsewhere: Knorr's cheddar-flavored rotini side dish noodles include disodium guanylate and undefined "natural" flavors. The first chemical there is a garden-variety flavor enhancer. As to the second, it's all fun and games with "natural" flavorings until you understand that the FDA does not require food labels to disclose the source of the flavor (21 CFR 101.22). This is a not-so-well-known problem for people with restrictive dietary choices (of whatever nature, whether medical, religious, or other). If you "don't dig on swine" (NSFW), then beware of a package of split-pea soup that includes natural flavorings, because they're almost certainly derived from ham. In fact, just about any soup that is not explicitly labeled as "vegetarian" almost certainly includes "natural flavorings" derived from beef or chicken ingredients.

Thanks, FDA!

But back to the math. Making your own side dish of noodles in the same quantity that you'd buy in a convenience packet costs about $0.60. Less, if you use powdered milk as we do, but we're freaks who don't otherwise consume milk in the house, so we buy only powdered milk and reconstitute it as needed for sauces, desserts, and beverages. But I'll use a cost more realistic for readers, who probably buy fluid milk. To continue, the convenience packet noodles, without a coupon, cost $2.79 prepared. You won't beat the Rowhouse Livin' price unless you find a coupon deal for some $2.00; and then, even if you do find a deal, you'll have to accept the nutritional and freshness trade-offs of using a highly processed food. Or in other words, for the same price as one package of side dish noodles, you can make four from scratch. And in whatever style you like! Basil-spiked, for a creamy American-style alfredo, for instance, or earthy with a smoked sharp Cheddar, mmmm.

My point, and I do have one, is this. I contend that this math is universal among coupon use. The coupons are, in fact, ads for convenience foods, not budget-friendly discounts offered by altruistic food manufacturers. These foods are poor in nutrition compared to what you can make at home. Their preparation is not actually less time-consuming than their home-made equivalents; it's a silly, expensive myth that cooking from scratch takes a whole lot of time. (A huge exception comes to mind: the granola barswe keep on hand for emergencies and days with weird schedules.) So quit couponing. Better to keep a price book so you know when certain things cyclically go on sale, and make dishes from fresh, scratch ingredients at home.

Do the math: home-made bread

There are a number of things to keep in mind if you want to figure out whether it's worth your while to make your own bread. Do you want to compare by weight? Or number of slices? Do you want 100% whole wheat, or will you settle for 50%? Or do you prefer white bread? Are you trying to avoid dairy products, or high-fructose corn syrup, or any of the numerous chemical treatments used in modern commercial breadmaking?

My starting point is that I like a hearty bread with over 50% whole-wheat flour. I avoid HFCS for calorie reasons and I avoid commercial breads with their weirdly spelled dough conditioner chemicals for hippie reasons. Thus, for my household's purposes, I'm not going to price-compare between my home-made bread and, say, dollar store white sandwich bread, even though the dollar store bread would "win." In our household, spending money on food with that little nutritional value is not a victory; it's a waste of money.

Breaking the prices down, I'll compare by slices, because in the end that's how I consume bread. I make a sandwich with two slices of bread, whether the bread is my heavy, home-made pain de campagne or a package of the lowest-priced, mass-produced bread I can find at the grocery store. A loaf can weigh 21, 24, 32, or 34 oz.; but keep in mind that the loaf I finish first won't be the lightest one -- it'll be the one with the fewest slices. And note that two supermarket loaves may cost the same but have a remarkable difference in the number of slices: family size versus sandwich size versus "country" size, even from the same manufacturer, can vary in price or weight, or maybe not, but they'll definitely vary in number of slices. And if you don't feel ripped off when you pay the same price for a family loaf as for a country loaf, but you get 5 fewer sandwiches out of the country loaf and don't feel any fuller at the end of your lunch, you probably should.

First, a quick summary of what goes into a loaf of my home-made bread, using prices from the affiliate links when given: 2 cups of whole-wheat flour; 1 cup of white flour; 1/4 cup wheat berries; 1 tsp salt; 1/2 tsp yeast, water. A 5-lb. sack of flour will yield about 19 cups. Whole-wheat flour is $4.99 per 5 lbs., or $4.99 per 19 cups, or $0.26 per cup, $0.52 for 2 cups. White flour is $1.99 per 5 lbs., or $1.99 per 19 cups, or $0.10 per cup. Wheat berries cost me $1.65/lb. last time I got them; 1/4 cup weighs about 2 oz. or 1/8 lb., so $0.21.

As for salt and yeast . . . I don't want to say the prices on those quantities are negligible, because I want to be rigorous here, so here goes. A 26-oz. canister of table salt costs $1.35, and Morton tells me that there are 491 quarter-teaspoons in the canister. That makes $0.0027 per quarter-teaspoon, or just over $0.01 per teaspoon. Yeast is a little trickier, but it's just algebra. I buy my yeast in 4-oz. (113.4 g) jars for $6.99. The manufacturer tells me that one of their 7-gram packets contains about 2 1/4 tsp, so I have a ratio of 2.25 tsp per 7 g. Now I have enough numbers: (2.25 tsp)/(7 g) = (x tsp)/(113.4 g), so x = 36.45 tsp per jar. Each jar sells for $6.99, or $0.19/tsp; so 1/2 tsp costs (and I'll round it up) $0.10.

Putting it all together, when I make a loaf of bread I use $0.62 for flour, $0.21 for "crunchies" (the wheat berries) and $0.11 for salt and yeast, plus water and cooking gas, which I'll ballpark at $0.25. My total is $1.19. I usually get a dozen slices of bread (plus heels) out of one loaf, so my price per slice is $0.10.

Thus, any bread I find at the store has to beat $0.10/slice, while also carrying the same nutritional kick as bread with 67% whole-grain flour, the added benefit of whole wheat berries, and the hippie holier-than-thou perk of using no high-fructose corn syrup or chemical additives.

Rowhouse Livin' bread: $0.10/slice

Whole-wheat boule from upscale supermarket's bakery: $4.29, about 15 slices, so $0.28/slice

Organic whole-wheat bâtard from neighborhood supermarket: 21 oz., $4.79, about 18 slices, so $0.27/slice

Organic whole-wheat commercial bread from upscale supermarket's bread section: 24 oz., $4.59, 20 slices, so $0.23/slice

Non-organic whole-wheat commercial bread from neighborhood supermarket: 24 oz., $3.89, 20 slices, so $0.19/slice. From this price level downward, all of the breads contain chemical dough additives and/or HFCS, making them less desirable for the Rowhouse Livin' household.

Non-organic whole-wheat commercial bread, family/king size: 24 oz., $3.89, 22 slices, so $0.18/slice

Non-organic, whole-wheat commercial bread, supermarket generic: 16 oz. (!), $1.79, 20 slices, so $0.09/slice

That last loaf there competes in price to my own, so now I'm back to quality issues. At just 16 oz., that loaf must be pumped full of air so that the light-feeling slices don't taste too "disagreeably" like whole grain. That bread will also be soft and squishy, without the sturdy grain and hearty mouthfeel that I prefer. But, you know, if you like a bread that melts in your mouth without your having to actually chew it, and if your household does not find dough additives and HFCS objectionable, then maybe you would prefer to buy this bread than make your own.

Which brings me to Ray's question from the other day about calculating time. It's a complicated question, and one I will be addressing sometime soon. Here's one consideration. My home-made bread requires 5 minutes to mix, and another 5 minutes or less (in short segments) to turn out of the bowl, shape into a boule, place into the proofing bowl, place into the oven, and retrieve from the oven. (The fermenting and baking times are hours when I am asleep, or I can work on other things, or I don't even have to be at home.) On the other hand, it's a 20-minute round trip for me to travel to my neighborhood supermarket for its generic brand whole-wheat bread. Please consider: not only do I subjectively think that last loaf of bread is terrible food, but actually it takes twice as much time to obtain than does my own bread.

Do the math: Yes, algebra is necessary

About two weeks ago, some noodle-head at the New York Times, in an attempt to paint the paper as even more of a bastion of elite media detached from reality, asked "Is Algebra Necessary?"

Yes, it is, because you can't run an economically efficient household without knowing how to calculate prices by the ounce or the mile or the hour. The question isn't whether kids should be learning algebra in school. The question is whether they are learning how to apply algebra to real-life situations. Are they learning how to figure out which train, when the Acela leaves Boston at 10:22 and the Regional leaves D.C. at 10:45, arrives at Philadelphia first? Or are they learning how to figure out which is cheaper to bring to a Fourth of July picnic, a store-bought blueberry pie or a home-made one (answer)? Are they learning how to figure out how much money they'll need to budget for gas every week, if their commute to work is 12 miles each way, gas is $3.50/gal., the car gets 23 mpg, and they'll telecommute every Friday? If you hire movers at $120/hr., how much money will you save if you shave 90 minutes off their clock by de-clutterring to downsize the amount of belongings you move, stacking your boxes neatly before the movers arrive, and disassembling your bed? How many hours will you be able to pay them if they charge $90/hr. to pack your things beforehand, and your moving budget is $800.00?

No, I'm not moving. I like living in the city.

Paraphrased Ben Bernanke: "Pack your lunch to work"

See, it's not just me! Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke thinks you should bring a sack lunch to work every day, too:

Financial education supports not only individual well-being, but also the economic health of our nation. [ ... ] Financial education also provides a context for students to develop important skills that can be applied more broadly. Making good financial decisions requires that consumers seek out relevant information from trustworthy sources, and that they use critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and decisionmaking skills.

Via Consumerist. Say what you like about how the Fed is handling (or not) the economy, he's right on target to assert that young people need to learn how to manage their money and plan for the future. The more money you shave off your expenses every week or every day, the better you can weather an emergency; the better you can handle a stretch of unemployment; the better you can withstand an uninsured loss; the earlier you can retire; the more relaxed you'll be when you take the vacations you can now afford. How about some do-the-math on my lunch today?

How can you have any pudding if you don't do your math?

I brought a cheese sandwich on home-made bread and a chopped apple and peach. I drank water. To compare, I looked for the lowest-priced hoagie at Wawa and identified a lunch cart in Center City Philadelphia that offers fruit salad and chose the smallest size.

Internet research unverified by a walk to Wawa (because it is too hot and muggy at the time of writing) reveals that a four-inch Junior Hoagie at Wawa costs $2.99. While this hoagie would include condiments and accompaniments that my sandwich did not, I'll stay with that price for two reasons. One, my bread is heavy and wholesome, enough so that that I honestly think that my sandwich may actually weigh as much as a four-inch Junior. And two, as you'll see, I'll win even if you take $2.00, or two thirds, off Wawa's price. As for fruit, I found a cart selling a small salad for $3.00. I will knock $1.00 off that price because I used only two pieces of fruit, even though I think my container was holding the same volume as the cart's small salad. As for something to drink, this time of year I always seem to come across a plucky entrepreneur on the sidewalk selling ice-cold water in pint (500 mL) bottles for $1.00. To sum up: Wawa Junior hoagie plus small fruit salad from a lunch cart plus water: $2.99 + $2.00 + $1.00, or $5.99.

My home-made bread as prepared in that photo cost about $0.10/slice (I have a do-the-math post in the works about how to compare bread prices). I used 2 slices, plus about $0.75 worth of cheese, mayo, and Old Bay, seasoning of kings. On the right is about 3/4 lb. of fruit that we found at $1.75/lb. at the farmers market this past weekend, for a total of $1.31. Water is free at my office. So my total cost for lunch today was $2.26.

(a) Total Wawa + cart lunch: $5.99
(b) Wawa + cart lunch taking $2.00 off Wawa's price: $3.99
(c) Total Rowhouse Livin' lunch price: $2.26
Maximum savings, lunch (a) minus lunch (c): $3.73
Minimum savings, lunch (b) minus lunch (c): $1.73

But we're not going to stop there. This was only the quantitative reasoning. The next step is to use the results to make better decisions. If you work 50 weeks per year, 5 days per week, and can save even just $1.73/day by bringing a sack lunch, you can put aside $432.50, and not have to walk to Wawa and a fruit cart at noon on one of the hottest days of summer. If you instead save that $3.73/day and put it aside, you'd have $932.50. That right there is round-trip airfare for two to the west coast, or a month's rent or mortgage, or property taxes, or perhaps four months' groceries, or 266 gallons of gas at $3.50/gal. (think 70 fill-ups), or very nice extra payment into the 401(k) or your credit card balance. That could even be a full one year's electric or gas for a smaller household.

When Amy Dacyczyn explained, in The Complete Tightwad Gazette, that pennies add up, this is what she meant. And I think it's what Ben Bernanke means, too.

Do the math: Bar soap versus liquid soap

Ounce for ounce, and use for use, bar soap is cheaper than liquid soap. Bar soap probably has a smaller carbon footprint, too, since it's lighter to ship, per use, than liquid soap; and one of the cheapest brands, Ivory, is made in North America -- as opposed to a lot of the liquid soap I see, which is made in China.

Ivory Soap: used in the hosing-downs on army transport ships during the Great War, according to this old ad in a National Geographic magazine, presented here for purely beefcake purposes. Larger version.

Why does everyone use liquid soap? (Note: that antibacterial soaps are bad and a waste of money is not a question. This post is only about bar soap versus conventional liquid soap.) Is liquid soap more sanitary? I found one secondary source that says "[g]erms can grow on bar soap." But wouldn't viruses, molds, and bacteria just wash off your hands with the mechanical action of washing and rinsing, and the chemical action of soap micelles forming around them? And what bacteria can grow on bar soap, anyway? I thought one of the basic (ha-ha) things about soap was that it lyses bacteria when the business end of a hydrophobic-hydophilic soap molecule disrupts a bacterium's lipid membrane. There must be more types of bacteria in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

My household is blessed with good health, so I don't think we're a valid example of the proposition that liquid soap is always more sanitary or less dangerous -- boy, does that beg a question -- than bar soap. But I'm still not convinced that, outside of a medical or laboratory setting, or a house with someone with a compromised immune system, one should waste money on liquid hand and bath soap. Here's my math, all prices estimated from a large general Internet retailer:

1 quart Dr. Bronner's liquid castile soap (32 ounces): $15.00
6 7.5-ounce bottles Softsoap liquid soap (45 ounces): $9.00
16 4-ounce bars Ivory soap: $10.00

Say you use 1/2 teaspoon of Dr. Bronner's or Softsoap for every hand washing. There are 6 teaspoons, or 12 half-teaspoons, in every ounce. So one quart of Dr. Bronner's will give you 384 hand washings, at $0.039, or about 4 cents, per wash. (Many people dilute their Dr. Bronner's or use only a drop at a time, so I'll be happy to go with half that number and call it 2 cents per wash.) The 45 ounces of  Softsoap bottles will give you 540 hand washings, at $0.0167, or between 1 and 2 cents, per wash.

So the big question is, to beat the Softsoap price, how many hand washings will you get out of $9.00 worth of that 16-bar pack of bar soap? I think I get about 700 hand washings out of 3 bars of soap, because I wash my hands in the kitchen about twice per day (more when I'm home, less when I'm not or when someone else is cooking), and I go through 3 bars of soap at most at my kitchen sink every year. Each bar of soap costs $1.60. So that's $4.80 / 700, or $0.0068, barely 1 cent per wash. That sounds like a low number of bars of soap; but even if I ratchet it up to 1 bar every other month, I'm spending 6 * $1.60 / 700, or $0.013. It's not until I go to 8 bars per 700 hand washings (8 * $1.60 / 700 = $0.018) that Softsoap wins.

And that's assuming the calculus is only about price. Maybe you would consider carbon-footprint concerns like packaging and shipping: Dr. Bronner's plastic bottles, Softsoap's plastic bottles and mixed-material pumps, and bar soap's wax paper and plastic film packaging. And how much oil to ship a package containing 384 versus 540 versus 700+ hand washings?

Note that under no circumstances is it acceptable to skip hand washing in order to save money. Ben Franklin didn't live to see the germ theory of disease fully developed, but his "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" seems eerily prescient.

Do the math: On those 12 pounds of blueberries

A few weeks ago, I got 12 pounds of blueberries at $1.50/lb. We spent $8.00 on gas and tolls, for a total of $26.00 for the 12 pounds, or $2.17/lb. Here's a summary of what I did with them and how the cost compared to ready-made prices. All supermarket or online retail prices were from 25 July 2012. I comparison-shopped when possible and used the lowest prices I could find with a reasonable effort. For example, I used a supermarket bakery price for the blueberry pie, not, say, Isgro's Thanksgiving blueberry pie price. Also, if I found an item in more than one area of the store -- say, both the bakery and the freezer case -- I chose the cheaper item. However, I did not do an intensive search for the absolute lowest price available online or in regional stores, because research that intense is outside the scope of this post. (Keeping a price book is a fantastic strategy, and a topic for another day.) Here goes:

1 pound blueberries, eaten fresh: Supermarket price was $3.99/lb; I spent $2.17, for savings of $1.82

1 pound blueberries, frozen: Supermarket price is $5.99/lb.; I spent $2.17, for savings of $3.82

1 dozen blueberry muffins: Supermarket price is $3.99/4, or $11.97/doz.; my recipe used 1/2 pound of berries plus about $1.00 in other ingredients and cooking gas, or $2.09/doz, for savings of $9.88

1 blueberry pie: Supermarket price is $6.49 for a bakery pie. The bakery pie was smaller than my deep-dish pie, so let's say that it would take 1.5 of them to match mine, or $9.73; my deep-dish recipe used 1.5 pounds of berries plus about $0.75 in other ingredients and cooking gas, or $4.01, for savings of $5.72

1 blueberry cobbler: My supermarket didn't have a cobbler in the bakery or freezer, so let's say I made one from canned blueberry pie filling and a 16-oz. tube of refrigerated biscuits. Canned filling is $4.04 for 21 oz., or $0.19/oz., and I would need 32 ounces, or $6.08 worth. One tube of biscuits is $2.15, so the total is $8.23; my recipe used 1.5 pounds of berries plus about $0.75 in other ingredients and cooking gas, or $4.01, for savings of $4.22

6 half-pints (48 ounces) of blueberry jam: Supermarket price is $4.94/lb., or $0.31/oz., so $14.88; I used 3 pounds of berries plus about $1.60 in sugar, lemon juice, pectin, jar lids, and cooking gas, or $8.11, for savings of $6.77

10 ounces blueberry syrup: (Even though I unintentionally made jam, it was same ingredients, same cooking time as syrup.) Supermarket price is $66.6/oz., so $6.66; I used 1/2 pound of blueberries plus about $0.60 in sugar and cooking gas, or $1.69, for savings of $4.97.

2 quarts (64 ounces) brandied blueberries: Priceless? Though you can get whole blueberries in light syrup, or blueberry jam or preserves made with brandy, nobody seems to sell whole blueberries preserved in brandy. The closest analogue -- but not a perfect one, because blueberries are almost always more expensive to begin with -- I could find is the more usual brandied peaches, via an online retailer at $10.90 for 18 oz., or $0.61/oz., so $39.04; I used 3 pounds of blueberries plus about $2.00 in sugar, brandy, jar lids, and cooking gas, or $8.51, for savings of $30.53

Total supermarket prices: $100.49
Total Rowhouse Livin' prices: $32.76
Total savings: $67.73

And now I promise for real that I'm done with the blueberries. New topic tomorrow!