Fool-proof method for keeping horsemeat out of your house

So in Europe they're dealing with a food supply scandal where an abbatoir in Romania may or may not have sold horsemeat that may or may not have been labeled as such to a French food processor that may or may not have mixed the horsemeat with beef, where it may or may not have been included in steeply discounted single-serve lasagnas, meat pies, and other microwave-ready boxed meals in supermarket freezer aisles.

Now, horsemeat isn't intrinsically a poor food, unless the horse was treated with a drug not otherwise allowed in horse destined for human consumption, the detection of which was one clue that led to the scandal. But generally, it's my understanding that it tends to be less fatty and richer in iron, magnesium, and phosphorus than the grain-finished beef that Americans usually get. And I'm told it has a grassy flavor somewhere between that of beef and venison, which is at worst unobjectionable and at best mighty tasty. But if you don't want to eat it, you shouldn't have to; and if a package of food doesn't list horsemeat on the label, you should be able to trust that there's no horsemeat in the package. Anything else is fraud, pinching money out of your pocket.

But evidently you can't trust labels, even from high-profile international brands like Nestlé. This is because the path that ingredients take from the field or stockyards to your table is a circuitous one, crossing state lines (or national frontiers) over and over again. Ingredients pass through multiple hands, literally and metaphorically, as they're processed into the end product. And at every step, a processor needs to take its cut and make a profit on the value they're adding to the foodstuff. How do they do it? By using the cheapest ingredient or method possible before they finish touching the product and moving it to the next actor.

Then the final vendor does their balancing act with pushing down the retail price as low as possible while still eking out a profit. One of the problematic products in the U.K. was a bolognese sauce that retailed for £1.00/500g, or about $1.75/lb., or about $1.75 for a pint jar of red pasta sauce with meat. Think about it: that's an extraordinarily low price. If you were to make a pint of red sauce with ground beef in it, you'd need a couple of pounds of fresh tomatoes, perhaps a quarter pound of beef, a little bit of onion and other flavorings, a little oil, and some lemon juice and/or sugar, depending on the tomatoes.

Let me try to price it out if I were to make this sauce today at home. Winter is an awful time to buy fresh tomatoes, but it looks as though I get get a couple of pounds of tomatoes for $5.00; a quarter pound of beef for $1.25; enough onion for $0.25; and let's say another $0.25 for everything else in the ingredient list plus cooking fuel. My version of the sauce costs $6.25. It would likely be cheaper in the summer, when I can get deals on tomatoes. I could save some more by starting with a cheap cut of meat and grinding it myself, or teaming with another household and buying an entire side of beef to share. I think, though, that it would be very difficult to get my pint of meat sauce under about $3.00 while still using quality ingredients.

How to manufacturers do it, then? By buying their tomatoes in quantities larger than six items at a time, of course, with long-term contracts the scale of which I haven't seen since I studied the UCC in law school. The difference between what Campbell's pays for the tomatoes it puts in its soup and juices and what you pay for the tomatoes in your salad is, shall we say, disheartening. Same with the beef they put in their ravioli versus what you put in your sloppy joes. A single producer, a cooperative of farms, or an agribusiness operation will give Campbell's a better price than you'll see at the grocery or farmers market, because you can't possibly match the soup company's economy of scale.

That's only part of the story, however, because there are other actors between you and the tomato field when it comes to industrially produced food. Different components in the package's ingredient list may come from different suppliers, and the food may be only partially produced in one location before it's shipped elsewhere to be finished. Everywhere along the line, the actors will seek to maximize their profits. They'll opt for cheaper raw materials, which may not be as high-quality as what you would buy for your household. What kind of quality do you think you'll get when you pay $1.75 for a 16-ounce jar of pasta sauce?

A butcher in a BBC article explains that it's about "knowing and trusting the people [you] do business with." You can get to know your producer, abbatoir, transporter, and vendor; or you can learn a few languages and travel all over Europe trying to figure out which processor or factory is looking to save a few euro here and there by cutting the ground beef with ground horsemeat:

How's your French, German, Turkish, Greek, Dutch, and Romanian?
See the BBC page for a clickable version of the map with more information.

So, the Rowhouse Livin' fool-proof method for keeping horsemeat out of your house? Don't buy pre-packaged food with a price that's too good to be true. In fact, avoid pre-packaged, processed food whenever you can, because what you gain in price you lose in quality, nutrition, and trust, every single time. If time is a problem, try these: (1) use weekend downtime to make larger batches of food and freeze leftovers in smaller containers for later meals; (2) regularly prepare an extra portion of dinner in the evening, and enjoy it for lunch the next day; and (3) dust off the crockpot and use it at least once per week.

And with that, I'm off to lunch: a couple of slices of home-made pizza left over from Sunday dinner with friends. Absolutely no horsemeat in this pizza. Bon apétit!

Pricey pasta follow-up

Yesterday I complained that pasta at my local supermarkets is stubbornly refusing to get down to my price point, which is $1.00 or under per pound. I checked a second grocery store today, and no luck: the lowest price was still $1.19, and I'm too stubborn-headed to cave and buy a box to make my shelf look better stocked.

What do I do now, then? Mostly, I'll go a little easy on the pasta until I see it again at my price point, which I'll hopefully see soon in a clearance sale. I feel as though we're overdue for one. I probably make pasta for dinner too frequently anyway; we could use more variety in our dinners. I know I have some corn flour masa kicking around, so perhaps I'll make corn tortillas one night this week.

As for tonight, it's semi-potluck dinner with friends. I host a pizza dinner once or twice a month, asking guests to bring sides, desserts, and bottles. I'll make two pizzas: one plain and ordinary (or maybe with one non-challenging topping, like sweet peppers), and one a little more interesting. Tonight, I'll top the interesting one with baked acorn squash purée and caramelized onions, flavored with some sage:

Bon apétit!

Cold weather, pricey pasta

Here in mid-Atlantic Philadelphia -- very squarely outside of New England -- we dodged the big nor'easter just as we did Superstorm Sandy in the fall. It's stupid cold outside (I don't tolerate the cold well at all) but other than some icy sidewalks we don't have much to complain about.

Except for the price of pasta. I remember seeing sometime last year that wheat prices were going to go up permanently, and the price rise seems to have taken hold. Lately I haven't found pound boxes of pasta for less than $1.19 locally. (Barilla on "sale" at 4 boxes for $5.00 doesn't cut it for Rowhouse Livin', though that's our preferred brand for taste and texture reasons.) Now, I have a good supply here at the homestead to wait a little longer, in case a deal does come along. I mean, I think I'm low, because I have two full half-gallon jars, which is about 4 pounds' worth of pasta. But we do go through pasta really quickly, being mostly vegetarian and totally cheapskates: main dishes, side dishes, starchy stretchers in a crockpot full of soup, and so on.

So I'll try the supermarket again tomorrow when I go on a quick run for some items I missed at the store today, but I'm afraid I'll be disappointed again. And not just at the cold, cold wind blowing tears out of my eyes. I guess I should have invested in wheat futures last summer!

Culture wars in the supermarket

Following some bouncing links the other day, I came across an article in The American Conservative, admittedly a website I don't usually make time to read. The article, "Porky Populism: Class war comes to dinner, and conservatives are on the wrong side," focuses on the interesting resentment that conservatives sometimes harbor against liberals who eschew junk food over arugula, and the disconnect that some conservatives display by shouting for personal responsibility and freedom of choice on the one hand, but on the other hand filling up on unhealthy food to the point of making themselves physically disabled. To be clear, Rowhouse Livin' isn't into culture wars. We like eating healthy for the budget benefits now and the health benefits later. (Yes, I'm typing this blog entry from a neighborhood cookie shop.) We don't care what conservatives or liberals think about our food choices, because we concern ourselves solely with our own health and budget. We also don't intend a statement with what we eat, and we don't read a statement in what we see someone else eating. But two paragraphs stuck out as we were reading:

[The author's household] allocate[s] our grocery budget differently [than his sister's], so we can afford higher-quality meat, dairy, and produce. A clever home cook knows that if you cut out junk food, you have more cash for good stuff. If you don’t eat meat every day, you can eat better meat when you do. Whole Foods is expensive, but I learned how to make meals for pennies by shopping the bulk bins for beans, rice, and grains.

I've discussed the budget wonder meal, rice and beans, before. The author here mentions that his sister's haul from the grocery store included packages of junk food. So I'll take the rice and beans discussion a little further. A family-size sack of Doritos -- 17 oz. -- costs $2.99. For the same amount of money, you can get two pounds of apples, or a 5-lb. sack for less than a dollar more (PDF).

I've been trying for five minutes to think of something not impolite to say about a household food purchaser on a limited budget (and we are all on limited budgets) who would opt for Doritos rather than apples. Dig that PDF, the USDA's National Fruit and Vegetable Retail Report for 21 September 2012. You can buy a lot of vitamins and minerals for $2.99 -- unless you decide to exercise your freedom of choice and your personal responsibility by spending the $2.99 on deep-fried chips of corn tortillas dusted with chemical flavorings, colors, and preservatives, and devoid of any nutrition other than calories.

More:

"These kids are having drive-thru McDonalds for dinner every night. Can you imagine the cost of that, not to mention the empty calories?" [chef and culinary arts teacher Amy Dreher] said. "They’ll laugh at me for going to Whole Foods, but I'm like, 'You have $800 rims on your car, versus me shopping at a grocery store that has the reputation for being more expensive? Come on.'"

And I've talked about food deserts before. All I'll add here is that anyone with a car, $800 rims or not, and a drive-thru fast-food budget can drive to an out-of-neighborhood grocery store instead of the drive-thru.

It's not a culture war of anti-fast-food liberals vs. anti-arugula conservatives. That's ridiculous, because a liberal's dollar spends just as well as a conservative's. But spending a dollar on junk food to spite liberals -- the "proxy for the politics of class and culture" that the article author discusses -- comes perilously close to literally cutting off your nose to spite your face.

The price book tool that you need to create and start using immediately

I don't keep a price book.

But I should! I try to keep in mind all the lowest prices I know I can get for this item and the other, but I know I don't always succeed. If I would just write it all down, I know I could keep a few more dollars in my hands and out of the supermarket's every week.

I get ahead of myself. What's a price book?

Amy Dacyczyn explains this brilliant tool in her brilliant compendium, The Complete Tightwad Gazette. Look at your grocery list. Take a notebook (or a spreadsheet) and make one entry for each item in your grocery list. (You don't need to take an inventory of your pantry and list every single item there; start with this week's grocery list, and add new items as they come up.) While shopping, note the date you bought each item and what price you found. Note the price per unit or by weight, and note the package size. Note which supermarket or big-box retailer you bought it from. And repeat all these notes every week, especially noting prices as they rise, and making sure you writing down the date.

Do this for every item. Not just grocery foods, but also household necessities like toiletries and cleaning products; home maintenance hardware like furnace air filters and lightbulbs; and even some clothing items like sport socks and those plain white undershirts that come in 12-packs. Everything! You hear me?

After a few months, set a couple of hours aside and look at the data you've gathered. Some prices are steadily going up; some cycle every few months or twice a year. Sometimes the big-box retailers don't actually have the best price. In a separate master list, or by writing in different colored pen on the entry for each item, note the lowest price you see and how frequently that price cycles around. At this point, you have a very powerful tool for your pantry planning. You can now stock your pantry in an awesomely efficient way: by buying what you need at the lowest price possible in a quantity that will carry you to the next time that lowest price appears. Brilliant!

Here's the Rowhouse Livin' example. At my local supermarket, the regular price of the pastawe prefer for quality reasons is $1.39/lb. This is an objectively ridiculous price; and sometimes it goes up even more, and some of the varieties have been appearing in 12-oz. boxes rather than 16-oz. I hate the "grocery shrink ray." But the brand we like does cycle down to $0.99/lb. on a regular basis. I call this number my price point, and whenever I see our favorite pasta at that price, I snap up as many boxes as I can carry. (The Rowhouse Livin' price point for family size boxes of Tastykakes is 2 for $4.00. This unfortunate blogger is paying too much!) But more importantly, and this is the only way you can get the most effectiveness out of this tool: I never buy pasta at a price higher than that point, ever. Even when my pantry is empty of pasta.

Stand firm!

What should your price book look like? Dacyczyn gave a description in her Gazette that I don't recall offhand, and my copy of the book is at a friend's house so I can't look it up. But it could be just about anything: a small loose leaf notebook, a classic marble composition book, an ordinary spiral-bound notebook, or even a stack of index cardsand a rubber band. If loose-leaf, use one piece of paper for each grocery item. If a comp book or spiral-bound notebook, use one page or one half-page per item. If index cards, use one card per item. The way you create this tool isn't terribly important; do what works for you, though it'll be easier to use if you can alphabetize items by name and perhaps organize by store. What's crucially important is that you don't ever stop using it. Your price book is a dynamic document, and prices are always going to change.

Hop to it! Right now, you probably have kicking around the house an old, half-used notebook you can repurpose for a price book. Within six months, and definitely after 12 months, you'll have a completed tool for effectively controlling your food and household purchases budget.

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.

On food deserts

A food desert is a city neighborhood or other residential area in an otherwise developed nation where it is difficult to easily obtain nutritious foods. The typical example is an urban neighborhood without a major chain supermarket -- just corner convenience stores or drugstores with grocery aisles -- where residents, typically without cars because they don't need or can't afford them, find it inconvenient or even dangerous to walk to the nearest full-service grocery store. Think the little old lady who has trouble navigating unpaved sidewalks with her granny cart, or a neighborhood isolated from more prosperous surrounding neighborhoods by passenger and freight train tracks or high-traffic boulevards. Instead, the corner stores and drugstore grocery sections notoriously sell overpriced, sometimes expired foods and offer little in the way of fresh, healthy options.

Real estate developers should put supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods. I guess they don't because they've done the math and figure they can't make a profit on such an investment. I don't know all the factors they consider (I have never looked into commercial real estate development, myself), so I'm in no position to wonder just how badly a supermarket in a blighted neighborhood would actually perform. Maybe it's very difficult or very expensive to obtain insurance? There could be tax breaks, perhaps, to incentivize development; certainly it makes more policy sense, I think, than using public funds to re-route trolleys and upgrade infrastructure at a casino.

Some authorities question whether food deserts actually exist, or if the term is simply the result of circular research: a phrase that the media has picked up and repeated so often and for so long that it must be true, because it turns up in news media Nexis searches. I won't go so far as to deny the existence of urban food deserts. When I was looking for a Philadelphia home to buy in 2005, I scratched Northern Liberties and Fishtown off my list of potential neighborhoods because the closest supermarket was the Thriftway in Port Richmond. (Now, of course, there is a brand new Superfresh at 2nd and Girard.) And a good friend of mine works to attract supermarkets and other anchor retail stores to distressed communities and retain them through sustainable development practices -- he'd be the first to de-friend me on Facebook if I say, "I picked this place because the supermarket is three blocks away" in one breath, and then say, "There's no such thing as a food desert" in the next.

But consider, very especially here in Philadelphia. Every regional rail line, every subway-surface trolley, the El, and the Broad Street subway all stop within a block of the Reading Terminal Market and stop at or near the Gallery. The Market has stands offering fresh produce, fish, and meats, and the Gallery includes at least one produce market and fishmonger. I've found through my own price comparisons that the non-organic Terminal Market stands and the shop in the Gallery have prices that are competitive with local supermarkets. Most if not all of these vendors take SNAP ACCESS cards (food stamps). Now, from many places in the city, you can reach the Market and the Gallery with a single $2 transit fare (or a $1.55 token). From outlying areas in the Great Northeast, you can do it with a bus trip and a $1.00 transfer to the El. From zip code 19133, referenced above, you can do it with a single bus.

With some planning, and with adding transit fare to your food budget, you can address the food desert problem yourself, at least in Philadelphia. (This is an urban home economics blog, after all.) The transit trips may take a while, especially on weekends, so you'll need to do some time management. But if you work days in Center City yet live in a food desert, there's almost no excuse not to take advantage of the offerings in the Reading Terminal Market and the Gallery.

People who live in food deserts can't magically make commercial developers build supermarkets in their neighborhoods. But they can consider some self-reliance. Work the transit fare into your food budget. Investigate options for reduced fares or a bus pass from your employer or school. The Food Trust's Healthy Corner Stores Initiative is a great project but can go only so far; a household has to look after itself.

Domino sugar package gets smaller, price stays the same

When manufacturers reduce the volume or weight of their product but keep the price the same, often disguising the reduction by keeping the package the same size, the Consumerist blog calls it the "grocery shrink ray." I found a disappointing example at the supermarket the other day.

My local non-premium supermarket carries Domino cane sugar in 5- and 10-lb. sacks and 1-lb. boxes. But those 5-lb. sacks are being restocked with 4-lb. sacks (a size I don't think I've ever seen before), and the price isn't changing. The packages are almost identical, and I almost picked the smaller size. Grr!

Note: I'm not a brand purist for sugar. The reason I get Domino isn't that I'm a loyal longtime customer for abstract reasons, or because of the sign in Baltimore, or because I like that package design. It's because Domino offers 100% cane sugar. A package of sugar that doesn't specify its composition could be cane sugar or beet sugar or a blend of both, depending on whatever was cheapest for the manufacturer. I think I can tell the difference between cane and beet sugar, and I think I prefer cane sugar, particularly in baking and canning. There's a little caramel je ne sais quoi in there that you don't get from beet sugar. And the lion's share of the sugar I use goes into home canning recipes. So I spend a little more to get Domino, and try to save the difference by getting larger packages.

Now that the 5-lb. sack is gone, I think I'll be switching to the 10-lb. sack. I preferred the smaller one, because finding room in my pantry for the larger size is tricky, though a better economic choice (it's cheaper per ounce than the smaller size). Too bad for Domino. I wouldn't have switched for my benefit if they'd left the 5-lb. sacks alone.