This American Grocery Budget

Circling HomeWork #10

When I was little, my mother kept her grocery money tucked inside a wrinkled envelope in the drawer of her desk. Each week on Tuesday, she removed the correct number of bills and together we took them to Aldi, where we put a quarter in the cart rental and walked the aisles checking items off a paper list handwritten in loopy pencil. 

My mother’s grocery budget was $260 a month – $65 per week, unless it was a month with five Tuesdays, in which case it went down to $52. 

This budget feels, to me, mythical. The stuff of legend. The dollars I spend on food shock and appall me. When I feel a pit in my stomach as I swipe my card at the grocery checkout, I think of my mother. How did she do it? How did she feed us? And why can’t I do it for the life of me?

Of course, one answer is inflation. The internet tells me that $65 in the year 2000 is $117 in 2024. Comforting except that it’s appalling, and also even $117 per week is a number deep in the rearview mirror from my own spending. (Beyond overall inflation, grocery prices in particular have famously spiked and stayed high in the years of supply chain problems and climate change affecting agriculture – the latter of which will only get worse.)

Another answer is unpaid domestic labor. Our meals were homemade and resourceful, which is to say they were mostly labor-intensive for my mother. She makes a granola out of oats and raisins that she has been eating every single day of her life for I want to say thirty-five years. When I was young, she sometimes made a dinner that we jokingly called “poor man’s meal,” which was cabbage and noodles made from scratch out of flour. She taught me how to take apart a whole chicken, because a whole chicken is cheaper than just buying the parts you want – how to separate the breasts from the ribs, break off the wings and legs, slit the stringy skin away from the meat, and use the bones to make the broth for future soups. 

I tell you, not once, not one time in my whole adult life, have I ever bought a chicken and dismembered it, tip to tail, upon the surface of my kitchen counter. I have no intention of ever doing such a thing. It sounds gross. Which brings me to the third reason for my out-of-control-feeling food budget, which is simple lifestyle creep. My family lived on $65 of food a week because that was what we had. We were never hungry, but our food was cheap and resourceful and, again, mostly a lot of work for my mother.

Things that felt like luxuries in my childhood are absolute givens in my home; things that my mother’s grocery budget never dreamed of are staples for me. We buy the expensive milk, coffee beans whole from a local roaster, salmon often and steak sometimes, berries whenever we want them, parmesan in wedges instead of powder, snacks with abandon.

We buy a lot of convenience food. I love the way Shana Spence talks about the neutrality of processed foods. Everybody is allowed to buy convenience foods. I, for one, buy a lot of convenience foods, and I spend a lot of money on them.¹ I don’t love how much of my diet is packaged and bottled and processed within an inch of its life, but I am grateful that I can afford foods that will feed me in a pinch, and so I buy them. When struggling to feed a baby, the more charitable of advisors remind mothers that fed is best. The method is secondary. I like to think this applies to grown-ups too.

Outside of home groceries and into food spending more broadly, another part of lifestyle creep is social group creep. I romanticize the way my friendships worked in college and my early 20s, when we would seep in and out of each other’s houses, sharing snacks and pots of coffee around the kitchen table and spending almost no money because we had almost no money. Today, I don’t live in the same city with most of my friends, but also, habits have changed. My peers seem to do less cupboard-raiding, and more meeting up for $8 lattes, for $35 brunches, for $50 dinners. I feel panicked and wonder how is everyone doing this? Are you not stressed? Do you know I have food in my kitchen? Come into my house! You can have all the leftovers out of my fridge. I’ll feed you on berries and cream, on pizza warmed up in the oven, on cookies made fresh if you want them. I will make you coffee right here, for free, and you can snoop in all my cabinets. What’s mine is yours. Make yourself at home.

Every time I panic as I hand over my credit card at a group outing, I have the same frenzied urge to know the interior of every person’s life with food and money. Am I the only one feeling stressed by this dinner bill? Surely not! But how do other people live? Tell me how the sausage is made, and also where you buy it and how often.² My own food spending feels chaotic, but other people’s feels absolutely opaque. Earlier this year, I was fixating on this question and started asking around. The results are wide-ranging, and helpful mostly insofar as they are wide-ranging.