Reflections on a cheap bag of rice

This bag of rice got me thinking...

As you probably know, a major impetus for this blog was the realization that most of the people who write about what we used to call home economics have little idea what things cost and no idea how to live on a budget. One of the threads I started in response to that was an informal survey of what budget staples cost at various grocery stores.

If you have to feed yourself on a very little money, you will very probably end up eating a lot of beans and either rice or potatoes. Rice is easier to transport and (at least for white rice) store. Potatoes are easier to cook and are, perhaps, a bit more versatile. As for price, that depends on sales.

This is the best price I’ve seen on rice since I started this experiment (seen in Chinatown at a neighborhood Wal-Mart grocery). According to the nutritional panel on the package, this comes to less than a nickel a serving. Now, it should be noted that a “serving” in this context isn’t that much food, particularly if you’re trying to build a meal around it, but two or three will go a long ways toward filling you up, particularly when combined with a good helping of beans and a piece of chicken. At the store in question, red beans were $1.50 lb. and value-packs of chicken were $0.99 lb, so you can have a filling, if simple meal for under a dollar.

Of course, these are reduced prices and trying to live on sales brings with it a whole new set of complications. To do this effectively requires significant planning, time, self-discipline and flexibility. Plan on hitting two or three stores a week and spending a lot of time in each. The marketing psychology behind sales is designed to get you to buy things that you don’t need, so you’ll have to be vigilant; just throwing away a bad purchase is not an option when you’re living on less than $30 a week.

Then there is the question of storage. This is where we hit one of the many paradoxes of shopping while poor. By far the cheapest way to go is to go for volume either with large economy sizes or by stocking up when you find a good sale, but poverty frequently comes with cash flow problems, limited storage and pests.