(I’ve updated this post from a couple of years ago for you all! Sorry for the delay in getting it up. We have been very busy with a very happy newly engaged family member – wedding dress shopping and the whole bit. This is part of my 52 ways to save money on a healthy diet series)
Several weeks ago a few of you asked how I was able to add seafood into our diets without raising our budget. Good question. We have not always eaten seafood consistently for various reasons (I didn’t realize I liked seafood until recently and because of the cost). But the health benefits of seafood made me realize that I really wanted to be able to fit it in for the omega 3’s, and zinc and other nutritious attributes to seafood. Dr. Price was most impressed with the health of people groups in coastal regions who ate a lot of seafood, by the way, which was just one more score for seafood.
How to fit it in our budget was the tricky part.
Seafood is one of those foods that is important not to skimp on quality. No farmed salmon here! While it is a lot cheaper, they are fed wild fish (an unsustainable option), are often overcrowded and diseased, they are dyed to hide their unnatural gray flesh, and antibiotics are routinely were used to treat them. They are generally not as nutritious, good for the environment and probably are not going to taste as good either. I also don’t recommend tilapia, as unless you are getting it from a fish farm that uses excellent methods, you are likely buying a very inferior product very high in Omega 6’s. With farmed salmon and tilapia out of the picture, you may find yourself wondering how to fit more expensive fish into your budget. Here are a few things that have worked for me.
Tip Number One: Figure Out Your Daily Budget
First, figure out how much you have to spend per day on food. For me, I had to first subtract how much I spend on my bulk orders (oils, grains, etc). Then I took the remaining amount left in our budget and divided it by weeks, then by days. This helped put my spending in perspective. (If we go out to eat and spend 20 dollars on dinner or on seafood at the store that takes up the money for X amount of days). I realized that the cost of seafood could sometimes take up most of a day’s worth of our budget.
So then, on seafood night, I make sure that we eat leftovers for lunch and an inexpensive breakfast. That enables me to spend almost all of my day’s budget on dinner. I also try to do a very frugal dinner the night before, to help give me wiggle room in my budget. It was really that simple for us. When I had a whole day’s budget for our dinner, I was able to “splurge” on seafood much more easily.
…