Becoming a frugalvore: How to eat well for less
Hey hey, y’all. Here’s a guest post from former GRS staff writer (and perennial reader favorite) Donna Freedman. This piece about becoming a frugalvore contains material that originally appeared at Donna’s site, Surviving and Thriving. It’s been modified for GRS. Enjoy!
The “locavore” movement is based on the idea of eating only foods grown within a 100-mile radius of where you live. Vicki Robin, for instance, might be best-known for her money manual Your Money or Your Life, but she also wrote a book for locavores in which she advocates a ten-mile diet.
I’m not a locavore but I have my own system, and I think it deserves its own name: I’m a “frugalvore”. Becoming a frugalvore is pretty simple. You shop mostly (or completely) for what’s on sale.
This isn’t exactly a new idea. Plenty of people shop that way their whole lives. But it might be new to you if you grew up in a home where no one read the supermarket ads, created menus, and then worked to get the most bang for each grocery buck.
Becoming a frugalvore both simplifies and complicates your approach to eating.
On the one hand, it’s easier to shop because you plan menus around that week’s most affordable foodstuffs. However, if you’re the kind of person who always shopped by grabbing whatever looked good, then you’ll need to rethink your supermarket habits.
Fortunately, it’s fairly simple. Not always easy, but simple. Here’s how you can become a frugalvore.
