I’m still working on balancing cost and sustainability
We buy our ground beef through a local rancher who delivers in-town, and we have our own chickens for eggs most of the year. We’ve also started raising roaster chickens, so we get about 30 chickens/year. My husband is working on getting game meat, but he hasn’t had much luck in the last few years. His friends are nice, though, and give us some of their animals every year, which has been great.
Maybe see if you have a local butcher? They’d probably be pretty up-front about where they get their meat. We have one near us who uses local farmers for all of his meat, but it’s SO pricy I can’t afford to get all of our meat there. And like @Bracken_Joy said, well-raised pork is always hard to find. I don’t think there’s nearly as much of a demand for ethically raised pork as there is for eggs or “grass fed beef” or whatever.
Colorado has a lot of ranchers, too, which gives you lots of options. Here’s a website where I started looking EatWild - Colorado. Most of these places sell beef shares, if you have a big freezer, but there are a lot of other kinds of protein as well.
If I were willing to spend more in line with my values, I would buy from the Mennonites. There is a shop just a bit north from us (an hour walk) that you can order frozen cuts, or else you can get a half or quarter animal if you want to get in bulk.
Instead I buy the ‘free from’ which is the no-hormones/no-antibiotics big store brand, or else buy from the butcher which gets from named farms that the higher end more ethical restaurants use (e.g. “The majority of our pork comes from 2 local farmers - well respected for their humane and sustainable farming practices. It’s the best pork available.”).
We buy the lower price, longer cooking meats like beef shanks, pork shoulders, stewing cuts to try to balance out the higher prices with my preferences.
I’m not yet able to spend in line with my values a lot of the time, but I try where I can. I buy 100% grass-fed humanely raised (do these actually mean anything, I don’t know) beef from natural grocers when it’s on sale. I’m currently saving up to purchase 1/4 of a cow, but that has taken me a while to feel ready to save for. In AZ (and in CO too) there are a bunch of different farmers who sell 1/4 and 1/2 beef and pig. I’ve found most of the farms that I am interested in by just googling and spending a lot of time on their websites reading about their practices. I’ve also emailed a couple if I had questions that I didn’t see answered.
Chicken is really challenging. I listened to a 3 hour podcast in the middle of the night once about chicken farming and felt super convicted to research the best chicken I could buy in my area. The best that I had access to was Mary’s heirloom pastured chicken. I simply can’t afford it most of the time, so I stick to the organic Mary’s at natural grocers. In my ideal world I would buy pastured chicken at the farmer’s market, but $30 a chicken is not in my price range right now. If I had land I would raise meat birds like one of my friends is doing…a future dream for sure!
These are all great recommendations and I love the mix of reading + brands, please keep them coming! Thanks, everyone.
@chaskavitch I have been thinking about how I really need to make friends with people who are into homesteading and keep chickens at home, and this is just reinforcing it. 2022 goals!
According to one of my friends, Whole Foods has some kind of system where they rate their meat with happy or sad faces based upon animal welfare and she only buys the happy meat? I have never looked at meat at Whole Foods so I don’t know how accurate that is, I just know that was one of her explanations when we were discussing her $1500 per month grocery spending for 2 people.
Not from what I see? And unfortunately she isn’t wealthy enough for that and it has set them back on financial goals like buying a house. I don’t know all of the details but she shares snippets. I try not to pry unless she is open to talking about it. She also has a bedroom in her house just for her clothes
Nope, restaurants are separate spending. They honestly don’t eat at home a whole lot so I couldn’t figure out how they spent so much. I’m also guessing with my $1500 figure, she just said it was well over $1000
I admit I have a bedroom in the house just for clothes. (two dressers, a mirror and a chair that clothes get draped on) It’s a three bedroom house and only two people live here. It was useful when I was leaving the house at 6am that I could get dressed without the light bothering the shadowy one. And we decided that we didn’t have people over enough to justify making it a guest bedroom when we switched the 3rd bedroom from the guest room to my wfh space.
The space is too big for us, but it’s hard to find smaller non-condos.
In case anyone is sincerely curious. We don’t spent quite that much, but I have friends who do and I’ve extensively observed and asked about their habits.
1- lots of food waste
2- dietary restrictions using very expensive replacement foods ($6 a bag GF pretzels, so on)
3- speciality meats like smoked salmon, fancy salamis, etc
4- out of season produce, lots of fresh berries
5- erratic dieting habits- stocking up on keto mixes at like $10 a thing then changing habits and letting them go to waste
It adds up quickly. We’re pretty dang mindful all in all, and as 2 adults and 1 toddler we’re probably at $1200/month (virtually zero restaurant budget though, I think last year we averaged $26/mon lol)
Eggs are definitely feast or famine, haha. We have months in the winter where we get an egg a day if we’re lucky, and then in the spring when they all start laying we get 5-6 eggs a day from 9 chickens. I give away a LOT of eggs in the spring, and in the fall if we have spring chickens that are starting to lay for the first time.
@Bernadette there are lots of homesteaders on YouTube. I love watching their videos. Have you seen Acre Homestead’s channel on YouTube. She’s in the pacific northwest and she only has an acre. She keeps chicken and has an amazing garden. She also does lots of canning and cooking videos too.
I’m having a fun time imagining what groceries I would buy with $1500…I think it would be pretty easy for me and involve a lot of smoked salmon and fancy cheese. And definitely fancy pickles!
