I've been banging this drum for years in Salon: cook with dried beans and other legumes, whole grains like brown rice or wheat berries, inexpensive greens like mustard and collards and spinach, and root vegetables like carrots and onions and garlic. Add in peppers, and you can have great and varied dishes every night of the week.

You can supplement that with pasta and homemade tomato sauce (it's easy), and add more expensive yet affordable ingredients like tofu. This vegetarian/vegan, low on the foodchain way of eating is delicious, healthy, kind to animals, and much, much easier on the environment. The whole world could eat like this and not go hungry.

Yer not from around these parts, are you?

A great article! I will use it as a starting template for my re-adjustment to eating.

For the past several years, when I go to the grocery store I just draw a blank. I am completely out of ideas. And most of the food I pick up is poison - the salts, the sugars, the fructose, the MSG, the myriad shit who knows what else.

I, too, am now on a budget, and our local Co-op refuses competition - they ran Whole Foods out of town years ago. Their selection sucks and their prices are ridiculous, so my "carbon footprint" will be commuting to a major metropolitan area to shop for organic/local foods, so that these self-congratulatory hippies can keep ripping off my local community.

I just planted a garden and started making my own bread (I like to knead - I come from a long line of bakers). This looks exciting!

Let me know where I can find a woman who can cook, and who likes to eat. Last time I met one I was 6,000 miles from here (the midwest).

I didn't commit any felonies while shopping at Safeway this week.

Spoken like someone who thinks that the dietary elitists invented thrifty eating.

Lordy, does the hubris ever end on this site?

but I think the general concept of eating organic is sound for those of us who have gotten past our lean money periods.

over the past year, I have progressively weaned myself off most of the restaurants I used to love to eat at. It is of necessity. The restaurants normally use processed foods rich with sodium, pushing blood pressure up and eventually failing our systems. More recently, GMO corn and wheat have rendered me unable to consume restaurant meals anymore.

Just today, I went to one of my favorite places, Chuys, to get my fave Elvis Combo. I do this occasionally. Now, when I eat the corn chips and the tortillas, I exhibit some mix of coughing fits (I normally have a lot of post nasal drip due to food allergies, which I more and more suspect are pesticide and rogue protein [GMO proteins] allergies), tightening throat, spitting up, burping, gas, and bellyaches. Today did not disappoint.

Ironically, not only do I not exhibit these symptoms no matter how much organic wheat I consume, but I do not even show any gluten allergies. Goes to show how fucked up the standard food supply is.

Anyway, I have been cooking more and more, buying everything organic if possible. I cook up more than I need and I bought a buttload of glass crocks to store the food in in 16 ounce portions which I take to work so that I am not tempted to eat out everyday, like I used to.

Onto my point, Between Whole Foods, Central Market, and Wheatsville Coop here in Austin, one is able to pretty much find most anything organic for only a fraction more cost than the typical processed to hell crap. Organic apples are regularly as low as 99 cents a pound, for instance. Yes, some things, like free range meats, do cost more, but overall, my costs actually seem to be LOWER than when I ate one meal out everday at restaurants.

And I eat not only better, but incredibly better. Many of my health problems disappear with in days after I begin eating better. Much of the problem is not us but what we are consuming. I cannot imagine how messed up some people's bodies must be inside because they refuse to listen to their body and to feed it good food.

Part of the problem the author has is that he/she lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Frankly, I still think large swaths of America are Hell Alleys for food. The few exceptions being cities that support a Whole Foods or a local food coop.

Texas is blessed in this way. I was shocked a few years ago when in Redlands a friend and I went to get some ingredients for our meal at a local supermarket. In the cradle of agriculture, California, food prices are positively CRIMINAL. What the hell are they doing?!? Sending the food by ship around the world once before returning it to California?

Whenever I fall off the wagon and begin to eat out and weeks later am hurting and stumbling like an agitated 74 year old, it is such a godsend that I can return to eating well and begin to feel inside like an 18 year old again within days.

I look at the cost as an offset from my having exhorbitant medical bills one day and also as a lifestyle issue where I feel better all the time, making my life richer. ALSO, I prefer to spend a bit more on good food and forgo other stupid things or find ways to do them cheaper.

When I was in 8th grade we had to take a class called "Home Economics". We made brownies and sewed and such like. This was all considered "women's work" but because we were being educated by sensitive bureaucrats the idea was that boys should be exposed to this curriculum as well as girls.

Fast forward 25 years.

Now women are being called upon not only to manage the eco-cleanliness of their families domiciles, but also to manage the ethical qualities of their families food choices: a leftist version of "Better Homes and Gardens".

I think we should all just eat canned spam, learn to clean a handgun and live by plunder. I want to live in a robotic future where we survive on calorie pellets dispensed from the government truck that visits our housing complex once per month.

I am just so tired of it all, really.