Saving Money on Organic Food (Deals, Discounts, and Delivery)

I recently ran across an article on the Internet entitled, How to Eat Organic on a Budget. Since this is the tag line for my Homemade Life workshop, I clicked on over. This article listed 75 ways to save money while eating organically, most of which I already do and a few that caused me to chuckle (get a couple of chickens and hatch your own eggs - really that's all there is to it? and skip the Starbucks -duh). It also listed sites where you could find discount coupons and deals on organic products. I was excited – this is useful information! So I spent the better part of an afternoon exploring these sites. And I learned two things –

If you spend two hours tracking down a coupon for 50 cents off a product, you probably haven’t really saved anything.

Most sites that make big promises are either for products you’ve never heard of and have no need for, or are full of dated information and expired coupons, but plenty of advertising.

And here’s the thing about coupons – they’re only useful if you were planning to buy that product anyway. Otherwise they’ve done exactly what the company had hoped when they hired that fancy advertising genius – they’ve tricked you in to buying their product.

A few of the sites did actually garner real coupons on products you might actually find in your grocery store. Now, I make no promises that your grocery store accepts these coupons. The world of coupons is lost on me mostly because coupons are for processed food – organic or otherwise, and I avoid processed food – organic or otherwise- as a rule of thumb.

All of that said, I will share with you the sites that looked promising because I know I’m an oddity and most people have no choice but to buy processed food (or starve) so I’d rather you bought organic processed food if you must buy processed food at all.

Me Thinks Thou Dost Protest Too Much

All week I keep running in to the recent study being widely heralded across our nation declaring that organic fruit, vegetables, and meat are no more nutritious than conventional fruit, vegetables, and meat. So? I think the study completely misses the point on organics. I don’t eat organic because I think the food is better for me nutritionally, I eat it because it doesn’t have pesticides, GMO engineering, artificial additives, preservatives, and God knows what else in it.  

As a parent of a child with an incurable auto immune disorder which has an environmental trigger that has yet to be identified, I’m all about avoiding unnecessary chemicals. My leanings aside, there have been MANY studies indicating the potential danger of pesticides, artificial food dyes, and GMO engineered foods. Beyond that, no person with a fully functioning brain needs a study to tell them that chemicals meant to kill insects are not something they want to be ingesting. 

Beyond the nutrition and the chemicals avoided, I eat organic fruits, vegetables, and meat because they taste better. I’ve done my own studies, and the four other participants in my extremely local study agree with me. Organic food tastes exceedingly better and we don’t need a multi-million dollar study to tell us that. 

Now, if you want to compare the nutritional value of locally grown fruits and veggies with conventionally grown veggies shipped to me from across the country, I would hypothesize that the local stuff is more nutritious simply because it’s fresh. It hasn’t lost valuable nutrients in the process of being stored and shipped.

I’ve come across this Stanford study in basically every newspaper, periodical, and news web page I’ve opened this week. Which begs the question, who’s paying for all this publicity? (And who funded the study to begin with?) Could it be that conventional farming lobbyiests and food industry advocates are desperate to turn the tide of public opinion? At my house, the party that protests the loudest is typically the guilty party. Just a thought.