by leaving my truck parked and gathering moss.  Switching to bike/bus full time allows me to keep on buying organic and local.

is chicken only $2.63 a pound? Or less (since it will climb to $2.63)??  Granted I generally buy my chicken from the farmer's market, but when I do pick up organic chicken breasts from Trader Joe's, it's $6.99/lb.  I can't imagine that conventional chicken is THAT much cheaper.....

I still shop at a regular supermarket (I am after all, very poor and there isn't much in the way of farmers' markets around here until later in the season), but my indulgences are fresh fruits & veg, not electronics. Though I have racheted down spending on meat. I'm always amazed to see people walking around the grocery store with their carts full of processed foods, whereas the only processed food in my cart is generally bread and the ocassional box of cereal or plain pasta (sometimes I splurge on ice cream or frozen pierogies).

Maybe if people learned to cook (even at the basic level that I'm at: baking and pan-frying meats & veg, steaming & blanching, liberal seasonings, few sauces) using fresh ingredients and took a little more time doing it, we wouldn't have so much value-added "food-like products" to spend oodles of money on.

Then maybe we could eat better and more healthily and STILL have some extra pocket change to save up for that iPod, or to splurge on guilty pop chart pleasures on iTunes.

Hi All,
    This year we're raising our own chicken.
This is not the cheap choice, because of all
the things we needed to buy and build to make
it possible.  But we did that last year, and
we are still eating the chickens we killed
last fall.  This year the feed has gone up,
it's about 35 cents a pound.  Chicks are
about $3 each, and so the final product is
going to cost us about $2/lb live weight
and maybe $3/lb after cleaning.  That's
closer to Trader Joe's prices than the super
market, but it's nice to know my chicken got
plenty of room to run around, socialize and
hunt insects.  There isn't very much pollution
associated with raising your own chickens
either, they taste great, and we have lots
of good fresh eggs to eat too.  We had to
design an insulated brood box because our
electrical system couldn't power a 250W bulb
24/7.  We're off the grid, and totally solar
powered.  A heat lamp on a thermostat did the
trick for keeping the chicks warm.
            Cheers,
                 Susanna Gross

Raising your own chickens is one of the "big" steps that most people aren't willing to make.  Convenience, convenience, convenience.  I assume you've got yourself some books?  Chickens are probably the easiest things to raise...in the summer they eat a lot of insects around your garden and clip the grass.  They'll also eat any food scraps so if there's a restaurant or grocery store that you travel by daily, you might want to inquire about the availability to overripe/spoiled food (unless they're already sending it to a commercial pig farmer or the like).  Also, make sure that your coop doesn't have the smallest hole and that it's shut up tight at night...a single weasel will kill every one of your prize chickens in a matter of an hour and they can squeeze in through a whole the size of a quarter.

To everybody else, unless you're willing to humanely raise your own animals and then take the knife in your own hand, I recommend you try to eat low on the food chain if you absolutely must shop at grocery stores.  Also, if you go to a grocery store and it's all nice cars/white people in the parking lot, you're paying too much for your food.  A grocery store doesn't need the "atmosphere" of a night club...yet if I go into a SafeWay, a Giant, or a Harris Teeter, I immediately ask myself how expensive it must be to have everything so neat and clean and pretty.  

The absolute best grocery stores with the best prices are the ones you see Central Americans, Koreans, Chinese, and Indians walking out of with old beat up little cars in the parking lot.  They've got the best produce, the best grains, and brown rice comes in economical 20# bags, not the 1lb bags like Harris Tweeter.  Sure, it stinks like a third world fish market, but that's what real life smells like anyways, not a sterile, synthetic, flower-like smell.  Oh, and by the way, if you trade in your car and buy the car that those people have been driving, you'll save a lot on gas too.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.