Food and the single girl

I was reading The Frugal Girl (one of my favorite blogs) and it was her Monday Q and A post. One of her readers, Elizabeth asked:

I struggle mostly with saving money while shopping for food because its hard to buy produce for one without spending a lot of extra money for small portions and a lot of packaging. When I buy regular-sized things, they tend to go bad before I can finish it. I hate to waste food because it feels like I’m throwing money away! Do you have any advice on how to shop more frugally for one?

I understood exactly were Elizabeth was coming from. I am single and live alone except for my beloved tri-colored corgi. I have a small 720 square foot 1/2 duplex with a tiny kitchen and very messy pantry.

At the end of 2008 I was working in the hospital building industry. The industry just tanked and all of a sudden I stopped working for my client. I found myself happily broke, moving in the direction I wanted to be moving in and now having to cook my own meals. I wasn’t even sure if I remembered how to cook for one person.

I had been single for ages but hadn’t done my own cooking. The culture I had been working was one where you went out to lunch every day with your co-workers. This entailed a $10.00+ meal of varying degrees of nutritional goodness. The meals fell into the categories of bbq, mexican, chinese, southern and foods from your childhood.

Dinner was eaten out or whatever snack food and condiment combination I came up with from my fridge. That is one thing about being single you have a great condiment selection. I am very partial to pickles, olives, pestos and mustards.

And I have definitely gained some weight over the last couple of years embracing this lifestyle. This is not something I am happy about. I am short and when I gain weight I start to look alot like a fire hydrant. Not particularly attractive. Plus being in my mid-40′s now with bits falling off I am hyper-aware of health and eating.

So I searched around online to see if there was any web sites with tips and so forth for the single kitchen. I thought it would make my transition to home cooker on a budget easier. There wasn’t to much out there but I did learn how to potion out 24 servings of chili to freeze but that was about it. Which is really surprising considering that according to Euromonitor International:

The number of one-person households worldwide reached 202.6 million in 2006, up from 153.5 million in 1996;

The trend of single households is closely correlated to culture and living standards. As such, developing regions tend to have a considerably lower proportion of single households than developed regions;

Most single householders fall into one of the three categories: single young professionals who can afford their own place, middle-aged divorcees, and elderly people who tend to be on a tight budget;

The proportion of single households is highest in developed countries. In 2006, one-person households accounted for 28.9% of all households in Western Europe, 26.7% in North America and 25.7% in Australasia;

That’s alot of single people that need help in the kitchen. I know 8 months ago I did. And it is not like I can’t cook because I can. It is just different when you are single. Even a friend of mine who is a stellar cook admitted to regularly eating canned tomato soup and toast in her single kitchen. And Elizabeth is right about the food waste. The USDA states:

91 billion pounds of food were lost by consumers and foodservice in 1995.

Foodservice and consumer losses accounted for 26 percent of edible food supplies.

Fresh fruits and vegetables accounted for nearly 20 percent of consumer and foodservice losses.

That is an outrageous amount of waste. Waste that I can’t afford in my kitchen. The USDA Food Plans budgets for my sex and age group anywhere from a thrifty $34.80 to a liberal $69.00 per week for food. That means I can be losing anywhere from $9.04 to $17.94 in food waste per week. I have better things I could be doing with that money than tossing it out.

For the last 8 months, I have been practicing and experimenting in a single kitchen to see just how best to operate a kitchen for one and save money. And now that we have the site relaunched I have a forum to expand on this topic.

I hope some of my posts help you in the kitchen and you find the rest of our site useful as well.

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