enlarge Doug Jones/Staff Photographer

Munjoy Hill residents Bill and Taeko Lee plant tomatoes in their plot at the community garden on North Street in Portland. Having the small garden means “we are not going to buy fresh produce until November,” Bill Lee said.

enlarge Doug Jones/Staff Photographer

Wilfred Beriau says his dish of grilled Atlantic salmon, diced carrots, potatoes and fiddleheads costs just $5 per serving, with the pound of salmon split three ways.

FOOD COST-SAVING TIPS

• Rediscover the joys of home cooking, which is cheaper, healthier and potentially tastier than dining out or takeout.
• Plan a menu for the entire week and stick to it.
• Limit grocery store trips to once a week to avoid impulse-buying.
• Bring a list to the grocery store and stick to it.
• Leave the children at home when buying groceries to keep focused and free from their pleas for extra treats.
• Avoid shopping for non-food items at grocery stores, where they may cost a lot more than at discount stores.
• Go meatless for a meal or two a week, switching to beans and other proteins that cost less than meat.
• Avoid instant rice, oats and cereal, which cost twice as much per serving as regular grains and rice.
• Buy cereal in large boxes, which have a cheaper cost per serving, and without sugar, which can be added at home.
• Grate cheese yourself. Packages of grated cheese cost more than a cheese block.
• Select canned or frozen vegetables, which are cheaper than seasoned vegetables and boil-in-the-bag packages.
• Be aware of how food in grocery stores is displayed. Food on shelves at convenient chest level or in aisle displays may cost more.
• Buy store and generic brands, which are cheaper than brand names.
• Use care with coupons, which may be for name brands that are still more expensive than the store brands after the discount.
• Throw a family-buffet-night party featuring all of the leftovers from the past week.
• Buy fruits and vegetables when they are in season. They are usually cheaper and fresher.
• Stretch canned meat and fish sandwich fillings by adding chopped vegetables.
• Learn to improvise with what is in the cupboard, rather than ordering out.
• Check out the University of Maine Cooperative Extension's low-cost recipes and tips at www.umext.maine.edu.
• Form a food-buying club to get wholesale food prices.
• Dine out for breakfast or lunch rather than supper, which is costlier.
• Stock up on meat reduced for quick sale and freeze it.
• Make extra portions and freeze them so you have an easy-to-fix meal when you don't feel like cooking.
• Shop at ethnic grocery markets and off-brand stores, which are often cheaper than national chains.
• Ignore vending machines.

 

THE SERIES

SUNDAY: Mainers look for ways to cut crushing cost of fuel.

MONDAY: Families can save on heating oil charges this winter.

TODAY: Shoppers are cutting their grocery bills.

WEDNESDAY: Drivers can use the pump a lot less often.

THURSDAY: People are making life changes that might transform the state.

Bill and Taeko Lee are depending on a 10- by 15-foot plot of earth on Munjoy Hill in Portland as their source of fresh vegetables this year.

They are already picking lettuce and rhubarb from their carefully tended spot in the community garden on North Street. Later in the summer, they will harvest peas, tomatoes, cucumbers and the Asian vegetables that Taeko Lee uses in her native Japanese cuisine.

Lee also will forage for dandelion roots to make a coffee-like brew highly prized in Japan. She will pick the mugwort that springs up in vacant city lots and along sidewalks for use as a food coloring and flavoring for her Japanese dumplings.

"We are not going to buy fresh produce until November," said her husband, a graduate student and part-time statistics teacher.

Gardening and foraging are some of the strategies – along with careful menu planning and coupon clipping – that the Lees and other Mainers are turning to in their search for affordable food.

Energy prices have driven up the cost of producing and transporting food, with big increases in the price of petroleum-based fertilizer and diesel. Government agricultural subsidy programs and an increase in fuel prices worldwide also have convinced many farmers to produce crops for ethanol production rather than the supermarket.

With food prices rising at the fastest rates since 1990, Mainers are rediscovering their latent frugality. Suddenly it's cool to be cost-conscious.

Spam, sardines and other inexpensive fare are back on the menu. Water-cooler talk has switched from summer vacation destinations to who found the biggest bargain on food.

"This is the topic of our conversation," said Suzan Norton of Standish, who has put her food budget on a diet ever since gas prices started to soar and the new reality of her daily 17-mile commute to work in a gas-guzzling van set in.

Food-buying clubs, such as Foodnow on Munjoy Hill, are seeing their memberships grow. Food clubs allow members to access wholesale food prices by pooling their food orders and buying in bulk.

Foodnow started with eight members in December. Today, the group is ordering organic food for 44 people.

Some of the steps people can take to fight high food prices are easy, considering that American households throw out 14 percent of the food purchased every year, say dietitians and other food specialists. They say cooking smaller quantities and eating leftovers can lead to significantly less waste. Other strategies require more work, such as cooking from scratch and menu planning, a challenge for time-pinched working families.

"Quick and easy is expensive," said Mary Webber of Yarmouth, author of "The Frugal Family's Kitchen Book," a cookbook now in its third edition.

Webber wrote the first edition at the height of the fuel crisis during the 1970s. A divorced mother of four, she said she was forced to rediscover many of the time-honored strategies for stretching a food budget.

"What is really funny now is listening to people with all these exciting new tips that are as old as my mother's," she said.

Webber's flare for frugality propelled her into a job as a family thrift counselor at the now-defunct Maine Savings Bank, writing a newsletter on how to cut food costs and a radio show. But when good times came roaring back, Americans lost interest in thrift.

"People just wanted to see how much they could spend," Webber said.

Now, two career switches later, she is back in style and maintaining a blog – www.thefrugalfamilykitchen.blogspot.com – filled with ideas on how to save money on food, tips that she never abandoned.

Webber is a big proponent of growing her own. She and her husband, Bert Smith, raise turkeys and egg-laying chickens in their two-acre yard next to Yarmouth High School. They maintain a...