Meals on a budget: Buying in bulk

Buying in Bulk

Obviously you can save money by taking advantage of bulk discounts.  You also cut down in the time required for people to repackage bulk items into smaller bags, and you can cut down on the amount of waste.  

When to ALWAYS buy bulk

Your staples, if living on a really strict budget, will be rice and beans.  Let's face it.  It's not a stereotype, it's a reality, for multiple good reasons.  You need protein to survive, and beans are a cheap item that is pretty high in protein.  You need carbohydrates and calories to survive, and rice supplies plenty of both while beans also do their share.  You need "complete" proteins, meaning you need the full spectrum of amino acids that make up proteins.  While beans alone lack some things you need, rice also lacks some things you need.  Together, they comprise a "complete protein" source.  Also, dry beans and dry rice can be stored for years at a time.  This means you can buy these in the same bulk quantities that a Jamaican restaurant would where beans and rice is the specialty entree.  Even if you're only cooking for two!

Most other grains fall under the category of "always buy bulk," as do many other legumes.  Notable exceptions are ground grains (like flour) and peanuts.  Ground grains go bad much more quickly than whole grains, that are protected by their outer coating.  Most dry legumes are fine in long-term storage, but peanuts behave more like a nut than a legume, because they are so high in fat.  While nuts store quite well, over time and especially with exposure to heat their fats start to oxidize or, well, go rancid.  You'll know rancid fat when you taste it or smell it.  It's not bad for you, just bad for your appetite.

When to SOMETIMES buy bulk

If you can find a market that sells ground grains (like flour), dried fruit, nuts, etc.. in bulk at good prices, take advantage of it.  Just remember that flour isn't good on the shelf at room temperature forever, so if you buy a 20 lb sack and only make something with flour in it once a week, put the bag in your freezer.  Same goes for other items of this category you might be tempted to stock up on when there's a good bulk sale.

The golden rule of buying bulk:  make sure you can use up what you buy before it goes bad given your storage methods.

Anything you don't use goes into the trash, and that's wasted money and time.

When to NEVER buy bulk

In general, you should never buy fresh fruits, vegetables, or meat (including fish) in bulk.  These things all have a limited shelf-life independent of storage, and therefore not worth buying in bulk unless you are feeding a church group of a couple hundred.  Typically you pay an overhead for keeping those items fresh during transport, and would do better to buy in season or frozen than in bulk.  However, there are exceptions.  When corn suddenly hits the market for about 2 months of the year and it's prices even at mainstream grocery stores drops to below $0.05 an ear, that's the time to stock up and freeze or can corn.  Fruits and other non-government-subsidized veggies typically never hit this boon.  However, there are even exceptions to this rule.

If you happen to live in Boston, you're familiar with Haymarket at least via it's stop on the Gold Line.  While touted as a "Farmer's market," Haymarket is actually where shippers go to unload surplus produce that grocers didn't want or couldn't take.  At least, that's my impression, given that there were bananas and okra there.  Boston?  Really not the right climate to grow either.

Anyway, it is the best place to find deals on fresh produce if you show up after noon in the summer when everyone who works there is getting tired of sitting in the heat with no breeze and just wants to sell out of all their stock so they can go back to air conditioning, which as an aside was not a luxury I had while I lived there.  I always say it's particularly stupid to buy fresh berries in bulk, but one time I got a good deal on 20 lbs of strawberries for $8.  That was the one time it made sense, so I did it.  We had strawberries in the beer, falling out of the freezer, and more than we could ever eat fresh despite trying really hard.  There are times when buying fresh (even berries) in bulk makes sense.  You just have to make sure you have a plan of action to turn all that produce into food.

Another fresh produce windfall happened to me while picking blackberries on the side of the road in Martinez, CA.  I had loaded up my backpack with enough tupperware to hold all the berries I would get on my 3 mile trek around "wild urban blackberry" country.  An old white pickup with an old, white-haired man in it pulled up next to me and said he could see I really cared about fruit, and so I should go take all the nectarines and wild plums off his property so he wouldn't have to clean the place up after they dropped.  I obliged, and I brought a gift of homemade cheese and an herbed vinegar.  I spent the next two days processing that surplus.

Morales of this story?  Know your environment, adjust accordingly, and be okay with accepting good food that someone else doesn't want and wants you to have.  You watch those blackberries one year, and you'll see that the bulk goes to the birds or is wasted entirely.  Blackberries are an invasive species, and harvesting their seed pods (berries) is doing a community service.  My Dad has battled the blackberry bushes intensively, and I have to say you can't hardly kill them...  but you can definitely profit from them!

Stay hungry!