Looking at the 2024 Groceries: End of First Quarter

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

Back in November, as I was slowly regrouping from my long medical catastrophe earlier in the fall, I speculated that, having lost several months, maybe I would start to track our household grocery expenses (food and common household items such as tissues and dish soap) again. I kinda sorta tracked them in December, then scrubbed 2023 entirely. I think we came in somewhere around the $300.00 mark that month, what with additional purchases for baking biscotti and making peanut brittle, but that's a rough guess. And the other months were just lost. Farewell, 2023.

Here we are in 2024, and despite more medical interruptions (the broken wrist being one of them), I am again tracking our household grocery expenses. 

So let me start out with the obvious: yes, food costs have gone up, even from last year. Thank god for a husband who shares my attitudes and beliefs on plain (but tasty) cooking and does not turn up his nose at leftovers. (I am still stunned when someone says to me that they throw out their leftovers because "no one will eat them.") Thank god we have a working freezer. Thank god our food waste, with rare exception, is zero in this household. (The most noted exception? The hummus we bought and started eating in July got lost in the medical chaos in the fall; it was not salvageable when it came back to light months later. I have no problem cutting mold off of hard cheese, just so you know, but hummus is not a hard cheese.) 

Still, even with a very thrifty January ($70.73, all food), our first quarter expenses rang in at, gulp, $682.87 for both food and household items, or $227.62 a month average. Of that figure, $634.64 was food. Ouch.

Okay, not terrible and not even that far off on what we were running in 2023: $208.16 at the half. But I'd like it to be a bit better. 

Now, a couple of notes. There was a major restocking of the pantry and freezer in February and a smaller restocking in March, the latter triggered in part because we had a guest artist staying with us mid-month. And March was a tad high because, of course, with hams going on sale around Easter, we bought some. (Only three this year. Trust me!)  

I also want to note is that these figures do not reflect the one-a-day protein drink that my oncologists and my PCP want me to drink; those came into my life back in July 2023. Yes, it is a nutritional item, so it is "food." But it is, as far as I am concerned, a medical add-on that I would not be buying but for their insistence. (And, given the tremendous weight loss of this fall, I appreciate that I already was drinking them.) The cost ($17.20 for a case of 12, or $1.43 a day) is one I chalk up to oncology and other medical impediments. I am not factoring them into our home groceries. 

That's where matters stand at the end of the first quarter of 2024. I will be very interested to see what the next quarter brings! 

Two tangential notes! One: when I smashed my wrist and could not write down grocery purchases, I created a spreadsheet on my computer to track the numbers. Talk about coming out of the Dark Ages! Two: our local (and superb) farm center, Miller's Country Gardens, just opened for the season. Their colder-weather starts (cabbages, for example) will come out for sale this month; the warmer ones (TOMATOES) in May. I have not made a list, let alone checked it twice, but you know there will some tomatoes. How could there not be?