Shitty Housewife Gets Nerdy, edition five

The family holiday newsletter that started it all

[Note: This is a piece of real physical mail that is posted to a lot of our family and friends (and let’s be honest, they also make up the bulk of the subscriber list of this baby newsletter). I’ve been getting reports of this arriving in letterboxes so I feel like it’s okay to send out the electronic version now. I’m sorry to everyone overseas who probably won’t see the hard copy for a few more weeks. The main difference between the physical copy and this one is that the hard copy has photos. Also it’s glossy this year! We got fancy.]

Dear family and friends,

It’s that time again! ‘Shitty Housewife Gets Nerdy’ returns for a fifth year (are you as surprised as I am? I seriously can’t believe I’ve been doing this for five years) (Okay, so here’s what’s going on. Jen has been tracking every cent spent on food for five years now because I just had to build a spreadsheet to indulge her idle curiosity. We included some of the data in a much-shorter version of this newsletter in 2019, people liked it, and we just haven’t stopped. —ed*). The fabulous thing about having five years’ of food spending data is that I can better see trends and patterns, and find interesting stories in the data. Before I begin, a very quick note on demographics, in case you’re not keeping track of how old the children are — Tilly is six and Charlie is three. (Jen and Brandon are both old. —ed) Both in school. Happy and healthy. Very well then, let’s crack on.

As you can see, our total food expenditure for 2023 is pretty similar to the previous years — a hair over $10k for the whole year; approximately $800–900 per month. I should note that the average is skewed because we spent most of August in Australia, and this figure does not include any Australia food spending. So the average is actually more like $953.69 per month. Give or take.

In the interests of transparency (Because all family newsletters should strive for academic integrity. —ed), I’m including Table 2, how much we spent on some of our main grocery items, and you can see some of the interesting stories there. But before I elaborate on the stories, there are two more tables you ought to see (see Tables 3 and 4).

Strawberries, yoghurt, and the farmers’ market

When I first looked at the numbers, my immediate reaction was ‘Holy crap we spent SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS ON STRAWBERRIES?!’. To paraphrase Bandit Heeler in the Cafe episode (season 2, episode 34) of Bluey, ‘We have a strawberry problem’. There was only one other single item we spent more money on and that was milk at $647.33. One other item also dramatically increased in expenditure, and that was yoghurt which went from $228.53 in 2022 to $462.50 in 2023. Strawberry expenditure was more than double the year before, and yoghurt expenditure doubled from the year before.

This increase partly reflects eating patterns. The kids both ate (read: incessantly demanded. —ed) strawberries as part of their breakfast on many mornings, and I often packed them in their lunchboxes. I continued eating yoghurt, fruit, and nuts for breakfast, and converted Brandon to that breakfast too (Ultra-processed foods are kinda scary. —ed).

But the increase better highlights our discovery of the farmers’ market. We started going to a farmers’ market in March. We went a few times over the first months, and from September onwards we were going every week (The allure of a train ride and bao for lunch meant the kids asked to go the market sometimes as early as Monday. —ed). By the end of the year, it had stopped being a fun place to take the kids (Can we ride the train! Pleeeaaasse can we ride the train? —ed) that also happened to be somewhere we might buy a few fruits and vegetables — it had become a regular source of certain food items. Strawberries stopped appearing on the Trader Joe’s or Vons grocery lists and moved to the farmers’ market shopping list. Apart from the $600 on strawberries and $460 spent on yoghurt, the fact that I had a farmers’ market shopping list was an indicator of how ingrained into our grocery shopping routine the farmers’ market had become.

The farmers’ market patronage was a continuation of the food trend of the past few years, to vote with our forks and try to be as ethical as we could with our food purchases. The produce was more expensive but it tasted miles better than what I was buying at the supermarket. It was also a way to eat locally and seasonally and support local small-scale farmers. It was nice to see the same vendors week after week, recognise and chat with them, and have them remember me too.

Inflation (or not)

Our cheese spend in 2023 was $294.50, which is the highest it has ever been, but the increase wasn’t quite as dramatic as the strawberries and yoghurt. It increased by 27 per cent from 2022 (when it was $231), and our cheese habits didn’t really change so my theory is that the increase in cheese expenditure reflects grocery inflation, which has been a headline for the past couple of years.

Everything has become more expensive, and apart from the many news articles on the topic, people on Reddit (fount of all wisdom and highly accurate reporting) observed increased costs of foods like chips and cereal to such an extent that they no longer buy them. Which brings me to a second interesting observation in our food spending — cereal. We spent $33.83 on cereal in 2023, which is the lowest it has ever been, by a significant amount.

Like the strawberries and yoghurt, this decrease can be partly attributed to changes in eating patterns. We stopped buying Weetabix (we actually still have a couple of boxes from years ago), and only buy Os from Trader Joe’s. I stopped giving the kids Os as snacks, so they’re only eaten at breakfast and it’s not at every breakfast (Charlie went through an avocado toast phase which is another expense entirely). But despite the supposed cereal inflation, we’ve managed to find the one cereal that has never increased in price. Trader Joe’s sells its Os for $1.99, and one morning I asked the manager at our local branch when they last went up in price (As one does. —ed). He looked it up, and the computer records showed that their price had never changed. Another staff member also mentioned that bananas have been 19¢ each since 2001. So grocery inflation is undeniably real and affects family grocery budgets and expenditure, but there are still products out there that are curiously, wonderfully resistant to price increases. (We finally get some real, practical, consumer advice after five years: eat Os and bananas from Trader Joe’s; they’re inflation-adjusted cheaper. —ed)

Speaking of bananas…

I’m sorry for making you wait this long to find out how many bananas we got through in 2023 (I don’t count this as burying the lede. —ed). But I thought the $600 ON STRAWBERRIES was more interesting. We spent $94.65 on bananas, and if I use the same calculation as last year (22¢ per banana), then we bought 430 bananas in 2023.

My (possibly controversial) take is that bananas aren’t the story anymore. Or maybe the story is that banana consumption is going way down. This is arguably a good thing since the bananas we eat are all clones and in danger of being wiped out in my children’s lifetimes (Or maybe it’s a good thing due to the realization that unfettered banana access can have some, er, adverse consequences. —ed). Here, eat $600 of strawberries and $200 of blueberries instead.

I Still Call Australia Home

As mentioned, we were in Australia for most of August. This was our first trip back since 2019, and Charlie’s first time. We spent some much-needed time with friends and family, went to eight different playgrounds and three zoos, and ate some of the best food. The kids discovered pineapple buns, drank and loved Vietnamese egg sodas, Tilly found a love for chicken katsu sushi rolls (which they don’t have in San Diego as far as I’ve seen), and they ate a lot of gold kiwi fruit.

In 2022, we spent $171.30 on gold kiwi and in 2023 it was a mere $4.99. This might give the impression that we essentially stopped eating them but that was far from the truth. The kids were getting through about four or six a day in Australia, and I figured they got their fill on that trip so didn’t really buy them when we came back to the US. I bought them once, from Vons. Which leads me to the next story…

Is Costco executive membership still worth it?

Previously, I bought gold kiwis from Costco because it was cheaper than buying them from Vons. But we stopped buying produce from Costco in 2023 because, quite frankly, it just wasn’t very good. (Other anecdotes match our experience; the quality of fresh produce has declined. —ed) As a result, the frequency of Costco shops decreased.

Now, the only food items we buy from Costco are tofu, nuts, olive oil, and frozen blueberries— and even that has decreased because we started buying more fresh blueberries from the farmers’ market (Charlie still sometimes requests frozen blueberries specifically, and cries if they’re too warm. —ed). As you can see in Table 5, our Costco food expenditure more than halved in 2023 from the previous year. Trader Joe’s and Vons went back up but the farmers’ market is the winner here in terms of where we spent our food dollars.

The other stuff

In 2023, we remodelled our kitchen, went on two trips (the aforementioned, long-awaited trip to Australia, and a road trip to Albuquerque [We sent the moon in front of the sun for a ring of fire eclipse for Matilda’s sixth birthday, which is going to be hard to top. —ed] and Phoenix), and generally went about our merry way in suburban utopia.

Tilly started piano lessons and had her first recital; rode her bike five miles around the lake; and continued to love swimming lessons (She’s a not-so-little-anymore fish —ed). Charlie loves to cook and help in the kitchen; started music classes at school; and is still doing swimming and yoga. (He does the best giraffe impression when swimming to keep his face from getting wet. —ed)

Brandon continued to work at the start-up he started at in 2022 and still likes his job. I took this newsletter digital and wrote more regular updates of my food observations and musings — and speaking of which, that is where you will find the appendix this year. (Hooray, I don’t have to typeset 18 pages again! —ed)

We hope that 2024 brings you good health, peace and quiet, and contentment in all your endeavours. Eat well. Be happy.

*ed is Brandon, the long-suffering editor and husband of this newsletter’s author.

Appendix A: Food books read this year

Appendix B: The year of the kitchen remodel

Appendix C: How much did we spend on ultra-processed foods (UPF) in 2023?