Thursday, February 23, 2012

Maybe I'm too Cheap for Paleo?

Paleo on 100 Dollars a Month starts in March, and I have been getting ready for my challenge, mostly by eating up a few odds and ends in the fridge and scouting around for the best local deals.

I visited a local Mexican market this afternoon, and the price hikes on the meat are almost as high as the gasoline price spikes at the station across the street.  I am not sure if I will be able to do this as well as I thought last fall when I dreamed it up.  My shopping buddy/trading partner says that sometimes they have great deals, sometimes not, so I probably won't be counting on that store.  I am not going to go all over town wasting gasoline to save a few pennies on meat.

I listened to Robb Wolf's podcast featuring Larry Istrial and his Ancestral Weight Loss Registry, and took a look at the data so far.  Wow!  Almost half of the registrants have an income over 100K dollars a year!  That's lots of grass-fed steaks for the people who for real are getting real in the Whole Foods parking lot, but certainly does not match the demographics of most communities.  Larry also talked about his project, PhotoCalorie.  It would be "free" for me as an AWLR registrant, once I purchase an iphone, bandwidth, and a long-term contract.  I guess I could buy a cheap iphone and have like no dollars left for the rest of the month, which wouldn't be so hard now that I have done the leptin reset and can go for long periods of time with no food no problem.

Sigh.

Is Paleo now as pretentious and elitist as being a locavore?

Meanwhile, while the rest of the leptin reset cult is modifying their fatty acid ratios in their ice-filled hibernation tubs, spring is bursting out all over around here and carbs are once again plentiful.  It has been a bumper-crop year for citrus, and my friends' and neighbors' trees are loaded and I hope to get my hands on some.

6 comments:

  1. No money for a month of paleo? No problem!

    Fasting is paleo, isn't it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I eat paleo plus dairy, mostly local produce and meat, on less than one-third what the feds consider "poverty level". It's all about priorities.

    ReplyDelete
  3. hi DJ, how much do you spend in a month? Unfortunately for me, local meat here is a boutique market only, and headed for the Santa Monica market, so I would have to even drive really far to get hamburger at 8 a pound, and then it isn't even grass-fed. Being local was soooooo much easier when I was mostly vegetarian.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Jim! I don't think I could go for a month, even if it is paleo. I am sure I could go for a day, but I would never have said that blasphemous statement a couple of years ago when I was eating like Dr. Oz. Fasting might be part of my strategy for March.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Being local was soooooo much easier when I was mostly vegetarian."

    I can relate, at least without a decent farmer's market! Hm, 1/4 cow every winter from a local farm is almost 10% of my annual income, but it lasts anywhere from three to six months -- let's be pessimistic and call it four, which would make it about a hundred bucks a month. Maybe not everyone would enjoy organ meats and bone broth as much as a burger or steak, but for me as long as I have enough fat it's all good. Add on roughly another fifty per month for a half hog every winter, and let's be pessimistic again and call it a hundred a month on average for plant-based foods. Even allowing for occasional indulgences like canned coconut milk, which definitely is not a staple around here, that's around two-thirds of my income. BTW, I should add this is feeding two adults, not one; and my mate brings home about twice what I do, which goes toward non-food expenses (and we have paid off our mortgage).

    ReplyDelete
  6. hey DJ, I'm so jealous of your local bounty. I also have to think of the electricity cost of having a freezer. It is one thing to have one buried in a nice cold basement, but mine would be in an extremely hot garage for most of the year, and we are prone to power failures during the hottest times of the year.

    ReplyDelete