It is amazing how the price of food has risen in just about a week's time here in Hawaii.....
My son Anthony is a great shopper....I don't have the patience to shop like he does. He checks prices and labels. I go for what I need and thats that. Consequently, he is our regular 'designated food shopper'.
When he came back to the car yesterday after shopping - (I stay in the car and read...;-))) - he was shaking his head and said he had just led a mini-boycot at the tuna shelves.... Tuna here has always been a great buy. So inexpensive that we even fed it to our pet dog, Phoebe, who loves it! No more! The price of tuna has jumped from 10 cans for $6 to $1.49 each!!! Several women were parked in front of the shelf and they were discussing it....Anthony said he wasn't buying and all the little old ladies put theirs back on the shelf.....;-)
We are big milk drinkers.....from now on we might have to cut way back on fresh milk and use powdered for cereal or cooking.... A year ago we were paying $7 for 2 gallons - it jumped to $8 for 2 gallons in less than one year.....Now in one week's time it has gone to $9 for 2 gallons....
Potatoes - all of a sudden the price has jumped out of sight.....he paid $6.44 for less than 5 pounds!!!!
One woman in front of him at the checkout nearly had a fit when she saw her total....over $200 and she said she had not bought anything different than she normaly did and this week her cart was over $50 higher than usual....
Anthony prides himself on the savings he gets by shopping wisely - the Safeway ticket/register receipt shows you the percentage and dollar amount of savings - normally he shows anywhere from 40 to 47% savings - yesterday it was 23%. He was quite upset.
Over 95% of the food stuff is barged to the island....with the cost of fuel increasing, the cost of shipping has, of course, gone up....but .50 increase in one week for a gallon of milk is a bit steep
I guess we better plant more food and buy a cow!!!
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Comments: 42
We go through 4 gallons a week here.
Sad thing, is that it's awfully cheap to give them soda, but try to give them something nutritious?
I don't know if you've seen my article today but because a fellow gatherer took the seach up, all my siblings have been found. You were right and I said so in the article.
Hugs from the mainland~
We don't buy many (if at all) convenience foods....we rend to do more fresh cooking than anything else else and I do keep prepared meals (by me) in the freezer, as I am quite frugal that way... cook two or three of something , serve one and freeze the others is a way of life with me.
Nic, we are used to drinking about 3 gallons a week between the two of us - of course some of that was also used in cooking...but still!!!
April, how wonderful!!!! I will go now over to read!!!! Oh, that is so exciting!!!
As to rice flour...I will check and see what I have in my files and send it to you.
Dan, thank you for your insight. I am not a very political person and some things sort of tend to fly over my head, but yes, the price of oil has had a great impact in everything we do.
Powdered milk should never be suitable for human consumption. It is full of oxysterols (harmful oxidized cholesterol) that is found to be a dangerous to health as trans fats.
Dalal, I have no room for a cow....plus the feed bills it would entail ;-)))
Soul Dancer, Aloha! We drink a lot of smoothies, but we use ouw own fresh foods mostly.
Donna, your Din Din story reminds me of my 'Charlie' story.........when I lived in SC, my husband Jim (an engineer with a farmer's heart) had bought a steer the kids named Charlie....after the kids were gone to college and Jim was traveling a lot (sometimes a month or so in the Orient) it fell on me to look after Charlie - feed and so forth....sometimes I would get home from my store/cooking school and charlie would have gone on the lam to join the cows on the next property...and ZI would have to go chase after him and bring him home, mend the fence and it was no fun, especially when it was cold and raining.... Anyway, when Jim decided it was time to turn Charlie into dinner, he had a horse trailer brought to load him....but it fell on me to bring Charlie back home in my station wagon. My sister called the shop asking for me and one of the employees told her I had gone to "pick up Charlie" - later when I was talking to Sandra she asked me what in the world was I doing and how could I "pick up Charlie" and from where.....My reply was "in 10 boxes" - when she and her kids visited next time, every time we served beef they would ask if that was Charlie and we would tell them no... LOL, only then would they eat it.
Tonia, when I first moved to Hawaii my son had a white goat - unfortunately it was a male, so no milk.....Unfortunately he also loved all the ginger, banana, heliconia and Diphembachia (sp?) foliage and would not touch the weeds....!
Beverly, I think everyone should be thinking of planting little gardens to help ease the grocery bill woes....!
It was really interesting to read your article and all the comments. The rising food prices definitely aren't just in Hawaii. Just about everything I buy at the store costs more each time I buy it. The owner of the small natural foods store I shop at confirmed that a while ago, saying that every time they reorder (from week to week!) the price has gone up on nearly everything.
And it's not just food, either. I've watched over the last several years as prices have skyrocketed on farm supplies, especially anything containing metal, such as fenceposts and rolls of barbed wire. It wouldn't be quite so bad except at the same time, everything is being made with less metal and inferior in construction. So twice the price for half the stuff. It's terrible.
P.S. I haven't forgotten about emailing that info to you and Anthony! : )
Jodi, that is true...we all need to eat. I just think we all need to re-educate ourselves on how to eat for survival.... Who knows? we might all start losing some weight...! LOL
I feel the same, gotta have my milk, but am seriously considering on cutting my consumption way back.
Our own little boycott is going on already...... ;-)
We belong to Costco and a gallon of milk was $2.78 a gallon on Saturday when I bought it.
Our good tuna (solid white) is always around 1.29 a can so that doesn't sound so bad to me. I can get the icky stuff on sale 2 for $1 but I wouldn't feed that to my dog..she wouldn't eat it anyway, but still.
We grow as many veggies as we can during the season, I wish we could grow more. I spent most of the day on Sunday canning tomatos and making homemade salsa and canning it.
One thing this situation has done is to make us think a bit more as to what is actually essential and what is not (for us) when it comes to buying food....
Our Costco is way across the island, so it is not a savings for us to go over there just for shopping due to the cost of gas....but we do shop there when we have a scheduled trip to the west side of the island.
I have made pesto several times from the basil in my garden and am saving/freezing other herbs when I trim. Unfortunately we can't grow many varieties of tomatoes here due to the amount of rain we get (they split before they are ready to pick) but we do have cherry, grape and Romas planted and we have some tomatoes forming.....We shall see what happens with those.
But I do have a friend who has a fantastic tomato farm (greenhouses) nearby and I try to buy cases of them to make my roasted tomato sauce and freeze in batches.
Aaron, we too have a few dairy farms, but the cost for them has risen so high that some have had to close and the others just passed the rising costs to their clients......It is a shame that in a place with the variations in clime and terrain in which we could grow almost anything that grows anywhere else in the world, we have we are not more sustainable... Before we know it, all our small farms will be gone and then ALL our food will have to be imported...
Also, with land cost rising due to speculators, plus farmers' children opting to move to the mainland or follow other carreers, the farmers are faced with selling out for lots of money or continue struggling on their own....
I don't want to be the voice of doom, but someday officials here will wake up and find that they should have set in place plans for sustainability long ago....
Risa, gas here now has gone down a bit. I noticed this weekend some places selling it for $3.27 gallon of regular.....it had gone up as much as $3.40 not too long ago.
I haven't seen $3.29 for a gallon of milk here in quite a long while!