Eating on $50 a week

Several months ago, blogger and cookbook author Emily Farris moved back to the area from New York City (Plog covered her journey). Since moving back she has co-founded the blog Fifty Bucks Per Week, where she and two other writers (one living in Brooklyn, the other in Portland, Oregon) try to eat on $50 a week. Not so hard if you’ve got ramen noodles and mac-n-cheese. But the catch is they have to eat well. 

Yesterday, Time Magazine featured Farris and her cohorts in a wide-ranging interview on just how they manage to do it.

One of the first things I did upon agreeing to this project was join my

local CSA [community supported agriculture]. I’m lucky in that for $25

a week, I get meat, cheese, milk, eggs, bread and vegetables. I really

only have to buy coffee, yogurt and cereal or granola. This has been

fantastic for me because I never know what I’m going to get when I pick

up my share every Monday and I’m forced to use ingredients I would

never have bought at the grocery store or farmers market… However, when the CSA ends in September, all hell

might break loose. But I’m working on a little vegetable garden out

back, so hopefully I’ll just be forced to be more creative in other

ways.

While Time does not mention it, the CSA Farris raves over is Growers Alliance CSA which works in conjunction with Hen House. Elsewhere, she talks about the importance of cayenne pepper and how the biggest thing she’s had to change is giving up coffee houses.
 
As might be expected in an article focusing on people having to cut back on $4 lattes (the horror!) there has been some backlash.