This post is part of a series, Real Food Economics 101. The series covers the cost of real food and applying the 80/20 rule to managing your time and money in the kitchen in depth. Click here to start at the beginning.

Last week in “Real Food vs Average Food Budgets” we compared several real food budgets to the USDA average food budget and found that on average real food budgets are the same or cheaper than the average household food budget. This leaves many wondering just how this is accomplished? On the face of it it looks impossible … most real food items are more expensive, substantially more expensive than the similar real food item. Raw milk is more expensive than pasteurized, raw cheese is more expensive, grassfed milk is more expensive, condiments more expensive, produce more expensive, and so on. On first glance it looks like moving to real food will cost much more. Yet many real food bloggers are managing to eat real food for less, my own family included. Let’s talk about some of the strategies employed to reduce the cost of real food.

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