One of the biggest budget breakers in eating healthy is buying fresh fruits and vegetables. Sure, it isn’t much of an issue when you have one or two servings of fruits and vegetables a day, but when you are eating healthy, and aiming to eat fruits and veggies at every meal, that is another story.
To make matters worse, you can no longer have the convenience of buying things in cans (after all, there are a lot of hidden things in there that might are good for your budget but terrible for your health). If you are a budget person, like me, you know that the produce section is where things can get a bit hairy and now you are looking at an increased fruit budget and an increased vegetable budget.
Luckily there is a trick to this, and the trick is so stupid simple that I am ashamed to say it took me years to find it, and even then it wasn’t me, it was a food blogger that I follow.
Instead of buying fruits and veggies in the produce aisle, get it from the frozen foods section. There are two big benefits here….
Obviously the cost is the biggest benefit. Shopping in the freezer section is generally no more expensive than the produce section, and in many cases it is actually cheaper. Best of all, the work is done for you. I recently had a recipe that called for a bunch of peaches. Not only was it more expensive for me to buy the peaches in produce, but the frozen peaches were already cut for me – that my friends is a major score for an anti-cook like me.
The second biggest benefit is that frozen fruits and veggies last longer than fresh ones. Yes, some can argue about the taste, but I personally don’t notice it. And even though there are times when I love escaping to the grocery store, I generally hate shopping for groceries and I would rather order pizza every night than make that dreaded half hour trip, (which is really more of an hour trip after I haul everything in and find a home for it in the kitchen). At the risk of losing my mother of the year award I will tell you that I have done this pizza trick many times, my budget has suffered and my waistline has suffered, but for some reason it still seems better than restocking my grocery supply. Thankfully, when I buy most of my fruits and veggies from the freezer aisle, I don’t have to worry about them going bad as quickly, I get to buy enough for two weeks and then stay as far away from the store as humanly possible.
