Cheap Meat

In an unforeseen plot twist, this blog is actually going to give you some useful information you can apply to your life instead of my usual esoteric ramblings about regrets and death and so forth (or maybe a bit of both). Don’t get used to it though...

My path to health over the last few years has led me to a keto/carnivore way of eating. In other words, I eat almost the same thing every day - meat and eggs. And I eat a lot of it. Most days it’s between 3-5lbs of red meat with up to 6 eggs. 

My intention when I started making changes to my lifestyle back in 2016 wasn’t to end up here. Eventually, as I lost weight and became healthier, I just stopped craving veggies. That, along with an incident when I was cooking broccoli in the middle of January 2017 where I looked out my kitchen window and realized how unnatural it was. There’s no way I could grow broccoli in my snow-covered garden when it’s -40 outside. In order for me to be cooking that broccoli, it had to be grown in (probably) California, watered in a drought, picked by an underpaid migrant worker, wrapped in plastic and shipped in a semi truck emitting a shit-tonne of carbon. It doesn’t seem sustainable to me.

So while I do grow a giant garden every year and enjoy the spoils from it when it’s time, I mostly stick to steak, ground beef and eggs for the rest of the year. One of the more common questions I get asked is “how can you afford to eat like that”? After all, you can go to the grocery store and the cheapest items are the processed, packaged, non perishable shit foods like mac and cheese, pasta, etc. Meat can get pricey.

The answer to that is actually another story in and of itself. Now, I’m going to be careful with how I word this because I don’t want to throw my wife under the bus. Or at least not too violently. At one point in our relationship, I made the money and Suzanne spent it. Not in a bad/wasteful way, but she was the one that did all the shopping. It would also be fair to say that we are wired a bit differently when it comes to money… I’m a “tightwad” and she’s more of a “liberal spender”. 

I forget the exact reason (I think Suzanne was out of town), but I had to do some grocery shopping myself. I took my daughter with me (who was maybe 12 at the time) and I decided we would make it a game - find everything on my list for less than $100. As we walked around the grocery store, we mentally added up what was in the cart and took out things that put us over our budget and found cheaper alternatives. We ended up spending $75. Charlotte really enjoyed the challenge, and at the end said something like “that’s not how mom shops for groceries!”.

For curiosity’s sake, I decided to look at our grocery budget. It turns out we didn’t have one - we were buying what we needed, regardless of cost. It was around that time that I had made a trip to Costco and while checking meat prices, I realized that you could walk out of there with a decent amount of meat and still keep it around $5/lb average. Since that day, that has been our goal.

Two major discoveries made that not only possible, but simple (actually the same discovery, just different versions of it). The first was looking for deals on meat every week. You see, grocery stores run weekly specials. Now, it would be difficult and time consuming to drive to every store to see and compare prices, but it turns out you don’t have to. Every Thursday, we have a pile of flyers delivered to our house. We started going through them and separating the ones for grocery stores out from the rest. Then we’d go through the grocery flyers and find the best prices on steak, ground beef, bacon, etc. 

Every Thursday we’d look forward to the flyers coming so that we could see where the deals were. I was telling a buddy of mine about our newfound, revolutionary way of grocery shopping when he gave me that “duh!” look and told me that his family had been doing it for years - except they had “levelled up”. They use the Flipp app - it’s unique to Canada but I’m sure there are other versions everywhere.

Flipp takes all of the flyers that come with all the deals and puts them online. Better yet, it’s searchable. So what do we look for? Basically any combinations of meats that average out to $5/lb total. Over the years we found that striploin and ribeye steak regularly goes on sale for $6-$8/lb. It’s not uncommon to find ground beef for under $3/lb and chicken for less than $2/lb (drumsticks and thighs are cheaper than breasts, but those go on sale too). If you’re willing to eat sirloin tip/top sirloin steaks and roasts (I’m a ribeye/striploin snob most of the time), they can be found for $5-$7/lb. Leaner cuts like eye of round can be as cheap as $4/lb. So basically for every pound of steak that I eat that cost $7, I’ll eat a pound of ground beef that cost $3. When we find a deal and are able to, we buy as much as we can. I remember once having a cart full of 20lbs of ribeyes at Sobeys that we’re on for $6/lb and a guy got in line behind me with the exact same thing in his cart. We exchanged a knowing glance a slight nod… those who know, know.

So as you can see, if you’re on top of the flyers and sales you can eat a keto diet on a very reasonable budget. While I feel like I did kinda/sorta threw Suzanne under the bus a little in this one, I’m sure she’d love to write a blog about how much it costs for me to procure a pound of meat from hunting (in terms of the cost of rifles, bows, equipment, gas, time, etc…). Whatever bus she decides to throw me under in that one is 100% deserved and justified.