Go Green Within Your Means

Organic food comes at a (high) price! But with the right planning, there’s more ways than one to eat on a budget. Real mum and entrepreneur Shalini Srivastava shows you tried and tested ways of eating clean and green without burning a whole in your pocket!

When I lived in cosmopolitan Bengaluru, most of the parents I interacted with found healthy eating overwhelming. There was so much conflicting advice and no one felt confident about figuring out what was truly healthy or how to cook it! Now that I live in a more rural environment, where there are few restaurants, and groceries straight from the farm, I find that most people here find healthy eating less daunting. Almost everyone prioritizes fresh, local, and organic, and nobody seems particularly confused about what healthy eating looks like.

Perhaps this good advice can be applied to how we budget for our food as well. Our great-grandparents spent nearly 40% of their income on food and savings were found in homemade, local, and fresh. While we’ve made it possible to fill our grocery carts with cheap foods, they come at a high cost to our family’s health and our environment, riddled with pesticides, additives, and preservatives. Foods that are truly healthy for you—the organic apple, pasture-raised cow butter, and kale from your garden—don’t have big marketing budgets designed to persuade consumers with bold new packaging at the expense of the actual nutrition within. I encourage families to defy the cultural pressure to further cheapen the eating experience and instead consider the benefits of strategizing to consume more nutrition and less contaminated food by shopping local, investing in the infrastructure for home cooking, and prioritising quality over quantity.