Money Makes the World Go Local!

I’m a (relatively) poor college student. Nora’s a (relatively) poor college student. Many of you are probably poor college students. Thus, it was super important to us to try and do some calculations on how economically feasible it actually is to eat locally! Let's chat $$.

We'll start with Brown Market Shares! As I mentioned before, I have a ginormous crush on this program.

They offer a produce share for $200/10 weeks, a bread share of $50/10 weeks, a full dairy share of $150/10 weeks, which breaks down to an Egg share of $40/10 weeks, a Milk share of $30/10 weeks, a Cheese share that’s $50/10 weeks, and a Yogurt share which costs $30/10 weeks. The full pricing information can be found here, and varies slightly depending on semester.

As I wrote about previously, Market shares was kind enough to give us a produce, bread, and dairy share for free for the sake of this experiment, a $40 value. That said, given that we only ate locally for one day, we weren’t able to consume all of the food in those 24-hrs. Consequently, I’m going to do a little bit of creative subtraction/division to try and get a closer estimate of the dollar value of what we actually ate.

Out of the produce, we ate around half, which cuts that cost down to $10. We did eat all of the bread, so I’ll leave that at $5. We didn’t eat any of the eggs, so I’m not going to include that $4 in there. We drank around 2/3rds of the milk, cutting that price to $2. Of the cheese, we ate approximately half, bringing it down to $2.50, and around half of the yogurt, bring that down to $2.50 as well.

That comes out to a total of $22 worth of food from market shares.  My math is based off of the assumption that we would have eaten all of the food we received, which, given how delicious everything was, would probably not have been a problem!

Now, let’s figure out pricing for our Farmer’s market food! At the farmer’s market, as written in our previous post, we spent $1.50 on a clove of garlic, $8 on fresh pasta, $5 on mozzarella cheese, and $6 on tomato sauce.

Again, I think it’s important to try and come a little closer to figure out our pricing on just the food we consumed that day. So, considering we only ate 3/4ths of the pasta (our hungry friends finished it off), I’m going to cut that down to $6. Similarly with the garlic, we used maybe 1/3^rd of the clove, bringing our price for that down to $.50. We also only consumed approximately 2/3rds of the tomato sauce, so I’m going to reduce the price for that as well to $4. We did, however, eat all of the mozzarella cheese, so that’s an even $5. Yum yum yum. Taken together, that comes out to a total price to $15.50.

That brings our total price of the day, for three meals for both Nora and I (6 meals in total), to $37.50. Per meal, that’s a price of $6.25.

In comparison, meals on Brown’s standard, 20 meals a week plan are valued at $6.40. By eating locally, Nora and I actually saved money (if we were off meal plan), and were able to eat much higher quality food!

It’s also worth noting that, if $6.25 still seems high as a price per meal, that there are countless ways to trim down this number. One would to be more cognizant of prices. As Nora noted, we managed to purchase the most expensive garlic glove in the entire farmer’s market. Additionally, on our day of eating locally, we purchased items that, though local, were very expensive compared to their non-local counterparts, particularly our pasta. By eating predominantly locally, but buying cheap essentials like pasta from the supermarket, you could save money and still get many of the benefits of eating locally.

Additionally, Brown Market Shares offers low-cost shares to faculty, grad students, and other members of the community, though unfortunately not to undergraduates at this time.

Overall though, I think that our average meal price is really exciting. It’s showing, somewhat definitely, that eating locally doesn’t have to be out of reach for individuals at Brown University. It’s a definite economic possibility for most of us.