So I've been trying to change my diet lately switching to healthier food. However this choise was more expensive than planned, since buying veggies and healthy food in general from the grocery store requires a lot of money. Sometimes I can go to the fruit market and save some money, but it's pretty distant from my house so I can't do that every week. Do you have some tips to save money buying healthy food?
If you mean healthy food is vegetables and fruits, my usual haunt is the town market (this is a public market with stalls for the vendors). Compared to the supermarket, the town market prices are way much cheaper like 30%. And the goods are fresher since they get the farm produce at dawn so you are assured they were harvested just the day before. With the fruits, the town market has the usual discounted prices for ripe fruits since it will go bad on the next day.
I go to the town market and I buy quite a lot of stuff there, however it's pretty distant from my home and I can't visit it too often, and on top of that they have mostly fresh stuff that needs to be eaten right away or the next day. However I agree, the prices are really lower and the quality is the same, if not better! As for "healthy food" I mean not only veggies and fruits but everything that is healthy for our body.
As soon as you add the word "organic" or something like it, food gets really expensive. My doctor told me if I want to be vegan, eating more fruits and veggies I should only buy organic and natural stuff... But it's so expensive, I couldn't find a place that sells them for a reasonable price. I guess the only way I could find was to look for sales, which doesn't happen that often.
Where I live, we don't get that many options beyond the regular supermarkets. There was a South African retailer called Food Lovers' Market and it had absolutely everything you can think of under one roof, from groceries through to your fruit and veg to all sorts. I thought it was a fantastic concept, plus they had a lovely cafe at which you could stop for a bite. But for some weird reason, it just didn't catch on. There's also the Farmer's market I could go to, but it's somewhere out in the sticks. You need a car to get there and I don't have one. I can't wait to be able to go one day.
You are right with that organic issue. the price is more or less 20% expensive if the food stuff has a label of organic. And what's in it for us? This is not to smear organic food but do we really get a longer life when eating organic? And what if the label is organic but it's not organic? What I mean is the guarantee, how can we be sure that what we are buying is what the label claims?
