Preliminary Vegetarian Grocery Breakdown

I switched to a vegetarian diet about 2 months ago while reading Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and The Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully (hopefully I will have time in the next couple of weeks to post something on that). Since the change in diet, I entered all my grocery expenditures into a spreadsheet except for one missing week. I also went on 2 vacations where I did eat meat, but most of those expenses are not included below.

First, here is a percent by cost breakdown of my groceries. The key on the right is in order from high to low, and the pie chart starts at about 12 o'clock and goes clockwise from high to low.

I somewhat arbitrarily separated foods into groups. Some may be smaller or larger based on whether it is a general or specific category. For example, it may make sense to combine cereals, grains, crackers, and bread into a grains/carbs category, but I split these into separate categories. Also, juice is included in fruit, which probably accounts for at least half the high placement of the fruit category. There is one more caveat and that is the short time span. I have a huge collection of some of the foods above and will not need to buy anymore for several months, so some percentages such as protein bars, fat (oils), and tea will decrease.

This graph still gives some interesting insights. I am spending approximately 57% of my grocery money on soy, dairy, vegetables, cereal, and fruit. I expected soy to be high, but not the top category. I typically buy tofu and tempeh for protein in roughly half my meals, but seems somewhat cheap with a pound of tofu costing ~$2 and a 1/2 pound of tempeh costing roughly the same. In comparison to meat, soy is probably the same price or cheaper per gram of protein (with comparable amino acid profiles). Dairy may be high because I recently switched to organic milk, which is almost twice the cost of regular milk. I'm glad to see that vegetables are high (consuming roughly 6 to 8 ounces/day). These are mostly frozen vegetables, which are typically much cheaper than fresh vegetables. Cereal is sometimes a breakfast food but usually an after-dinner snack. Although the high cost for cereal seems unnecessary, I think the high protein and fiber makes this a nutritionally dense food that is worth the high cost.

A good question after seeing this graph is what can I cut. I don't think I actually eat that much fruit, so I think cutting fruit juice and increasing other fruits may be nutritionally beneficial while still reducing costs. Jelly seems high, but PB&J is my go-to for lunch if I do not have any leftovers available. There may be some way to reduce that as jelly isn't the greatest thing nutritionally anyway (maybe less jelly/sandwich).

Here is the same data, but graphed to give a better idea of the magnitude of each cost. This graph isn't too much more useful than the first one, but it is interesting to consider with these numbers: a total of $588 was spent for 2.5 months of food, which comes out to approximately $7.74/day and $54.19/week.