I love oatmeal. I eat it for breakfast probably five days a week. It’s a very healthy fuel to get your motor running for the day, plus it can be very tasty if it’s made well.

Whenever I find myself using something almost every day, I begin to wonder if I can’t reduce the cost of it somehow. This led me down the path of making my own instant oatmeal packets. Could I make them as well as (or even better than) the instant Quaker Oats packets for a cheaper price?

The answer is … sort of. For me (and for anyone else who consistently eats oatmeal for breakfast), the answer is emphatically yes - you can make packets significantly cheaper and far tastier over the long haul. For people who might eat oatmeal once a week or less, though, you’re likely better off buying the Quaker Oats packets.

Here’s the plan.

The Basic Recipe
All you really need to make your own basic oatmeal packets at home are instant (ready to eat in one minute) oatmeal, salt, and sealable baggies to store them in - you might also want sugar or another sweetener if you wish to pre-sweeten the oatmeal.

The procedure is really easy. Just add 1/4 of a cup of the oats and a pinch of salt (1/8 of a teaspoon if you must measure it) to each baggie. Out of that container there, you’d get about 48 bags. I also like to pre-add a bit of sugar to it - about 1/2 of a teaspoon. You can choose to add none at all or add another sweetener like Splenda at your own discretion.

These will result in basic oatmeal packets very similar to the “regular” oatmeal packets sold by Quaker Oats. If you like the basic oatmeal with no changes, this is a very cheap route to go - since you can re-use the baggies, the only recurring cost over a realistic timeframe is the oatmeal itself - a bag of sugar and a canister of salt will last you effectively forever with this recipe.

Flavoring It Up
Of course, I like to flavor it up.

On the left are the ingredients for cinnamon-raisin packets. On the right are ingredients for blueberries & cream packets - dried blueberries and fat-free non-dairy creamer. Why not powdered milk? It tends to potentially mold and have other bad effects if left in baggies for too long - Coffee Mate is an excellent substitute.

For my cinnamon-raisin packets, I just add about 1/4 of a teaspoon of cinnamon and about two dozen raisins to each bag. For the blueberry packets, I add a tablespoon of the creamer and about a dozen and a half blueberries. Perfect.

Here’s a finished blueberries and cream packet:

The nice part is you can basically make anything you want if you’re making your own packets. You can experiment as your heart desires - any dried fruit pieces, any seasonings you can find - anything. I’ve actually made batches of cranberry oatmeal using dried cranberries in the past - I love it, but it’s not something you see sold on store shelves.

Adding the ingredients yourself make for tastier packets. The pre-mixed packets that Quaker sells seem to use low-quality versions of the added ingredients. For example, the dried blueberries in this packet are way better than the blueberries used in the Quaker Oats packets, resulting in a much tastier blueberry oatmeal.

Storing the packets is easy, too. Just stuff the baggies into the oat canister. That’ll hold 80% of the baggies - just sit the rest next to them and eat those first. Problem solved.

I Like It Thicker
One thing I don’t like about the Quaker Oats packet in the stores is that the oatmeal is almost always too thin. Personally, I like thick oatmeal, the kind that reminds me of the stuff my great grandma used to make at her house.

Since you’re making your own baggies, you can make it nice and thick, too. All you have to do is puree some of the dry oatmeal in your handy-dandy blender.

Put in about a quarter of a cup at a time and put it on puree for about ten seconds. You end up with oatmeal powder.

Then, just add a tablespoon of this powder to each baggie to make it thicker. I actually add two tablespoons to each baggie - that makes it really, really thick - just how I like it!

Here’s the bowl of thick blueberries and cream oatmeal I had for breakfast this morning:

I just dumped the baggie into the bowl (saving the baggie for reuse, of course), added about a quarter of a cup of skim milk, and microwaved it for about sixty seconds. Nice and thick and warm and delicious.

Cost Analysis
I wound up making 42 baggies with this batch. Normally, one would make 48 baggies out of a normal-sized canister of instant oatmeal, but I pureed enough of the oatmeal to make only 42.

15 of the baggies were blueberries and cream and 27 were cinnamon-raisin.

Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of ingredients left over:

I used all of the oatmeal and all of the blueberries, but I still had almost a full container of salt, an almost full container of cinnamon, an almost full container of sugar, a 2/3 full container of Coffee Mate, half a box of raisins, and 58 Glad baggies.

This means that if I were to make a second batch, I’d only need to replace the oatmeal and the blueberries. Since I can reuse the baggies and I have enough salt and sugar to last effectively forever, those are sunk startup costs - after that, you just need to replace oatmeal and the flavorings when you need to - and most of the flavorings will last for multiple batches.

Batch 1 - More Expensive
Of course, the first batch was a bit more expensive per packet than just buying the Quaker Oats packet. Here’s my receipt from Fareway for the stuff for 42 homemade packets:

The cost per homemade packet during the first run is $0.46 per packet. The cost would have been $0.43 per packet had I not ground up some of the packets to thicken some of the others. We’ll figure up costs for future runs in a minute.

What about the time cost? It took me about thirty minutes of mindless work to make these packets. I spent the entire time making them on the phone with my mother - I just conversed with her while my hands were busy with… well, busywork. Thus, I don’t consider the time sink to be significant.

How about the Quaker Oats packet? To control for location and store differences, I bought a box of packets at Fareway to compare the price:

The cost per packet for Quaker Oats is $0.30 per packet. Yep, the prepackaged ones are cheaper at first. But let’s keep looking.

Batch 2 and Future Batches - Less Expensive
The kicker with making your own packets is that they get cheaper on future runs. You don’t have to buy the sugar, the salt, or the baggies any more. Let’s say I made another identical batch to the one above - 42 packets. Using what I have on hand, I only have to repurchase the oats - $2.99 - and the blueberries - $3.29. The second homemade batch has a cost per packet of $0.15 - way cheaper than the prepared packets. In fact, averaging the two costs ends up with an average cost per homemade packet after two runs being almost identical to the cost of buying prepared packets - $0.30. If I had not ground up some of the oatmeal to make thicker packets, it would have been cheaper - $0.28 per packet.

Runs beyond the second further reduce the cost. And when you consider the flexibility of your homemade packets - and the fact that they taste far better - it becomes a pretty clear bargain after a while.

Reducing the Costs
Even more important, I didn’t optimize my ingredient purchases very well. A bit of optimization shaves off a lot of the cost.

The biggest way to save more money is to buy a giant canister of the oatmeal rather than a fairly small canister. Buying the oatmeal in bulk cuts down on the cost per packet significantly. Similar logic applies to some of the ingredients - if you particularly like blueberries in your oatmeal, for instance, buying them in bulk cuts down on costs, too.

Also, re-use the baggies. There’s no reason not to here - you’re only storing dry ingredients in them. Use them again.

Another tip - buy snack-sized baggies instead of sandwich baggies. I bought sandwich baggies in the example above because the store’s baggie selection was small - snack baggies are cheaper, easier to store, and hold an oatmeal packet easily.

All of these tips can trim the cost significantly, particularly on future batches.

Conclusion
If you or your family eat a lot of oatmeal, making your own packets is a cost-saver over the long haul - plus they make for tastier packets. In our house, I eat oatmeal four to five times a week, plus my son eats it twice a week and my wife perhaps once a week. That makes eight packets a week. In ten weeks, homemade packets become cheaper per packet. In twenty weeks, we’re now saving, on average, a dime for every packet we’ve eaten - $16. After that, it’s just gravy - another $1 or so each week saved while eating better oatmeal packets.

The key, though, is that your family eats a lot of oatmeal. If they don’t, then making your own packets probably won’t be cost-effective for you.

There was a fascinating article yesterday in the New York Times entitled Recession Diet Just One Way to Tighten Belt, which looked directly at the real-world ways consumers alter their spending at the retail level. In other words, the authors, Michael Barbaro and Eric Dash, actually went to a supermarket to watch and learn how spending was changing because of recession fears. A few elements really stood out to me.

Buying the Cheap Stuff

At Save-A-Lot, a discount grocery store in Cleveland, Teresa Rutherford, 51, chided her sister-in-law, Donna Dunaway, 44, for picking up a package of Sara Lee honey ham (eight ounces for $2.49).

“We can’t afford that!” she said. “Get the cheap stuff.” They settled on a 16-ounce package of Deli Pleasures ham for $3.29, or 34 percent less an ounce.

Here, Teresa is clearly advocating buying a cheaper type of cold cut ham, presumably for sandwiches. Yet I’m left with a biting question here: what’s really behind this switch from the high-end ham to the middle-of-the-road ham?

Clearly, the belief here is that price is directly related to quality, and because of that, many people when in corner-cutting mode will simply settle on a cheaper version of the product they’re already buying when they see it on store shelves rather than asking more fundamental questions. To me, this is the equivalent of buying a new GM car instead of a new Lexus without even looking at the late model used options - it’s settling on a mediocre option because you’ve already self-limited your options.

Cutting corners by just buying the slightly less expensive version of the same item isn’t really cutting corners at all. In the book Predictably Irrational (which I enjoyed and reviewed a while back), Dan Ariely (the Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT) dug into this phenomenon repeatedly from different angles.

Relativity Ariely argues on page 4 of his book that when people make buying decisions, they are looking for information, and in most buying situations, the easiest available information is the sticker price. They want guidance, so they use the highest price and the lowest price as “runway lights,” guiding them into a safe place in the middle where they feel like they’re not spending too much, but not buying something cheap, either. Teresa in the ham-buying example is using these runway lights - the high-end ham is too expensive, but she doesn’t go for the low-end Carl Buddig ham for less than $2 a pound, either.

Obviously, marketers are aware of this and thus price accordingly. They want to ensure not that those middle prices are a good deal, but that the fattest profit margins are connected to the item that sells the most. Thus, quite often the items in the middle tiers at a grocery store are the worst bang for the buck you can buy - they’ve got the highest profit margin for the store.

Anchoring Similarly, people often judge what a “fair” price is based on the first price that they ever associate to a given product - that becomes the anchor price for all future buying decisions and an anchor price is very difficult to do away with, as Ariely describes on page 30.

In this ham-buying example, Teresa and Donna likely have different anchor prices for ham in general, but they also might not be anchoring on the same item, either, and this is probably likely given how different they thought the acceptable price for ham was at the beginning. One person’s definition of acceptable ham is different from another’s, so Teresa might go home and find the cheap ham to be completely unacceptable. The best solution would have been to buy a small amount of the cheaper ham and a regular amount of the usual ham and actually find out whether the cheaper one is acceptable.

My question is why is $3.29 a pound ham a necessary purchase at all? If you’re truly being frugal with your money and didn’t necessarily put a premium on the quality of your ham (which, if you’re willing to compromise while standing at the store shelf, is likely a given), why not try the lowest-end ham and work up from there? Or, even better, drop the ham entirely and eat leftovers for lunch?

Another quote from the story really shook me:

Ms. Dunaway, a homemaker, used to splurge on the ingredients for homemade lasagna, her husband’s favorite, before food prices began to surge this year.

“Now he’s lucky to get a 99-cent lasagna TV dinner, or maybe some Manwich out of a can,” she said. “I just can’t afford to be buying all that good meat and cheese like I used to.”

Ms. Dunaway was willing to make homemade lasagna, which means that food preparation time isn’t that big of a deal - she has ample time to prepare meals. Yet she’s replaced this with a 99 cent lasagna TV dinner or some Manwich out of a can? That’s cutting corners in the short run, but adding a lot of cost over the long run due to the consequences of an unhealthy diet.

The problem is clear - when the economy is bad, people cut corners, but cutting corners on food not only often undermines what you’re trying to accomplish, but can have bad long-term consequences for your health.

The Solution: A Cheap and Healthy Diet
If you want to “cut corners” when buying food, don’t turn to the junk food aisle and don’t “settle” for middle-of-the-road inferior versions of other foods, either. Instead, make a sensible plan and stick to it. Here’s what you do.

Use your grocery flyer. Each week, grab a flyer for the upcoming week at the grocery store. Look at what fresh produce, fresh meats, and healthy staple foods are on sale in the upcoming week.

Make a meal plan. Using those items, figure out what meals you’re going to eat over the next week. Focus on simple stuff that you know how to make and tasty stuff that you know you’ll be interested in eating.

Focus on inexpensive staple foods. If you’re looking for foods to supplement what you have, look at inexpensive staple foods, especially anything that can be bought in large quantities and stored. Beans come to mind - a pound of dried beans can be purchased very cheaply, provide a lot of nutrition and protein, and can go a very long way.

If you make frugal choices to begin with, you can choose the high-quality version of that item. For example, once you’ve made the decision to give beans a serious try in your diet, you can choose organic beans or fresh herbs and spices to give them a rich flavor. Choices like these are quite frugal - you’ve already made a great cost-saving choice by going with beans and flavoring them up the way you like them best is a great way to keep yourself eating them.

Avoid the junk temptation - it’s cheap and tasty now, but has long term consequences. For most people, it’s a lot easier for the moment to just say, “Why bother?” and head down the junk and prepackaged food aisle for some easily prepared and rather tasty meals. Resist that temptation at all costs. Stick with staple foods and fresh foods - you’ll be much better off over the long haul.

Use a grocery list. Once you know what you’re eating, make out a grocery list containing exactly what you need for the coming week - and only what you need. When you get to the store, only put stuff in your cart that appears on the list. Do that and you’ll be in great shape at the checkout aisle.

Use what you learn - and don’t lie to yourself. Many people give this a sincere try and wind up preparing foods that they frankly don’t like too much. If you don’t like a dish, don’t blame the process - blame the dish. Just simply note that you didn’t like it and try something different. Many people give up on an ingredient or a process simply because they didn’t like the first permutation. You know what? It’s the anchoring problem from earlier in the article all over again.

Make meals in advance. If you find something really tasty on sale, make a bunch of meals with that food, freeze them, and enjoy them later. That way, you don’t just get to enjoy the benefits of the sale now, but for as long as the meals last in your freezer.

Afraid to cook? Many people are trying to cut back right now, but don’t have the basic kitchen skills needed to make things work. My suggestion is to head down to your local library and pick up Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. Make some very simple recipes using some very simple ingredients. Learn a little bit at a time. Pay attention to what you like that also happens to be healthy (for me, tomatoes and onions and garlic are right up on that list, for instance). Use those in abundance, especially when they’re on sale.

I’ve become convinced lately that the most cost-efficient food in our kitchen is beans, and it’s a food that people often overlook. Beans are loaded with protein and are quite flavorful, particularly as a substitute for meats in a vegetarian diet.

How Cheap Is It?
Here’s a real world example of how inexpensive they can be. My family quite enjoys bean soup with a wide variety of beans in it. Let’s say, hypothetically, that we were to order this soup from Amazon Grocery. You can get four 29 ounce bags of 13 bean soup there for $18.96 and free shipping. Now, when I prepare a pot of soup beans for my family, I use about a pound of beans, so each of those bags would in effect be eight meal preparations. Even more amazing - each batch of soup I make will feed my family of three (since my daughter isn’t quite old enough to eat such things yet) plus make at least enough to freeze two bags of completed soup, each of which will provide another meal for all three of us.

So, I get eight batches out of this $18.96 order, and each of those batches provides three family meals of bean soup, and each of those family meals feeds three of us. That’s 72 meals, meaning the cost of beans per meal is about a quarter. Even if I spent that much just on spicing it up with leftover ham, pepper, salt, and such things, that still means I’m paying $0.50 a meal. That’s ridiculously cheap.

Even better, you can easily just buy several one pound bags of various bean types and mix them yourself in a large Tupperware container. This substantially pushes down the price of the beans - you can reduce the total cost by 40% or more beyond this just by doing some frugal shopping and mixing them yourself.

Beans can be used in countless dishes - burritos, casseroles, side salads, soups, and even breakfast. It’s also very easy to accent their flavor: pepper, salt, leftover ham, and most savory seasonings work very well with beans. There’s also a substantial variety in bean flavor and texture, so it only has to be repetitive if you let it get repetitive.

Here are five of my favorite bean-oriented recipes that you can make at home very inexpensively. Pick up a bag of dried beans (or even a can of them, though it’s not as frugal) at your local grocery store and give these a shot.

General Dry Bean Preparation Tips
Dry beans are by far the cheapest way to purchase beans - and much tastier and full-flavored than canned beans, in my opinion. The only drawback is that there’s some preparation work involved - but don’t worry, you can get it started before you go to work and finish pretty quickly when you get home.

It’s easy. Before you go to work, get the biggest pot you have and add a pound of beans to it (roughly two cups). On top of that, put six cups of cold water and let it sit on the counter top all day.

When you get home, pour off the water they’ve been soaking in and pick out any bean skins that might have soaked off of the bean. Put two tablespoons of oil in there (this keeps it from boiling over), then pour on six cups of fresh water, add a half a teaspoon of salt, and put the pot on the stove to boil. Get it at a gentle boil and then just let it boil there for an hour and a half or so - once you get it right, you can easily walk away from it if need be, as the oil will prevent boiling over.

In the end, you basically have bean soup. You can drain off the liquid if you want to use the beans for other purposes, or you can just eat the soup as is. However, note that most soups taste better if you add all of the other soup ingredients early in the boil. Also note that after you’ve boiled the beans, you can just drop them in a container for storage in the fridge - they’ll be fine for a day or two.

Beans and Eggs
Easy as pie. Just crack four eggs, add half a teaspoon of milk and some pepper, and beat them rapidly until they’re consistent in texture. Pour the egg mixture into a skillet and add half a cup of cooked black beans (or a bean mix, if you prefer). Scramble the eggs by repeatedly moving the eggs around in the skillet as it cooks until it’s nice and fluffy and full of beans. Put some cheese and salsa on top and you have one of my favorite breakfasts in the world - plus it’s an ovo-vegetarian dish.

Balsamic Vinaigrette Bean Salad
Take two pounds of cooked beans, any variety you’d like, and add in a diced medium red onion. To this, add two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, four finely chopped garlic cloves, a quarter of a cup of extra virgin olive oil, and mix everything together. Add some ground black pepper to taste. This makes a very big batch of the salad, which is a great thing to take to a potluck dinner - for home use, you should probably halve the entire recipe (one pound of beans, a small diced onion, one tablespoon of vinegar, two garlic cloves, and an eighth of a cup of olive oil).

Beef and Bean Burritos
Cook a pound of ground beef. As the meat is cooking, add half a cup of chopped onion and a minced garlic clove. Stir the meat often to break it up, then when it’s well cooked, drain it, and add to it two teaspoons of chili powder, one teaspoon of oregano, half a teaspoon of cumin, half a teaspoon of salt, and half a teaspoon of brown pepper. Mix it all together and you have the beef part of the recipe. Just fill a large tortilla with this meat, some lettuce, and whatever beans you like - I prefer black beans or pinto beans or even refried beans.

Sixteen Bean Soup
Just follow the cooking directions above with your favorite multi-bean mix, except add half a pound of leftover meat to the soup as it’s cooking. I like to add cubed ham myself, but you can add other meats. Also, add a small minced onion to the soup, too, just as it begins to boil, and also add salt and pepper to taste.

Bean, Ham, and Tomato Casserole
Basically, take the soup you made with the sixteen bean soup recipe and drain off all but a cup of the liquid. Mix into the soup two diced tomatoes, put a bit more pepper on top, and (optionally) put a thin layer of finely ground Cheddar cheese on top (the cheese is highly optional). Bake it at 350 F (160 C) for about ten minutes and it turns out surprisingly well and often very distinct in flavor from the sixteen bean soup.

For the first time in my adult life, I have adequate space for a real kitchen garden. We’ve got two boxed gardens in the back yard, a big batch of winterized compost, and big plans.

What’s a “kitchen garden”? A kitchen garden merely refers to a garden that consists almost exclusively of plants intended to be eaten. Although one might put a few decorative plants around the edges of such a garden, the vast majority of the garden is intended for food.

What to plant? As spring is just about to dawn, we’re already thinking about what sorts of plants will go into our garden. For a kitchen garden, the best method is to examine the food that you want to eat as a result of the garden.

For us, we want to be able to make several things. First and foremost, we want lots of tomato-based things, as we intend to do some canning. We want tomato juice, tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, and salsa, all canned fresh. Thus, we’re going to need quite a few tomato plants. We’ll also plant a few pepper plants and a nice balance of herbs, particularly Italian ones.

We also want to be able to make fresh salads in late summer, straight from the garden. This means some amount of lettuce, if nothing else, and probably some carrots as well.

In a nutshell, don’t just plant whatever you think should be in a garden - instead, let the food you want to eat lead you towards your planting choices.

How much to plant? Using this basic framework, we then make a rough sketch of what we’ll plant in our two boxed gardens. Tomatoes, herbs, lettuce, a few pepper plants, and carrots all need to have room, and perhaps a few other things we like in any leftover space, like eggplant or okra.

This requires some research, so I start looking into how these vegetables are planted. Carrots can largely be planted in a row, as can some types of lettuce, but peppers and tomatoes are often standalone plants that need some free space around them. We also need to look at when we can plant them to avoid weather damage - here in Iowa, planting too early runs the risk of your plants being killed off by overnight frost.

We then look at which items are the most important - and for us this year, that’s tomatoes. That’s the item that should be overplanted, especially if you have use for as much of it as you can grow. We’re actually filling one of our boxes 75% with tomato plants, planting 12 plants by our diagram.

The rest of the space is filled by the remaining items in order of importance. The remainder of the tomato box has pepper plants, while we’re planting a fair number of herbs plus lettuce and carrots in the other box.

How does this save money? A healthy, well-cared-for main crop tomato plant, like a Burpee’s Big Girl, can easily produce 100 pounds of tomatoes by itself, something that would cost you at least a dollar a pound at the grocery store. I’m giving a low estimate here, as I remember my father’s garden having only a few plants and also having a daily harvest of tomatoes so heavy you could barely carry them for month after month.

Even better, you can easily use organic methods at home - we’re using compost for fertilizer, for example. Organic tomatoes tend to go for something close to $2 a pound, meaning one tomato plant can produce $200 worth of food. If we grow 12 plants, that’s $2,400 worth of tomatoes and, yes, more than half a ton of tomatoes over the whole growing season.

This doesn’t include the other vegetables, nor does it include the social benefits of being able to share or trade with your neighbors or friends.

Obviously, there is some cost (basic equipment, straw, tomato cages, etc.), but the cost of a bit of straw and the investment in a few tomato cages that can be used for years and years is pretty low. Even in a startup year, where you might buy a small tiller and a few garden implements, you can still come out money ahead on a small kitchen garden.

The real investment, though, is time. It takes regular time to keep the garden weeded and keep an eye out for pests. There’s also some research time required, and if you’re storing some of the output, that takes time (and space… and a bit of equipment) as well.

A kitchen garden is a cost-saving activity that can really be enjoyed as a hobby. I recommend starting very simple, even as simple as a single tomato plant, and then building up from there. Gardening is a hobby that isn’t enjoyed by everyone, but if you get into it, gardening can save you a ton of money over the long haul.

Recently, I discussed the value of investing in yourself - putting time and money into improving you, not building assets. Today, we’ll look at one area of investing in yourself as part of an ongoing series on the topic, spread out once per weekday over two weeks. If you’d like to review all the entries, look at the investing in yourself subcategory.

Just a week ago, I touted the benefits of investing in yourself via exercise, and it met with a lot of interesting discussion, including the astute point that exercise and diet are two halves of the same coin when it comes to managing your short-term and long-term health.

It’s true: the food you eat every day has a profound effect on your long term health. High-calorie and high-fat foods might be convenient now, but that time you save right now is taken away from you at the end of your life as a result of unhealthy eating. Even more so, bad eating reduces the quality of your daily life even now in your healthy years. It’s easy to witness this effect - try eating very healthy for a few days and you’ll notice a significant change in how you feel. I often notice it after just one meal - a very healthy breakfast (oatmeal and/or fresh fruits) makes a huge difference for me.

I’m not talking about dieting for weight loss here - I’m talking about eating well for a lifetime of good health. Such eating usually results in weight loss, especially as you transition to it from less healthy eating, but the best way to invest in yourself with your diet is to eat naturally nutritious foods in a balanced fashion.

But what is a nutritious diet? This concept has been heavily marketed over the last decade or so, often to the point that it’s hard for the average consumer to separate fact from perception. I’ve read a lot of books related to food over the last several years (and I’ve discussed a few on here, including In Defense of Food and Volumetrics) and I’ve found that time and time again, a few basic principles are all you really need to cover your bases for a healthy diet.

Prepare more food at home.
At a restaurant of any kind, you’re relying on the food preparers to make selections for you and their primary interest is providing a tasty meal at a fair cost (with different levels of taste and cost depending on the establishment). Most restaurants aren’t really concerned in the least about the long-term health implications of the food you eat - they’re mostly just concerned that it’s tasty and that it pleases you in the short term.

When you prepare food at home, you have more control over the stuff you put into your body. You can make choices that lead towards a healthier lifestyle. When you make pasta, you can substitute in whole wheat - or even make some of your own. You can choose from a wide variety of spaghetti sauces, or else boil up some tomatoes yourself. You can buy a cheap loaf of bread, an artisan loaf, or make one yourself from just a handful of ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, and yeast).

Here are some tips if you’re afraid to make that leap.

Get a cookbook that focuses on teaching technique with a gentle hand. My favorite cookbook along these lines is Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. If there’s something basic that I’m unfamiliar with, this is the book I turn to for tips on getting started. Better yet, Bittman’s recipes tend to lean toward the healthy side (for the most part) and are quite simple to follow.

At first, focus on simple stuff that you’ll find tasty. Don’t try to make something intriguing but nearly impossible right off the bat. Also, don’t decide that the day you’re going to start cooking at home is the day you’re going vegan. Start off making comfort foods, even if they’re not the most healthy dishes you can make, and choose ones that aren’t overly complex. For me, spaghetti with a tomato sauce is the perfect meal for people just starting to cook at home - it’s very simple to prepare in its basic form, most of the stuff you’ll need is easy to acquire, and when you want to start kicking it up in complexity and healthiness (making sauce or pasta or breadsticks from scratch), the basic form is very adaptable.

Eat more vegetables, especially leafy ones.
Our bodies are designed to eat more fruits and vegetables than meat. This harkens back to our hunter-gatherer days, where our diets would consist of mostly gathered fruits, nuts, and vegetables and an occasional large helping of meat when a hunt would be successful. Millions of years of adaptation attuned our biochemistry to this - only in the last few hundred years has our diet changed significantly from that basic structure.

Eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, especially fresh ones. Try everything. You’ll find some you like and some you don’t - that’s okay. Just make sure you’re not eating the same vegetable over and over or it will get boring (and it’s not particularly the most healthy choice, either). You’ll also find some stuff that surprises you - my parents both hated okra and so I never tried it until I was in my mid-twenties, when I discovered that I quite liked it.

Eat at least one salad a day. I really, really enjoy a basic salad (lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, etc.) with a bit of ranch or blue cheese dressing on it. It’s a very healthy thing to eat, very easy to prepare, and not very expensive, either. We eat one as part of our evening meal almost every night and I occasionally eat one as my lunch, too.

Eat a larger portion of vegetables than meat at any given meal. It’s not very fair to give an exact amount for each one because there are so many variables, but you can rarely go wrong with simply making sure there are more vegetables on your plate than there is meat. Keep that as a constant rule of thumb and you’ll be doing fine.

Avoid heavily processed foods.
Again, the logic for this harkens back to the foods that our bodies are biochemically adapted to eat. We’re made to eat the nutrients found in fresh foods, not the ones found in heavily processed foods. Here are a few things to keep your eye out for.

High-fructose corn syrup appears in a lot of foods. It’s a sugar substitute in many industrial foods because it’s cheaper, easy to blend, and leads to a long shelf life. Because of these properties, HFCS appears in abundance in expected foods and even pops up in significant quantities in food you wouldn’t expect. The consequence of this is that it raises your sweetener intake significantly - and increased sugar intake is not a good thing. You’re far better off just sticking with naturally-occurring sugars - if you need a sugar fix, eat an orange or a banana and avoid foods with HFCS.

Startling health claims are usually a sure sign that a food has been significantly altered in an industrial process, quite often with additives of some sort that are very hard to figure out from the label. Don’t buy a processed food because it has plant sterols added to it - just go eat a vegetable instead.

A large number of ingredients that you can’t easily identify is another sign of serious processing. Again, staple foods have all of the nutritional value that a person needs, so why would you consume this stuff, especially if you don’t know what it is? When you buy a food, check the ingredients label and if you start seeing a lot of stuff you don’t know, reconsider putting it into your body unless you’ve done the research on this stuff.

Buy foods from people who care about food quality.
The best way to buy food is to buy it from other people: people you can talk to and can tell you how it was made or grown or produced. Around here, I’m a big fan of the local Picket Fences Creamery. They’re local, give public tours pretty much whenever you want, maintain a blog, have “Sample Sundays” where you can stop by and try lots of the things they make, and generally wear their passion for what they do on their sleeve. They make a quality product out in the open that I can witness and know what goes into the food.

Buy local. Whenever you have a chance, buy your food from a local source, particularly one where you can literally visit the place where the food came from and follow it every step along the way. This way, you know exactly what’s in that food. You can carry that even further and have a garden yourself.

Attend a farmer’s market. I love our local farmers market - I get a lot of produce there during the right season and I’ve even considered selling something there a few times. Here are some tips for newcomers - the best advice I can give is to just go, see what’s there, and talk to people. You might even consider getting involved in a co-op, where you pay for a share of a farm and in exchange they deliver vegetables to you on a regular basis.

Set time aside for meals if at all possible, and avoid eating on the run.
One of the true highlights of my day is dinner with my family. We all sit around the dinner table - even my six month old daughter in her high chair - and we eat together with conversation. My wife and I talk about politics and current events, my son tells us about his day’s adventures at daycare (usually involving a blue truck), and my daughter usually passes around a lot of smiles and gurgles at everyone.

Taking the time to devote to food is not only spiritually fulfilling, but it can be beneficial to your diet as well.

Never eat alone. Dinner conversation is the single best way to keep you from bolting down your food. Get engaged in the conversation and eat the meal slowly - you’ll find yourself enjoying the food more and not eating as much of it.

If you must eat on the road, avoid places where they bring the food directly to your car. It’s a pretty safe rule of thumb that food preparation that is put directly into your car is probably not the healthiest choice to make. If you do have to eat on the run, bring something from home or stop at a grocery store to get something remotely healthy. A drive-thru is a dangerous place for your health, no matter how yummy it is.

In a nutshell, I think Michael Pollan nails it when he says “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Live by that and you’ll be all right.

Each Friday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book.

This week, I’m going for a severe change of pace from the usual book on personal finance issues. Instead, I’m reviewing a book about food and nutrition - what we eat, why we eat it, and how it relates to our health and - inevitably - our money.

About a week ago, I wrote about the deep connections between food and personal finance and how that connection affects us deeply, both on a daily basis as well as on the scale of our whole lives.

We all need food to live, and we all spend a portion of our budget on food - but what food should we be eating? Should we focus on the convenience aspects of it, eating quickly prepared meals and treating food mostly as a basic energy fuel? Or should we treat food as a source of spiritual healing and entertainment, enjoying well-prepared meals with our loved ones?

Should we maximize our food-buying dollar at all times, looking for the most calories and nutrients for the dollar, saving cash in the short term? Or should we spend extra to purchase foods with a delicate, healthful balance, saving us from health issues in the long term?

Should we avoid everything with even the slightest hint of unhealthiness, adopting a vegan diet and enjoying soyburgers? Or should we subscribe to soul foods, rich in fat but deep in spiritual pleasure?

These are questions that I personally think about a great deal. I am growing a deep passion for preparing my own foods (in fact, as I write this, I just finished a six bean salad with homemade balsamic vinegar dressing for a community dinner and some delicious from-scratch lemon hazelnut dessert bars), but yet that deep passion has made me ask a lot of questions about what I’m choosing to prepare. What’s the right balance between frugality and quality? Healthiness and tastiness? Convenience and soulfulness?

This book is a meditation on these topics from the food writer I perhaps trust most of all. Michael Pollan wrote what was probably my favorite book I’ve read in the last year, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which tracks the source of four meals from the dinner table all the way back to the soil. It really opened my eyes to the political and social implications of the food I eat.

In Defense of Food is something of a companion to that, addressing the balance between what we eat and what we should eat, something I’ve looked at in the past. Does this book come up with some worthwhile conclusions about our food and what we spend on it? Let’s dig in and find out.

A Deeper Look At In Defense of Food

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That’s the phrase on the cover of the book and it basically summarizes the conclusion here, a simple recommendation for a simple diet that works in our complex world. Most of this book simply takes the ideas from The Omnivore’s Dilemma - that the process to get cheap food to our table results in a lot of unhealthy dining options - and carries it forward to an analysis of our diet. What can we eat that balances the short term costs of food with the long term costs of health? In a nutshell, that’s Pollan’s answer.

The Age of Nutritionism
The book opens with a splendid argument against the way we select foods at the grocery store. In a nutshell, Pollan argues that buying foods based on the nutrients marked on the box is actually a very bad way to select foods.

From Foods to Nutrients When you walk down the aisle of your average grocery store, notice that many of the items are packaged to focus on the specific nutritional composition of the food. Polyunsaturated fats. Carbohydrates. Fiber. These aren’t things that you eat themselves - they are merely nutritional aspects of food. The problem is that food is more complex than that - there’s a lot of biochemical complexity in a carrot, for example, and boiling it down to simply saying “carrots are good sources of beta carotene” does a deep disservice to the nutritional value and complexity of a carrot. This transition occured because of government regulation - the contrasting need of the FDA to make healthy diet recommendations and the demands of various food lobbies (the beef industry, etc.).

Nutritionism Defined The first problem in this shift to “nutritionism” (the valuing of individual nutrients over the food as a whole) is that you create some sense of a nutrient “battle.” For example, which is more important - high fiber or low fat? Different nutritionists have completely different opinions on which nutritional aspects of food are most important, and as a result we keep hearing different evaluations of foods. Are eggs good for you or not? It’s not a matter of new research - it’s more of a matter of changing definitions of which nutrients are “good” and which ones are “bad,” when neither judgement takes into account the nutritional complexity of a food.

Nutritionism Comes to Market With the shift towards defining foods as merely being a listing of nutrients, it became much easier for synthetic foods to slip into our diet. For example, margarine is a butter substitute that looks quite good in terms of a checklist of nutritional factors, but it continually morphs to match whatever the recommendation of the moment is. The only problem is, just adding nutrients together results in unintended effects - the complexities of biochemistry means that you can’t just pull four nutrients out of a hat and mix them together.

Food Science’s Golden Age The end result of all of this is that synthetic foods are constantly being made to subscribe to whatever the general consensus on what’s healthy is at the moment. Of course, with the definition of “healthy” being carefully managed by various interest groups, we wind up in situations where potatoes are labeled as unhealthy, while a high-sugar processed cereal is identified as healthy.

The Melting of the Lipid Hypothesis Here, Pollan directly takes on one of the most widely accepted “facts” about food - that dietary fats are linked to heart disease. Pollan cites a scientific paper, Types of dietary fat and risk of coronary heart disease: a critical review, which reviews a giant mountain of literature on the subject and concludes that there’s basically no statistically relevant link between the two. So why is this belief so prevalent? The truth is that the connection between dietary fats and heart disease is primarily marketing - that’s what the scientific literature actually says. This calls into question a lot of established “facts” about which nutrients are actually good for you and are bad for you.

Eat Right, Get Fatter Another problem: when you have such confusion and misinformation being spread about what foods and nutrients are actually good for you, you open a lot of windows for food marketers to slip all sorts of nonsense through. An example of the absurdity? The FDA now endorses health claims from some forms of potato chips because they’re soaked in one type of fat rather than another. That’s not healthy, no matter how you spell it.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle Quite often, healthy foods are perceived as not being tasty. Almost everyone gains a sense that they have to find some sort of compromise between pleasurable eating and healthy eating. Rather than simply finding the foods that they honestly enjoy, they select foods that have some arbitrary balance between “health” and “pleasure.” Rather than selecting foods because of this arbitrary balance, particularly when nutritional balance isn’t really known at all, doesn’t it make more sense to eat foods based upon what brings the most value to your life? Here’s what I mean - one of my favorite foods on earth is homemade salsa. It’s not only healthy, but it also has a lot of family history as well, as my father and grandfather both made it. Why don’t I just make a lot of homemade salsa and eat it - and trust myself? I asked my wife what she would eat if every food on earth was healthy. She said, “After I had my fill of ice cream and chocolate, I’d eat a lot of asparagus.” Why not just trust ourselves and eat what we most deeply enjoy?

The Proof in the Low-Fat Pudding The obvious response is that by just eating what we want, we’ll pay for it with our health. Yet the scientific evidence doesn’t back that up at all. Prevalence of heart disease is strongly linked to smoking and regular medical care, not to diet. Even more, obesity is tied much more to processed carbohydrate-heavy foods than to anything else - processed foods are the problem, not the carbs themselves. Whole grain bread is actually just fine for you.

Bad Science Pollan criticizes nutrition science here, showing pretty clearly several problems with modern nutrition science. Chief among these is that most of the research focuses on individual nutrients rather than looking at whole foods. In other words, rather than evaluating the effects of eating oranges, they’ll focus on the addition of vitamin C. Again, this really doesn’t say that much about the nutritional value of oranges at all, but it does provide “evidence” that a synthetic food using vitamin C is potentially “good” for you. Thus, food production companies like to support this individual nutrient based research, not the research into whole foods - they can make money off of the individual nutrient studies.

Nutritionism’s Children The end result of this is that our definition of what’s healthy and what isn’t is really, really skewed. For example, if you’re trapped on a desert island, you’d be better off on a diet of nothing but hot dogs or of chocolate than a diet of bananas, corn, or alfalfa. The fact that this is so shocking to many is indicative of the anxiety and confusion we all face when shopping for food.

The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization
After tearing down the idea of nutritionism and processed foods in the first part, Pollan starts to look for other answers in this section, starting with a look at the hunter-gatherer diet.

The Aborigine in All of Us In a number of studies, when individuals were forced to return to a traditional hunter-gatherer diet (in which they ate what they could forage or kill), their health improved significantly. In the case of a small Aboriginal group, this return to nature actually turned back the effects of Type II diabetes. In other words, even if you eat foods that are starchy and fatty, you’re better off eating raw foods than you are eating processed ones.

The Elephant in the Room So why don’t we eat this way? The typical Western diet is nothing like the diet of a hunter-gatherer. Most of us eat very light on fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, and whole grains, but very heavy on processed meats, processed foods, and dairy products - in other words, the normal Western diet. The hunter-gatherer diet, on the other hand, is very high on fruits, vegetables, and grains, supplemented with limited amounts of meat - basically the opposite.

The Industrialization of Eating: What We Do Know This section reiterates many of the ideas from The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It focuses the deep, intrinsic role of large-scale agricultural interests in the development of the Western diet - and not to the benefit of the person eating the diet, either. For the most part, these interests seek to maximize the amount of money that can be made from the raw food they produce - and quite often, that path is via being processed into prepared foods for us.

Getting Over Nutritionism
The book ends with solutions - a lot of them.

Escape from the Western Diet Pollan offers up three simple rules for escaping the traps of the modern Western diet - eat food, mostly plants, not too much. The remainder of the book spells out each of these tenets in detail.

Eat Food: Food Defined What does “eat food” mean? Basically, it means avoiding synthetic foods. In a nutshell, Pollan recommends avoiding anything that you can’t pronounce or that you don’t know what it is, as well as avoiding any food that makes a health claim on the package. He offers a litany of thumbnail rules, but the easiest thing that you can do is to buy most of your food in the produce section of the store or, even better, do a lot of your food shopping at the farmer’s market. Eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, but not necessarily exclusively.

Mostly Plants: What to Eat For starters, eat vegetables, especially leafy ones. Recognize that when you eat something, you’re also eating whatever that thing ate, so when you buy meat, know what it ate as well - if it’s something you wouldn’t eat, don’t eat it. One good way to do that is to eat things like free range chicken or grass-fed beef. Pollan stops just short of recommending organic foods, but does recommend buying foods from people who care about the food they’re producing - another urge to shop local by hitting farmer’s markets or getting involved in a co-op. Also, don’t worry each day about perfectly balancing your diet according to someone’s arbitrary definition - take supplements and don’t worry about a perfect food balance each day. Just try to eat a variety of things. Best of all, Pollan recommends a glass of wine with dinner - something I really value as well.

Not Too Much: How to Eat Basically, Pollan recommends that you take the time each day to sit down and eat meals instead of grabbing it and going (which encourages bad eating habits). He also gives a big nod towards buying high quality foods and spending more - and balancing that by eating less at a time. Eat slowly, and eat with others - have some nice dinner conversation, which will accomplish both.

In a nutshell, Pollan says to ditch the processed foods and hit the raw vegetables and fruits. Sit down and eat these foods together, with your family, and set aside the time to eat right - a family meal is a great way to bond with them. The amazing part is that, at least at my own grocery store, this process is usually cheaper than eating processed foods and is unquestionably healthier.

Buy or Don’t Buy?

It’s difficult to separate In Defense of Food from its predecessor, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Together, the books present a powerful discussion of where our food comes from and how it affects us, both in the short term and the long term. Pollan goes beyond the primary effects (the dollars we spend at the supermarket) and the secondary effects (the dollars we spend on health care as a result of a poor diet) to look at many of the tertiary effects, such as environmental factors and so on.

If you take away In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma doesn’t really offer any clear solutions to the problems that people can implement. On the other hand, if you take away The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food seems to provide solutions to problems that aren’t fully fleshed out.

In a nutshell, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food are very much worth reading as a pair. Together, they present an eye-opening view of the complexities of the roles that modern food production plays in our lives and offers solutions for a more healthy diet, both in terms of our money right now, our costs over the long term, and the effects on the environment. However, taking either one of them away weakens the other - The Omnivore’s Dilemma presents the problem without a solution, while In Defense of Food presents solutions without a clearly defined problem.

Read them both in the order they were published - The Omnivore’s Dilemma, then In Defense of Food. You’ll be glad you put in the effort.

Better yet, use that time to just go home tonight, bust out some fresh vegetables and fruits, and have a simple meal at the dinner table with your loved ones or your friends.

Over the last week, SuperCook has quickly become one of my favorite websites. Basically, SuperCook is a database of recipes that works in a very clever fashion - just start entering ingredients in the upper left and it will start listing recipes on the right. Every time you add another ingredient, it finds recipes using only those ingredients and only a minimum of additional items. So, let’s say you add “tomato sauce,” “pasta,” and “pork” - it’ll suggest spaghetti with marinara sauce, which you’ll only need parmesan cheese for.

It’s not perfect yet (there’s some limited ingredient misidentification), but the potential for an amazing amount of utility is in place. I found a wonderful simple grilled fish recipe very quickly just playing around with the tool. Quite simply, this is a wonderful online tool for anyone who cooks at home.

Naturally, I began to look at this tool through the lens of how can it save money for me and my readers. Here are some ways you can apply this tool to save money in your own kitchen.

Dig through the cupboards. You likely have some stuff buried in the back that you haven’t thought about using in ages. Plug it into this tool, add a few other seemingly compatible things you have lying around, and see what recipes this tool gives you. Ideally, you’ll come up with a number of interesting recipes.

Sit down with your grocery flyer. Find out what foods are on sale this week, then use the tool to see what sort of recipes you can make from these items that are on sale. Fish fillets, lemon juice, and potatoes are on sale? Pop all of those into this tool and it’ll spit out some recipes. Just go through the whole flyer and enter everything that seems tasty and you’ll find a big bundle of complete and nearly-complete recipes just waiting to be used.

Buy in bulk. If you have an opportunity to buy food in bulk, this tool can be phenomenal for helping you generate a ton of ideas for what to do with it. We’re considering buying a quarter of a cow for our deep freezer, so we’ve been looking at lots of beef recipes. I entered “beef” into this tool and was flooded with ideas, so I started thinking of foods that, in my mind, would be tasty with beef. There are more ideas here than I can possibly use, and I’m further convinced that the purchase is a good idea that will save us some real money.

Inspire yourself. Often, the one thing that gets me into the kitchen after a long day at work is inspiration - the idea that I can quickly cook something quite delicious for my family. All I have to do for some inspiration is to put in a thing or two that sound really tasty to me right now - say, chicken and parmesan cheese, and see what I can find. Then I keep adding stuff I know I have around the kitchen until I find a recipe.

SuperCook has very quickly become a part of our family’s meal planning routine, and it’s already saved us quite a bit of money by helping us figure out what to do with what we already have in the cupboard in conjunction with what’s on sale at the grocery store. Check it out.

Over the last year, I’ve really rediscovered my passion for cooking and food. We’ve moved into a house with a good-sized kitchen (not the large one of my dreams, but plenty big enough) - it’s the largest kitchen I’ve ever had access to in my life. I’ve used it with gusto, making homemade breads, homemade pastas, and countless other interesting things. This summer, it gets even better - we have a box garden where we plan on growing a bunch of vegetables.

Many of the discoveries I’ve made through this process directly relate to personal finance. In short, in both direct and indirect ways, this rediscovery of food has saved me a lot of money. Let’s take a look at the direct implications.

I’ve drastically reduced my levels of eating out. A typical Friday and Saturday evening used to involve a trip to a place like Applebee’s and a $30 bill. Even on weeknights, we used to often order takeout, with a bill adding up to $15 or so. Now, I often prepare meals at home for $10 or less - and these meals usually generate enough leftovers that they amount to a free lunch.

A corollary to this: my food spending is actually higher now than it was a few months ago because I’m now selecting higher quality ingredients. I buy things like Boston lettuce, organic vegetables, free-range chickens and eggs, organic milk, and so forth - they’re more expensive, but they genuinely taste better and produce a better dining experience. I’ve made a garlic and rosemary-crusted chicken using fresh, organic, and free range ingredients - it was rather expensive, approaching an Applebee’s bill, but it was by far tastier and healthier than anything we could have eaten at Chili’s - and it gave me two days’ worth of leftovers for work that smelled like heaven in the break room.

I feel healthier. Even with two children in daycare, I’ve not had one severe cold this winter. This is completely unusual for me - I usually suffer three or four bad colds in a winter. I’ve lost about ten pounds during the winter as well, even though a normal winter sees me gaining that much (then losing it again during the summer - that’s what a 100 degree seasonal temperature variation does for you). Some digestive issues I was having a year ago seem to have largely vanished. Most important, I genuinely feel better on a daily basis - mentally happier and physically more energetic than usual. The only signficant change I’ve made in the last year is that I’ve moved heavily into eating at home.

What does that mean for my wallet? No doctor’s visits, no cold medications, no prescriptions, no lost days of work. All of those have a direct financial cost to me, and they’ve all gone away this winter.

I’ve found a financially responsible hobby. Over the last several months, cooking has really grown into one of my primary hobbies. I deeply enjoy it, and it’s an enjoyment that I would never have discovered without considering my money first. I’ve always realized that cooking at home is cheaper than eating out and I knew that my house had a large kitchen on it, so I pledged to give some real effort to the cause of cooking at home. What I found was that it was fun. I enjoyed it - a lot. Not at first, when I was just rehashing old skills, firing up the crock pot for basic recipes, and stuff like that, but when I began stretching my skills and trying new things. That was fun, and that’s what has kept me in the kitchen.

Perhaps even more interesting than these obvious benefits are the indirect implications, which are also worth mentioning:

My family eats dinner together, at the dinner table, every night. We eat a homecooked meal, talk about our day, and bond together. We don’t scavenge for food, call for takeout, or eat separately - we eat a single meal, together. This is one of the key parts of my day and food preparation is a big part of that process. This fosters a deep relationship with my wife and with my children, one that I don’t have to foster with gifts or other big splurges to “make up” for time that I didn’t set aside for them.

I can receive gifts that aren’t redundant, silly, or take up space. Instead of receiving an Uncle Joe’s Bathroom Reader or an ill-fitting t-shirt as a gift, my friends and family got me a lot of useful stuff for the kitchen as gifts for Christmas this year - several excellent cookbooks, a pasta mill, and an electric carving knife, for starters. These are gifts with utility - the best kinds of gifts - and I have many more ideas along those lines, too. I’m certainly thinking of upgrading my knife set over time, particularly in terms of getting a few top-notch general chef’s knives. I’d also like a collection of herb jars and a nice spice rack - again, utilitarian gifts instead of junk.

The investment in some bulk quantities of food makes more sense. I’m currently involved in buying a quarter of a grass-fed cow to stock my freezer with several months’ worth of beef. Buying at this quantity means my prices, as compared to buying grass-fed beef at the store, are far, far cheaper - roughly 40% off on everything. Without a commitment to preparing my own food, this would be a poor purchase, but I’m quite sure we’ll get through all of this meat.

In short, a commitment to home-prepared food opens up many doors for trimming your budget, sometimes in subtle ways that you don’t even expect.