… I just got home from a trip to the market. My mom needed mayonnaise. My sister requested her favorite salt and vinegar potato chips. I needed brown rice cereal for the Bittman granola bar recipe. We also needed pickles. Such a weird list.

I stuck to the list, thankfully. All of this came to $12.66 which sort of seemed like a lot to me. Of course my brown rice cereal was the most expensive. (Approximately $4.50) Next was the eight ounce jar of mayonnaise – $3.59 – this was surprising to me! Of course when you purchase the smallest amount of a certain product available, you pay more. But I would rather waste less food, so I went with the 8 ounce jar. The pickles were $2.99, which seemed normal to me.

The item that was the cheapest out of all four things was the bag of potato chips. The junk food was the cheapest, $1.50. A lot of times the junk food is the inexpensive food at a grocery store – and for some people that can be why junk food is purchased.

The trip to the market got me thinking…. making Mark Bittman’s granola bars can be expensive for a person that does not have the ingredients already in their pantry. I was lucky to have everything except for the brown rice cereal. There were boxes of granola bars on sale at the grocery store for $2. I spent $4.50 for one ingredient in the recipe. Imagine if I had to purchase all of the ingredients to make the granola bars? It would cost me well over $30 dollars probably (at the grocery store I saw a generic jar of almond butter – it costs 10 dollars! Honey, or agave was $8!). Which is why it can be expensive to eat healthy food – but if you start by making small changes, and adding healthy food (dried fruit, nuts, natural nut butters, and so on) slowly to your pantry it will not seem quite as a strain on your wallet.