Ethical Shopping on a Shoestring

My main quest for January and indeed for the future is to drastically reduce our monthly spend on food without resorting to or relying on supermarket offers and economy ranges. Instead I want to see how feasible it is to maintain my ethics but still cut costs.

Since embarking on our project and realising the huge amount of time and effort that goes into growing and making our own food I have become more and more amazed and disturbed by the contrast in prices between supermarkets and independent/specialist retailers - leading me to question how little the producers are being paid for their products to enable the supermarkets to slash their prices so dramatically.

We consistently read/hear about the benefits of cooking with cheaper cuts of meat and I am certainly a big advocator of this, using my trusty slow cooker at least once or twice a week but actually when bought from a butcher these cheap cuts are not that cheap. Obviously I could take advantage of the regular supermarket deals and buy large quantities of meat for £10 but this does not sit comfortably with me on an animal welfare level and even more so on a producer welfare level. My budgeting solution to this dilemma is simple and pretty obvious - to buy the best quality, cheaper cuts of meat available but in smaller quantities. So far nobody seems to have minded, or maybe not even noticed, my hefty use of lentils to bulk up a casserole, bolognaise sauce or a curry.

I have also pledged to pay more for my milk. This may seem rather ridiculous when I am trying to cut costs but I find it ridiculous that a bottle of water costs  more than a pint of milk. How can we justify this?

My task, therefore, is to save money but to shop with a conscience. Making and growing much of our food definitely allows us the luxury of eating better quality food than we could if we were purchasing the ready made, packaged or manufactured equivalent but we still seem to spend more than we can afford. 

I am currently trying to find out what the average spend per person on food is per month as I really don't know whether we spend above or below what might be expected of us as a family of five. I suspect that we probably spend more but it would be great to be able to find a way to spend below average yet eat better and more ethically.