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.

Low Budget January... (and maybe all of 2015, if I don't find a job !)

The children are back at school and I have finally retrieved the last of the stray Christmas cards and baubles from under the sofa.

Having closed the door on 2014 and emptied the house of all our alcohol (except for our last three bottles of Greengage Spirit - not too much temptation I can assure you!) we have stoically embarked upon a dry January and pledged to reduce our food costs and living expenses once again. The former is a tradition (an attempt to compensate for the excesses of December and the months preceding it) and the latter is a necessity born of our wobbly finances and my need to find paid work.