Food Prices for Cook for Good Top 20

Use the chart below to find food bargains and to spend your money for organic and sustainably-raised food wisely. It shows the current prices for a serving of twenty ingredients used year round. Cook for Good will track prices for these items each month and show the rise or fall of the cost of the basics in our menus. (See the serving sizes at the bottom of the page and the definitions of regular and green.)

May 2009 — If you could buy just one serving of each of these items, the total cost for the regular servings would be $3.40, down from $3.56 last month. The green servings would be $5.37, down from $5.68. Going from regular to green would cost $1.97 or increase your grocery bill by 58%. Compare to prices from April 2009.

Getting the most for your money this month

The Cook for Good Top 20 list is in order by the difference in the cost between the regular and green versions of each item, so you can easily see where going green will cost you the least. In May, Whole Foods was having a terrific special on two new organic olive oils, one from Italy and one from Greece. The one from Italy was only $5.99 a liter (33.8 ounces), making it much less expensive than the conventional olive oil at the regular grocery. A serving of organic diced tomatoes or carrots would cost a fraction of a a penny more than conventionally grown ones. So you could go green on a serving of potatoes for 35 cents or for the same price go green on a serving of olive oil, carrots, onions, rice, tea, kidney beans, raisins, apples, and peanut butter ... and still have four cents left over.

What's going on? The spring crops are filling the markets and the early summer crops are on their way. Cows and chickens produce more in the spring too. Use your savings to buy an extra quart or more of strawberries, then make strawberry sauce to freeze for when fruit is scare in the winter.

See a larger version of this chart. || See the analysis and charts for April, March, February, or January 2009.

Serving sizes

top 20 core items	serving size
all-purpose flour	1/4 cup
apples	1 small apple (5 1/4 ounces, 2 3/4" across)
butter	1 tablespoon
cabbage	1 cup chopped
carrots	1/2 large carrot (2 1/2 ounces, 8 inches long)
cheddar cheese	1 ounce
eggs	1 egg
kidney beans, dry	1/2 cup, cooked
milk, 2%	1 cup
olive oil	1 tablespoon
onions	1/4 large onion
peanut butter	2 tablespoons
potatoes	1 medium potato (8 ounces)
raisins	1/4 cup
rice	1/4 cup dry (1/2 cup cooked)
rotini, high-protein	3/4 cups (dry and cooked)
sugar*	1 tablespoon
tea	1 cup
tomatoes, diced	1/2 cup (7 ounces)
yeast, rapid-rise*	2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet)

* Sugar and yeast are always show just the regular price, since the green versions are so expensive as to not be practical.